Last week Mary and I went to see The Dark Knight with some friends. We went to the Camera 12 theater in downtown San Jose on a Wednesday night. It was not crowded, but there were more people than typically there for a mid-week movie. I suppose the elevated attendance would attest to the popularity of this movie, which has already made it in to the All-Time Top 10 USA Box Office and #1 on IMDB’s Top 250.

To start with, I enjoyed this movie very much. It has good action and character development, an uncommon combination. As with Batman Begins, this is a much darker portrayal of Batman the the older movie series. With that said, I’m not sure it lived up to all the hype. I think a lot of the hype stems from the tragic death of one of the stars, Heath Ledger. He does put in a great performance as the Joker, but I’m not sure why people keep talking about it in terms of the Oscars. To me it’s not so much better than Jack Nicholson’s portrayal in the 1989 movie, though it does benefit from being in a stronger movie over-all. The older movie series was a bit campy at times, especially in the later installments.

I like Christian Bale as Batman, though he’s not a prominent in The Dark Knight as in Batman Begins. Aaron Eckhart is also pretty good as Harvey Dent, [spoiler alert] although I think they ran out of time to fully explore his fall from grace. Even as it was, the 152 minute movie is a bit long by my reckoning, not so much that it had a lot of unnecessary scenes, I just don’t find it so comfortable to sit in a theater for 2.5 hours. I suppose this is the price you pay to add plot and character development to a summer action blockbuster.

We went to a couple barbecues over the weekend. On Saturday, after hiking Mission Peak, we went to Joe and Cam’s house for some good pulled pork and lime pie. Joe is one of Mary’s old co-workers, and Mary is the one to introduce him to Cam, a friend of a friend. They are married with two kids now. On Sunday we went to Than and Mike’s house. They are cousins of Mary’s and were having a barbecue since a lot of extended family was in town for a wedding of another of Mary’s cousins’ kids. There were folks in from all over the country and even one cousin from Vietnam.

Earlier on Sunday we had gone to check out the owls by the “Magic Fence” and for a walk around Don Edwards. There’s still one little owlet in a burrow near the road (pictured on right, taken by Mary). The burrow is under the cement support for one of the street lights. It sits just behind the light quite often then darts for the burrow when spooked. There are still a couple other young owls in the field, but I think they are a bit older than the one by the light post. At Don Edwards we saw most of the usual suspects, including the black phoebe pictured above left. Click the phoebe picture for a full sized version, or click the owl picture to see the rest of the pictures we took on Sunday.