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(Spoiler-free, I think)

Amazingly, this movie comes painfully close to living up to its hype. It’s really, really good. I would not put it in the pantheon of great films, but there is little doubt that it is far and away the best “comic” movie ever made. Not sure if there’s a close second.

This review will seem a little negative only because I’m not going to waste time being redundant and pointing out what every critic on the planet has already said: it’s dark, compelling, well-acted all around, and not “fun” in the summer movie sense. Everything you’ve heard is true. I’ll mention two pleasant surprises and one big negative.

First, Christopher Nolan got slightly less terrible at filming action scenes! He replaced his technique from Batman Begins - shaking the camera around so the audience feels like they’re “in the action” (i.e. nauseous) - with a mildly irritating Michael Bay-style series of rapid cuts. It’s not good, but it’s a dramatic improvement. They could get someone to film the action better, but then they’d be stuck with all of the idiocy that accompanies those folks. Second, Aaron Eckhart acts like someone other than Aaron Eckhart, Smug Asshole. That’s refreshing.

The problem: this was very, very obviously two films. The original plan was to make the third film in the series about Eckhart (Two Face) as the main villain, but instead the writers and director chose to merge that story into the second film. It showed. A lot. The last hour of this film is a condensed version of a third film, and Nolan struggles mightily to A) connect the second act to the first and B) keep the Joker involved in the Two-Face storyline. Several storylines in the film were truncated as a result.

I suppose a second negative is that I have no idea how they’re going to milk a third sequel. What could possibly follow this? One big problem with the Batman franchise (as sharply noted by commenter Scott N.) is that the villains absolutely pale in comparison to the Joker. The only other charismatic villain is Two Face and, well, they shot that wad too. Given the gravity of Heath Ledger’s and Eckhart’s performances, it’s going to be nearly impossible for the writers and whatever actors are tasked to play a milquetoasty villain in the next film to keep pace.

OK, last complaint. Christian Bale’s “When I Dress Up As Batman, I Talk Like I Am Trying Really Hard to Shit but Failing” voice gets so ridiculous that he’s barely intelligible at the end of the film. Seriously, it’s so over the top that, among all of the sound effects and music, I couldn’t even understand a few of his lines. At this rate they are going to need to subtitle Batman in the third film. Or pump the Caped Crusader with prune juice until he craps. A lot.

1. So like most people in my age bracket I will be seeing The Dark Knight this weekend, and let me tell you something - after the amount of hype this film has received, it better be good. It better solve longstanding historical controversies. It better balance the Federal budget. It better make everyone who watches it lose 10 pounds. It better give me an above-average haircut. It better make Godfather II look like a high school play interrupted by fighting hobos.

The bar, it has been set high.

It looks good. It looks like it will be better than other movies coming out this summer. But for christ’s sake, people, settle the fuck down. It’s a Batman movie. I know too many people who are beside themselves with excitement and fully convinced that this will be Citizen Kane for the 21st Century. Perhaps if we keep our expectations grounded more firmly in reality we can avoid crushing disappointment.

I’m optimistic, though. If Christopher Nolan figures out how to film an action scene (which, don’t forget, he can’t do to save his soul in the first film) it might be a 10 out of 10. But seriously, let’s all settle down.

2. I/we have been immortalized in cartoon form in NUVO, which is Indianapolis’ version of the Reader or Village Voice. Contrary to the impression that this creates, our singer is not Fidel Castro.

From the fine fellows over at The Monkey Cage (a blog run by political scientists who don’t swear nearly as much as I do, which may be why they all have jobs):

A casual visual inspection suggests that people in their forties are more Republican than any other age group. Unfortunately that is one of two potential interpretations, the relative merits of which cannot be determined by this data. Are people aged 40 to 50 more conservative, or are the people aged 40 to 50 right now more conservative? This is a very old debate in the social sciences, the endless squabble over life-course effects versus age-cohort effects.

We could easily construct a story that supports either argument. For example, it’s logical to suggest that people between 40 and 50 are bound to be a little less liberal, having settled into a life of property taxes, car payments, and saving for college. Conversely we could argue that the individuals between 40 and 50 today are more conservative because of the 1970s. They became politically aware during a thoroughly depressing era and experienced Carter Malaise followed immediately by Morning in America.

Short of doing decades-long panel data studies (and those have plenty of critics too) it’s virtually impossible from a social science perspective to distinguish between these possibilities. I’m simplifying things, for certainly many researchers have devised innovative ways to support one argument or the other. But it is fair to say, as someone with no horse in the methodological race, that it remains an open issue.

On a personal note, I have long considered the first possibility - that aging makes us Republicans - to be overwhelmingly depressing. Ginandtacos nation, this post serves as binding legal authority for one of you to smother me with a pillow if I ever take up Tax Bitching as a hobby or cheerlead pre-emptive wars in the hopes of getting some great new footage for Wings.**

**The one on the Military Channel, not the delightfully crappy 1990s sitcom. I know there are only so many times one can watch the same episodes (”Wings of the Luftwaffe”) but there is a moral limit to what I am willing to support to acquire new footage.

No Arts No Letters = No More. He is now here.

I don’t know why it took me so long to notice. Oh wait, I’m furiously trying to finish my dissertation.

My fellow Americans,

Now that I’m making up a little ground in the polls I think we should talk about what I am doing. Frankly you all are starting to worry me a bit. Some of you are seriously considering voting for me. Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?

Listen. This entire campaign is just an elaborate piece of performance art. An experiment, if you will. We are seriously just fucking around with you - seeing how blatantly we can give you the finger without losing your support. I had Phil Gramm (remember when he ran for President and finished behind Lamar Alexander?!?!) go on TV and call you a bunch of whiners for complaining about the economy. Read that again - my multimillionaire surrogate mocked your economic difficulties! I also promised to stay in Iraq (you know, that war you fucking hate!) for 100 years while all but guaranteeing a new war in Iran. It’s like Marcel Duchamp crawled from the grave and ran for President.

I’m publicly dropping hints that Mitt Romney will be my running mate. Mitt Fucking Romney!!! I mean, come on. I can barely even talk about it with a straight face, and you retards just keep applauding! Next I’ll roast a live panda over a bonfire while my campaign staff steal medicine from pediatric cancer patients. And my supporters will send more checks! Ha ha!

Even when I act senile - trying to provoke a reaction like “Oh my God, this demented fossil can’t possibly have his finger on the button” - you’re unfazed! I just gave a goddamn speech about Czechoslovakia (and did it again after I got called on it!) That hasn’t been a country for, what, 20 years? Your response: crown me a foreign policy “expert!” You gotta be shitting me.

It’s no secret that my party has been trying to tank this one from the outset. We all know what’s coming, and we’re perfectly happy to blame Great Depression II on the liberals. No fracking way do I want to be the older, dumber Herbert Hoover for a new century. But at some point I started having fun with this, seeing how far I can go. I am standing before the camera with both middle fingers shoved in your face screaming “Hey! Suck my dick, losers! Sometimes I buy gas just to set it on fire!” And then you promise to vote for me. I give up. So here’s my platform for the rest of the race:

1. I’m sending Former Majority Whip Dick Armey to your mother’s house to bone her in the ass. Not metaphorically. With his wang.

2. I’m going to start referring to Asia as “the Orient” and southeast Asia in particular as “Indo-China.” Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda will be “Tojo.”

3. New tax breaks for single people who drive SUVs.

4. Unrestricted immigration for gay Mexican welfare recipients.

You people are amazing. Remember when the Supersonics played nothing but scrubs for a couple of months in 2006, hoping that they would lose enough games to draft Greg Oden? The damn scrubs tried too hard, won too many games, and the plan failed. That’s what you’re doing right now. Come on! I’m not trying to win; the point is to let my team reap the benefits of losing.

Bite my ass,

John McCain

If it’s true that there is nothing sexier than a lapsed Catholic, then I will argue that there is nothing more entertaining than a lapsed neocon.

Francis Fukuyama has long been lauded by the right for his classic, thunderingly stupid The End of History and the Last Man. While international relations is certainly not my field, I feel comfortable mocking the shit out of rhetorical detritus like:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

I will pause while you marvel at the fact that this man became internationally famous and virtually canonized by the right for proposing that in 1992, with Earth’s sun not set to burn out for another billion-odd years, Western free-market democracy became the “final form of human government.” We attained perfection. Fifteen years later I am still blown away by the hubris, naivety, and self-congratulatory tone of the early post-Soviet era.

Tim Krieder (The Pain comics, with major h/t to Matthew) uses Fukuyama as a primary example of how the right lacks imagination and creativity. In the ideological glow of “their” victory over Marx, they were simply incapable of imagining an alternative or wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could reject the promise of unfettered capitalism. How could anyone want anything else? There is nothing else.

Well, it turns out that history didn’t end and the rush to embrace The Only Way was less than universal. As Samuel Huntington argued in The Clash of Civilizations, it turned out that there were still a few ideological disagreements in the world.** Duly offended by the tepid response to Democracy’s Promise in the middle east and Asia, the Western world has tried spreading it through economic hegemony. Or the barrel of a gun.

Fukuyama seems to understand that he may have underestimated a few things (although he insists, as conservatives always insist, that the real problem is not the ideology but that we strayed from it). Since 2006 he has alienated his neocon devotees by suggesting that perhaps the Iraq invasion has not been a success. He has also repudiated the Neocon movement he was so instrumental in creating. Now? He’s endorsing Obama. How’s that for the “Where Are They Now” file?

I can’t tell if he’s a late bloomer or simply a craven opportunist, but I am not a man who will stand idly by and fail to enjoy a very public academic humiliation.

**Having mentioned Fukuyama and Huntington, we have now exhausted what I know about IR.

The thinly-veneered “lifestyle” journalism that masquerades as news these days has yielded another gem, courtesy the New York Times (At $100 for Tank of Gas, Some Choke on ‘Fill It’“) The purpose of this slipshod amalgam of random quotes is unclear. Are we supposed to feel sorry for these dipshits or simply marvel at the fact that some people buy GMC Suburbans without realizing that they will have to put a lot of gas in them? To wit:

Bryan Carisone, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in Raritan, N.J., “absolutely loves” his new GMC Denali XL, an extra-large sport utility vehicle with televisions built into the leather seats. But in June, one week after he bought it, he pulled into a station on a near-empty tank and watched the total climb higher and higher — to $109. “It just about killed me,” Mr. Carisone said.

Apparently the size of the GMC Denali XL’s fuel tank and the EPA mileage estimates are both classified information, as obtainable to Mr. Bryan Carisone as the launch codes for Soviet ICBMs. It is unfortunate that he was forced to buy this grotesque land yacht without that information.

It gets better.

For people who love their big vehicles, the pain is acute.

But the Avalanche also has a 31-gallon tank, which would cost $127 to fill at Saturday’s national average price. Even the truck’s most dedicated fans find that galling. David H. Obelcz, who founded the club in 2002 and is still a member of the board, sold his Avalanche because he could not afford gasoline for it.

At what point in one’s journalistic career do the trials of being a brainless yuppie qualify as “pain” let alone “acute pain?” Hold on while I cry my fucking eyes out for the Fan Club devoted to the Chevy Avalanche, a vehicle whose turn signals are labeled “port” and “starboard.” I hope Mr. Obelcz had the version with the 8.1L V8, which is by far the largest gasoline V8 in a passenger vehicle.

Families that were accustomed to the convenience of sport utility vehicles are having to cut back as well. Colleen Hammond of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, loves packing her three kids and all their soccer gear into her 2000 GMC Yukon XL. But she hates paying $160 to fill the 38.5-gallon tank. Last month, she parked the Yukon in her driveway and borrowed her friend’s Toyota Land Cruiser.

Again with the dramatic language. People who have to decide between food and medicine “cut back.” People pissing and moaning about how much their SUV costs to own do not. And for the last time, no one owns an SUV because of “safety” or “convenience.” Minivans are far safer, hold more people and cargo, and are more fuel-efficient. People buy SUVs because they think it looks cooler than driving a minivan. Period.

Steve Burtch bought a Dodge Ram truck last year, when gas cost $3.75, because he thought gas prices had peaked and would start coming down.

Steve Burtch, I have taken shits smarter than you.

“It’s a huge inconvenience,” said Dr. Walter Bahr, a chiropractor in Cape Coral, Fla., who drives a Dodge Ram 2500 pickup and pays $130 per tank.

WHAT IN THE HOLY HELL DOES A CHIRPRACTOR NEED A 3/4-TON PICKUP FOR? This is not a rhetorical question. I will give anyone who can answer it one million dollars. Ram 2500 pickups are made for construction work and building contractors - they’re work trucks with 10,000-pound towing capacity. Apparently Dr. Bahr needs it to haul his tiny penis around rugged Cape Coral, Florida.

And here’s the best part:

By late spring, owners of pickups and sport utility vehicles with 30-gallon tanks, like the Cadillac Escalade ESV and Chevrolet Suburban, started paying $100 or more to fill a near-empty tank. As gas prices continue to rise — the national average stood at about $4.10 a gallon Saturday — membership in the triple-digit club is growing. Now, even not-so-gargantuan Toyota Land Cruisers and GMC Yukons can cost $100 to fill up.

Way to pander to the yuppie readers, New York Times, by noting that high gas prices are also affecting the (implicitly “normal”) vehicles that a quarter of your Sunday demographic drive.

The Toyota Land Cruiser is over sixteen feet long and six feet wide. It weighs 5,690 pounds empty. It has a 5.7L 381-hp V8 (larger and more powerful than a Gen-IV Corvette from 1996). It gets 13 mpg in traffic.

The GMC Yukon has a 26-gallon fuel tank at 14 mpg city. It too has a large V8 (5.3L) and weighs over 5,300 pounds.

According to the Times, these are reasonable “not-so-gargantuan” vehicles which should not be expected to require $100 fill-ups. It is unconscionable to think that these entirely justifiable, average vehicles should be so burdening the wallets of the Normal Americans who drive them.

From now on I intend to season all of my food with the sweet, sweet tears of SUV owners.

(Note: I wrote this during the recent flooding but it got bumped from the schedule. Since I kinda like it, I’m running it even though it is dated now. It owes a serious debt to Ben Metcalf’s “American Heartworm” for the inspiration and P. Hawkins for the title, which he improvised as we drove over the muddy, shit-colored ditch itself.)

Since I never tire of lobbing molotovs at inaccurate or misguided aspects of American folklore, let’s spend a few minutes talking about the “mighty” Mississippi River. It occupies a special place in our history, especially in the West and Midwest. The Mighty Mississip! Old Man River! Big Muddy! Mile Wide and a Mile Deep! What an awe-inspiring force of nature, one whose imprint is visible not only in our art and culture but also on the very shape of the country we call home.

In reality, the Mississippi River is a glorified creek that floods like a little bitch at the first sign of rainclouds. This incontinent drainage canal - stagnant, baby-shit brown, and stinking to high heaven - originates in a nondescript pond in Minnesota and steals flow from the actual major rivers in the US (Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, and others) in order to create the illusion of being impressive. If it were Mighty, it wouldn’t flood three or four states every time the Midwest gets some rain. Nor would it need the herculean efforts of the Army Corps of Engineers just to make it all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Nor would it destroy a few billion dollars’ worth of communities every ten to twelve months because it is better suited to appearing in Mark Twain stories than actually carrying water, a task at which the average backyard creek is better.

Neither its width (max. 3000 feet, generously rounded to a mile) nor its depth (an average of less than 100 feet, a.k.a. a mile) suggest that it is a force of nature to be reckoned with. In many places it maintains a navigable shipping channel of as little as six feet. The next time someone idicates “respect” for it (i.e., blatant ignorance of the fact that living next to something that floods every summer is a bad idea) please be sure to punch them for me. Aside from its appearance and reverential mythologization in a few colorful pieces of literature, the Mississippi’s gift to the American Midwest has been to bring destruction - from the rifle- and smallpox-bearing Europeans who came to do away with its initial inhabitants to the steamboats integral in the slave trade to the annual devastating floods and finally to the riverboat casinos which expand the River’s capacity to destroy beyond the physical plane and into the psychological.

I do not understand why people of the region - Iowans, rural Illinoisans, Missourians, etc - hold annual festivals commemorating something whose only contribution to their lives is to submerge all that they own in fetid water on a regular basis. I do not understand why they speak reverently of something that exists only to take their money and teach them lessons in hopelessness, chaos, and the unfathomable stupidity of rebuilding their homes and lives so near something intent on destroying both. Fuck you, Mississippi River. Respect is given only to rivers that put up at least the appearance of a fight against the waters they purport to tame.