'huge, queer and tawdry' but 'much admired by the public'

The Dark Knight is not, contra IMDB, the best film ever (but then look what they've got at #2 - ugh!). It's not even the best film about a non-powered billionaire playboy superhero released this year - Robert Downey Jr is Stark is Iron Man, whereas Christian Bale, though he plays a brilliant Bruce Wayne, only in the car chase and the climactic fight ever convinced me he was Batman, as opposed to just a guy in a Batman suit. It is, however, bloody good. All this talk of a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger - well, I'd approve, obviously, because it'd be an Oscar going to a frakking SUPERVILLAIN as against some sententious middlebrow issue movie, and because his death-by-Method would really raise the bar next time Tom Hanks or similar git wants a cheap win by playing a retard - "No, sorry Tom, these days that would actually require you to suffer severe brain damage". Well, I'd be happy to help 'coach' him with an iron bar...but I digress. Heath Ledger plays a damn fine Joker, drawing on both 'The Killing Joke' and Arkham Asylum and managing that rare feat of actually making him *funny*, as against a Stalin whose crap jokes you laugh at because otherwise he'll kill you. But this is not his film, it's Aaron Eckhart's; this is Harvey Dent's story and he plays a better Dent than I think I ever saw the comics manage.
( minor spoilers )

Went to have a look at Burne-Jones' Sleep of Arthur in Avalon at the Tate yesterday. Obviously he's my King in a way no Windsor could ever be, but I was still reminded that Burne-Jones is really not my favourite pre-Raphaelite; this painting is acknowledged unfinished, but set against Rossetti or Millais or Waterhouse (as he is in the Tate) his works all look a little that way, lacking some final glaze - or the breath of life - to really give that great pre-Raphaelite impression of being a glance though some charmed casement into faerie.
(They've also got Flaming June in from the same lender - both the paintings are in the free access areas so if you're a fan, drop in, but be warned their lighting is still atrocious, reflection and glint all over the place. Also, there's some asinine Martin Creed conceptual piece going on next door which as so often, is based on an OK idea but not really thought through)

Club night becomes religion to dodge anti-flyering byelaw.

I didn't even know there was a film adaptation of Jan Potocki's Manuscript found in Saragossa until I saw the DVD at my parents'; they had never heard of the book and had just had the DVD pressed on them by a friend. Neil Gaiman summarises the book better than I could; the film manages a remarkably full and faithful adaptation of this bizarre mish-mash of a book, getting the Goya-style chills and the absurdist sitcom in there as close as can be. Apparently lead actor Zbigniew Cybulski was considered 'Poland's James Dean' - which shows you how bad things must have been behind the Iron Curtain, 'cos to me he's more Brendan Fraser meets David Mitchell. Fortunately, that's just what you want in Alphonse van Worden.