Dark Knight!

Wow. See it if you haven't already. There are a couple of possible missteps in the plotting (below), but Maggie Gyllenhaal portrays the best comic book movie love interest ever (sorry, Margot Kidder, and all due respect to Lea Thompson), Heath Ledger delivers all that we could hope for as the Joker (except for a repeat performance), and Freeman and Caine shine in every line they're given. Eckhart is a commendable Harvey Dent (though the Two-Face makeup is almost comical and, as my brother says, "I almost started a chant to bring back Billy Dee, but I may have been alone on that one. Two Face kicks back with his homies and a smooth Colt 45."), I still like Oldman as Gordon, and Bale's "Batman voice" remains the weak link in an otherwise serviceable performance.

<spoilers>

We really felt the pain of losing Maggie -- we were really looking forward to seeing her in the next movie!! From a scripting standpoint, we tried to think of ways to save her; Harvey could go just as nuts thinking he'll lose her because she won't be able to look at his scars, and then she could be the D.A. in the next film and be closer and more inaccessible than ever to Bruce. This just feels like an unfortunately closed door.

The "fake death of Jim Gordon" subplot seemed unnecessary, or required more film time to develop. As it was, I was just disoriented for 20 minutes knowing that they wouldn't have killed Gordon while trying to figure out in what cool way they'd have him come back into the story. And then his reentry into the story is completely contrived (like Batman couldn't have gotten off his motorcycle and just kicked the Joker's ass, instead of the melodramatic crash that doesn't really prove anything). In general, the action didn't do much for me; I was much more interested in the acting.

And... I almost forgot about the Watchmen preview! That was incredible, because I didn't know they were making a Watchmen film, and they start the preview by showing part of the Dr. Manhattan backstory and we're thinking, "this is some lame comic book movie that they're advertising" and then we see Nite-Owl's machine come up out of the water and I whisper, "holy shit! It's the Watchmen!" It /looks/ absolutely dead-on (the flash of Ozymandias in action was amazing), but I'll be skeptical until I see it. They'll have to chronologize some of the storytelling because the whole section on Dr. M (my favorite part of the comics) can't be done in prose or film; it is tailor-made for comics.