Basshole brought up a good point in the comments for my 2008 top 10 movie entry, though probably not intentionally:
I just have to say I was rather underwhelmed by Dark Knight (but loved Batman Returns). You can be frenetic and still tell a story; this wasn't it. Ledger WAS good, though I wonder how much attention that would've gotten if he didn't have the good fortune to drop dead.
This was followed up by a similar comment from Emily. And while I'm as big a fan of Michelle Pfeiffer in a catsuit as anyone, I assume both of you were referring to Batman Begins.
Anyway, part of the disconnect that comes from critics praising a movie highly and, say, somebody seeing it a few weeks or months after that fact certainly has a lot to do with the tyranny of elevated expectations. I saw The Dark Knight a good two weeks before release. There had been rumors about Ledger's performance and how well-crafted it was to that point, but nothing like the orgy of critical acclaim that was to come shortly thereafter.
Fast forward a month or so, words like "masterpiece" and "epic" have been bandied about in reviews, and you might be heading in assuming the film in question is as fan-fucking-tastic as everyone is saying. Trouble is, that's almost never the case: partly because almost no movie is ever that good (and certainly not if your benchmark for criticism is Peter Travers or Jeffrey Lyons), but mostly because you can't help yourself from at least unconsciously believing something receiving so much praise must be pretty damned good. I know that happens to me all the time, the most recent example being The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
I still think Ledger's performance would be getting a lot of attention, however.
Well, count me as one who preferred Dark Knight to Batman Returns. Ledger’s performance was definitely the highlight and was already generating buzz around it before his death. As for the movie itself, if they would have done a cliffhanger ending leading into the Two-Face plot, it might have been damn close to perfect (doesn’t anybody realize how well the depressing end of Empire Strikes Back worked anymore?).
I really like the Dark Knight. I thought if you examined it for a while it was a great allegory for an examination of the balance of civil rights and the war on terror.
And as much as I liked Heath Ledger, I loved the score especially in the Joker’s scenes. It wasn’t enjoyable as a piece of music, but in combination with Ledger’s performance it did amp up the tension and sense of dread. To me that’s what a good score does…improve the presentation of the story.
Sadly, my love for all things Michelle Pfeiffer has not lasted…. — basshole
That simply means you haven’t seen Grease 2 recently. Rectify this with a quickness, so your love will be reborn.
Add “The Fabulous Baker Boys” to that. Then you’ll be sitting in your car in front of her house for hours on end.
Ouch, and I even thought it looked wrong at the time and didn’t bother to check. Batman Begins. Begins. Sadly, my love for all things Michelle Pfeiffer has not lasted, just like her career as a respectable actress really didn’t reach INTO the 90s.
I’m not saying Dark Knight sucked, and I went in with great awareness of hype, but the “Bourne-ification” (an offshoot of “Matrix-ization”) of all things action really killed it for me. It was style over substance. Or certainly style distracting from the substance. Ledger’s performance aside, I really didn’t expect to hear people talking about it at the end of the year.