The Brown Knight - I lowe Heath Ledger and Mike Jack

I'm in Ahmedabad! I arrived last Thursday, and will probably write something about what's going on here later. For now I wanted to talk about the topic of the day: The Dark Knight, the most phenomenal movie I have seen in quite a long time.

A group of friends from the U.S. who are here in Ahmedabad got together to see it together on Sunday night. We went to one of these megamalls that are everywhere in the city now. Big, shiny, full of young people... surprisingly quite an enjoyable atmosphere. Naman picked me up in his battle-scarred Maruti Alto, which he handles pretty well except for that fact that he is a big wuss with the horn. I realized that using your car's horn is part of what constitutes safe driving in India, since it indicates your car's presence in tight spots and blind turns.

Before the movie, we hung around in the mall for a while and went into a computer gaming parlour where we played some Call of Duty 4 on the LAN. I felt like a 12-year-old. Then we get in the movie and I realized I love watching American movies in Indian theaters for the following reasons:

• Assigned seating. You don't have to worry about getting to the theater early for good seats because you reserve an exact seat. We had the best in the house.
  
• They were playing Michael Jackson "The Girl is Mine" before the movie started. That really got me amped.
• There were small jokes and subtleties in the movie that only an American/English-speaker could get. For example, no one got it when the batmobile flew into the parking structure at the beginning and set its mode from "Loiter" to "Intimidate". At points in the movie like that, Naman and I were the only ones in the packed theater laughing. We also were probably the only ones who knew the Batman back stories, like who Harvey Dent was from the very beginning. Oddly, all of this made me feel special/privileged like I had some sort of insider knowledge of the movie that others weren't cool enough to have.
  
• Intermission. Of course American movies aren't meant to have breaks in the middle, so it stopped in a pretty awkward place. But it worked in this case because the movie was so good that it just made our anticipation for the rest of the movie multiply as we discussed with looks of disbelief at what we were watching. During the intermission they played "The Girl is Mine", "Thriller", and "Beat it". Naman and I were jamming to the music in our seats. Combining that with our high spirits from such an extraordinarily great movie, that had to be the most enjoyable intermission of all time. People around us were likely scared and/or annoyed.

As for the movie itself, I can't say enough about it. I can't remember my reaction to any other movie being, "I need to see this again right away." The acting, the story, the character development, the effects, everything was great. I didn't want it to end. Heath Ledger was just godly. Naman made the comment during the movie that the fact that he died making this movie makes his performance that much more impressive. It's a sad thing to say, but probably true. He should win all the awards for this performance, and the geeks at Slashdot agree.