YOU IS EGGY!

Just back from LA where I spent my limited downtime reading ‘The Joke’s Over’ - Ralph Steadman’s bittersweet, affectionate, long-suffering memoir of his association with Hunter S. Thompson - and watching some movies, also with a ’joke’s over’ theme, interestingly enough.

GOLDENBATS RETURNS

Second night in town, I’m invited along to a preview of ‘The Dark Knight’ on the IMAX screen at Universal City, which I reluctantly must decline…

NOT!

I really don’t think I’m sticking my neck out too far if I hail ‘The Dark Knight’ as not only the best Batman movie so far and one of the best Batman stories ever told, but as the quintessential superhero story itself, laid bare, lasered down to its skeleton and reconstructed to suit the needs of our times with panache, wit and a monstrous sad darkness. It may even be the best popular meditation on a peculiarly postmodern version of Gnostic dualism that we’ve been given for a bracingly long time.

So comics scholars will understand me when I compare ‘The Dark Knight’ to WATCHMEN as a measure of its likely impact on the ’genre’ that spawned it. Like WATCHMEN, it forces all previous and future offerings of its kind into a higher-level dialogue and it will be intriguing to see what comes next. This looks set to redefine the limits of what a ‘superhero movie’ is capable of.