The Durrrrk Knayyyt!

I'm just as excited as probably anybody else about The Dark Knight Rises. But I'm also probably a little bit more cynical; apparently this is what happens as you approach 30 years old. Christopher Nolan's films are clearly levels above plenty of previous efforts, though I do still hold a special place for Tim Burton's first two films, like anybody around my age. They weren't perfect, but they captured a little era so perfectly you can almost forgive Kim Basinger for basically screaming for that entire first movie.

And now I'll stumble onto something: Why are the women in these movies so awful?

I should clarify: I don't entirely blame the actresses. I do blame Katie Holmes for ruining Batman Begins, even if she was handed some shitty writing, probably written by boys who grew up reading comic books filled with women who were either impossibly voluptuous or pathetically weak and clingy and nothing in between. But that's too easy. I don't care what anyone says, you don't become a Hollywood writer, at least nowadays, with that kind of warped view of what a female is. Which tells me that, especially in the Nolan films, the writers are trying really hard to walk a really fine line between writing the big boobed comic book woman who will sell tickets to young boys, yet not making her totally pathetic, bland, and dumb, and hopefully achieving a somewhat smart and powerful character.

It's a totally noble effort that sort of accidentally ends up becoming chauvinistic, because ultimately the women, to me, end up feeling almost entirely inhuman. Or even if they are kind of human, they're forced to regurgitate some downright awful lines.

So let me just clean up my puke after hearing Anne Hathaway's Catwoman whisper in that new trailer, "There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you ever thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us."

It's not that the barely hidden income inequality stuff is bullshit or annoyingly topical (if you know anything about superheroes in general, it's that they are always fighting for the less fortunate out there), but that storm metaphor is just gross. It reads like a fucking stump speech. AND she's saying this to Bruce Wayne, the single biggest philanthropist in Gotham; half the plot of Batman Begins was built around the idea that Gotham was spared total economic collapse because the Wayne family gave so much. So if they're moving the plot in the "Bruce Wayne turns into a money-grubbing asshole" direction, I'm going to be supremely disappointed.


Anyway - I'm just scared. Hold me. The end of The Dark Knight where the ferries are supposed to blow each other up but don't because the goodness of mankind prevails....oof. Semi-interesting idea but I could have done without the "HEY! IN CASE YOU MISSED IT THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE THE MAIN THEME OF THE MOVIE" card dangling in front of the screen the whole time.