I realize that I'm normally an incredibly snarky writer, but some of my responses to comments this past week - Dark Knight comments, in particular - have been downright mean. So this is just a quick explanation why.
I've been posting to discussion boards and participating in internet arguments for over a decade, so my tolerance for trolls is virtually nil and has been for a long time. This isn't normally a problem here, though, because my personal blog tends to attract comments from relatively small groups of people - people I know personally, professionally, or through other blogs and forums in which I participate and actually care enough to leave that space and follow me here. But discussion of The Dark Knight seems to have attracted a new crowd - I went from about 50 comments in the first 6 months of 2008 (and about half of those comments are my own, too) to 30 or so in the past 4 or 5 days (fewer than half of which are mine; and most of which, strangely, were in response to old posts about the film's promotional shots, rather than my actual movie review). You can see them if you click on the 'batman' tag and read older posts, though I haven't made all of the comments public. Some of them are so needlessly nasty - it is, apparently, an Internet Thought-Crime to say anything critical about the film - that I've actually dreaded having to review the comments over the last few days. And with those comments in the back of my mind, I then start responding to the genuinely well-meaning comments, which is not a fantastic idea.
So if I've seemed a little quick to snap at people or otherwise like a pompous ass, (more so than usual, that is) please forgive me. Once the movie hype washes over and the flood of anonymous people telling me I'm an idiot/douche-bag/pussy subsides, I'll revert to my more benevolent forms of snarkiness.
4 comments:
dear neil,
i adore you even more when your a douchebag. but maybe that's just me.
AS IF you haven't RSVP'd to my going away yet. I may have to cry inconsolably for the next several days.
I've been reading your thoughts on the movie and the look of the joker.
Why do you have such a problem with the scars? I'm pretty sure that Bob Kane Modeled the Joker partly after a myth where a man had his mouth cut by gypsies and it made him look like he was always smiling...
I don't think the cuts were arbitrary.
and I also think that you intellectualize it a little too much and that must ruin a lot of movies for you.
I can't wait to see what you think about Watchmen.
I believe comic book heroes and villains are most interesting when seen through other writers eyes... meaning that there is no right or wrong way for them to go... they are just ways in which they are crafted.
I really enjoyed the movie myself. I think that Nolan is taking Batman a step further than even Frank Miller did in the 80's.
Your opinion is just an opinion and i know that... but the way you paint yours to look like it is higher than others is what i have a problem with... stop looking at the thesaurus for your words and take time to look at things with an open mind... instead of a heightened one.
take care...
B
Marcos: But I have to pay money to go! ...I'll be there, but are you free for coffee at some point before then? Because I've seen you, what, maybe once all summer?
anonymous wrote "I also think that you intellectualize it a little too much and that must ruin a lot of movies for you."
The opposite, in fact. Geekily enough, I enjoy movies more when I can read them theoretically. Case in point is Ledger's Joker - if I weren't able to read him through Freud (and Rube Goldberg), I probably wouldn't have liked his performance as much. And I certainly wouldn't have been able to describe why I liked it. We all make sense of things in relation to everything we've read and watched before - it just happens that I've read a few theory books and use those as my touchstones.
anonymous wrote "stop looking at the thesaurus for your words"
Unfortunately, this is just the way I talk and write. As they say, take it or leave it.
so if one cannot speak the same language with someone, one can never achieve true dialogue. so this separates people even more because of the differential levels of language (ie. upper class = complex words, use and vocabulary - cannot understand personal meaning)
so how does one break the barrier between the "class" and the "classless"?
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