What, no Iron Man?

Attention flyover country: Your taste in movies sucks.Take several blockbusters and a couple of acclaimed art-house pictures, shake them up, and you've got this list of the "11 Offenses" of the past year. I'm no fan of The Dark Knight, Australia, or Pineapple Express, but this list seems a little too oriented towards telling you that all of the big event movies you enjoyed last year were actually crap. (Reverse Shot)

The Dark Knight:

This may be a Schrödinger's Cat of an argument, but isn't it convenient that, just at the heaving endpoint of a long national nightmare that's bruised and battered the American psyche, we can look back on the movie year of 2008 and see, sitting atop the box office junk-heap, a blockbuster entertainment that pokes exactly where it hurts? And critics have accepted it as serious art (and not shrewd business) merely because it came from the creator of . . . The Prestige? Please. The Dark Knight is no more than a typically bloated franchise movie infused with a dram of schematic lip service to "big issues," and because it was all "blalck-as-night" or whatever, it got taken for serious. Did anyone leave this thing and get into a deep debate about the efficacy of terror? The ethics of surveillance? Doubtful, except for the few conservative noisemakers who actually did a nice job of equating Batman with George W. Bush.