The Dark Knight, Rush Hour 3, & The Simpsons Movie

The Dark Knight is something I really don't need to say much about. Like with the original Spiderman, I was there the first weekend, contributing to the largest weekend box office ever. I have some serious problems with the film: the Bat-Sonar fight was confusion to an extreme, the film was far too long, Christian Bale was somewhat disappointing, and the turning of Two-Face made little to no sense, let alone him being wasted in what was clearly Joker's film. And this was Joker's film. As good as Gary Oldman is (and this cast was friggen amazing, with Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Aaron Eckhardt all being quite good), Ledger owned the film. The Joker is one of the classic comic book villains. And I also want to say, again, that Edison Chen is an ass. His role had to have been slightly bigger before that happened. The film is clearly cursed, with Ledger's death, Bale's arrest, and Chen's sex scandal. Even with all this, I liked the film, it's slightly better than Batman Begins, but it's not the best film ever, IMDB. What the hell, nerds?

Rush Hour 3 should prove, once and for all, how masochistic I am when it comes to movies. I knew it was going to suck when the words "Directed by Brett Ratner" were first announced. He's a terrible, terrible person. And Chris Tucker should, umm... stop making movies? Please. That all being said, the stunts were crappy, it was depressing to see the constant stereotyping (Youki Kudoh as "The Dragon Lady"? You couldn't even be bothered to give her a name?), and Jackie Chan is too old to be doing this. There are others in the cast I like, like Max von Sydow, Yvan Attal (quite possibly one of the luckiest men on the planet), Philip Baker Hall, Roman Polanski (well, I don't like him, but I think he's a great director), but this movie was just even worse than the second one. Partly because that one had Zhang Ziyi. But Ratner is just making crappy movies as an excuse to sleep with attractive women and do enormous amounts of blow. I hate him. Only partly because I want to be him. Not the blow part.

The Simpsons Movie just depressed the hell out of me. It's basically like three episodes of the series strung together. But not the good series (I recently watched a couple of early episodes on TV, and loved them again, but I stopped watching the show back in 2002), the recent stuff, of which I rarely crack a smile when watching and never laugh. I only catch it when others are watching and I happen to be there. But the movie was just crapping all over my memories even more. This is the reason that shows need to be cancelled. I can count the number of shows that didn't have enormous drop offs in quality: those are the ones that got cancelled. No scripted show has ever deserved twenty seasons. There's such a thing as diminishing returns, when you run out of ways to make it fresh. They ran out years ago.