I was the only one in the theater when I went to see The Dark Knight. I can't understand how this movie slipped into theaters unnoticed. That's my lame little joke. Actually, when the movie was over at the showing I saw, the packed audience of 290 people applauded. The auditorium right next door to the one I saw it in was an IMAX also showing The Dark Knight, and that one was sold out for the rest of the weekend. I liked the movie way more than I thought I would. I didn't have much enthusiasm for Batman Begins, but this one I liked.

Best thing about the movie to me: the way the Joker is presented as a Mephistopheles (an angler in the lake of darkness). He is really explicit about this. He wants to uncover people's naked souls and discover if they are substantial or shriveled. He wants to strip away the civilized layers that cushion people from the essential things of life and see what's down there at the center of the soul, and he assumes that most people have pretty flabby, empty, crappy souls but like to tell themselves that they are good, moral, decent people. He engineers shocks of various types to show people what they are to themselves (rather than trying to rob Fort Knox, for example, as so many super-villains might attempt--that's the closest I'm coming to a spoiler, sorry). The movie is kind of a modern Doctor Faustus story. It's at its best when exploring that idea, which is most of the time. That may be one of the things that comic-book movies can do--bring up and explore these mythic, operatic ideas and not seem to be reaching. The movie kept gaining depth like that in surprising ways, and Heath Ledger's acting (and frankly his also being dead) contributed to this mythic quality of the movie.

I keep reading how Chris Nolan likes to compare himself to Alfred Hitchcock, which is unfortunate, especially when applied to this movie. Nolan never once uses (or never uses in a clearly noticeable way) what was to Hitchcock the defining tool of the filmmaker: constructive editing, which is showing, in order: a) a character looking at something, b) what the character sees, and c) the character's reaction. This technique invites the audience to climb inside the character's skin and to read the emotions of the character. It is something that film alone can do. Its power, Hitchcock told Peter Bogdanovich, is "virtually limitless." In a movie like this that deals so much with inwardness and how who we are really is not who we think we are, such a technique would be ideal. Yet I don't think it turns up at all in Nolan's fillm. Why? Because Nolan mostly adopts the current and cliched style of a) almost never having a stationary camera so that virtually every shot is unmoored and drifting a little left or right or moving in or out and b) not having the shots stay on the screen for very long (though the movie isn't cut nearly as rapidly as Moulin Rouge or Chicago). What that means is that when the shots go by as rapidly as these mostly do and when the camera is drifting in nearly every shot, the audience can't register multiple-shot patterns that would put them in the head of the characters. This gives the movie a lack of subtlety that Hitchcock's movies usually had. Of course, a comic-book movie probably doesn't aim for subtlety. I did like that Nolan keeps the camera back in many scenes and gets across a sense of physicality (of mise en scene) of characters in proximity to others and to wherever they are at the time. The movie isn't shot in nearly all close-ups, as many movies today seem to be. That's to Christopher Nolan's credit. The script also has some wit in the dialogue, and the plotting offered some pleasant surprises. The movie is built around set pieces, all of which come off pretty well.

Now that I've written all this, I think I liked it even more than I thought when I started. But a little subtlety can be good, too.

In North by Northwest at some point something happens, I think in the scene when Cary Grant bribes his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) into sneaking into George Kaplan's hotel room at the Plaza. He's looking for something to explain to him why the bad guys think he, Roger Thornhill, is this mystery man, George Kaplan, and he's going through the closet. He tries on one of Kaplan's suit coats. "Now isn't that the damnedest thing?" he then says in silky Cary Grant-ish tones to his mother. (And he concludes that they've "obviously mistaken me for a much shorter man!")

But the expression is one you don't hear too often: damnedest, which is a strange superlative to form. The comparative form ("damneder") is amazingly rare: "A Brownwood Pharisee is damneder than an Abilene Pharisee." Most would just say "more damned" and then realize that they were into hair- and soul-splitting comparisons better left to the angels. North by Northwest dates from 1959, so Cary Grant's word modernizes the movie by pushing a little the verbal envelope.

What made me think of this was a message I just got from someone in advance of a job interview who said, "They want evidence of quality teaching." In my mind I immediately heard Cary's voice: "Now isn't that the damnedest thing?" Job interviews can be soooo artificial. The people who run the educational circus ask for all sorts of things without seeming to stop and think. It's part of the job-interview necessities. At my school they want evidence of quality Christianity, which is really hard to translate into an interview setting. Can you say, "Okay. Have your secretary smash the windows in my car, and I'll try my best to forgive her"? No, because they know you want the job so badly that you'd forgive her just to seem Jesus-esque. So you offer up the church pedigree: what aisles I've walked and when, what church jobs I've had and for how long, etc.

You pick up things from job interviews, especially from those that lead to offers. What seems to work is to get under the interviewers' radar in some way. When I was in Indiana interviewing at Huntington College in February 2002 and meeting alone with the president, he asked me the obligatory question about faith, and I gave him my church pedigree. I could see he was not pleased. "You've told me about your church background, but what about your feelings about God?" I was impressed (embarrassed, too). So I chose a spiritually significant incident from my past and briefly told him about that and how and why it affected me. He smiled warmly. I gave him points for not being church bound in his question, and he gave me points (I guess, since they made an offer) for not being church cocky in my second, improved answer. It made me wish my school could lose its church cockiness. Side note: The president of Huntington College also meets with every single teacher at least once a year in the professor's office to offer him or her next year's contract and to express his appreciation for their past year's work at Huntington. I only talked to him in his office for about thirty minutes during my interview, but that was all it took for me to really respect that man. (I heard about the contract procedure from another professor, not from the president.)

So, summing up, in an interview you have to puncture the artificiality bubble, which is what the president's question about God did for me in Indiana. When it comes time to show evidence of quality teaching, you can't really round up twenty people off the street and talk to them about your area. That's a bit cumbersome. But you can say something like, "Well, here's a little thing that happened recently to me with regard to my teaching that tells you a lot about how I approach the job"-- and then select something that gets under the interviewer's radar. Hard to do but it will probably work. It's the damnedest thing.

Today's mail had some oddities. The post office forwarded to me from Brownwood a small, white envelope addressed to me by a hand I don't recognize with no return address that had a clipping from something calling itself Automotive Insider announcing a special that a car dealer was running in Brownwood for new car buyers, basically giving up to $1881 off and calling it 99¢ for a gallon of gas (up to so many miles). On the clipping was a post-it with writing that said: "Glenn, 99¢ gas, Wow!" It was signed with a letter, either a T or a D or a J or maybe an O. Not sure. It's sort of like those letters on the eye chart that could be this or that. However, it didn't seem to have any anthrax power in it, so I guess we can move on. Maybe it's the car dealer, sissors in one hand, phone book in the other, who is sending them out to residents.

A magazine came. This week's issue of Entertainment Weekly covers their idea of the classic movies, TV, music, books, etc. of the last 25 years. Their #1 movie was Pulp Fiction. Other high-ranking movies from the past 25 years, according to EW, are:  LOTR (#2), Titanic (#3, lame), Blue Velvet (#4, surprising), Toy Story (#5), Saving Pvt. Ryan (#6, it doesn't need the first half-hour), Hannah and Her Sisters (#7, more than surprising), The Silence of the Lambs (#8), Die Hard (#9, a typo?), and Moulin Rouge (#10). The #1 of the 100 TV shows they listed was The Simpsons. I have never seen a single episode of that show, or even part of an episode. Don't know why. I have nothing against it. I've just never sat down and watched it. Down the list of classic TV: The Sopranos (#2), Seinfeld (#3), The X Files (#4) . . . and from there it continues.

I also got another one of those toll-paying reminders. This has been going on for a while now. I owe the state of Texas something like 92¢ for driving to Austin at some point in 2008, and they've spent now about $4 on postage to remind me to pay them. I have a friend who went to seminary and who has actually preached sermons (good ones) and who works daily at paid religious tasks. She gets those pay-the-toll reminders which she forgets about, and she's said that she's afraid the state troopers are going to come and get her for the 92¢ she owes. So I figure until they put her in jail, I'm good. (And I got to use the rarely-used cent sign repeated times in this post!)