I'd heard a radio interview the day before in which John Darnielle confessed to having strep throat, so I was more than a little nervous, especially as the Mountain Goats had played at the Meredith Music Festival just the day before. Perhaps surprisingly, it never occurred to me that the show might get cancelled; the foci of my fretting were:

1. Oh no, John is sick! Poor John. I hope he is not too sick and miserable. Aww, I just want to give him a hug.
2. Man, I hope he doesn't die or something.
3. If the show is horribly disappointing I am going to feel guilty for seeing them in good health in Melbourne.
4. Augh! Why aren't the doors open yet?

But eventually the doors were open.

Not having been to the Zoo before, I was very pleasantly surprised: despite the odd entry stairs which directed everyone past the bar on the way to the stage, it was a pleasingly lowbrow sort of venue with pool tables, dim lighting, grotty carpet on the stage, a "backstage area" with a graffitied door through which one could (and did!) spy on the performers, and no crowd barrier¹. Just the right sort of place to see the Mountain Goats.

The Support: Baseball

Surprised though I was that Baseball did not support the Mountain Goats as expected in Melbourne, after seeing them at the Zoo I think it is probably a good thing for me that they didn't. Not because I didn't like them - they were really excellent - but because I suspect that my companions at the Melbourne show would not have shared my enjoyment, and it's always less fun when someone is having too much less fun than me.

It's hard to know how to describe Baseball in a way that will do them justice. It certainly can't be done without the words 'punk', 'noise' and 'energy'; Patrick Donovan of The Age described them as "like the Cramps being shoved in a blender with the Dirty Three", which is as good a way as any to begin. Not the sort of thing I would tend to listen to when sitting around at home², but electrifying in a live setting.

Evelyn Morris and Monika Fikerle, both on bass guitar and drums³, with Ben Butcher one of the more subdued excellent guitarists I've seen, provide an unrelenting foundation for frontman Cameron Potts⁴ with his violin (which must be a tough piece of work, judging by the tattered state of its bow by the end of the set). Potts and Fikerle are the main vocalists, Fikerle's sometimes-ethereal, sometimes-biting lines an interesting counterpoint to Potts' squawks and howls.

Middle Eastern flourishes and an unflinching intensity make for a bone-crunchingly good time. I hope to see these guys play again sometime. An easy A.

The Main Event: The Mountain Goats

When John Darnielle walked out onto the stage it was almost anticlimactic; only the most subdued of responses from the audience, and the man himself looked a little the worse for wear. His fears and ours were soon allayed, however: after confessing that he was sick, and that doctors would probably tell him to cancel the show but he hated doing that, he played a few songs solo and acoustic to an adoring reception. As I described it more than once after the night, he loved us for being nice to him, we loved him for being John Darnielle, and it was just a room full of love. Probably a great relief for the man whose main memory of Brisbane from last time was of the room "bursting like an artery" after "This Year".

After a trio of older songs⁵ (which any Mountain Goats audience is sure to love, after all) and another wonderful rendition of "Black Pear Tree", John forgot how to play "Get Lonely" and opted for "Dinu Lipatti's Bones" instead. A surprise grower from The Sunset Tree, and not a song I would ever have expected to get live, this just highlighted the marvellous lottery that is a Mountain Goats show - a special lottery, where everyone is a winner.⁶ A couple of live performances have also cured my ambivalence towards "Thank You Mario But Our Princess Is In Another Castle", which is just a catchy little bit of loveliness.

Part of the way through "In the Craters of the Moon" (a song with which John has done amazing things on this tour), Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster burst onto the stage and joined in, natty as ever and inspiring John and audience both with a burst of energy. A couple of songs later, an unexpected announcement: Peter Hughes would be singing for a while! Now, I did not know what to make of this at all, and I must confess to more than a moment of doubt. Would this be embarrassing? Would my careful selection of a spot on John's side of the stage prove to be a bad idea? Would PPH singing be a worse one?⁷

Thankfully, the answers were "no", "no", and "oh, ye of little faith". After a slightly shaky start with "International Small Arms Traffic Blues", PPH hit his stride during "Love Love Love" and then absolutely slaughtered "See America Right" and "Palmcorder Yajna". The former was possibly the most fortuitous setlist substitution I will ever have the privilege to witness: "Moon Over Goldsboro" was down on the list, but I defy anybody to believe that "See America Right" PPH-style is that song's inferior in any way. Your love is like a cyclone in a swamp, and the weather's getting warmer!

Throughout these delights John was hopping about with his guitar, mouthing lyrics and now and then stepping up to the microphone, interacting with the audience and generally having a grand old time. I was happy to see the pleasure he took in PPH's moment in the spotlight, as it would have been horrible if he had not been able to enjoy the show - and it confirmed for me, yet again, that he is indeed an Excellent Person with many qualities worth emulating. Have I mentioned that I want to be John when I grow up? That said, I am pretty sure that PPH would be the most awesome person in just about any other band he chose to be in, so in the end I just feel a bit sorry for Jon Wurster (who is an excellent drummer and brings a great deal to the live show, but was somewhat eclipsed).

Closing out the show with almost-entirely crowd-sung versions of perennial favourites "This Year" and "No Children", John promised Brisbane something amazing next time, ruling out only a naked show. He explicitly did not rule out "assless pants" (a commodity which he claimed could have saved the relationship of the Alpha couple), so look out Brisbane when the Mountain Goats are next in town.

1. i.e. The Zoo > Billboard.
2. Although, let's face it, that's what I'm doing right now.
3. Not both at the same time, mind you. They're good, but they're not that good.
4. Also known as "Thick Passage", for reasons which escape me entirely
5. "Elijah", "Horseradish Road" and "There Will Be No Divorce"
6. Apart from possibly the ill-mannered young law students behind me, whom I refuse to class as winners, but that is by the by.
7. New laws said that seventeen-year-olds could do federal time; you were the first one.

Well, it isn't just slackness. Unlike, say, Iron Man (which was crying out for me to be flippant and disrespectful about it), The Dark Knight was mostly just really good. I'm not very good at writing about things that are awesome; it tends to degenerate into burbling and overuse of the word "awesome", with a complete absence of meaningful content. Perhaps I should start out by complaining, and see how I go.

There were two things I actually didn't like, and the main one was the "Batman voice". I don't remember noticing it as much in Batman Begins, perhaps because Bruce Wayne had all the lengthy speeches; this time, when Batman spends quite a lot of time talking, his bass-ified Batman voice is not as silly as Xerxes' in 300, but still quite silly and not always easy to understand. It's all very well to have a dramatic hero voice, but not if it makes you sound like a cheap speaker-human hybrid. The second thing I didn't like was Two-Face's, well, face. It looked like something I would expect to see in a shlocky horror movie, not in a gritty-realism Nolan Batman.

The only other quibble that I had was that I wanted the Joker to tell a third version of the "wanna know how I got these scars?" story, not have Batman interrupt him. A third story would have been nicely symmetrical (although I suppose disrupting that was a fair enough play, I am still cranky with Nolan). Incidentally, the Joker's stories reminded me oddly of The Mountain Goats, so much so that I have been listening to All Hail West Texas and We Shall All Be Healed even more than I otherwise would have (hint: that is a lot).

Heath Ledger's Joker was, as we were all brainwashed into expecting encouraged to expect, excellent. I don't think the hype was in any way unwarranted. The Joker was utterly insane, in the way that also suggests a frightening sort of sanity, and not overplayed at all. I think one would have to look very hard to find a trace of Heath Ledger in the performance -- and I won't get into analysing that, because it would just be overreaching (and morbid overreaching, at that). So much has been said in praise of this Joker that it would be dull and repetitive of me to rehash it, so I'll just say that this movie was a Joker movie, not a Batman movie.

The (mostly) unsung hero, though, was Gary Oldman. He was just brilliant - but then, he always is.

Other bits and pieces of opinion and observation:

• I am susceptible to irritation when the generic bad guys in superhero movies are always filthy foreigners. I know it's "just" genre schtick, but it's irritating.
• The pointed real-world political allegorical posturing didn't actually annoy me much, if at all. It was fairly deftly done.
• The whole thing with the two ferries was amazing.
• I am so taken by this idea (warning: spoiler) from thekit that I am going to be bitterly disappointed when the next movie comes out and something else happens instead.
• Michael Caine & Morgan Freeman = win.
• Really enjoyed Batman's transformation into the dark knight, angst and all.
• Can we have the next movie now?
• How about now?

It took me quite a while to resurface after some very necessary hand-unclenching, two very sure signs that I got sucked in good and proper. The whole thing didn't feel long at all. (It was long; I know, because the buses had stopped running by the time it finished. Sigh.)

In short: A+, would watch again (a rare thing for comic book movies, although it seems that they're the only ones I get out and see these days).

So, yesterday I spontaneously decided to go and see Iron Man. I'm quite fond of comic-book-adaptation movies; the mediocre ones are entertaining enough and have enough Great Big Effects to justify spending money to watch them, and the good ones ... well, the good ones are better than the mediocre ones. They never make my favourites list, but they're pretty good.

Iron Man falls squarely in the Mediocre But Fun category. In the proud tradition started (for me) by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and proudly carried on by (for instance) that Narnia movie, Iron Man was fun to watch for the spectacle and the joy of laughing at things the rest of the audience isn't laughing at. Most of its value lies in ridiculousness which can be mocked later; this is particularly true if you have seen it with someone who thought it was "awesome sauce".

The Good:

• Robert Downey Jr, playing the character that Robert Downey Jr plays so well.
• Awesome suiting-up sequences.
• Gwyneth Paltrow (surprisingly, for me).
• J.A.R.V.I.S - mm, sarcastic AI with a British accent.

The Bad:

• Strange pacing, a overly long prologue and a bizarre lack of any feeling that anything is really at stake. In a way, nothing really seems to happen.
• America Good. Weapons And Guns And Stuff That Goes Bam Good (Unless Brown People Have Them).
• Highly educated, politically aware women will turn into undiscriminating nymphomaniacs the moment they are patronised by the right sexist jerk.
• Gags that seem quite funny at first turn out to be the setup for the same gag, which will show up three or four more times.
• Completely unconvincing I-will-become-a-hero epiphany and accompanying speech.

The So Bad It's Good:

• Ham-handed foreshadowing all over the place. Gosh, do you think that might turn out to be the Big Bad Guy? Do you think that maybe he might turn out to need that [significant item] at a crucial moment in the future?
• Bad guys who lose because they are just not very good, rather than being defeated because the good guys are awesome.
• Power armour that protects the wearer from sustained gunfire, tanks, etc, despite having bullet holes in it afterwards.
• Robert Downey Jr's facial hair.
• "Special" laws of physics etc. for this comic-book-movie world, which are then violated by the comic-book-movie itself.
• Hey, isn't that a gizmo from Men In Black?

I don't begrudge the money I paid to see Iron Man - half the fun is seeing it on the big screen, and the other half is seeing it with a bunch of other people (many of whom react with surprise to the blindingly obvious, thus providing yet more snarky fun for yours truly). On the other hand, I wouldn't pay full price to see it and I don't think I'd even sacrifice two hours to see it again for free.

Can The Dark Knight come out now, please?