And does anyone want to come babysit so I can go see TDK in a theater?

Yes. Because you MUST!

I go get plane ticket....

6.5 hours til we get to see it.

I would be most appreciative if those who have already seen it would stop bragging discussing it so as to not drive me bugfuck with anxiousness spoil the movie.

(j/k. mostly.)

Is the Joker-in-the-coffin scene in?

The rumor I heard was a body bag -- was it a coffin? That's even more over-the-top grotesque! (And by "grotesque," I don't mean "OMG bad!"; I mean it's utterly appropriate for the Joker.

midnight debut record for TDK

[link]

A very negative review of TDK: [link]

Best part:

Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children—which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson’s ’89 Joker. Nicholson’s disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger’s Joker (sweaty clown’s make-up to cover his Black Dahlia–style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh—fashionable icons of modern irrational fear. The Joker’s escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens—to spook excitable kids. Ledger’s already-overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place?

Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan’s unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses. Nolan’s single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker’s psychobabble: “Madness, as you know, is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.” The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Nicholson's Joker is sophisticated and multileveled, and Heath's was one-note and ham-acting????

Yeah. The dude should have just opened his review with "Anything I have to say can pretty much be dismissed out of hand."

Salon's review was also negative.

This your first experience with Armond "I Am Insanely Contrarian About Everything" White? I almost never agree with him on anything, but he's a pretty interesting read, even when glaringly, painfully wrong. Which he is about almost anything. Even when he's right, he's wrong, y'know.

Salon's review was also negative.

Stephanie Zacharek. I should have known. She's probably the reviewer I most love to hate. She can be utterly infuriating, even when I find myself agreeing with her.

Back to the movie itself:

I need to give a HUGE shout out to Tiny Lister, who absolutely stole his brief scenes, by playing almost exactly the same kind of character he always plays. Love him.

I heard that the movie is sold out in Chicago through Sunday. That the AMC Cantera had it on 20 screens last night and sold out. (Or almost.) There were these young guys waiting for the 12:30 pm show with me who had driven around the 'burbs looking for tickets - Fandango said there were seats at Cantera and there was one. One seat.

It was on six screens in DeKalb last night - 5 sold out.

It wasn't very crowded at the first show (the one I went to this afternoon) but when we got out at about 3:35 - there was quite a heard of people waiting and that line went out the door.

Yeah, it's making a few $$ this weekend.

I really enjoyed it - I thought that Heath Ledger's Joker was just excellent and it just makes me all the more sad. I was thinkining on the way home that unlike the first movie they didn't lay in the next story - but really I guess they did. With a Batman trying to fight the baddies AND escape the GPD. The Jim Gordon death TOTALLY fooled me. I absolutely believed it.

Yes, Aaron Eckhart did an amazing job as Dent too.

Was Tiny Lister the guy that Dent is torturing to get info on the Joker ?