I have two reviews for you today, because I had a heavy weekend of cinema-going.

First up: The Dark Knight. LJ users can skip this by not looking behind the cut. Non-LJ users…. Well. I must be the last person to see this movie so I can’t believe spoilers matter.

It was okay. You know. Pretty much meh. I think it has been over-hyped and under-criticised because it was Heath Ledger’s last film and his performance was supposedly fantastic. No one likes to speak ill of the dead.

It was a good performance, but then it wasn’t a superlative one. It wasn’t the high point of Ledger’s career. It wasn’t the equivalent of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, for instance. Everyone knows Ledger could act. I was expecting something original, and the sad fact is that I’ve seen Death Machine.

Let me just take a brief sideways step here: Death Machine is on my list of top ten best movies of all time. I do indeed have a penchant for darkly humorous horror science-fiction, and I consider this to be a prime example. It is, after all, the only film I know to imply a bizarre and tragic accident involving a baby and a garbage disposal unit. One of the characters is called Sam Raimi. It is a rare offering of something dripping with references to the genre and yet doing something that manages to come across as original. It also has a Big Bad in it that’s frankly far more terrifying than bloody Terminator ever was.

In that movie Brad Dourif plays a psychotic genius living in the basement who, despite his lunacy, nearly outsmarts everyone else. Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight was so reminiscent of Dourif’s in Death Machine that I couldn’t watch it without wondering why in the hell Dourif wasn’t playing the part. He did it first. Ledger obviously took some inspiration from Jack Nicholson’s performance as the same character, but that was a tiny veneer on what for me was Jack Dante from top to toe. Also, to me he didn’t look comfortable in the part. He didn’t ever look as though he’d settled into the role. He reminded me of a cat in a box: little bits of him kept poking out.

And let’s just mention Bale’s voice. How irritating was that? Come on guys. We don’t need an anti-hero who sounds like he has a constant case of bad strep throat.

Eric Roberts, obviously so overblown at being offered a job in something Box Office smashworthy for a change, actually did some acting and tried to pull off his part as a Mafia boss, but did about as believable a job as he did playing the Master in Dr Who (I know, I know, you’ve wiped that from your memory, just like Highlander 2). Aaron Eckhart is still Dr Josh Keyes in my head, burrowing through the Earth’s mantle in a metal cigar tube and defying all laws of physics, for which I cannot and will not forgive him. HE’S NOT A DISTRICT ATTORNEY. HE’S A CRAPPY FREAKIN’ SCIENTIST WHO SHOULD BE SUED BY OAKLEY FOR DARING TO UTTER THE WORD ‘UNOBTAINIUM’.

The plot was… Yeah. Come on. Mafia hiring the Joker to kill Batman because there’s a new DA in town? I found it largely implausible and disjointed and the way it was all stitched together managed to put me very close to that feeling of lots of things going on but nothing actually happening. For me that’s the worst sort of film: all data and very little information. There are films that get away with it because they are sticking precisely to a genre template and the fun is in seeing how they’ll play out a well-known story. These are what Frood and I call Mighty Ducks movies. We watched Balls of Fury the other night, which did exactly that and was great. I didn’t have to worry about the story and could get on with admiring Christopher Walken’s lack of shame.

Then there are films that try to tell a story and yet they don’t have enough of it to fill the time the crew has allotted itself and so a substantial amount of the film is padding. The Usual Suspects was just such a film, the Spiderman films are expert at it and, sadly, The Dark Knight.has gone that way too.

Raise your hand if you didn’t figure out what would happen to the sonar database when Morgan Freeman punched in his character’s name at the end. Raise your hand if you didn’t know the crims on the ferry would make the right decision before the decent townsfolk. Raise your hand if you didn’t realise Harvey Dent was going to end up horrifically disfigured and calling himself Twoface. raise your hand if you didn’t figure out that Ramirez was going to be one of the traitors (Hispanic female cop: bound to be on the take. She’s got a family to support ).

Anyone? No? Thought not.

OK, I’ll admit I was surprised by one thing: that they wasted Twoface with less than half a movie’s worth of screentime. Also, if the Joker was, as he claimed, not a strategist but a dog chasing cars (which I found the biggest disappointment of all because the dog chasing cars metaphor told me exactly how the Joker should have been written and wasn’t) then what possessed him to put so much effort into turning Dent into a walking weapon doing what he couldn’t be bothered doing himself?

The film was overly long for what it had to offer and could have done with having a good 45 minutes chopped off its running time to force the writers and directors to be more sparing and more efficient. There is nothing as delightful as an efficiently told story. Especially in the cinema. I don’t know why the fashion these days is for films well over the 2 hour mark. It’s as if the film-makers have forgotten that value for money lies in the quality of the film, not how many minutes we’re paying for. I’d rather have a great film of 90 minutes than a so-so film of 140, especially because I don’t need to worry about needing the loo before the end or my back locking up in protest at having to sit still for too long.

All in all, an okay effort. Bale did a better job as Wayne in this than he did in the first film: he did a better job as Wayne than he did as Batman. Michael Caine showed his usual ability to throw on any old part and make it look accomplished, although it helps if you can imagine Alfred as somehow having survived the battle at Rorke’s Drift. Gary Oldman looked like he was performing at what we in triathlon circles call ‘recovery effort’. Cillian Murphy popped up to make sure we hadn’t forgotten his character and then vanished again; only to turn up wearing a hat near the end, presumably because they’d confiscated his sack. Maggie Gyllenhaal was a bit of a wallflower, in my opinion. She certainly didn’t simper or scream, however she did somewhat fade into the background, which is odd given that the plot hinged on the critical love triangle between her, the golden boy hero and the dark and dangerous anti-hero (and dear gods THAT one has been done to death in the Cyclops-Jean Gray-Wolverine never-ending saga). The ending was just plain ludicrous. I thought Oldman was going to burst into some tragic opera (which might have meant I could hear WTF he was saying).

Plus points: I got one of the tickets for free because I joined the Cameo membership programme and the volume in the Cameo goes all the way up to eleven. There was a motorbike, even if it would have handled like a barge and no, you can’t do those Parkour style wall-jumps ON A FREAKING MOTORBIKE. I left with the warm, comforting glow of knowing that the Marvel flicker-flack at the start of their movies is umpteen times better than the DC version. The sky-hook balloon looked like a jellyfish, which got me thinking about that film with the flying fish and the egg… Actually that’s a bad thing, because I can’t remember what it was called and I’ll spend all day trying to find out.

If you can forget the hype and go with full awareness that it suffers from the malaise common to so many sequels, you should enjoy it. Just don’t believe anyone telling you that it’s better than the first one. It might be closer to DC universe canon, but I think that made the production team just a little bit lazy.

Wiggle included a little packet of Wiggle-logo shaped faux midget gems with my Salomon Revo Raid, which just arrived at my desk. Amazingly fast given that I went for the free delivery option.

Sweeties!

“No, darling. Letting the moth I’ve just caught go does not mean putting it through someone’s letterbox.”

One of my training things is to run to the gym with my kit and have a session in the pool or of weights or both and then run home again. I also want to spend the winter hill-running (in an all-day, half-run, half-walk and a picnic kind of fashion) and have a morbid fear of getting into trouble and having to get mountain rescue out, only for them to discover that I’m under-equipped. How embarrassing would that be?

The problem is that what is required is an adventure-racing specific pack, and they just don’t make those for women. Girlie-bike packs are now easy to find. Camelback have a great range of packs that’ll carry about 2l of water and enough kit to see you fine all day on a mountain when you’re biking. But adventure racing? No one makes them.

I bought an OMM Running Light last year on the basis that the OMM team probably knew what they were doing and the lightly-loaded jump test in the shop made it a hands-down winner over the Inov8. However, sadly, when running I have discovered that the hipstrap slips up and the only way to keep the pack from jolting around is to tighten all the straps as tight as they go and have the hipstrap around the waist. To be fair the product manual says to put the hipstrap around the waist, but the whole point of packs like this is that they should sit on the hips. Tightening the strap around the waist affects the diaphragm and breathing capacity.

I have thus been using it for short runs but have been under-impressed, on the whole. This has pretty much been my experience when trying to buy running packs. They ride up and don’t sit properly and interfere with my breathing.

Trips to various specialist shops have revealed only that I have a moderately pronounced lumber curvature and a stupidly small waist for my size, which means my chances of getting something to sit where it’s supposed to when running are fairly slim.

Wiggle recently expanded their product range and I was delighted to discover that Salomon have been added to their suppliers. I have a friend who is an anthropologist and expert on Mongolian shamanism — and who also happens to have successfully completed the Marathon Des Sables. She recommended the Salomon Raid and told me that my best bet was just to bite the bullet, order one online and see if it worked.

Hence I have just placed an order for the Salomon Revo Raid. The black one, naturally. I’ll let you know how we get on.

And if this doesn’t work I’ll be looking for further recommendations.

After years, and years, and years of insisting that out there somewhere is a film set in WWI where they build tractors into aeroplanes, Munky has found it.

Dude. Srsly. There were mines in the air and zeppelins and dirigibles and FLYING FREAKIN TRACTORS.

Watch and learn.

The name of this 1980s piece of hokum? Sky Bandits. I got the year right and everything. The only reason I couldn’t find it on IMDB is the description of it bears no resemblance to the plot that I remember at all. And there is no mention of the word tractor in the keywords. FAIL.

There aren’t many. Today there were two. Both involving death on the roads.

(1) Road kill. Cars kill beasts, and cyclists are left to ride through the miasma of their rotting corpses. This morning it was a fox, and it had been fairly thoroughly shredded: probably in the wee hours of this morning, judging by the smell. The day was just beginning to heat up so it hadn’t had time to get going properly on the whole festering lark.

(2) Probably not one for the men: getting home and removing one’s bra to discover bugs killed by being squashed between boob and bra. I mean, I suppose some men fantasise about being crushed to death by 32DD bosoms, but I’m fairly sure that the flattened aphid I discovered had met its untimely end in my cleavage didn’t have the brain cells for pornographic fantasies.

Heads up, folks.

Twitter appears to have had a brainfart over the last few hours and you may find that your following/followers data have been lost. I’ve just had to go finding all mine again.

If I’ve not found you, just, you know, ping me and I’ll fix it.

Here was me thinking that Mars Phoenix wasn’t talking to me any more…

Fixed gear commuter racing. Against a reasonably attractive young man. Normally I’m the one in front providing the view. He was up for a bit of a burn, though, and I could not catch him until the roundabout above the bypass, where my approach coincided with the lights changing and he thought he’d dropped me so didn’t accelerate very hard.

That’ll wake you up in the morning.

If you were the rider of the orange fixed gear with the orange messenger bag (Crumpler?) travelling in the direction of Heriot Watt this morning along Calder Road being followed (then passed) by a red-head in a Sugoi Manga Jersey on an Il Pompino with Midge bars carrying a silver and black Timbuk2… Tighten your chain, man!

Lack of biscuity hug was disappointing today, though. I think it was vanilla shortbread on the way home yesterday.

The Cottage.

Run. Don’t walk. Put the DVD down and flee. Don’t even touch it. Don’t pick it up. Do not expose yourself to the teasing lies that adorn the back of the box. You will thus be spared reading “The Cottage isn’t just the funniest British Comedy in years, but the horror event of 2008. Don’t miss it.” That’s all right. It’s fine. If you had picked up the box you might have spotted that this review comes from The Daily Mirror, even though they’ve carefully made that bit grey and blurry and very, very small so you might think it came from someone worthwhile. If you leave the box on the shelf you will not be tempted by the presence of one of the cast of The League Of Gentlemen.

The description on the back of the box bears little relationship to the film itself. I once bought a low-fat, low-sugar recipe book. In it was a recipe for custard and jelly that used polenta and fruit tea. I kid you not. The author said that the yellow colour of the polenta “bore a comforting resemblance to custard.” The entire book bore a displeasing resemblance to food.

This film bears a displeasing resemblance to something for which it is worth losing 90 minutes of your life. Roll up all the zombie/Texas Chainsaw Massacre/Evil Dead/Lock Stock Dog Soldiers Britflick tropes, stick ’em in a blender, sieve them to remove the lumpy bits then water it down for people who can’t take anything stronger than dilute Ribena.

I haven’t seen anything that tries so hard and fails so miserably in a very long time.

From now on, all Mars Phoenix tweets are to be read in the voice of GLaDOS.

That is all. Carry on.