In Which Hank Reviews A Movie

Warning: some spoilers contained herein

So C i n d y and I decided to kill about 4 hours this Saturday by watching The Dark Knight at our local cineplex. What follows are my thoughts on said experience.

The movie was showing every half hour somehow (maybe it was on 5 screens, who knows), so at 1:30 we bought tickets to the 2pm showing. First off, it was $7 a pop for tickets, and this was the "cheap" matinee price. So we dropped $14 in ticket fees and another $10 or so in gas since the theater is about a 8 mile round trip from our home (okay, maybe that's a bit exaggerated, but still, with the cost of gas this does become a factor). We entered the theater and it was totally empty. I was expecting it to be a bit full since it was due to start in just 30 minutes, and since a friend of mine has been keeping me updated on how much this movie was grossing and I just assumed it would be crowded. Not then, anyway. We sat smack dab in the middle, which was nice. Ten minutes later the theater began it's loop of trivia question slides. In all, there were (literally) only about five of these, so we, the audience, were asked about 20 times who said what in a given movie.

Finally, people started arriving, about 10 minutes to showtime. Unfortunately, the couple behind us included one of those guys who doesn't realize/care that he's in a public place, and talked full-volume about this inane thing and that boring thing. So we had ten minutes of that, combined with about 15 more slides asking the same dumb movie trivia we'd been viewing for the last ten minutes.

At 2pm, the house lights finally dimmed. The movie was about to start! Right? Nope. You see, in order for the theater to charge such cheap, affordable prices for their tickets, we had to watch about five commercials for Sprite, JCPenny, etc. But that's cool, since the tickets are so cheap and all. Finally, with the commercials now over, we all (about a 2/3 full house) collectively settled down to watch the Batman. Right? Nope. What then followed was about ten previews. Again, I'm not exaggerating. We had to sit through at least ten previews, along with the Loud Guy behind me complaining the whole time about how many previews we had to see, and how he'd timed his day around the running time of this movie, and assumed that would start at 2pm, and now he'd miss his next item on the agenda, etc. The good news is the preview for The Quantum of Solace looked really good.

With all that housekeeping out of the way, the actual movie did, in fact, actually start. I was a bit afraid, since I'd read several opinions that the PG13 rating could really have been an R, and specifically I'd heard of some sort of "pencil trick" that many pointed to as an example. Therefore, when the pencil scene started I was ready to look away. However, that was unnecessary, as they don't actually show anything. The same can be said for many scenes in the movie that could have potentially been overly violent; they always cut away right before the blood and gore would have made its appearance. Which is fine by me, but I wonder, then, about all the "this should have been R" chatter. Why? I actually wonder why it was PG13 instead of simply PG. Remember the Michael Keaton Batman movie with the Penguin? Now that was an overly violent movie. I seem to remember Danny Devito biting off someone's ear or nose or something, and they showed that. That was overly violent. The Pencil Trick? Not so much.

So the movie continues, and whenever Christian Bale is wearing the batsuit, he talks with a weird voice. That always bothered me in the first movie, but I was told by my Comic Book friends that he does that in order to disguise his voice. Fine, okay, so I'd just accepted this tepid explanation, and we have this movie where, in one scene, he uses this voice when talking to Rachel (I think that's her name), and another scene when he's alone with Lucius Fox and uses this same voice. Now, both of these peeps know that Batman is Bruce Wayne (or vise versa as the case may be), so why the strange voice? Then it hit me: I guess that batsuit's collar is just overly tight and Bale's thoat gets constricted, thus causing him to sound like a four-pack-a-day pissed-off sociopath. Or something.

So then the movie ends, with the death of Rachel and the birth of Two-Face, and... wait. The movie doesn't end? It keeps going. But why didn't it end there? It's the two-hour mark, after all. My body tells me the movie is about to end, as does my mind, looking at the plot. But no, we still have (as it turned out) another 30 minutes or so, and another couple of plot lines. But then it does end. I think? Yes, this is definitely the end. Okay. I can tell it's the end because the couple behind us are finally quiet.

So we walk out of the dark theater into the bright, 100 degree weather both thinking that the movie was okay, but that it was too long, and we wonder how/why so many people are seeing it several times, since to us its too expensive and a bit too long and a bit too much of a pain to sit through ads and trailers and people talking, etc, to hear some guy struggle to talk in an ill-fitting suit.

I'll be buying the Blu-Ray, though.