Current mood:	pleased
Current music:	Jason Mraz

Joker means a winning hand
Sold-out midnight shows and packed first-night screenings full of the young moviegoing crowd are one thing, but a theater half-filled with adults (mostly without kids) willing to attend a showing of a film based on a comic book at 10 o’ clock on a Saturday morning? Confirmation that “The Dark Knight” isn’t just any comic book film.

If you've ever winced at the tongue-in-cheek dialogue, pop-art colors, over-the-top villains, battles bloated with outlandish computer-generated images, and two-dimensional heroes that populate most comic book-inspired movies — wishing instead for something darker, grittier, more complex and grounded in at least some semblance of reality — the long wait is over.

From what I'd read in advance, I knew that "The Dark Knight" lives up to its title, but when my 14-year-old daughter, Olivia, who attended a Friday night screening, added in the middle of giving it a rave review that it was "so dark it was depressing" and that the late Heath Ledger's acclaimed portrayal of the Joker was "fantastically creepy," I knew director Christopher Nolan had succeeded. Then my grad-student son called from D.C., where he has a summer internship, to report he'd just seen it, too. Young Bill, who generally isn't nearly as easily pleased at the movies as his sister and father, pronounced it "ridiculously good."

Then he added: "It's the Batman film I always hoped would be made."

I knew just what he meant.

You see, young Bill grew up on Batman movies, starting with the two Tim Burton films, which were entertaining but flawed. Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman was refreshingly off-center but Burton's tendency toward operatic overkill often got in the way of his story. And while Jack Nicholson's hammy interpretation of the Joker scared 3-year-old Bill in the first film, I preferred Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer's darker readings of the Penguin and Catwoman in the second, though that film went off the rails a bit toward the end with its army of rocket-bearing penguins shuffling through Gotham City. Bill and I both found the third film, with which director Joel Schumacher took over the franchise and Val Kilmer's Batman was joined by Robin (always my least favorite comic book character), a bit silly, and we were hardly out of the theater from seeing Schumacher's "Batman and Robin," with an ill-used George Clooney in the title role and a winking tone that aped the awful, campy 1960s TV series, before we were saying how much we hated it. We weren't alone. Audience rejection of the film was so complete that it killed the Batman movies for a decade.

But when Nolan relaunched the series with 2005's "Batman Begins," we agreed that he was on the right track. However, that first Nolan effort spent half the film setting up the rather too-lengthy back story before finally getting around to what we were there for: Batman. Versatile Welshman Christian Bale's interpretation of the Caped Crusader hit all the right notes, though, and the closing scene's hint that the next film would feature a new take on the Joker was tantalizing.

Then came the unorthodox casting of Ledger in the role, the first online views of his grisly twisted-clown visage, and then the media hoopla over the young star's death this past winter after production wrapped. After a suitable period of mourning, Warner Bros. unleashed a well-executed publicity campaign that stoked fans' anticipation to unprecedented heights. The only question was, could "The Dark Knight" possibly live up to the hype? Reviews mentioning Ledger and Oscar in the same sentence and giving the film nearly across-the-board raves were the answer.

And in this case the critics are right on the mark.

The new film doesn't waste any time on back story and in fact taunts those who want one by having Ledger's Joker tell different versions of how he got his leering-grin scars to different victims. It has lots of action, filmed refreshingly the old-fashioned way (much of it on location in Chicago) with stunt men and real explosions. The flipping of an 18-wheeler and blowing up of a hospital weren't done with computers or even miniature models. They really flipped an 18-wheeler on a Chicago street, and a former Windy City candy factory was blown to high heaven in the guise of Gotham General, with the shock waves visibly buffeting Ledger's Joker as he walks away from the scene — a one-take wonder.

While Ledger is getting most of the critical attention, the rest of the cast also shines. Bale gets both the angry, anguished masked vigilante and his flippant playboy alter ego just right. Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman give strong support. Aaron Eckhart makes a believable 180-degree turn as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, the film's tragic "hero," and Maggie Gyllenhaal is much more interesting as Dent and Bruce Wayne's mutual love interest, Rachel Dawes, than Katie Holmes was in "Batman Begins." (My daughter didn't like Gyllenhaal much on her first viewing of the film but decided after accompanying me to the Saturday morning screening 17 hours later that she'd changed her mind.)

But Ledger's Joker is the film's centerpiece, and it's an unforgettable (and in my mind unsurpassable) performance. Beyond the masterfully grotesque smeared makeup, he manages to give us a remarkably nuanced portrayal of a villain who is really more of a terrorist than just a bank robber and killer. This is not the Clown Prince of Crime embodied by Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson. This is a thinking man's freak, a merciless killer with a perverse sense of humor. The pencil scene early on (I won't spoil it), leaves members of the audience gasping. And the little touches — from Ledger's snakelike flicking of his tongue and cracked voice to his body language and the way he primps by brushing back his greasy, greenish-tinted hair with a hand clutching a knife as he approaches Rachel after crashing a society fund-raiser — fill out the portrait of calculated madness perfectly.

"The Dark Knight" isn't just a good vs. evil story, either. The Joker knows, and Bruce Wayne learns the hard way, that there's a fine line between vigilante and terrorist, that he and Batman are different sides of the same coin. Complex issues, such as using illegal surveillance techniques for a greater good and whether the unvarnished truth is really what we always need, take the comic book film genre in a new direction. But it's not all downbeat. The Joker's cynical reading of the public at large ultimately isn't vindicated, and he winds up truly surprised that while he might have turned one hero to the dark side, he can't make Batman into a killer. Plus, the twist at the end, in which the Joker and the Batman both wind up losing, is a master stroke.

Young Bill put it best: It's the Batman film that true fans always hoped would be made but feared was beyond Hollywood's grasp.

I can't wait to see it again.

MORE AT THE MOVIES: The previous weekend, Olivia and I had a double-dose of Jules Verne-inspired screen adventure. First, we went to see the new fun but flawed PG-rated Brendan Fraser version of “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” At only 92 minutes long, it moves quickly, and Fraser is an ingratiating screen presence, as always. Anita Briem, who plays an Icelandic mountain guide (and is actually from Iceland originally before launching an acting career in Britain) makes for diverting viewing, too. And it’s nicely modernized by having Fraser’s volcano expert character following the tracks of his missing brother, who was a Verne fan, by using a copy of the original Verne novel as a reference. But even by Verne standards much of it doesn’t make a lot of sense — surviving a fall miles down in a volcano tube? A cellphone receiving a call at the center of the earth? — and if you take away the 3-D elements (which mostly consist of stuff shooting out toward the audience), the CGI special effects aren’t all that special. It’s basically a kids movie made by folks who don’t really have faith in the kid audience, who don’t believe kids can handle any plot or character development more involved than in your average beginner’s level video game.

That same night, we pulled out the DVD of the original 1959 Pat Boone-James Mason (yes, Boone, incredibly, was top-billled) of “Journey,” one of my childhood favorites from the time I first saw it in one of those PTA-sponsored Saturday morning movie series in fifth grade. Made on a much grander scale than the new film and more or less following the original Verne story, it’s so great that it doesn’t even matter that Boone is in it! The science may be just as unrealistic, but it’s believably and excitingly presented. And I still found the monsters done by using trick photography to make real-life lizards look giant much more convincing than the computerized dinosaurs in the new version. After the disc was finished, I asked Olivia which version she liked better. She didn’t hesitate in picking the 1959 film. Who says kids don’t appreciate the classics?

FULL CIRCLE AT SHEA: Friday night, Billy Joel performed in the last-ever concert at New York City’s soon to be demolished Shea Stadium (named, of course, for the famous Cuban guerrilla, Che Stadium), and the show was topped with rumors of a Paul McCartney appearance coming true. Macca and his Hofner bass came on for a storming version of “I Saw Her Standing There” with Joel and his band, and then after Joel did “Piano Man,” he brought Paul back on to do “Let It Be” on piano (with Joel singing backup while sitting at times on the grand). My friend Tom Frangione was there and pronounced it “pretty friggin’ amazing.” Says Tom of when McCartney was first introduced: “I’ve been to hundreds of indoor and outdoor shows (with or without a Beatle on hand), and even more baseball games at Shea, and I have never, ever felt the concrete foundation shake the way it did at that moment.” So, The Beatles played Shea’s first rock concert in 1965, and a Beatle fittingly played the last song performed in concert at Shea. Kudos to Billy for making it happen.

You can see several so-so audience-shot Youtube videos of the McCartney-Joel numbers at:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Billy+Joel+and+Paul+McCartney&search_type=&aq=o

QUICKIES: Speaking of McCartney, a lot of Americans first became aware of a much loved British children’s character, Rupert Bear, through Macca’s animated short “Rupert and the Frog Song.” My Welsh grandmother used to send me Rupert annuals (hardcover compilations of the comic-book style adventures issued yearly) for Christmas. But before I was old enough for Rupert, she sent me annuals for another U.K. children’s favorite that I first discovered when my mother took me to Wales for my 3rd birthday: Sooty Bear. Sooty started out as a handpuppet on British TV, and in fact appeared on the first week of “The Mickey Mouse Club” in America in 1955 (available now on DVD). Another Beatle, George Harrison, once wrote an introduction to a book about Sooty. Anyway, this weekend Sooty celebrated his 60th birthday in Britain. Which takes me back to my pre-school days and makes me feel rather old, all at the same time! … After four weeks of reading about Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” topping the U.S. singles chart, I decided to check it out on Youtube. It’s slick, danceable pop performed by a very attractive 23-year-old singer-songwriter and sometime actress, and the video at once wallows in your typical music video Frederick’s of Hollywood sexy stereotypes while sending them up. Ditto popular sapphic fantasies, which are both exploited and winkingly parodied. Along the same lines, last year Perry first attracted attention with “Ur So Gay,” a catchy folk-pop number that makes fun of a former boyfriend (and the use of “gay” in the current Generation Y lexicon) by using Barbie and Ken-style dolls. Most of the other tunes of hers I’ve heard are sort of in that beat-heavy pop territory between Alanis Morissette and Madonna. It’s not bad, but what sets Perry apart so far is her sense of humor. Once upon a time she would have been a prime candidate for a musical-comedy variety show on TV. Anyway, you can check her out at:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Katy+Perry&search_type=&aq=f
About a decade ago, before Emeril and Bobby Flay had become household names, my family first discovered Food Network by tuning in to the British cooking series “Two Fat Ladies,” featuring Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright, who spent not quite four seasons traveling about the U.K. and dishing up a mixture of delightful wit, no-nonsense tips and deliciously rich, high-calorie dishes before Paterson’s death. A 4-disc “Two Fat Ladies” set comes out on DVD July 29 and is highly recommended for those who like a dollop or two of fun (as well as cream and butter) in the kitchen.

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