A New Feature: Movie Reviews from My Mother-In-Law! - the first installment: "The Dark Knight"

For those of you who tire of my frequently excessively long and pointless movie reviews, I’ve decided to add a much more to-the-point feature (occasionally) to the blog: Movie Reviews from My Mother-In-Law! (you may now mentally insert the theme music from “Dragnet”)

Oh, I’m not abandoning my movie reviews – I’ll keep posting my long-winded cinematic bitchings (most likely late, as usual), but this is something I’ve been mulling over as an extra for a while.

My mother-in-law is a 50-something Chinese living in Hong Kong. Because she took very early retirement years ago, she’s got a lot of time on her hands. One of the things she enjoys is going to the movies. And she goes to a lot of ‘em. While she isn’t a fan of SF movies, she does take in one or two from time to time. Another thing about Mother is that she shoots from the hip. Her thoughts on any film, good or bad, rarely require more than a couple of sentences, and she’ll tell you exactly what she thinks. And once a verdict has been rendered, it’s final. There’s no discussion. It’s safe to say that Mother and I approach movies from different perspectives. I rarely agree with her assessments, but listening to her sledgehammer reviews always gives me a chuckle, if for no other reason than their brutally opinionated bluntness.

The seeds of this feature were first planted years ago when “The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring” was released. Mother was less than enchanted, having this to say: “Ugh. It was bad! Just a bunch of dirty little men running around.” After our initial astonishment, my wife and I had a good laugh. We were flat-out howling years later when we saw Kevin Smith’s “Clerks II” and Randall did his take on LOTR, alleging that all that really happened was walking. At any rate, we knew that Mother’s thoughts on pop culture cinema were an untapped gold mine just waiting for the right opportunity.

And so, it is with great pride that I share with you the first installment of Movie Reviews from My Mother-In-Law! In this review: “The Dark Knight”

“Meh. It was okay. Why did they bother to go to Hong Kong though? There was no need for that.”

Stay tuned for my own take on the latest Batman flick.