Glenn Kenny at The Auteurs Notebook on his mood going into a viewing of The Dark Knight:
Because, trust me, as I made my way to the screening I was feeling well and truly sick of superhero movies. I’m not a guy—or for that matter a critic—who believes or has ever believed in genre hierarchies, but I don’t know, maybe my aesthetic arteries are hardening—entertaining arguments about the value/meaning of the likes of Hancock is increasingly making me (metaphorically) throw up my hands and say, “For feck’s sake, guys, this isn’t Stalker or The Red and the White or Kanal or Satantango or Muriel or what ever we’re talking about here, it’s a commitedly vulgar frickin’ superhero movie that’s been cut to shreds the better to flatter/insult its target audience.” Come on. Can we at least pretend we’re adults for 20 minutes or so? Apparently not, is what I’m thinking much of the past few weeks, entertaining dark thoughts about how if what 1968 embodied was a cultural explosion, what 2008 is building up to is an implosion into a state of permanent cultural adolescence.