the long dark knight of the winter

Last summer I didn’t pay attention to most of what was written about The Dark Knight because I hadn’t seen it and was planning to. Well, I never got around to seeing it in the theater and so I didn’t see it until yesterday when I watched it on DVD through Netflix.

Did anyone point out in the early reviews that it’s excrutiatingly awful, sort of a messy draft of a movie that never got around to an editor, at least not the kind of editor who cuts things out? That it lacked the subtlety of some of the not very subtle crime dramas about corruption and racketeering and reform that came out in the 1930s to 1950s (I am the Law, for instance)?

I liked Batman Begins and don’t think I automatically favor older movies over new ones (though it’s quite possible that I do) so I was pretty shocked at how much I disliked this. Netflix probably is too, since it predicted I’d give it 4 out of 5 (probably on the basis of my liking Following and Memento, both also directed by Christopher Nolan). My Netflix predictions are usually more accurate than that.