Scott’s back from vacation today- yay!  There was still a lot of work anyway, part of it being the need to catch him up on things.

Today is TDK Day, so I went and picked up tickets for the 8:30 show of Batman: The Dark Knight (TDK, got it>?) today.  Six of them.  They were for me and Amanda, Adam and Renee and Nick and Amy.  Movie tickets are expensive these days.

Amanda let me know today that Anna’s premonition from a couple weeks ago was in fact not a premonition.  So I guess there’s no possibility of finishing my and my dad’s birthday number sequence.

We went to Nick and Amy’s for dinner tonight.  They skewered a bunch of things- apples, ham, pineapple and zucchini.  I’ve never eaten zucchini before today and in fact I had to spell check it to make sure I spelled it right.  But it wasn’t bad.  I mean, there wasn’t much taste to it, but it definitely wasn’t bad.  (Although it wasn’t as good as the meat and fruits.)  I’ve been trying to open myself up to some healthier foods of late.

We left the Warkentiens and headed over to Mayfaire Cinemas.  Actually I think it’s called Regal Cinemas now or something, but it’s still Mayfaire Cinemas to everyone.  Nick hadn’t changed or anything from work so they followed a little bit after us.  Adam and Renee were already at Mayfaire, although Renee was buying stuff from Victoria’s Secret.  Nothing too exciting, Adam said.

We got in the theater itself and had a hard time finding six spots together.  We got one guy to scoot down a couple seats, which was nice of him since he was trying to sit in the middle, an obsession I can relate to.  That gave us four spots and there were two open seats in the row in front of us, so I stood in front of them until Nick and Amy showed up.

There was a trailer for The Watchmen.  The Watchmen is the most critically acclaimed comic book of all time.  If I didn’t know this, the trailer would have told me so.  I told Nick before the lights dimmed that there was supposed to be a Watchmen trailer and told him it was more of a noire crime story without a whole lot of real far out there sci-fi type of stuff in it, that it was down to earth.  Of course the trailer had a bunch of scenes with Dr. Manhattan in them, and he’s the main thing really that is far out there and supernatural.  After the trailer Nick leaned back and said, “Down to earth, huh?”

So, The Dark Knight.  Yeah, it was awesome.  Amanda talked about it all the way home.

Everybody is raving about Heath Ledger’s Joker and talking about posthumous Oscar nominations and the like.  I’m not one to give out Oscar nods, but his performance was outstanding.  All the little ticks and nuances, the way he shifted gears from sort of sing song to guttural.  He was a chaotic psycho.  I loved Jack Nicholson’s Joker (of course, I loved Batman and saw it eight or so times in the theater when I was about ten years old), but this Joker was on a whole ‘nother level.

I also really liked the psychology of the flick.  Batman, Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent were all fighting for the same thing, but they all went about it different ways.  I really liked the relationship between Batman and Dent- both wanted to be the other and thought the other more important and both were willing to give themselves up because they saw the other as the more important symbol of hope for Gotham City.

I dug what the Joker did in the final act of the film too, trying to (and in part succeeding to) corrupt the hopes of Gotham and spreading anarchy in the form of terrible social experiments.

Zach Dotsey