Yesterday, I went to see The Dark Knight with my sister and her boyfriend. The first thing my sister and I said to each other after the lights went up was, "I bet George Bush thinks that he's Batman." At which point, my sister's boyfriend told us that we thought about George Bush too much. How can we help it? Living in D.C. makes one a lot more aware of the inner workings of national politics than one would be otherwise.

Before I go to spoiler town, I want to tell everyone to believe the hype - Heath Ledger is AMAZING! Okay, so I almost cried the first time he appears on screen, but you swiftly forget that he has passed away as the power of his performance takes over. Every time he appeared on screen, I couldn't take my eyes away and every time he left I kept waiting for him to come back. The Joker is seriously demented in a wonderful way. Ledger's performance makes me even more upset that The Powers That Be didn't debrief him of his role and allowed the Joker's demons to become Heath's. The human mind is a lot more elastic than we'd all like to believe, and I'm sure that actors' minds are more changable than most - especially when they go in for method acting, which Heath did, I'm pretty sure. (We all remember the Stanford Prison Experiment, right?)

*sigh*

Along with my rest home for troubled starlets, I'm going to open a therapy unit for actors who play crazy people to prevent them from turning to drugs.

That said, I have two problems with The Dark Knight. One is my problem with most superhero films: the female characters are non-existant or helpless or both. Maggie Gyllenhaal did her best with a part that was nothing more than Something For Batman And Two-Face To Care About. She doesn't have a reason to exist outside of that.

And aside from the lack of women in Gotham City, the other thing I really didn't like was the equating of The Joker's random violence with terrorism. Like it or not, terrorists usually have a straightforward political purpose. It may not be a purpose we agree with and the tactics they use certainly are not something I agree with, but terrorists do not create violence for the sake of violence. They have political objectives. The Joker wants to reveal the facade of normality we live in. Existential terrorism is not a threat we face today. If you want to draw a parallel between some of the left-wing terror groups of the mid to late 1960s and the Joker, I'd have less of a problem with that, however, I doubt Hollywood thinks "Baader-Meinhoff" when it thinks "Terrorist."

So, yes, please everyone go see The Dark Knight for Heath Ledger's amazing performance even if you don't much care for superhero films. The special effects are used sparingly and for good purpose; they don't overwhelm. There is no real romance except between Batman and Harvey Dent, but I didn't mind the lack of it. And then you, too, can turn and say to your movie-going buddy, "Wow. I bet George Bush thinks that he's Batman."