Superhero films have been getting increasingly sophisticated and decidedly darker as they become (for better or worse) a full-fledged genre. With Batman Begins, writer/director Christopher Nolan (drawing inspiration from the revisionist Batman comic books by Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back to the shadows, both figuratively and literally. Now, with the origin story out of the way and the obsessive hero established, Nolan delivers a pulp epic with mythic overtones for the darkest of comic book heroes with The Dark Knight, a pulp tragedy with costumed players and elevated stakes and terrible sacrifices.

Heath Ledger leaves a legacy

In a Gotham City that is part violent gangster thriller of the thirties and forties and part modern metropolis with a rotten foundation under its magnificent cityscape, The Batman (Christian Bale) has cast an aura of fear across the underworld with his vigilante war on crime. He doesn’t trust many people in the corruption-riddled halls of justice, but he takes a chance on the man called Gotham’s White Knight: crusading new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart, who brings a hint of grinning arrogance to Dent’s passion).

Shambling into the battle comes The Joker (the late Heath Ledger). With his stringy hair, greasy make-up over the smile carved into his cheeks and garish, street-battered suit, Ledger gives us a volatile psychotic far removed from Jack Nicholson’s showboating exhibitionist in Tim Burton’s “Batman.” He works over his sardonic dialogue in a rumbling wise-guy whine and off-balance patter, his tongue darting in and out like a lizard, his slumping posture so at ease in the chaos of his capers it’s disturbing.

Nolan delivers the expected set pieces for a big screen superhero spectacle, from a sharp bank heist executed (in every sense of the word) with impersonal efficiency by a masked gang to a high-speed ambush in an underground tunnel to a nearly incomprehensible rescue operation where the good guys are working at cross purposes. But The Dark Knight is also a tighter, smarter, more focused film than Batman Begins and Nolan has become a more effective storyteller.

It’s one of the best American movies of the year (I review it on my blog here) and a terrific DVD.

The “Two-Disc Special Edition” includes “Batman Uncovered: Creation of a Scene,” a collection of over an hour of featurettes on the making of key scenes (like blowing up the hospital – for real! – and a real life stunt jump from a skyscraper more thrilling than the finished scene) and versions of the six scenes shot in IMAX format presented in their original aspect ratio…. The Blu-ray edition presents the IMAX version of the film (the IMAX scenes fill the entire widescreen TV frame)…

I review the DVD in my MSN column here.

Also new this week is Olivier Assayas’s breakthrough film Irma Vep in a new “Essential Edition” from Zeitgeist:

French director Olivier Assayas satirizes the French film industry and pays affectionate tribute to the joys and frustrations of filmmaking in his offbeat 1997 comedy. Hong Kong icon Maggie Cheung plays herself in this playful lark about a company trying to remake the silent film classic Les Vampires with an unstable director (aging New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud) and a power struggle within the crew.

My DVD review is here.

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I’d say I like superhero movies as much as the next guy. But that’s probably not true. I probably like them more than the next guy. I spent years collecting comic books and, after dropping out for a dozen years or so, got back into the artform with graphic novels and collections. That’s given me a love-hate relationship with the burgeoning superhero genre, embracing the best (the first X-Men and Spider-Man films) and decrying the worst (The Fantastic Four and Elektra, among others).

"I'm an agent of chaos"

The development of the superhero movie genre has been fascinating to watch. Over the past couple of decades, comics have become more cinematic and sophisticated and adult, leaving the preteen audience behind to focus on college readers and adult collectors. At the same time, movie blockbusters have become more juvenile and franchise oriented, while on the production side they have adopted technologies that allow them to replicate the kinds of images and action spectacle previously only possible on the page. In retrospect, the superhero movie blockbuster seems like an inevitable meeting of storytelling forms. What makes it so interesting is the way the genre has been attracting some of the most talented and cinematically enthusiastic directors: Bryan Singer, Ang Lee, Sam Raimi, and now Christopher Nolan.

With Batman Begins, writer/director Christopher Nolan (drawing inspiration from the psychologically brooding comic book rebirth of the seventies and the more recent revisionist Batman comic books by Frank Miller and Jeph Loeb) rebooted the Batman mythos for the big screen, bringing the often lighthearted hero back to the shadows, both figuratively and literally. The film was narratively dense but also a little ungainly, with a massive climactic set pieces that dwarfed the human scale of the action drama with the epic destruction.

With the origin story out of the way and the obsessive hero established, Nolan delivers a worthy story for the darkest of comic book heroes with The Dark Knight. The result is the new gold standard for superhero noir. Read more »