Sheppy · Thinks...

This helped.

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$900 to replace a catalytic converter. What does that do, you ask? It converts some of the harmful gases my car emits into somewhat less harmful gases. Still harmful, just not, you know, AS harmful.

$900 for this.

Never buy a Nissan.

I'm so getting a fucking moped when I move somewhere warmer. Fuck cars.

Ok, here goes.

1) Batman wasn't interesting: The movie is supposed to be about Batman. He's supposed to be the main character. We're supposed to be involved with the character, worry about him, care about the things he cares about, etc. He's supposed to be likable. He's not. He's not at all.

The problem is manyfold, but for starters, Christian Bale cannot act as Batman. Can he really be faulted for this? I don't think so. You wouldn't be able to act if you couldn't move your neck or see, either. Or hell, how about move his body at all? Batman is trained by ninjas. In fact, he's the best out of the ninjas. He's a superninja. And yet, he fights like a dude wearing 60 pounds of rubber. Stiffly, every movement precise but slow and obvious. There's no subtlety to the fights, if you don't count what we can't actually see happen because of the cape, or because the camera shakes like crazy during the fights. Compare that to Unleashed, or the Transporter, or the Bond movies.

Also, the movie isn't really about Batman. Batman is an element, sure, but an unimportant one. There are some characters that are powerful enough to warrant a beating from Batman, but he has very little to do with the movement of the plot. He's just running through a funhouse OTHER character have set up for him, hitting all the right buttons but not really getting too into it. Batman is supposed to be the world's best detective but he hardly does any detective work (what little he tries he fails at, such as finding out the Joker's identity).

Christian Bale was actually far better as Bruce Wayne... just like in the first movie. In fact, there's a scene in this one where he beats someone up as Bruce Wayne. No suit, no gravelly voice. Just some quick kung-fu. And it's awesome. It's one scene, but its the best sequence in the flick.

Finally, Batman is supposed to be a ghost-like character. A demon of the night, a sneaky guy who exists more as myth than man. But whenever he does hit the town, he's blowing shit up with his rocket launcher motorcycle. He had to go through ninja training for that?

Overall, I found myself wanting Batman on the screen less and less. Which, thankfully, the movie was more than happy to do for me. He gets very limited screen time, for a movie ostensibly about HIM.

2) Women in Refrigerators: If you're not familiar with Women In Refrigerators Syndrome, I'll briefly summarize (though I suggest you look it up on wikipedia). It's a form of sexism in comics (and really, all media) where a female character is abused, tormented or destroyed in order to motivate a leading male character. In this case, the woman becomes a plot device, rather than a character. The term comes from a storyarc in comics where Green Lantern's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator.

This movie suffers from a textbook example. It has one (1) female character, Rachel. Rachel is Bruce Wayne's ex-girlfriend, knows he's Batman, and is in love with Harvey Dent. That's it. That's her entire role in the flick. She doesn't do anything. She gets shoved off a roof, menaced with a knife, and spends a lot of screen time mooning over the male characters but never once makes an actual decision. Never once takes an active role in the plot. There's one scene where she stands up to the Joker, only to be menaced with a knife and pushed off a building.

Spoilers below. Read only if you've already seen the movie.

**SPOILERS BELOW DON'T READ UNLESS YOU DON'T CARE**

Halfway through the movie she gets blown up. And not the fakey 'she comes back later' kind. She gets the 'immolation by fire' kind. She's dead. I wanna say... about 60% of the way through. As a result, one character goes mad, the other becomes more driven. But that's it. Those are the consequences of her death. She has no family that I can tell, because nobody but the main characters mourns her. And they mourn her by blowing things up and punching. She gets no eulogy, no funeral. Nobody even really mentions that they miss her. Her grisly death exists as a modifier for the main characters... a motivator, a catalyst, and nothing more.

***END SPOILERS***

There are no other female characters of ANY kind. There's one, a female detective, that ends up getting pistol whipped. This is a movie that HATES WOMEN. Women are arm candy and nothing more. They don't DO anything. The male characters growl or fight or make decisions, and the females are there to be menaced and abused to motivate them.

3) The Plot: I honestly couldn't really tell you what the movie was trying to say. I came away from the movie having learned really nothing. And while a lot of even good movies suffer from this, they can make it up in little ways... this one cannot.

The plot is one unconnected scene from the next. The joker shows up, menaces people, blows things up, kills some folks, disappears. A few scenes happen while the main characters discuss and argue about what to do about the joker until he pops back up, wash rinse and repeat. This formula continues throughout the movie. There's a mini-climax somewhere around hour 1:30 that I THOUGHT was going to be the climax of the movie... but it wasn't. It was a false climax, and so I went the rest of the movie thinking... ok, uh, is this over yet? The climax, to me, had already happened. What followed was like padding.

There was a point where I actually got very bored. People were (awkwardly) fighting and things were (needlessly) exploding and I was just bored. There wasn't any emotional anchor left in the movie; they'd removed it at the mini-climax. They actually had to dial up a new female character to be menaced just to keep the tension going, but there WASN'T any tension, because I'd just stopped caring.

Plus, there was no message. "Crazy people are crazy", maybe? There was a lot of ruminating on 'heroes that are deserved' and 'heroes that are needed', but it seemed very specific to THIS MOVIE and this movie only, and I can't really think of a way to apply it in everyday life. Besides, the way they delivered it was ham-fisted in the worst way. Commissioner Gordon literally says it about four times near the end of the movie, to his son (who was made up for the movie. His daughter, who in the comics becomes Batgirl, doesn't get a line and her face is never seen.)

4) Just about the rest of it was lousy too: Here's the part where I bring up all the little things I hated.

a) Nobody just goes crazy, ok? You don't get into a car accident and suddenly you're a criminal. I understand that its handled that way in comics, but this is a movie that spends a LOT of time trying NOT to be like the comics.

b) The movie didn't bother even pretending the comics exist. They ignored everything you could possibly imagine and just made shit up. Here's a few differences: Harvey Dent has a wife in kid in the comic and Maroney throws acid in his face to turn him into Two-Face; Batman doesn't have a kindly old man who makes him his things... he designs them himself, because he's Batman; Batman doesn't have a secret underground bunker in the city, he has the batcave. What's wrong with the batcave?; Commissioner Gordon doesn't have a son, he has a daughter, and she's Batgirl. In the movie, they technically have her there, but they invented a son for him to have for the characters to talk to, presumably because Chris Nolan hates women.

The list goes on.

c) The dialogue was forgettable. It wasn't terrible to the point of being funny, but I can't remember any good scenes.

d) The writers think the audience is stupid. Morgan Freeman (and it doesn't matter what his character's name is, he's always just playing Morgan Freeman) tells Bruce Wayne that his cell phone can emit a high frequency pulse and read the ricochets of the sound waves to determine the shape of objects. I think, oh, like sonar. Bruce Wayne looks up at Morgan and says "Like a submarine?" and Morgan Freeman says "Yes, sonar, like a submarine." Ok, I know I maybe couldn't DESIGN a sonar device, but I know what it IS, thank you.

This happens again towards the end of the film as Gordon goes on a monologue about the concept of heroes we need versus heroes we deserve. Thanks, I understood that when it was mentioned in the beginning and middle of the movie, too.

e) For fucks sake Batman is supposed to be sneaky, how come he can't go into the city without blowing up a bunch of cars?

f) Why the fuck does Batman spend the entire final action sequence of the movie beating up POLICE OFFICERS? Would it really have been so hard to have him just wading through the Joker's goons?

5) Summary: The only moment I truly enjoyed was the opening bank robbery. It was brilliant, exciting, and clever. From that moment on, the movie was just boring and awful. I expected something at least halfway decent... what I got was a strong performance from Heath Ledger in a movie that was essentially about how women can't do anything but get taken hostage, how Hollywood hates comics and comic characters, and assumes the audience will be happy as long as there is a high explosion-per-screen ratio.

GO SEE HELLBOY.

HELLBOY IS GREAT.

HELLBOY IS A GREAT FUCKING MOVIE GO SEE IT.

Michael: "Yeah, I dunno dude, chicks are weird. Like, the girl I had in Paris, right? I guess... I guess she loved me more than I loved her, you know?"

Michael's Dumbass Friend: "Yeah dude, seriously."

Michael: "Yeah, I mean, I really wanted to explore sexually, you know? Like, I wanted to fuck other girls. Like, with her and stuff. I mean, this one time, I was fucking her, and I was like 'Hey, let's throw another girl in the mix'. She got really fucking pissed."

MDF: "Haha! Yeah man."

Michael: "She didn't eat for, like, four days. I mean, yeah, like, I was kinda cruel, you know? But at least I was honest."

MDF: "No kidding dude, right?"

Michael: "Passion is dead, man."

***

Later, they were sitting on the couch, listening to soft classical music, talking about a cellist, and then discussed which hands they masturbate with.

Yup.

Alright, so my roommate finally confronted me on the subject of the car.

See, when we first got this apartment, Michael, my 32 year old manchild of a roommate, had a car of his own. He has since broken it and sold it for parts. Instead of replacing the car, he decided to ride his bike around. He broke that too. So he bought a new bike. Then he broke that.

So he asked me to drive him to work. He and I live in the same apartment and work at the same job, so driving him in a carpool would make practical sense, and with anyone else I really wouldn't mind. However, I don't like him. But I drove him anyway.

I mentioned to him that he should be more responsible for his transportation, at his age. He accused me of being selfish and told me I was using 'ridiculous logic'. So I've been making him walk ever since.

Now, I secretly hoped that while he was walking to work this past week and a half, in the rain and the heat, that he spent that time to reflect on maybe WHY he was walking while I drove past him to the same destination each day. But I knew he didn't. Michael is utterly oblivious to the human race, and this was proven last night.

He asked me why I wasn't driving him like a 'decent human being'. See, I never told him this, but if he even so much as apologized or showed honest gratitude for the charity of others, I'd drive him. I'd drive him every day. But he is incapable of this. Instead, he once again insulted me. For fun, I tried bold-faced honesty and told him exactly why he was walking: He's selfish, he's never once said please or thank you, he insulted me even as I was doing him a favor, he expects others to serve him without question or recompense.

He stared at me like I was suddenly speaking Swahili. He muttered something about him just not understanding why people are so mean to him all the time and went back to watching TV, and the subject was not discussed further. He did, a few minutes later, say "I just don't want all this drama in this roommate thing," to which I responded, "Dude, I'm cooking a pizza while I play video games. I don't feel any drama about this at all. After all, I'm not the one walking to work every day." And that was that.

He really is quite mad.

Spidey comes off as kind of a weenie, and the dialog isn't so witty, but holy crap they're fighting giant robots so who cares?

This game looks awesome. Too bad I lack next-gen systems.

I watched this movie when I was about four. It terrified me. I still vividly remember the scene with the dog. According the comments on youtube, I am nowhere near alone in being traumatized by the movie after my parents mistook it for a sweet little epic adventure about rabbits.

my former leasing agency has rejected my application to get an apartment with them because of my (apparently) bad credit.

the harder i try, the more compromises i make, the more glorious and astounding my failure.

i'm going to be 45, virgin, living in my mom's basement, working as a temp, and wondering what the fuck happened to my life.

When I originally created this livejournal, it was based of the pretension that I wouldn't use it for internet wankage. That is, that I wouldn't simply log on and post up a bunch of crap purely about me, as though guided by some delusion that third parties would read it and find any of it interesting. I still do not believe that anyone WOULD. I am going to break my rule, however, so get ready for some serious wanking.

Not that it matters. I'm fairly certain the number of people who read this are equal to or less than the number of people who have my number on their cell phone, calling into question why I'd bother writing all of this out on the internet. My working theory is that since it is on the internet and accessible by anyone, it makes me feel better for having expressed my feelings in a public forum, while the knowledge that it will be read by pretty much nobody makes it a safe place to do so.

When I was in high school, I spoke often about how I was simply not interested in relationships. I never really pursued the opposite sex with any sort of effort because I really and truly didn't care. After high school I have felt that comfortable wall deteriorate to a state now where it is little more than a pile of old shoes. I am lonely, fiercely lonely, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot I can do about it.

In the past three years, I have actively tried to add something to the gaping void that is my personal life. All efforts have met with their own particular brand of disaster. I feel I should stress that it is not one singular event that has driven me to post this, but rather the amalgamation of many events, culminating to a point of supreme anticlimax. It would have actually been much better, for me, had my most recent pursuit ended in a fifty car pileup and not the pathetic little half-whimper that it did. The catastrophe would have been far more satisfying in its clarity. I am left instead to stumble around in the same blinding Silent Hill fog that I always have been, only as I grow older I become more and more concerned that I won't find my way out until the best of times has passed me by.

I'm a 25 year old college graduate, unemployed, living out of my mother's basement, and my last girlfriend, who was also my FIRST girlfriend, was about five years ago. Maybe more... I've lost track of the years by this point. I have not, on a relationship level, passed by the 'seeing if you enjoy each other's favorite movies' stage. I am like a child.

I am pathetic in ways that are themselves a force of nature. I am a stand-up comic's punchline. I am a sub character in a teen movie placed there to cartoonishly represent the hopeless loser. I am a caricature of a person.

Perhaps the reader of this feels differently. This may be because of insufficient evidence presented. Perhaps this will help.

eHarmony is an online dating service... in a way, it is THE online dating resource. It and Match.com are the Toyota and Ford of online dating services. As a half-joke, I joined eHarmony, because I thought that maybe, like a well-written romantic comedy, it'd spark off a series of doomed dates with various amusing people. I remember saying, hey, at least it'll be something... an experience, or an adventure, or SOMETHING to spice up my situation. eHarmony is so confident in its ability to match anyone, that they offer to renew your subscription for free if they do not match you with three people by the end of a three-month period. So I bought a three month subscription for something in the area of $75. The application process was more involved than most jobs, and I spent three hours filling out the most extensive personal questionnaire EVER. If there was a part of me not covered by one of the questions, I'm not sure what it is, because I wouldn't have thought to ask it.

After nine months and two free subscription renewals, they finally matched me with ONE PERSON. Excitedly, I checked the name of this person, so that I could initiate contact. This person had one name... I assume it was a first name, thought really, who could tell? The person lived in southern Maine, or so it claimed. There was no more information to be had.

Ready for the name? Here it is:

Dorko.

After nine months, the most powerful dating service in the business, bruised and bloody, hanging off the ropes, made one desperate attempt to match me with SOME human being that was even REMOTELY compatible with me, and the best they could come up with, after almost a year, was Dorko. Dorko from Maine.

I waited nine months for Dorko, and I feel that that sums up my situation.

I'm constantly told by reliable sources that I'm not hideous. I'm not malformed, or mentally handicapped. To the best of my knowledge, I don't emit noxious fumes and my touch doesn't spread disease. I'm working out often, I'm athletic, and I find it easy to make people laugh. However, I would appear to be about as appealing as a dead ferret. A dead ferret that died of some kind of explosive bowel disease that, upon exploding, sent maggots and spiders flying in all directions, and the spiders were on fire, but still alive due to evil magic. Or something. Maybe I just have a funny face.

I'm not sure what more I can do. I could go to bars and clubs and try to meet people, but I'd just be meeting people who go to bars and clubs and I HATE bars and clubs. I don't really have a hobby that involves interpersonal social interaction as a rule. I'm taking care of my body, I take care of my mind, I stay away from bad TV and I don't use substances. I don't drink, I don't get in fights. I'm just cosmically unlucky and, apparently, all kinds of unappealing.

Those who read this far looking for some resolution, sorry to disappoint. But there is no more fitting end to this diatribe because, like me, it simply trickles off at the end. There's no resolution, no answers, and no direction. It just sits here. Enjoy it.