Knights In 152-Minute Armor

• What I'm Watching/Listening To/Reading:
• Ok, so The Dark Knight... Ledger lives up to his hype. His performance is nothing short of brilliant. There are a couple of scenes where he speaks with psychotic glee, but his eyes show a totally different emotion of pure dark anger. Amazing work. When he's not on the screen? Pretty good, but the movie suffers a little. It's very long and feels that way by the end, and since the best scene takes place at the very beginning, there are pacing issues that pop up. However, the relationship between the three main heroes (Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne, Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Gordon, and Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent) is beautifully nuanced and the decisions that Wayne is forced to make are food for thought for a while after the film is over. I don't think this is the best comic book movie of all time -- I'll take Spiderman 2 or maybe even Iron Man -- but it's well worth seeing.
• Season premiere of "Monk" this week. What can you say? It's a funny, consistent show. Stanley Kamel's passing leaves a hole that is ably filled by the great Hector Elizando.
• I caught a little of House Party this morning. It holds up a little as a good movie. It is amusing that the slang used in this movie, made in 1990, is the slang that older white women use nowadays to sound cool.
• Random Thoughts/Links:
• This is a very interesting bit from The Daily Dish on intellectual trends in the presidency.
• We got screwed out of the good trailers this morning (for the most part; we got The Day The Earth Stood Still) because we saw a 9:30AM show. Good thing I've seen the ones for Watchmen and Terminator: Salvation on-line.
• Daily Rant:
• I've heard the word "manscaping" twice in the last 24 hours. Hate it. It officially joins "staycation" and "green-collar" as banned words/phrases.