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In Alan Moore's 1988 masterpiece The Killing Joke we got the clearest vision yet of the Joker as Batman's "dark side," and a Joker that was as vicious and demented as anything we had ever seen.

Until The Dark Knight, that is.

The movie borrows narrative strands from some of the best Batman graphic novels: Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, Loeb's The Long Halloween, and The Killing Joke. One of the core plot elements of the movie in fact (The Joker wanting to prove that everyone can essentially become like him given the right circumstances) is at the center of The Killing Joke, and many story elements and characters in The Long Halloween reappear in both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, most notably perhaps the plotline involving DA Harvey Dent and his transformation.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is nothing short of astonishing. In a sense Batman can be defined by contrast with his enemies, and Bale's Batman is better because Ledger's Joker has so much ferocity. Without it, one of the few shortcomings of the movie (that Batman's own latent insanity and his finely tuned detective skills are for the most part conspicuously absent) would be much more glaring.

A review I read somewhere said that The Dark Knight is a "modern bullet train of a movie" and it's true. The last half hour in particular is something to behold. It's one of those movies that really require a giant screen to be experienced in full.

Supposedly this is the second part of a trilogy, and if commercial success leads to sequels then this one is almost guaranteed (it broke the opening day box office record), and hopefully it will be as good as the first two.

In the meantime, we have The Dark Knight to take us once more to Gotham, in all of its bleak, chaotic intensity.

Spoiler warning: yes, this is a spoof, but it essentially contains the whole plot of the movie. Don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Read on after the break...

Could Alan Moore have been both right and wrong at the same time? This is what I keep asking myself a few days after seeing Watchmen.

The anticipation for this movie, certainly among the graphic novel nerds like myself, was probably matched in recent memory only by The Dark Knight. Zack Snyder & Co. clearly went through an herculean effort to remain as true as possible to the source material. Everything is there: as good and sometimes better as you could have imagined it. The complexity of the story remains untouched, and given what the book was this is, to me, nothing short of astonishing. Even the change to the ending, with the now-famous removal of the squid, is definitely an improvement. The squid may have been ok in the 80s, but these days... it just wouldn't fly.

And yet... as the movie was ending I felt a bit exhausted. The story is, clearly, simply too much to cram into two and and a half hours unfiltered. Maybe it would be better suited to be a miniseries (Battlestar Galactica comes to mind as an example). The best way I can describe it is by using the oft-abused metaphor of drinking from a firehose. But even as it blasted your brain with raw data, Watchmen also felt somehow ... surgical. Not that it had no soul, but, perhaps, that it had simply borrowed the book's soul without developing one of its own.

More importantly, I was just sad. Not because the movie leaves you sad, but because I was immediately convinced that the movie would be a commercial failure (I still am). Why? Well, I knew the story really, really well going in. And even so, it was almost an effort to keep up and take it all in. Every scene, every sequence, was dense with references, in-jokes, subtext, and, of course, the time-jumping criss-crossing plotlines. I tried to think what would someone who hadn't read the book, who wasn't as much into multi-level, dense meta-plotlines (read: most people), would take away from the movie, and if they would enjoy it at all.

No, not all movies have to be blockbusters. But let's face it: when you spend $150 MM to make a movie and then (at least) $50 MM to market it, and you basically spend over a year splattering trailers all over TV, cable, newspapers, and the interweb, that's what you're angling for. And in that, Watchmen fails miserably. It is not, in my opinion, making the story accessible to a wider audience which is part of what movies like this one are supposed to do.

Which brings me back to where I started. Moore famously stated that Watchmen was "inherently unfilmable". We have the movie now, which proves the literal part of that statement wrong. But in staying true to the story as it was, in all of its complexity and overwhelming fury, it shows that it hasn't made it more accessible at all -- if anything, it's become less accessible since you can't just savor it: once you enter the theater you have to take it all in, beginning to end. So the movie becomes less a movie than a live-action version of what we already had, failing to become a unique entity on its own right. The alternative, chopping up the story to turn it into a marketable movie, would have also eviscerated it, negating the reason for doing the movie in the first place. In a word: unfilmable.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. A lot. But I enjoyed it a bit less than I would have if I knew that everyone else would enjoy it as much. And that's part of what makes a movie like, say, The Dark Knight, great. It lets everyone, fans and not, in on the fun. Isn't it?

Update: A week later. Watched the movie again tonight. It's as good if not better on a second watching. However - theater half-empty. At 7 pm on a Saturday. I hate to be right sometimes.

Over the weekend I saw Predators (fairly entertaining, if slightly slow in the reveal for some portions of the story). I don't think I'll ruin anything by saying that in this movie we meet a new caste of predators that we've never seen before, a sort of super-predator that kinda slaps around the original predator as if they are oversized calamari with dreadlocks.

All the while, I couldn't help but think that there's a lot missing from the Predator universe. Here's some predator types I'd like to see in a future sequel:

• Insurance Agent Predator. Kills slowly by burying you under a ton of forms. Only wears glasses in the office. For all of the regular predators that go on safari... they clearly need insurance products. Especially in case they need to activate the mini-nuke they have in their funky wristband (What is that thing by the way? And does it support bluetooth headsets?)
• Janitor Predator. Given the mess they make with the skulls and the spines and all the weird creatures they hunt, they definitely need someone to clean up those spaceships. Does not kill, but if you piss him off you'll be cleaning up your own garbage.
• Software Developer Predator (aka Nerd Predator). Can kill with keyboard or strangle with mouse cord. Definitely a necessary addition -- these guys keep hunting stuff, but who is building new versions of the software they use in the spaceships and all their wonderful machinery? who updates the firmware for the ships? do predators have their own engadget? do they have open source? Do their ships run Windows XP?
• Gas Station Predator. Because they must get their fuel somewhere. 
• Celebrity Predator. they must have celebrities, right? right? I mean, they are a natural byproduct of any advanced narcissistic civilization.
• Paparazzi Predator. inescapable followup to celebrity predator. Uses a Nikon to kill its prey. 
• William Gibson Predator. Great predator-writer. Wrote the seminal book in a science fiction genre that deals with a dystopian reality where predators live in peace with the universe and ride little ponies to work, which consists mostly of tending to endless fields of tiny beautiful flowers and contemplating the beauty of the universe.
• James Bond Predator. Has a license to kill. Unlike the other predators, who don't ... but kill anyway.
• Dentist Predator. Flossing optional for these guys.
• Clown Predator. Provides entertainment in long trips, and between orgies of planetary destruction.

Proposed title for next movie? The Real Spacemen Predators of New Jersey.

That is all.