Good to hear your views on J. Brown. A friend and I hopped into this on Thanksgiving, and my younger self loved it.

The irony of hindsight works very well in certain improv-based theater forms… it’s much easier to trick the audience into feeling something is real when there is literally no production budget as opposed to millions upon millions of dollars just spent on the catering.

Here’s a good way to gauge how much I liked this movie. After watching it, I suddenly felt compelled to watch the Dark Knight — a movie, I might add, that I hadn’t seen in 4 years. After a few failed attempts to rent it somewhere (which is really hard to do in this day and age, rent a movie) I finally broke down and bought it for $7 at Target. So, for all it’s inconsistencies and clunkier elements, TDKR still inspired me to do that.

Noteworthy addendum to that — I think I might like TDKR more than The Dark Knight.

I do love Harvey Dent in the TDK (a better film than TDKR) and Nolan’s attempt to integrate the coin. To me the Joker WAS NOT the agent of chaos he just enjoyed messing with people. When something tragic happens to you, people do everything they can to gain understanding. When the Joker lied to him about chaos he gave a desperate man meaning in his life when the truth would have crushed him. The truth was it was not chance but his decision to act to help the city and he just was not prepared for the consequences of failure. The movie demonstrated he had a problem with anger and accepting unfairness (the scene where he nearly freaked out at the rich kids at his own fundraiser, relentlessly chasing dirty cops to become DA, etc) before the trauma and the Joker manipulated him in his lowest hour so Harvey can become the agent of chaos. Thus the coin (as good as most metaphors) represented at the beginning his will to act and changed to his inability to control that will. Exchanging demanding justice for the more understandable and easier chaos to satisfy his need for fairness. Harvey should not have been anywhere near the fight against crime and should have been in anger management the whole time, he just lied to himself. While Batman and Gordon were happy to only see the good side, leaving him too exposed until it was too late. This makes me believe it was not too shoe-horned into the plot

Again I understand if people don’t completely buy it and that these are minor details that do not stop you from enjoying these films. I am just demonstrating why, to me at least, I am more devoted to these films than other films that are also good vs evil. I could totally be wrong.