Sorry the movie sucked. I’d been pretty tempted to see it, since it’s likely to be the only movie I’ll want to see at a Regal Cinema before my giftcard starts losing money, but perhaps I’ll take my chances on the fall.

Thank you, however, for linking to that post again: I’d forgotten that comment of mine entirely. How articulate and insightful of me! The rhetoric, I fear, was a little lacking, in that I don’t think I addressed myself adequately to Katherine’s concerns. So, to be clear, I think the redemption starts just as the movie ends. Having watched Crimes and Misdemeanors again relatively recently, I’m even more convinced that Matchpoint is a re-telling of that already very well-told story with far more restraint and cinematic excellence (which can also be called simplicity, as Katherine indeed did). “Is luck really good for you,” is the question that speaker poses, I think, not the question the movie’s asking. But, man, I’m giving all this credit to Allen for simplicity and restraint, qualities I wouldn’t normally attribute to him. I want to believe he pulled off a movie like Bergman, but having not seen it in quite some time I’m doubting my analysis. Gotta watch it again.

nate: have you ever read Arkham Asylum: a serious house on serious earth? if so, what did you think of it? i know The Killing Joke is being cited as one strong influence for the film, but i actually think it maps better onto Arkham, particularly the batman portrayal. i’m not sure that was intentional, but i watched it in that context, and i loved it. it does make for a pretty deconstructed batman, though, admittedly, which may not be your thing. i’ve never been a big batman fan, and in my opinion, this was the best film.

HB: it still might be worth seeing. if you’re going to ever watch it, you’ll want to see it on a big screen; it wouldn’t be one to rent, in my opinion, anyhow.

I mostly liked it. It was huge, and I’m getting tired of huge movies, but I liked the sustained mood in the film. Like Anne says, the Batman in these movies is deconstructed, only slightly less than the aged one in The Dark Knight Returns. Christian Bale’s “growl” is intentional in that respect. He’s supposed to sound crazy and a little unstable, so that the voice fits for example the scene where he’s beating the Joker in the cell. The oddest thing about this movie is that it was a horror/disaster/terrorism movie. It really made you feel that the world was falling apart and evoked the corresponding mood in America today.

Also, I liked the Prestige.

to unpack a bit more (and i’m heading out to a second screening thisafternoon, so i might have more to say): the whole point of the fistfight is to watch batman struggle, in a physical, visceral way, with his shadow-self. it’s an exercise in jungian archetype. the physicality of it is only meant to underscore the struggle of will, but it’s almost beside the point: batman’s fight here isn’t physical. the joker dwarfs batman in the movie, almost to the point of making him invisible, because the joker looms so large in the mind of batman. think of gotham as the mind of batman, of batman as batman’s ego, and the joker as batman’s darkest fears personified.

You should probably still watch it, hb, if only because I’m curious to know whether you agree with me or not. In some ways, I think you and I look for similar things in films, and I’d be curious to see whether that similarity applies to TDK.

Anne: I haven’t read Arkham Asylum: a serious house on serious earth, but your comment certainly makes me want to. I certainly don’t object to the idea of Batman being deconstructed: I love, after all, The Dark Knight Returns; I do object, though, to a destructed Batman, a sin I ascribed to both Burton movies (not to mention the Joel Schumaker two). I feel, honestly, like many people described feeling after the latter two Matrix movies: they would acknowledge the beauty of the effect that those of us who were fans described, but thought that it just wasn’t in the movies themselves. It seems, honestly, like the main difference between me and some of my Batman-fan friends is that they were more willing to jump from the movie’s reality to the ideas and archetypes they wanted. That’s not wholly bad: I, too, mainly love the latter two Matrix movies for the imaginative place they put me in. But I also really love dialogue that does not require wishing to reach a place of satisfying depth… dialogue that has the capacity to surprise me with a cosmos larger and more coherent than I had understood or anticipated.

Method: Well, as I say, there are things about The Prestige that I thought kicked ass. I’m hoping that if I just go read the book that inspired it, all those ideas will be there without the botching (to my view) of the movie.

For what it is worth I thought the movie was awesome almost categorically.

Because I’m too lazy to Google: is the current movie indeed a sequel to Batman Begins, such that I should watch that movie before taking my giftcard for a spin?

You definitely need to see Batman Begins first.

For what it’s worth, I agree 100% with Martin - and that ALMOST NEVER HAPPENS.

Sorry to break in, but: Good lord you’ve got a mess of violence in your backyard right now, Nate. I’m sure you have two dozen preferable plans of action if it doesn’t let up and you need a breather. But if you get down to Plan Y, there’s an apartment set aside for guest rental over here on the dull side of town that can be had for less than the cost of a clean and quiet hotel room anywhere nearby. Be well.

HB: Definitely see Batman Begins first.

Mike: Thanks for the concern, but it’s not like there are riots happening. The recent shootings are pretty upsetting, but actual manifestations of violence are not usually changes so much as they are manifestations of dynamics that have always been going on. Not only do I feel content to continue living at my house, I feel content to continue walking around my streets with my normal degree of precaution. There are risks involved — the same ones that have always been there. Had I felt safe before but not now, I think I would’ve been foolishly misunderstanding the situation.

Just to speak for myself on Trinidad: the violence is undeniably awful, but somehow reading about it in the Post gives me a completely different feeling from the one I got walking around the neighborhood that night, mercifully several hours before the shootings. That latter feeling makes it seem absurd not to go to Trinidad (or, in Nate’s case, to flee his home), even if I’m not quite ready to move there myself for reasons, primarily, of inconvenient public transportation. There are just so many people who live there who are civilians, so to speak, just like me and my friends, that the thought of this place being any less worth living in or walking through doesn’t make sense to me. Perhaps that feeling will change if I am the victim of a crime, but I’ve witnessed two armed robberies directly outside my home on Capitol Hill in three years, the last with a pretty huge assault rifle, and I still want to live here. Horrible stuff happens. But we have to be courageous (not rash) in the face of it. Besides, as long as this stuff is happening in the Trinidads of America, no one is safe, not even people out in Vienna, or wherever.

What hb describes is a recurring theme in the Samantha Power book A Problem from Hell: America in the age of genocide. In retrospect, victims of genocides seem pretty obtuse. But there’s just an incompatability with the sense of home and safety that makes people unable to grasp the notion that they’d do better somewhere else. The notion that familiarity = safety is deeply ingrained. Which isn’t to say anything about your neighborhoods. I just thought it was interesting to see the same sentiment, which kind of stunned me, reading about Muslims in Bosnia, cropping up here, expressed in just about the same way.

the Post gives me a completely different feeling from the one I got walking around the neighborhood that night

I had the same feeling running in the opposite direction a few years back in Columbia Heights. The media ran relatively staid stories while the neighborhood mess was escalating steadily. Maybe the skewness is a matter of victim-oriented reporting, though I couldn’t discern a clear pattern of bias at the time. The local media makes me shrug a lot; normally I can count on it to cure occasional insomnia. Not so last night.

Tim: That’s an interesting idea, but one I think is inapposite to the question of neighborhoods in America; or, at least, while you may see a superficial similarity, I think any possible lessons we can draw from the right reactions to genocide would almost certainly be actively harmful when applied to the problems that face places like Trinidad. Specifically, I don’t think the solution to the genocides wrought by the War on Drugs, so to speak, can ever be simply that the victims would do better somewhere else. The problems of the Trinidads and West Baltimores exist because America abandoned those places in successive waves, first whites, then educated blacks, and finally anyone else who could get out. We have tolerated successive generations of jungles to spring up and choke themselves within our country, in those patches where we chose not to enforce America’s laws or educate her children. I wish I had The Corner at hand to quote Simon about how Americans know that we have got stuff like this coming to us.

I’m torn. On the one hand, remarking on the similarity between people who live with urban violence and those who were victims of genocide seems like another instance of denying agency to black folks. On the other, it’s not entirely inaccurate, as those successive waves of people have demonstrated: if you can get out to the suburbs in Atlanta or Prince Georges, why the hell wouldn’t you? The answers to why you live where your risk of violence is slightly higher than upper Northwest have to be longer-term or meta: the same reasons all people want to live in cities, plus global warming, commuting hell, etc. But all that depends on laws being enforced, walking on the streets, and people chosing to live with others.

We’ll see how Fenty and Lanier handle this; I’m glad they’ve been talking a lot about it and saturating the area with cops, but it’s clear that checkpoints are an unsustainable solution. They need cops with the skill to develop real intelligence about why these things are happening, and they need to keep after it. Trinidad’s proximity to the latest revitalization area of H Street means the political will will be here for a while. I’m just not sure the politicians have the right tools to actually stop the problems.

Mike: Yeah, there are a lot of factors at work here. The number of victims is abnormally obscene, as opposed to the usual trickle of black men being killed every day in scattered places throughout the city. Gentrification has progressed, so there are more people of the sort whose complaints tend to be heard. Gentrification is also possibly threatened by the housing market. This mayor and chief are different from Williams and Ramsey; they’re more inclined to stand in front of cameras on street corners, at least. They force the media to pay attention, maybe, and at a time when the Post in particular is facing stiffer competition from other media.

Just to reiterate two points: 1) these problems are already there and will still exist after the Neighborhood Safety Zones are dismantled, and 2) no one is safe anywhere. The most effective way to make yourself safer is to know more about what’s a genuine threat to you. As a white guy uninvolved in the drug trade, it’s random violence that’s my biggest threat, and that’s still relatively rare. The good news for me is that there is a fair amount of stuff I can do to prevent random violence, starting with walking places in my neighborhood.

That Atlantic article has a link that I’d missed to a story from 2000 about the murders in what is now called Capitol Hill East and what has long been called Rosedale. When the trouble first started this summer, the cops talked about a possible beef between people in Rosedale and Trindad as causing the killings. Friday night, I remembered that a young man had been shot dead in the streets of Rosedale (five blocks from my house) last week and wondered whether there would be a retaliation. Pure speculation, of course, especially since the cops have stopped talking about that theory.

Well, it’s appropriate that this thread got sidetracked into the urban violence/blight topic.

Having just watched Batman Begins, I have a couple reactions.

1) I have some damn sharp-eyed friends. Much of what you say here, Nate, on re-reading applies to the first movie. But Katherine’s critiques are better for being the more incisive. Sorry. The art direction alone, had it been truly unified, would have bumped this up a couple hb-monads: then at least it would have told me something. But I would have praised its technical excellence highly if Katherine hadn’t pointed this lack out to me.

2) The opening of the movie gave me an inkling, for the first time, of why one might like comic books (well, superhero comic books). What did it? Equal parts the idea of frustration at the partiality of the city’s justice (truly, I think the early parts, when you know what’s coming without the parents yet being killed, conjure the desperation that lies at the bottom of the desire for a superhero) and the setting in the Himalayas (it reminded me of Tintin and that I liked those comics a lot).

3) I’m tempted to universalize my critiques of the movie to the entire genre of comic books, and I suspect I’m not all wrong. For a movie this careful in some respects, it’s vastly overwritten (to rephrase Katherine’s first point). Thinking about the boys in the movie, however, is helpful in understanding, I think, why a work that really isn’t saying anything coherent, manages to hit on certain themes that are incredibly powerful and say things that, taken by themselves, are in fact true. The desires for justice and revenge are both irreducible things and members of the class that kids feel more purely for their inexperience than do adults. True education, of course, helps one to know which to trust, but they both battle throughout life, if less frequently on such a grand scale as comic books provide. The promise of comic books, or at least Batman, is that training and a certain kind of education will allow a human being to become just, even as he feels more keenly than his reader ever will how tempting is revenge. That little reader, who always wishes for a Batman to descend from the sky, never actually will get such a hero; but if comic books can provide a sort of faith in elemental ideas and thus the seeds for a later genuine education, then they’re worth it. They may flounder around a lot (“Justice! Fear! Decay!”) with ultimately incoherent writing; in fact, they’re doomed to be so muddled, being inescapably juvenile works. Juvenile works can be good, though, for exposing the inexorable contradictions of human life. It’s useful to keep Pascal around, for instance, to remind us, among other things, that big stuff is scary. We shouldn’t expect juvenile works, however, as I pretty much always have, to get the difficult work of building coherent accounts or solutions right. At their best, through the deliberate presentation of simple things (I’m thinking the first half of Batman Begins here), they can provide a vocabulary for those kids to become aware of and later then to reflect on those irreducible desires. And, of course, they’re really fun.

I was an iconoclast in my youth, bored with the transparent, I thought, stories and inexplicable artwork of comic books. I couldn’t take simple stories or stylized artwork simply; my experience with the comic books at the library was always a mix of confusion, boredom, and cynicism. (Tintin, however, was about wars and science and drug smuggling in the very real world so it was clearly important.) Thus, after enjoying this movie quite a bit, I’m less eager to see a movie that’s iconoclastic about the genre. I guess I would expect it to get a hell of a lot right in order to be worth it. But I’m certain about one thing, Anne: I’ll not be seeing The Dark Knight in a theater. The many silly requirements of the action movie format these days would make it hard to watch and impossible to take seriously when the audience around me was eagerly cheering for the obligatory cheap jokes and pithy rejoinders made in a mid-fight caesura. Those things are fine on their own, and because the first half impressed me so and established the right distance between the movie and me, they weren’t annoying in Batman Begins when I viewed it on my own. But it would cheapen and distract from the good parts, for me at least, to feel those private satisfactions at lines like “I’m Batman” to be part of the public response to plain pandering for applause lines. They may be that, but come on, people, don’t remind me of it!

I guess I’ll keep beating this horse.

According to Peter Moskos, young men have the same life expectancy in the Eastern police district in Baltimore as they have in Baghdad.

Another perspective, on a different city that I know a little bit about.

Nate, you have to give Christopher/Jonathan Nolan credit for “Memento” though. Its awesomeness is off the charts, IMHO.

Grace: I certainly remember enjoying Memento (I’ve seen it but once), though I’m less enthusiastic about it than most people. It was a clever film that surprised me in a number of ways. I feel I can chart its awesomeness in pretty concrete terms, though.

Is there a review of the new X-Files movie forthcoming? I’d be interested in discussing that here.

For you, Amanda, anything.