Boy did I hate this movie. I hate the Dark Knight to the point it where I couldn’t wait to leave the theater 20 minutes into it. And this is from someone who bought into the word-of-mouth buzz totally and sat down in his seat totally geeked to see a wonderful action flick. I’ve followed the raves online just to try to figure out exactly what it is I missed that made this movie supposedly so great. Instead my only conclusion is that there are just a lot of rabid fanboys and intense Heath Ledger fans combining to form a massive wave of delusion. This movie is nowhere near the masterpiece it’s supporters claim it is. It’s not even a good movie that people are proclaiming as great. I don’t think the movie is even competent on most levels.
- The incessant need to try to be “realistic.” There are two problems with this. First, Christopher Nolan seems to think “realistic” is synonymous with “boring.” Most of the things that make Batman the comic character fantastic and larger than life are excised from Nolan’s movie version most likely because he finds them silly and unrealistic. Batman’s fighting style is brought down to earth so that he’s not doing any high-flying gymnastics or martial arts, just some really boring and dull fight style consisting of repetitive body blows, elbows and arm grabs. And even worse, these fights are all shot in the dark and way too close with quick cuts, which I guess is somehow supposed to increase the realism through incoherency. We have a boring Batmobile that doesn’t have any bat insignias or oversized scallops or anything really that indicates it’s supposed to have a Bat-theme. Because I guess driving a giant bat-shaped car would be ridiculous. Joker can’t have permawhite skin like the comics because that’s also unrealistic, so he just wears face paint. And the list of fantastic comic elements that get taken out of the mythos for the purpose of the film go on and on. Which leads to my second problem with all this realism: IT’S A FUCKING MOVIE ABOUT A BILLIONAIRE WHO TRAVELS THE WORLD IN ORDER TO BECOME THE WORLD’S SMARTEST CRIMEFIGHTING NINJA, THEN RETURNS TO HIS HOMETOWN TO DRESS AS A GIANT BAT, DRIVE A WEAPONS-LOADED TUMBLER TANK LOADED, AND CLEAN UP ALL THE CRIME IN THE CITY BY ESSENTIALLY SINGLEHANDEDLY PUNCHING IT IN THE FACE EVERY NIGHT. AND NOW HE’S GOING TO FIGHT AN EVIL CLOWN. So please tell me…who the hell goes into a movie with a premise so inherently ridiculous and then DEMAND REALISM? Whenever I bring up how dark, dreary and joylessly boring this movie is, people say “it’s supposed to be realistic.” Why is the fighting and action so badly shot and dull? “It’s supposed to be realistic.” Why is Gotham City so bland and generic now and no longer a character like in previous Batman movies? “Realism.” And so on and so on. Since when is a movie about a guy dressing as a Bat to kick everyone’s ass every night the type of movie that demands realism?! It’s the exact kind of movie that works best when you accept how preposterous the premise is and respectfully have fun with it. This is what made the Burton Batman so great. It took the source material seriously, had the deep psychological stuff for the older fans that take the comics too seriously, and it also had the fun, over the top stuff for the people who grew up on the more fun, pre-80s grim and gritty stuff that came later. It had something for almost all ages and took it just seriously enough but not too seriously.
- Chris Nolan can not shoot action. He simply sucks at it. His camera work is horrible. You have a general idea what’s going on in the fights, but it’s never really clearly shot. We have a general idea on how he flipped the truck using the batwires but it’s not exactly clear what was happening or how he knew it was going to happen. Outside of things exploding, nothing else in the actions scenes worked, they just came off frenetic, claustrophobic and clumsy. Very, very clumsy. The New Yorker provides a very accurate description of Nolan’s action scenes:
Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method. Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.
- Depressing and sadistic. I guess this may fall under the “realism” criticism, since my take is that the filmmakers and the fans of this movie think that the more relentlessly sadistic, moralizing and depressing the movie is, the more realistic it becomes. But do we really need a superhero movie to explore such heady, bleak and cynical themes rather than a movie with a premise maybe better suited to such themes, like No Country for Old Men? And of course some fans will respond “But T, superheroes are just as capable of adult themes as any other genre. Why can’t Batman explore these same ultraserious, depressing and high art themes.” To which I’ll respond BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT A RICH NINJA GUY THAT DRESSES AS A BAT WITH SUPERTECH THAT RUNS AROUND KICKING AN EVIL CLOWN’S ASS AT NIGHT. No matter how much you lie to yourself, it’s simply not as high-falutin’ a setting as movies like No Country for Old Men or Sophie’s Choice. It’s a premise best suited for fantasy, escapism and cheap thrills. And there’s nothing wrong with that! You don’t have to reinvent it into Godfather II meets Silence of the Lambs meets a snuff film in order to prove there’s such depth and worth in the source material. Why does a movie about freaking Batman have to be so bleak, ugly and induce such nauseating violence and flinching?
- Fake hypocritical moralizing. This is a movie that tries to have its cake and eat it too. It is cynical, depressing and ugly throughout, showing everything ugly about society and human nature. The Joker is effectively presented as the moral center of the movie, the only person who not only stays true to his morals throughout, but he never questions or even wavers from them. Batman is weak and indecisive throughout, letting people die on his watch regularly, agonizing over every decision, even trying to steal a woman he loves from her fiance while claiming to admire said fiance. Harvey Dent, after being shown to be such a beacon of strength, immediately becomes a psychotic mass murderer and attempted child killer after his fiancee dies and he gets burned. The whole movie is dedicated to proving the Joker right about everyone else and showing that only he had anything resembling a consistent moral code. But wait! There are two boats that don’t blow each other up (barely). So obviously people are not so bad, right? Oh, and Batman doesn’t kill. So that makes Batman morally superior to the Joker and also proves the Joker wrong again. Yay. Except Batman kills Two-Face about five minutes later with no problem!! What’s the point of putting so much value into the fact that Batman won’t kill, presenting his inability to kill the Joker (and even going so far as to save him) as a moral victory over the Joker ONLY TO HAVE HIM KILL ANOTHER CHARACTER FIVE MINUTES LATER. And if killing is okay after all, then why does the Joker not deserve it more than Harvey?
- Did I mention it was sadistic and had lots of fake moralizing? Allow me to add overly manipulative in the process too. As the Daily Mail said, “The Dark Knight an unintentionally sick spectacle, pretending to justify law and justice, but in reality celebrating violence and chaos.” A commenter on the website rottentomatoes.com said it way better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote him:
- Forced chemistry. I was so glad I didn’t see this on IMAX. First because the action outside of the explosions was horribly shot, so seeing it on a big screen would have done nothing for me. And second because the close-ups of Maggie Gyllenhaal were painful enough on a regular screen, seeing her on IMAX would have made an excruciating movie that much worse. I just can’t buy a powerful DA and a billionaire fighting over a chick who resembles a sad turtle or a cabbage patch kid that’s all grown up. You mean to tell me that Bruce Wayne has that gorgeous ballerina, who is shown to actually have a scintillating intellect to boot, and he’s pining over a homely girl that looks 40? (And to all you guys who have seen Secretary, yes, I know there’s something in the viewing of that movie, perhaps subliminal messages or mass hypnosis, that causes seemingly normal people to see something hot in Maggie Gyllenhaal. I’ve never seen that movie, so please keep in mind that I didn’t get those crazy brainwashing rays and am only judging her by her actual looks). What a step down from the Kim Basinger days.
- No nuance or subtlety in the Joker. Fans are clamoring to say that finally the Joker was done right, like the comics? Give me a break. The Joker is not a hideously scarred, limping, stooped over creep in the comic books. He actually looks like he’s bordering between creepy and harmless. That’s exactly what makes him so cool. He can look like a harmless clown on the outside at times, harmless enough that children would approach him, but that clownlike exterior belies the unpredictable, and psychotic murderer underneath. It’s a great dichotomy: he looks like a clown or jester, immaculately dressed in a press suit, but he’s a fucking nut loose cannon that can go crazy on you at any minute and shoot or hack you to pieces. However Nolan has created a guy that blatantly looks crazy and psychotic and depraved from the moment you see him, before he even speaks, like Leatherface or the blonde Japanese guy from Ichi the Killer.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="270" caption="The Real Inspiration for Ledger's Joker, the movie Ichi the Killer"]
[/caption]
When you see Ledger’s Joker, there’s no doubt from the beginning that you are looking at a depraved lunatic, that subtle cognitive dissonance you get from seeing a fun looking clown also switch into psycho killer mode is taken away and instead you just see a guy that looks like a sick serial killer acting like a sick serial killer. (I think Ledger did a wonderful, although overrated job, and I don’t blame him for the lack of subtlety. I think he was playing exactly what he was told to play, and he did it well)
- Plot holes and bad scene transitions galore. Batman leaves a party of billionaires upstairs alone with the Joker to save Rachel Dawes. The Joker was up there searching for Harvey Dent. We never cut back upstairs to find out what happened. Did the Joker just give up and leave? Did Batman even try to go up and catch him? We never find out because it just jumps to the next scene. The movie is loaded with tons of inexplicable scene jumps like this, like when Harvey and Rachel are suddenly kidnapped. How did Joker plan in the beginning heist for the kids’ schoolbuses to have such a perfectly timed gap in between them for him to drive his own schoolbus in between during his escape? Anyone who knows anything about school buses knows they don’t drive behind each other in city traffic with a huge gap between them large enough for another school bus to just jump into the line. Bruce Wayne is shown as unable to do anything technical without Lucius Fox’s assistance, even to change his costume, yet at the end he miraculously can suddenly singlehanded use upgrade the sonar trick Lucius Fox showed him earlier and create a program to somehow make every cell phone in Gotham City broadcast a video signal that he can watch through some space-age lenses that cover his eyes in the Batsuit and are fed through a supercomputer in his secret lair. (So the Joker having chalk white skin and having over-the-top fun fight scenes are too ludricous for Nolan’s “realistic” vision, but that crazy tech wasn’t?) How about how ridiculous Gordon and Batman’s plan was of faking Gordon’s death and just transporting Harvey while hoping the Joker would attack…yet when it happened they still seemed totally unprepared for it. A commenter at imdb.com nailed it (found through The Dark Knight Sucks):
If I understand it correctly, Gordon faked his own death (even though it’s edited to make it look like he got shot for real) to protect his family. Batman then decides to announce who he is but Dent takes his place. The Joker intercepts the Dent convoy but is himself intercepted by Batman. Carnage ensues including the destruction of large parts of the Gotham road system and various buildings and, seemingly by fortune, Batman, the Joker and, the driver of the convoy who is, of course, Gordon, reach a point at which the Joker is captured. Unfortunately for them that’s what he wanted all along.
So: doesn’t make very little sense when you try and add it up from characters’ POV. Why would Gordon legitimise such a ridiculous plan: there’s no guarantee it would work and he’s placing the lives of his men and Dent in very real jeopardy because he knows the Joker is coming for them. Batman may suffer from incredible pride but there’s no way he could have planned, forseen or even imagained such a successful scenario as him flipping the Joker’s truck, faking his defeat and Gordon’s reappearance because it all happened just metres away from his vehicle. The Joker needs Dent for phase 2 of this particular plan os his attempt at killing him is self serving. He needs to be caught AND he needs the guy with the phone in his stomach to make it with him otherwise he’s got no way to get Lao or the money. He surely should have walked into the station with his men a la Se7en!
I put this to a friend and he suggested the whole ‘agent of chaos’ angle which doesn’t work for me because Dent, Gordon and Batman ren’t agents of chaos and that’s the force they’re fighting against. If the Joker had initiated this then, yes, I could agree. But this is their party which the Joker crashes.
- And even more plot holes. Okay, Harvey Dent is supposed to be some hotshot District Attorney right? And his fiancee is a rising star Assistant DA in his office? And they spend all their time together? Well let’s look at their stellar legal work in action, as described by Dark Knight Sucks:
Well, the writers must have been a bit more lazy on the day they wrote the segment where Rachel and Harvey were trying to nail Lau on something. Particularly, they were trying to use Lau as a means to incriminate all the crime heads in Chicago (I mean Gotham).
Apparently, they got Batman to go all the way to China, risk his life, illegally kidnap a Chinese citizen who had not been convicted or even indicted on any US-based crime, and bring him back for questioning and they didn’t have an actual plan. They had NO IDEA what to nail him on, they just knew that he was the money-man for the mob. So, when he finally admits to being the banker for numerous criminal organizations, Harvey has a eureka moment with Rachel and blurts “we can get them on RICO!”, presuming of course they can prove just one of the organizations pooling their money with Lau had committed crimes.
A bit of education: RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) is a US federal law. That means HAD that been the case that Harvey chose to pursue that path, he would have to hand over the entire case to a FEDERAL court, taking it completely out of his hands to prosecute - his jurisdiction was at a city level for Chicago (I mean Gotham). He was not a federal prosecutor. If he was, he would be referred to in the movie as a United States Attorney. If some want to argue semantics that he was a federal attorney and merely referred to as a District Attorney, that argument will fail because such positions are appointed by the President of the United States. They are not elected to that position, as is the case with Harvey Dent (it’s pretty clear in both the viral marketing and election context of the movie).
That was just one flaw with that segment; another flaw is the fact that Lau’s lawyer just stood there doing nothing while Harvey and Rachel were using unjust tactics to pressure him to talk, making implications they would place his life in danger based on how much he cooperates. Because, without those tactics, they didn’t seem to even have a clue of what to get Lau to admit to which might implicate the criminals they were after.
So basically these legal eagles didn’t think of the RICO statute, simply the most obvious and most-used statute used against the mob, until a EUREKA! moment occurred during an interrogation.
- Batman is impotent in his own movie. A good villain should be a step or two ahead of the hero throughout the movie. It keeps it exciting, and you want the hero to be challenged. But at some point there should be a scene where there hero turns it around and ends up getting ahead of the villain and outsmarting him once and for all in the endgame. This never really happens. The only “victory” Batman gets is when the two boats don’t blow up, which happens out of dumb luck. It could have easily gone the other way. Batman didn’t actually do accomplish the saving of those people, they just happened to end up okay, but no thanks to him. He spends the whole movie jumping through the Joker’s hoops, and even when he physically defeats him, it still seems like part of Joker’s plan. Then he sends Batman to chase after Harvey Dent, showing him that he corrupted someone thought to be uncorruptible. Chalk up another victory to the Joker, and another instance where Batman is two steps behind the Joker. But at least Batman got ONE moral victory in right? He still doesn’t kill, right? He managed to stop the Joker without killing him or letting him die. Too bad five minutes later even that victory is undermined by Batman killing Harvey Dent. So Joker not only corrupted Harvey Dent, he got Batman to kill at the same time. Great job, Batman! NY Magazine has a great piece on the impotence of this Batman throughout the movie:
From the beginning of The Dark Knight, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman is only the fifth- or sixth-most-interesting character in his own movie. (The Joker, Harvey Dent, Gordon, Rachel Dawes, and even Alfred the butler are more intriguing onscreen than Batman.) Sure, it’s not uncommon for criminals and supporting characters to be flashier than the superhero in a comic-book movie. It is uncommon, though, for the hero to serve — as Batman does in The Dark Knight — as little more than a patsy: just one of Gotham’s wind-up toys, serving only to be set in motion by the Joker and sent into yet another trap. Unlike in most superhero movies, Batman isn’t two steps ahead of the criminals, or even of us; instead, he’s constantly behind, until even the audience can see the plots developing, and Batman’s investigations making things worse.And so throughout The Dark Knight, Batman himself is further and further marginalized, made more and more impotent. Batman can’t stop the violence, can’t crack the case, and his inability to comprehend the pure malevolent chaos that the Joker represents costs dozens of Gotham residents their lives. In so exhilaratingly illustrating the expression of that pure chaos — and in the dire straits it eventually puts our so-called hero in — The Dark Knight can be read as a philosophical argument against superheroes in a complicated world.
I already know what the #1 defense from fanboys regarding this movie is going to be, “Oh My God, it’s a comic book, get over it, it’s not supposed to be realistic, get a life!” And you know what, I agree, it shouldn’t be realistic. The problem is, I’m not the one that set this standard of realism, it’s the creators of the movie and the fans of this movie that did that. I judge a movie according to the standards it sets for itself, and the creators of this movie wanted to present an adult, high Art with a capital A, pretentious movie that we should take as seriously as any other arthouse or intellectually sophisticated adult movie out there. This so-called gravitas and unflinching “realism” is exactly what this movie’s fans tell us is so great about it. In fact, when you complain about anything in this movie, the first thing that fans tell you is that it’s okay because the movie is supposed to be realistic. Why is the fighting so bland? “It’s supposed to be realistic.” Why does Gotham City looks so bland? “It’s supposed to be realistic, duh?” Why is it so relentlessly sadistic, mirthless and morally grey? “It’s supposed to be realistic, real life is not so black and white.” Why can’t the Joker actually have permanently white skin like he traditionally does rather than just be a guy with “war paint?” “Because this is a psychologically intense realistic tour-de-force along the lines of the Godfather 2 or Silence of the Lambs, it’s grounded in reality!”
Yet once you accept the premise of the filmmakers and the fans that this is meant to be a realistic, adult, intellectual and high Art movie and start judging it by those standards, that means you have to start taking it to task for the limitless ways it fails in plot mechanics, characterization, motivations and logic under those higher standards. Yet what happens once you start pointing out the myriad of ridiculous plot holes in this movie, ridiculous coincidences and things that just make no sense, like the utter stupidity of the cops at every turn (for example locking the Joker up without ever bothering to remove his makeup and send a picture of his unmade-up face to every federal and local law enforcement bureau in an effort to uncover his identity, then leaving him unprotected and not handcuffed in the interrogation room guarded by a single cop, even though he’s proven to be badass enough to fight the Batman and wreak total mayhem across the city?) These exact same people start saying “What do you want, it’s a comic book movie! It’s about a guy that dresses up as a bat! Weren’t you ever a kid? What do you expect, Shakespeare?” You can’t have it both ways.
And what sense does it make, if you ARE going to practice selective realism, to only select using realism in areas that will make the movie more boring and incoherent and illogical? So we must can’t use suspension of disbelief to make the Joker as visually unique as the comics and previous movies with chalk-white skin and creepy red lips and actual green hair. We can’t suspend our disbelief and just have a guy who is rich and has cool gadgets to fight crime with, we must forever be bogged down with the “process” describing how he gets every last toy. We’re not allowed to suspend our disbelief enough to have fantastic, over the top fight scenes like you see in movies like Kill Bill and Die Hard 4, movies that are somehow less ashamed of the superhero comic conventions and superhero aesthetics and laws of physics than an actual superhero comic movie like Dark Knight, we’re supposed to accept boring, incoherent plodding fighting instead. But what we do need to save our moments of suspension of disbelief for according to Dark Knight and its fans? Plot holes and wildly illogical event sequences and poorly thought out coincidences! Using suspension of disbelief for anything that would lead to escapist and over the top fun is forbidden, but for anything that makes the movie a more incoherent, jumbled and illogical mess, then it’s okay to accept the unbelievable. Wonderful.
See, I watched Spider-Man 1 and 2 and both movies were loaded with plot holes. How was Peter Parker able to put together such an expensive and complicated looking costume if he’s poor? How is it that the only two people in town who end up with superpowers happen to know each other? And don’t get me started on the improbably coincidences and the laws of physics broken throughout both movies. Yet in those movies I totally don’t care about the plot holes because Sam Raimi obviously shows us that the movie is in no ways meant to be realistic and minor plot holes are not that serious. He made a lot of it is tongue-in-cheek, was unafraid to embrace some of the more ridiculous but entertaining and fun conventions of the superhero genre and showed that he is unashamed to be silly and unrealistic at times in order to have some damn fun with his movie. So for his movie, I don’t bother to apply the same stringent levels of judgment regarding plot holes and logic. Nolan, to me, is ashamed to be doing a superhero movie and tries to excise everything superheroic he can get away with excising from the movie. And ironically he ends up with a movie less in touch with humanity than a movie like Spider-Man 2 that totally and apologetically accepts itself as a movie about superheroes and all the inherently ridiculous conventions that come with the genre.
When you look around the internet there is an extreme comic fanboy fervor that has overtaken message boards and magazine websites exaggerating the merits of this movie and attacking anyone who dares say anything bad about it. There is obviously a huge emotional investment in this film on the part of its fanbase to believe it would be the greatest thing ever no matter what the final product was that actually ended up in the scene. I think a lot of this has to do with the profile of the modern superhero comic fan. See, I am an adult superhero comic fan myself, so I’ve seen how the genre has evolved in the past few decades. Back in the day, the average superhero comic fan was of teenage years and gave up the hobby as he grew older. At some point, probably around the late 60s, the comics became so emotionally compelling and of better quality, especially after Marvel Comics hit the scene, that these readers started giving up these comics at later and later ages, if at all. So the older the average age of the readership got, you have to figure the more embarrassing it became for them to remain comic fans. So at some point, particularly around the 80s, there became this need to pretend superhero comics had incredibly more depth and intense psychological roots than they were ever really meant to have. The problem with this new wave of grim and gritty superhero comics, and movies they lead to like Dark Knight, is that these characters and premises were created over 60 years ago for kids and were never intended to hold up to intense psychological scrutiny and deconstruction. The more realism you apply to these things, the more the flaws become apparent. If you start examining Batman under the lens of realism and deconstruction, of course he will start looking like a neurotic and psychotic emotionally stunted morally grey madman who is the flipside to the Joker and may be harming society just as much as he’s helping it. That’s why this grim and gritty movement of the 80s started a slippery slope and we live in an era where every single Batman and Joker story has to focus on how morally grey and impotent Batman is in the face of Joker’s insanity, how he is actually the flipside of the coin to the Joker, the weird homoerotic undertones their relationship now has and the constant implication that Batman is somehow as unhinged psychologically and messed up as the Joker. It’s not bad stuff to explore occasionally, but as the norm it’s horribly cynical and bleak.
Comic fans love proclaiming that this movie, in being so “realistic,” is somehow the most true to the dark, psychologically intense world of Batman comics. They say this because (a) they want to convince themselves that Batman comics really are intended to be this realistic and intense and (b) they want to convince others that what they read is so realistic and intense so that they can feel less embarrassment at still reading them in their 20s and 30s. The reason they overrate this movie so much is because so much personal validation is tied into this movie for them. So the more realistic the movies are, the more comic fans will claim to anyone who will listen that they just witness a movie that is exactly like the books they’ve been mocked for reading for decades. But if this realistic tone is really so true to the comics as the fans say, then let’s run down everything in the Batman mythos and see if they can work in the sequel in this new “realistic” tone Nolan set up: Mr. Freeze? No. Killer Croc? No. Robin? Doubtful. Blockbuster? Maybe if they just did him as a big dude. Poison Ivy? DOubtful, unless you seriously tone down her abilities and take away her powers? Bane? Maybe. Dr. Phosphorus? No. Can you ever have other superheroes guest star? Definitely not. So if it creates a world where so much of Batman’s world from the comics, including Robin, won’t work at all or at least without being severely altered, how exactly is it true to Batman’s comic world?
So the next criticism becomes, if what you say is true and the main cultish fervor over this film comes from adult comic fans who need this overserious superhero movie for some type of personal validation, why did it make such crazy box office numbers. Obviously it’s huge among noncomic fans too. Well this can actually be explained easily: it’s a perfect storm of several mass hysterias at once. First there’s the comic fanboy hysteria that feels the more serious the source material is taken, the better the movie automatically is because it helps them achieve personal validation for the fact that they are reading it well into their 20s and 30s. That alone would make big box office, but you’re right that alone wouldn’t raise it to these ridiculous box office numbers. But then we get the “early death of a young genius” syndrome, similar to what happened to Tupac, Biggie, Bruce Lee, James Dean, Brandon Lee, Selena and most recently Kurt Cobain, where a genius that dies young is elevated to mythic proportions, and all their works, and ESPECIALLY what they were working on after they died, gets huge business. Ledger died and became our latest “Kurt Cobain.” Next comes the Brokeback Mountain crowd, those people that will automatically flock to a movie and rave about it if enough reputable critics drone on and on about how oscarworthy it is. These three groups combined to make the Dark Knight the most overrated movie of all time.
Let the flaming begin.
[/caption]
by John McWhorter, a black college professor from Berkeley of all places. Very controversial. 
by Larry Elder. Another black conservative, VERY cagey mind, really taught me how to think hard about race and counter arguments. This book was so influential to my thought process and writing style I actually bought about a dozen copies and gave them to friends. I still occasionally buy copies of this book and give it to people. Each chapter is something you can’t say in America, but for what you ask though, four of the chapters would be your main focus, especially Chapter 7:
by Thomas Sowell. Actually anything by Thomas Sowell is great. He’s another black conservative and one of the best economists I ever read. This is an economics book for laypeople, not a single equation or piece of math in it, filled with real world political applications.
by Bernard Goldberg.
by William McGowan.
