Wooh! That's the message of the day:
But the film that was playing in that theater—"The Dark Knight Rises"—deserves to be loudly celebrated as a masterful and stunningly honest work of Western popular culture.
The movie is a bold apologia for free-market capitalism; a graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movement from the French Revolution to Occupy Wall Street; and a tribute to those who find redemption in the harsh circumstances of their lives rather than allow those circumstances to mire them in resentment.
Bold apologia!
Graphic depiction of the tyranny and violence inherent in every radical leftist movment.
Such florid excesses!
Wooh!
And, do not be resentful, lowly peasants. Accept your fate humbly.
Andrew Klavan, the scribbler of the article in the Journal, has an ongoing love feeling for the Bat creature, comparing him to that other epic hero George W. Bush in 2008 with the appearance of the second Bat creature flick in the trilogy, which began with, hmm, Batman Begins:
What Bush and Batman Have in Common
.... A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That's not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a "W."
There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
I actually saw the Dark Knight and thought the Batman persona sounded like Dick Cheney. And, the clunky plastic helmetry was a bit of a turnoff, the whole strange armoring of the characters reminded me of armored police advancing on protestors.
And to hell with Habeas Corpus!
And, we must never forget about the "mighty" RUSH:
RUSH: So I'm in the library last night, and I'm doing what I always do. I'm doing show prep. And I get a text message from Kathryn who's in with the dogs in the kitchen. She says, "Are you in this Batman movie and you didn't tell me? Is this Batman movie about you?" I said, "What now?" She says, "I can't go anywhere without reading about you and this Batman movie." And I finally, in that moment, folks, I finally figured out what's going on. I outed them. Forget the creator. I don't care that the creator created the character Bane in the Batman movie back in the '90s. It doesn't matter. The Democrats clearly were going to try to link this villain to Mitt Romney. And I outed 'em. They've even got a couple Democrats admitting they were gonna, Chris Leheinous and Jon Stewart. And they're still trying to do it.
You know, independently of the producers and the actors and all the people associated with the movie, they saw it, they were gonna try to make the linkage, and now I'm out there basically accusing them of that, so they've got their backs up. They're acting like I'm some sort of conspiracy creep. But I outed 'em. I have shined the light of truth, as it were.
....This Batman flick, I'm sure it was eagerly anticipated and it was gonna have a big audience. But it's being talked about in places it wasn't gonna be talked about. It's now got controversy attached to it. And the bottom line is that when people watch this, when they go see it... Remember we talked about the first Dark Knight movie? Andrew Klavan wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal (I quoted from it extensively) in which he made the point that the Batman...
Well, the Dark Knight movie, the one with Heath Ledger as the Joker. That movie, without being braggadociosly up front about it, was all about the triumph of conservative values. Evil gets beat, good guys win, and people doing the right thing triumph. And Klavan made that point. And I spent a lot of time talking about that. And this movie is the same way. If you want to make a political connection, if Romney's anybody in this movie, he's Bruce Wayne. He's the rich guy.
Harsh circumstances. Um, would that be self-mortification for others?
Lowly impoverished peasantry, accept your humble fate and suffer nobly. The rich elites take joy in witnessing your suffering.
And I must close with the last word in Klavan claptrap:
Free markets lift us all. People's "revolutions" inevitably result in tyranny. Forgiveness and self-betterment redeem society while embittered extortions in the name of "social justice" poison it. None of these simple truths is hidden in the film. That is why left-leaning critics on both coasts have reacted to the movie with the same willful blindness with which they view history.