TFC Journal at TheFilmChair.com

It’s a bird. It’s a plane…

• A poker-faced Christopher Nolan quashes rumors about Superman and his third Batman. And he doesn’t create any new ones. (LA Times)
• Warner Bros. is looking at two Wizard of Oz projects in hopes of having Alice in Wonderland-type success. (LA Times)
• Clint Eastwood has his sights set on a J. Edgar Hoover biopic written by Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. (THR)
• Fox has moved Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps from its April release date to Sept. 24. (The Wrap)

Fin.

Top Story: Rumor alert! AICN is reporting that Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film will be shot fully in IMAX. This is 1.) a HUGE technological challenge that I’m sure Nolan is up for and 2.) a great gimmick but not great enough to trump Heath’s Joker.  Now if only Cleveland had an IMAX theater that played first run Hollywood movies. (AICN)

In Other News: Susan Sarandon has joined the cast of Wall Street 2. She joins a returning Michael Douglas, as well as Shia LaBeouf and Frank Langella. (Variety)

Fin.

That reputable news source The UK Sun reports that Eddie Murphy will be the Riddler in the third Nolan Batman film. The paper actually sounds serious when it says, “The Beverly Hills Cop star, 47, has been signed up by British director CHRISTOPHER NOLAN to reprise the role played by JIM CARREY in 1995’s Batman Forever.”

Are they crazy? Must be because they also sneak in a little tidbit about Shia LaBeouf, the most hated actor in the land of fanboys, getting the role of Robin. Batman himself, Christian Bale, has previously stated that he will refuse to work if they add the Robin character.

The article does have one interesting blurb about Rachel Weisz wanting to play Catwoman. That’s about the only idea in the article that I could get behind.

Mark your calendars. The second-highest grossing film of all time (domestic) and biggest superhero film ever is coming to a store near you on Dec. 9.  Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for the incomparable Batman Begins sequel, The Dark Knight, as I type this. (It’s also available on Blu-ray Disc and as a Two-Disc Special Edition.)

The December DVD date makesThe Dark Knight a super stocking stuffer this holiday season, and it also gives the picture (and, of course, Heath Ledger) a big push ahead of this year’s Oscar balloting. Nomination ballots go out on Dec. 26.  

I may not love the film, but I’m rooting for it. The Oscars need a big audience this year, and there’s no faster way to record ratings than to nominate The Dark Knight for anything it’s eligible for.  

When you’re doing press for one movie and people keep asking about another, how do you shut them up?

“No. I’m dead. ”

Aaron Eckhart attempted to quash rumors of a Two-Face return in the next Batman movie in at least two published interviews tonight, here and here.  He’s out promoting the upcoming Alan Ball film Towelhead, and along the way had to tamp down rumors of everyone’s favorite crusading district attorney turned whiner supervillain making a return.  

No big loss, considering the tepidness of his turn in The Dark Knight. (Angry commenting can now commense.)  I don’t imagine seeing Eckhart create a villain as malicious and sociopathic as we all now expect from the Batman franchise.  It will be hard for even the most gifted actor to deliver anything comparable to Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.  Still, they will try.

So, Two-Face is dead.  At least for now. 

Remember the good old days when people (me included) were talking about WALL•E being a Best Picture contender? Oh, June. That was a nice month.

Now that people are seriously, if prematurely, saying The Dark Knight is the iceberg to Titanic’s unsinkable box office record, one little robot may lose his spot on Oscar’s shortlist to a comic book adaptation.

Bold moves are rare for the Academy, which is why it can be easy to predict some eventual nominees a year in advance. An animated film and a comic book adaptation are hardly Oscar fodder. But rarely can the Academy ignore a cultural phenomenon the likes of The Dark Knight. WALL•E, which is universally acclaimed but struggling to cross the $200 million mark at the domestic box office, may not give voters the motivation that Big Money Bats will give them.

There’s no motivation like fear that the public will think those Academy elitists are severely out of touch.

You can never discount unwavering fan devotion when taking into consideration some Best Picture contenders. Fandom, combined with box office and serious cinematic achievement, has propelled unlikely films into the final five in the past. The bad news for WALL•E is that it’s no E.T. The good news for The Dark Knight is that it may just be a consumer-friendly No Country for Old Men. In addition to being in touch with the zeitgeist, The Dark Knight has enough artistic credibility to supercede the genre. Like The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King before it, The Dark Knight has the potential to defy the ‘rules’ of the Academy and ride this wave to a nomination. All the elements are there.

If both The Dark Knight and WALL•E are ignored come nomination time, there will be hell to pay for the Academy. If the rating sink much lower, the show is going to be tossed to basic cable. Today, however, I’m willing to bet that one or the other will be there.

Personally, I’m rooting for the robot.

Oscar 2008 – 2009 Prediction Charts

The Dark Knight (2008)–***

Heath Ledger’s turn as the Joker is both The Dark Knight’s blessing and curse. Ledger’s tour-de-force performance as the sociopathic clown takes Batman cinema into uncharted territory, but the cult leader like spell he casts over the audience has a devastating effect. We don’t really want the other characters in the film to keep up with him. And no other actor could do it if they tried.

The Joker is the bringer of chaos. With no back story or profit-producing schemes, he is only there to turn everything in Gotham upside down and inside out. He robs mob banks to prove he’s crazy enough to do it and to take away the one silly thing—cash—that the petty crime families are after. With a vigilante in a bat suit taking down the ordinary criminals, it’s the Joker’s role to act as the counterweight.

But Gotham has a new hero in waiting, a white knight. The tough, fearless district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) is prepared to take on those simple-minded mob bosses, with Batman (Christian Bale) playing no small part in the Gotham citizens’ belief that the streets will be clean someday. The crowd is quick to turn on Batman when the Joker starts a killing spree the likes of which Gotham has never seen. Every day that Batman doesn’t turn himself in, “people will die”, the Joker tells them. Judges, police officers, mayors, ordinary citizens. No one is safe from the Joker’s madness.

Of course, the Joker doesn’t want Batman to be unmasked. The Joker revels in being the yin to Batman’s yang. It’s the essence of his character. Every action this agent of chaos performs, his sincere commitment to unimaginable devastation, is so beyond the pale, we as an audience can’t help but develop a sort of Stockholm syndrome. We don’t necessarily want the destruction, but we begin to care about the villain much more than we do any of the heroes.

The Dark Knight could have been completely forgettable, or at least consumable, with a lesser Joker. We would then have been more inclined to appreciate the Bale Batman’s existential crisis and Dent’s psychological transformation into the supervillain Two-Face. If The Dark Knight has a flaw, it is this: the Joker is no counterweight. He’s a sandbag falling from a theater’s rafters, while the other characters are stage hands whose palms are burned as they try to grasp the rope.

I don’t recall a film with a single performance the stature of Ledger’s that didn’t have someone else to carry the film. Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates had Janet Lee and Vera Miles as the Crane sisters. Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter had Jodie Foster’s Clarice. There’s no one in The Dark Knight up to the challenge, maybe because so many of the characters still only connect as lighter comic book transplants.

The cinema of the 1970s offers the easiest comparisons to someone like the Joker with its Popeye Doyles and Travis Bickles. The films with these characters, however, have no intention of offering up any sort of hope with less reckless counterparts. They unsettle you intentionally and don’t allow you to feel anything else. When Gene Siskel said of The French Connection that he left the theater “looking for someone to throw up against the wall,” I knew the film made him mean it. The Dark Knight doesn’t ever reach that level.

It may not seem fair to compare The Dark Knight to some of the great films above. But unlike Batman Begins or Iron Man, The Dark Knight strives for cinematic greatness. Christopher Nolan’s inspired direction, the character-driven film music from Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, and of course, Ledger’s Joker all require that The Dark Knight be respected and appreciated for its movie-making, flaws and all, and not as just another comic book blockbuster. We’ll probably never encounter another superhero film like it. That more than anything else makes The Dark Knight worth seeing again and again.

The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Heath Ledger, directed by Christopher Nolan, is in theaters now. 

So I finally decided to see The Dark Knight tonight at 12:15 a.m.  I was going to wait, but I couldn’t hold out till Saturday.  The question isn’t really whether I’ll stay awake or not; it’s more about whether I’ll get up to go to my big people job in the morning.

The Dark Knight will be playing in a record 4,366 venues.  It’s selling out shows round the clock. The screening I’m going to sold out almost immediately after I bought my ticket. This one is going to be a monster.  Here’s hoping it crushes Spider-Man 3’s $154 million dollar record for opening weekend.