Most people agree that “The Dark Knight” was a pretty good movie. Even at a time when decent comic-based movies are commonplace, TDK has captured the popular attention like no movie in years. I went to the theater with some friends to see “Wanted” (also based on a comic book) late in its run, only to be told that the showing had to be cancelled to make room for more showings of TDK, which had just opened. (So we saw TDK instead.)
So Nolan’s epic is a good film and a popular film. But is it the best film of the year? Cinemablend.com blogger Josh Tyler thinks so, and in this excitable post he argues that critics and Oscar voters must award their highest end-of-year hosannahs to TDK, and if they don’t, it will prove once and forever that they are totally out of it:
After pointing out that people are increasingly getting their news and opinions from the internet rather than traditional media, Tyler warns that critics who choose anything other than TDK as the year’s best film are digging their own grave:
Jim Emerson, a blogger/critic and a pal of Roger Ebert, had his own thoughts on Tyler’s post. I didn’t entirely follow Emerson’s train of thought (he gets a little sidetracked by discussing fellow critic Manohla Dargis). But clearly he objects to Tyler’s hyperbole and bullying tone, and also to the idea that critics must conform to the mood of the public in order to do their job.
I came across all this when visiting Roger Ebert’s website, which links to Emerson’s post. It’s perhaps worth noting that Ebert thought there were so many great films this year that he couldn’t even narrow it down to a top 10. His top 20 list includes TDK and “Iron Man”, as it happens, as well as Pixar’s “WALL*E”, the indie drama “Rachel Getting Married” (which I liked a lot) and several films about which I’ve heard great or good things (including “W.”, “Milk”, “Synedoche, New York” and “Slumdog Millionaire”) as well as several that hold little interest to me at all. The fact that Ebert then felt the need to make another list just of the year’s best foreign films (including the vampire movie “Let the Right One In”) suggests that 2008 was quite a good year for quality movies, despite what Tyler suggests.
There are larger issues here than whether TDK is the best movie of the year, or even whether the sequel to a reboot of a 20-year-old movie franchise based on a 70-year-old comic book really does herald a bold new direction for cinema.
One is the issue of whether newspaper critics – or indeed, newspapers – are still ‘relevant’. In the old-media days, the power of “name” critics like Siskel and Ebert, Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, etc. was that they were tastemakers who took it upon themselves to educate the public in the qualities that made a film good or bad. Thanks to the rise of bloggers and websites, and the wider availability of obscure movies via DVD, people are now much more willing to decide for themselves what they like, and don’t necessarily need big-city critics telling them what to think. But the older model of film criticism helped champion a number of films and filmmakers who might otherwise have been neglected (Kael’s reviews, in particular, had a big hand in promoting the 1960s/70s generation of breakthrough directors), and it would be a shame if such critics completely lost their influence.
Another issue raised here is what type of cinematic storytelling deserves to be ‘championed’ by the cultural gatekeepers. Tyler clearly stands firmly on the side of geek culture and against dramas – he feels no need to argue exactly why “Star Wars” should have defeated “Annie Hall” at the Oscars, and regards the championing of less popular films as an “undeserved indie-film agenda“. This is the flipside of the snobbery I encountered in film school, where only foreign and independent films were held to be of any worth, while even the best sci-fi was looked down upon.
I don’t understand where this divisiveness comes from, this need to have one’s own tastes dominate the entire culture. I don’t understand why either genre films or dramas have to be championed at the other’s expense. In fact, the filmmakers I admire most are the ones who have managed to straddle that divide – Terry Gilliam, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, Darren Aronofsky, Danny Boyle, Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg have all been able to make unique, personal, memorable films while appealing to sci-fi/horror fans and highbrow film buffs alike.
I also have to admit that I haven’t fully bought into the “Dark Knight” hype. I thought it was quite good – it was a lean, mean, solid thriller, well-directed, with a great cast – but I don’t really see why it’s being hailed as the greatest movie ever made. I thought it took itself a tad seriously for a movie about a guy dressed as a rodent fighting a guy dressed as a clown. And that unbending earnestness made the various absurdities (How is the Joker able to just waltz uninvited into the hideout of the city’s worst criminals? Why doesn’t Harvey Dent’s left eye dry out? Why does Batman talk like that?) much more glaring.
Tyler’s comparison to the original “Star Wars” also loses me a bit – “Star Wars” changed the culture in 1977 because it was heroic and hopeful, whereas “The Dark Knight” simply reinforces our current cynicism. Armond White, one of the film’s few detractors, homed in on this point in his review:
Despite his alarmist, eggheady tone (no more dignified than Tyler’s fannish rant), I think White is onto something: It’s always considered manipulative to make an audience feel good, but it’s never considered manipulative to make them feel bad, because that’s more ‘real’ for some reason. Perhaps this – coupled with the unfortunate fact that one of the lead actors accidentally martyred himself – is the real reason why people who only like action movies are declaring this the greatest masterpiece in film history.
But as a filmmaker and film buff, I think all this debate is healthy. We keep getting told that audiences have irrevocably changed – that they have shorter attention spans, expect entertainment to be interactive rather than passive, get their news from comedy shows rather than reporters, and download music instead of buying it. So I’m glad that movies – new movies – can still inspire passion and enthrall people, whether it’s “The Dark Knight” or “Man on Wire” or “Repo! The Genetic Opera”. Movie critics might not be relevant, but movies are.
