I *finally* got to see The Dark Knight yesterday–Amy and I wanted to go together, but the first couple of IMAX weekends sold out immediately and we couldn’t go during the week as she’s been working swing shift lately. The anticipation has been driving me a little…batty, you might say. That is, if you were into bad puns, which I am totally not.

What I AM totally into is Batman, if you’re just joining us. Comic books, movies, soundtracks, games–you name it, and I’ve probably swung into a room shouting ‘I’M BATMAN’ while doing it. Hell, one of my college assignments was to write a ‘virtual pet’ program, and I made myself a virtual pet Batman. I am at a level of geekery that makes most normal people physically ill.

Unlike most people, I really loved Batman Forever–yes, it was campy, but I think both Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey are the bee’s knees, and Val Kilmer made one damn hot Batman. The Batman Forever soundtrack was also the very first CD I bought, and feel free to mock me, but it introduced me to some artists who remain favorites to this day, like Nick Cave and The Flaming Lips.

It was unfortunate that Batman & Robin was such a turd–I never expected great shakes out of George Clooney as Batman, but Batman & Robin introduced me to a whole level of suck I didn’t even know *existed*. I still listened to the soundtrack often, though, and was a little disappointed that the second Pumpkins song didn’t get the love I felt it deserved.

The Dark Knight was worth every second of anticipation, although I was more than a little disappointed that I ended up sitting next to The Most Annoying Man On Earth. Even though I am apparently shaped like a Mr Potato Head, I manage to fit within the confines of my seat easily. TMAMOE, on the other hand, although quite slender, couldn’t seem to grasp the concept that my sides were NOT where his elbows belonged. Every single time he shifted in his seat, I got jabbed. And he was a shifter. A SMELLY shifter. Wait, strike that. A smelly, TALKATIVE shifter. Wait, one more time. A smelly, talkative shifter, with the smallest bladder known to man. There we go. TMAMOE thought it was very important to have full-on conversations during the movie with the person on his right, jabbering and jabbering and jabbering, all the while invading my personal space, aka the seat I paid a ridiculous amount of service charges to park my ass in. When he was not talking, he was moving up and down the aisle, in and out of the theater. No less than six times did he cruise up and down the aisle during a two and a half hour movie. This is why I am not allowed to pick theater seats or a place in a bar or a place to stand during a concert–it’s almost I’m drawn to the places where I’ll be most annoyed. Seriously, who goes to a movie to talk through the whole goddamn thing? Wait until it comes out on DVD, you asshole!

Aside from wanting to slap TMAMOE until I was too exhausted to slap any further, I thorougly enjoyed every minute of The Dark Knight. I loved watching it on a ridiculously huge screen. I loved recognizing Gotham as being Chicago. I loved seeing the bridges and being reminded of my Batman Begins story*. I loved that the people involved are clearly Batman fans and have pulled from the comics for the movie, particularly ‘The Long Halloween’. I loved geeking out in the theater with a bunch of people who are just as clearly nutty about Batman as I am. I love that this Batman resurgence has kept him as a loner vigilante instead of sanctioned watchdog; Batman is best when he’s outside the law.

AWESOME. I may have to see it again before it leaves the theater. And again at the drive-in. And then six more times when it hits the cheapy theater in Federal Way.

*I went to Chicago with starladear13 in 2004, and ended up having to catch the train home to Kenosha. I checked the train schedule and realized that my train was leaving an hour earlier than I’d thought (uh-oh!) and left immediately to walk to the train station, figuring I’d make it there with 10 minutes to spare. To get to the train station, I needed to cross the river. As I approached the bridge, a man wearing the bright yellow and orange jacket of a traffic director told me that the bridge was closed. Cursing, I turned around and walked around the block to cross at a different bridge. At this bridge they had more than 100 people stopped from crossing. “Don’t worry folks, we’ll be re-opening the bridge in 15 or 20 minutes, we have it closed for your safety.” “For our safety” meant they were shooting something for Batman with a helicopter that was flying low over the bridges and didn’t want any people in the shot. Well that would have been fine if my train weren’t leaving in ten minutes and the next one was FOUR HOURS LATER. The crowd started getting unruly. One man said “What are you going to do if we go across? Shoot all of us?” and another one said “They can’t stop all of us. Let’s go!” So as a big unruly mob with a helicopter buzzing over our heads we ran over the bridge. One of the guards was calling frantically on her walkie-talkie for the police, which only made me run faster. Sirens started up behind us, but I was almost across…just a few more steps…Several people were being stopped by police, but I managed to duck into the train station and hopped on my train just before it pulled out. So now, like most of my co-workers at the time, I now had a ‘running from the police’ story. Only mine didn’t involve drugs.