Why So Serious?

I think it goes without argument that The Dark Knight was one of the best movies from 2008. It had the perfect combination of legitimate engaging story, good to great acting, engaging scenes, and a great bit of pop culture sensibility. Little did I realize at the time, but The Dark Knight was going to become the greatest television movie of all time.

What I mean is that whenever this movie is on TV I will probably end up watching a good portion of it. I'm a sucker like this. I own the Back to the Future trilogy. I can watch it whenever I want. I've also seen the movie about 250 times. With all that in mind I will still watch it when it happens to be on TBS. Same goes for Rocky 3 and 4. Once the holiday season rolls around (AKA ALMOST RIGHT NOW) they will do those crazy Rocky Marathons on a variety of channels. This could practically be called 'The Shawshank Redemption Memorial List' since TNT from the mid to late 90's in to the early 2000's would pretty much run The Shawshank Redemption at least twice a month.

The Dark Knight has a few things going for it. For one, you have Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker was awesome. The movie is a good two and a half hours and its not like the Joker is actually on screen for that much of the movie but when he isn't on screen you always feel his presence/want more. This sets up the great TV viewing situation. Hypothetically speaking lets say you really like Heath Ledger's performance and love when he is on screen. When you're flipping through channels and you see that The Dark Knight is on and say its early on in the movie with Batman in China you know that there are some choice Joker scenes coming up you will automatically sit around and wait for those. The beauty is that even if you love The Joker scenes you aren't just sitting around watching paint dry. For the most part the movie is very engaging and never dull.

Think of it like the big shootout in Heat. You know the big shootout is coming up but its still more than an hour away. The reality of the situation is that you are now invested in wanting to see that scene so you are just going to watch the whole damn thing. You dare not start changing channels once it hits commercials for fear of missing the scenes you really like because you got distracted and started watching that episode of Seinfeld where George keeps trying to get fired. I feel like The Dark Knight will enter in to the pantheon of movies that are pretty much ingrained in popular culture to the point where when its on you just watch it. It is going to be like Die Hard is. It should be noted though that I think The Dark Knight is still only on premium channels and hasn't trickled down to cable viewing yet. But once it does...watch out.

Oh and if you don't like the movie, I hate you forever.