Worst. Double. Feature. Ever.

Due to a scheduling mix-up, B and I ended up with tickets to "The Dark Knight" and "Mamma Mia!" on the same night, one right after the other. It was quite disconcerting.
"The Dark Knight" was incredible and lived up to all its hype. Yes, Heath Ledger is disturbing and amazing and mesmerizing, but so are all the other actors involved. Christian Bale is the best Batman ever--so conflicted as he falls deeper into his double life of vigilante justice. Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, and Morgan Freeman are just as fun to watch. And then there's the actual movie. It is the least enclosed of any comic book movie I've seen. While a lot of films based on comic books have a feeling like they're removed from reality, "The Dark Knight" lives and breathes in the real world with towering skyscrapers and dark skies above. The movie deals with good and evil and the line between them and psychology and human nature and terrorism and is so elaborate and ponderous, in the best way possible. It's nice to see a movie with tons of outlandish violence that isn't afraid to show the price of that violence, and how everyone, good and bad, can be at fault. It shows that sometimes we have to make hard choices for the right reasons, including doing wrong to do right.
Needless to say, "The Dark Knight" put me in a dark place. A kind of haze settled around my brain and I meandered to another screen where the previews for "Mamma Mia!" had started. Once the movie started, my haze was immediately confronted with a washed-out, cotton candy acid trip. The bright colors! The amazingly catchy music! The actors hamming it up! As shocking as "The Dark Knight" was for its deep, dark psychology, "Mamma Mia" was just as shocking for its unrelenting, self-acknowledged cheesiness. It wasn't anywhere near subtle and most of its part felt like they were shouting at you, begging for attention. But it was what it was and fascinating in carnival side-show kind of way. I'm all for actors singing their own songs, but some of the cast made me realize why people do get dubbed.
The combined force of these too very differing visions left me somewhat punch-drunk for a while afterwards. But I'm glad I went to both. In this day and age, it's always a pleasure to see movies that tries to steer away from being generic and actually have a point-of-view.