Word: villains
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...been terrific or just short of it. (The Incredible Hulk: not so hot.) It's been one of the best summers in memory for flat-out blockbuster entertainment, and in the wow category, the Nolan film doesn't disappoint. True to format, it has a crusading hero, a sneering villain in Heath Ledger's Joker, spectacular chases - including one with Batman on a stripped-down Batmobile that becomes a motorcycle with monster-truck wheels - and lots of stuff blowing up. Even the tie-in action figures with Reese's Pieces suggest this is a fast-food movie...
...really. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. He isn't a father figure or a macho man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he's not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history...
...audition for the role of villain in the world's financial markets, sovereign wealth funds would have pushed sub-prime mortgages close in recent months. Huge, government-controlled investment pools from Abu Dhabi to China have helped to rescue Wall Street banks left short by the credit crisis - and still managed to leave Western governments feeling spooked. Their worry: the funds - swollen with foreign-currency reserves or billions in profits from oil and gas - might be hiding dark political motives behind fuzzy financial aims...
...persists. Nor will the environmentally unfriendly origins of the fund's cash prevent it from pressing for better ecological standards. Last year, for instance, the fund voted in favor of a shareholder push for U.S. oil major ExxonMobil to adopt emission-reduction goals. Hardly the actions of a rapacious villain...
...graceful writer with a bracing cold streak and a sharp eye for period detail (Bond's girl of the moment drives a white Sunbeam Alpine). But by now, Bond is so bound by convention--there must be exotic settings (Paris, Persia, Russia) and vehicles (the unstoppable Ekranoplan!), and the villain has to have an exotic handicap (a weird, deformed monkey hand)--that it's all poor James can do to wriggle convincingly under all that baggage. And escape, my dear 007, is quite impossible...