I had to write movie recommendations for a film class. I thought I’d re-post them here.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
Everyone knows the disappointment of reading a book and being left wanting by it’s film adaptation. You take the time to read hundreds of pages on characters you invest in and are mortified when the film version does not do them justice.
Now imagine that you’ve been reading that same book for twenty years.
    This is exactly why the typical comic book adaptation is so disappointing and personally offensive to fans of the story. It is also why The Dark Knight is a movie I’d recommend to anyone, comic nerd or not. This film so completely embodies the themes and characteristics of Batman and his nemesis, The Joker, that it has forever taken the genre of “comic book movie” from a low-expectation, easily conquered sub-genre of film to a serious consideration in the scope of American cinema.
    When Bryan Singer (of The Usual Suspects fame) released his take on the long running and much beloved X-men comic, the film was lauded upon for simply being “not horrible”. Sam Rami’s telling of Spider-Man took the next step, but still kept the idea of comics-to-film in the proverbial “camp”.
    Comic books are important because of their fantastical nature. They allow us to explore issues in ourselves by bending the constraints of reality. However, the grittier and more “realistic” a story is (despite the existence of super heroes and villains) the more closely it can mirror humanity and its flaws. Even in a seemingly perfect character such as Superman, we learned more from his death (one of the highest selling storylines ever) then we did from his highly moral life.
    In Nolan’s re-imagining of Gotham City, we are forced to struggle with complicated issues. Batman cannot seem to do good without hurting someone in Bruce Wayne’s life. This brings to bear the duality of justice and the hard fact that “no good deed goes unpunished”. Nolan’s Batman is also forced to face the question of his motives in doing good. This has always been embodied, and is masterfully depicted as such by Noland, in the person of The Joker. 
    The Joker, not only wonderfully directed by Noland by ingeniously portrayed by the late Heath Ledger, makes the Batman confront the fact that he doesn’t do good by the book. He makes the hero question whether doing good out of anger or psychological illness is intrinsically good. In this, Nolan and his crew get to the root of why the Batman/Joker story is important to us whether we read comics or not.
    We face the thin line between revolution and chaos, orderly change and anarchy. Gotham is our world, corrupt and in need of reform. But the blurry line between destruction and construction is embodied in Nolan’s work as it was meant to be by the hundreds of minds and thousands of pages committed to this mythos from its inception.