The Dark Knight: the greatest superhero movie ever or bat-bollocks?

BATMAN movies keep coming, ever-darker, ever-ignoring that bats aren’t scary even post-Wuhan. Is 2008’s The Dark Knight the best one ever, or crap?

Batman’s bullshit

All superheroes are bullshit, but a man from Krypton could conceivably have amazing powers under a yellow sun. We don’t know. We do know that nobody, no matter how great their wealth or how deep their loss, launches an entire bat-branded terror campaign to stop crime, and nobody does that because it wouldn’t work.

It’s by Christopher Nolan

The films of Christopher Nolan are exciting, have a glossy intellectual veneer and don’t add up to much. Go on, name your favourite bit of Interstellar. Exactly. This mid-trilogy Batman raises thorny moral questions about surveillance society and terrorism, then abandons them for ass-kicking.

Yes, Heath Ledger is good

But remember when it was a big deal for a serious actor to stoop to being in a superhero franchise? Weren’t those, two movie Jokers and any fucking number of comic book movies since, happier days? Now even Robert DeNiro’s expected to bring his years of craft and gravitas to the role of Stilt-Man.

Turn the fucking lights on

This movie marks the moment filmmakers decided we’d been spoiled with music and lighting long enough. Post-Dark Knight they switched to glinting darkness soundtracked by lengthy electronic groans, and we’re still there. The most recent Batman film was so murky nobody’s even sure who starred in the bastard.

It’s got Michael Caine in

There are actors who act, and there are actors who gave that up in favour of being themselves whatever the film. Jack Nicholson gave up. Michael Caine gave up long ago. He plays Alfred the butler just as he played Get Carter, Austin Powers’s dad and Captain Colby from Escape To Victory. No film can be truly great if Michael Caine’s in it.

It’s all Batman’s fault

Gotham wasn’t having the best time pre-Batman but it’s been fucked since. His old mentor tried to poison and flood it, the mob funded a lunatic terrorist against him, then his mentor’s mates come back with a neutron bomb. He’s the cause of all of his problems. Commissioner Gordon should shine the Bat-Signal over a pit and shove the prick in.

Let's move to the West Midlands town where glassblowing and Grebo came from! This week: Stourbridge

What’s it about?

ON the fringes of, but thankfully not part of, the blighted industrial wasteland of the Black Country, Stourbridge has but two claims to fame – glassblowing and late 80s indie.

In the town’s pomp manufacturers like Tudor Crystal and Royal Brierley were on the town’s Crystal Mile, Stourbridge FC were nicknamed the Glassboys and every child in the place could knock out six thermometers on their way to school.

Now Asian sweatshops churn out glass, the arse has falled out of the market and every time the football team lose the local paper’s full of ‘Glassboys shattered’ headlines.

More recently Stourbridge spawned the Grebo scene, a forgotten indie movement led by Pop Will Eat Itself, The Wonder Stuff and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. Tourists still come to the town for a photo outside The Mitre pub, where all three played their first gigs. It’s a shithole.

Any good points?

An eclectic mix of places to eat, from Ronnie’s House, an artisan independent pizza restaurant named after the owner’s cat, to Greek, Turkish and Bangladeshi places within the ring-road which encircles the town acting as a racetrack for boy racers who think they’re Lewis fucking Hamilton in a Citroen Saxo.

There’s also the delightful green space of Mary Stevens Park, where the lake is populated by many species of waterfowl dying of avian flu.

Wonderful landscapes?

Obviously not, it’s in the West fucking Midlands. Wychbury Hill on the outskirts of town enjoys wide-ranging views and is one of the 29 million locations in England claiming to be the final resting place of King Arthur. If true, the Once and Future King can gaze across traffic backing up on the A456 link road to Birmingham.

The obelisk which tops the hill bears the graffiti ‘Who put Bella in the Wych Elm’, a reference to the body of a woman found in a hollow tree nearby in 1943. The ritualistic nature of the corpse’s positioning points to the sacrificing of a witch and is likely to do with the weird villagers up the road in Kinver, of which more later.

Sandstone beauty spot Kinver Edge has houses carved into cliffs, endangered species such as adders, rare butterflies and ramblers still using those fucking massive OS maps, and wasp’s nests.

Hang out at…

The Mitre, where anyone remotely middle-aged will proudly boast of being on first name terms with Jonn from Ned’s, Clint from the Poppies or Miles from The Wonder Stuff. Most of them are lying.

The nearby village of Kinver is a traditional English country hamlet with quaint shops and pubs, historic oak-beamed buildings and a casual penchant for devil worship. It’s a delightful place to spend the day. Don’t be there when night falls.

Where to buy?

If you’re shitting money go to Ounty John Lane in Pedmore, where it’s so posh the houses don’t have numbers and you can rub shoulders with formerly famous footballers now reduced to plying their trade in Birmingham.

The town’s Old Quarter has impressively ornate architecture and a bohemian community of artists, activists, musicians and anyone else who smokes weed. To buy said weed the nearby towns of Lye and Brierley hill are rough as fuck. You won’t want to live there.

From the streets:

Roy Hobbs, aged 62, retired roofer: “Apparently Tolkien was inspired to create Mordor after visiting the area. I’m not fucking surprised.”

Wayne Hayes, aged 48, kitchen fitter: “I was a leading light in the Grebo scene. If only it hadn’t been, musically, perhaps the shittest scene of the 80s.”