1) For those who have never been in an IMAX theater, it's one of those places that could simultaneously trigger agoraphobia and acrophobia. Other places may claim "stadium seating" because one row of seats is four inches higher than the one in front of them, but in an IMAX theater, it's "Stadium" as in "the cheap seats at Yankee Ditto". The LA Lakers could sit in front of you and not block your view. Abe Lincoln and Carmen Miranda would not need to doff their chapeaux.
2) It's really immersive if you're sitting in the miraculously empty seats that are dead-center on the screen, halfway up. I'm serious; if you put a dot in the geometric center of the screen and extended an imaginary line from it back into the seating area, the imaginary line would have poked me in the real eyeball. This did wonders for all of the scenes that involved plunging off skyscrapers, and there are a lot of them. I get all squirmy and sweaty-palmed watching base jumping videos in YouTube thumbnails, so you can imagine my contortions when the camera POV is hurtling towards the ground on a screen on which you could park a small fleet of Greyhound buses.
3) There is a little repeating cue in the soundtrack that lets you know when something all psychotic and Joker-like is going to happen. It is noticeable in a regular theater. With a hundred jillion watts of Dolby Surround Sound handling the audio chores, it has the same effect on the base of your brain as the sound of rabbits in a trap, crying babies, and an asthmatic tiger in the bushes twenty feet away, all rolled into one.
4) Damn Heath Ledger for going and dying. I could have happily watched him reprise this role. He crafted the most chilling and compelling movie villain since Sir Tony Hopkins stood under those bright lights in an imaginary loony bin. The awful thing about Hollywood is that the kind of numbers this flick brings in trigger an atavistic response in the movie-making crowd. They will have to make a sequel, and they will try to find someone to do the Joker. For an idea of how bad that will suck, compare The Crow to The Crow II, City of Angels.
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9 comments:
Amen to #4!
One of the great movie villains, on a par with Hannibal Lecter in "Lambs" or the pimp Drexel in "True Romance".
You watch guys like that and you have to suppress the urge to run from the theater: "It's only a movie! It's only a movie!"
One reason some of those action scenes work so well on an IMAX is because many of them were filmed with an IMAX camera. Christopher Nolan wanted to experiment with it. Apparently, it's something to see.
We no longer have Burgess Meredith with us, but perhaps we could reprise Danny Devito as the Penguin?
And putting Commissioner Gordon into office .. this looks more like the beginning of a Star Wars-like sequence than setting up for a lame Matrix II. And it looks like Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox character is able to continue as moral anchor and tech guru.
Why, we haven't seen 'Robin, the boy wonder' yet. Ah, I still miss Batman with Adam West.
As regards IMAX, my first experience with it was an Omnimax theater at NASA's tourist trap^Wfacility in Alabama twenty-ish years ago on a family vacation. There was a sequence involving a zip-line ride into a cargo net. I think the entire theater had braced for the impact in the net.
brad k: I can't dig up the link, but ISTR that Bale has said that his involvement is conditional on there not being a Robin to his Batman.
Local psych type says the role of the Joker killed Heath Ledger.Says he channeled the character and could not get him out of his head when filming was finished.Had to use drugs to purge the Joker from his brain.Yeah right,LOL.
"We no longer have Burgess Meredith with us, but perhaps we could reprise Danny Devito as the Penguin?"
Devito would fit in the Bale Batman continuum in a similar way to the way Nicholson would, unfortunately. Oh, he'd be a closer fit, definitely, but I don't think he'd be right, partly because he'd inject some of the other universe into this one.
Rumors on the web are that The Powers That Be are courting Johny Depp for the role of The Riddler in the next installment. And several seem to think Angelina Jolie will make a nice Catwoman. Lord knows anyone would be better than Halle Berry.
http://www.azcentral.com/ent/movies/articles/2008/07/31/20080731riddler.html
Tam, I think you're looking at the dead gay cowboy dude with rose-tinted specs. How hard can it be to play an over-the-top giggling psychopath in clown make-up? Hey, I've been accused of being a giggling psychopath even without the clown make-up.
IMAX is OK, but OmniMAX is better. Take that huge screen, and curve it around into a hemisphere, sort of. Now sit in the same seat you had, and there's nothing visible but the movie. Even your peripheral vision will swear you're actually there. People get motion sick with the right flick playing.
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