Come anticipate "The Dark Knight Rises" with *BATSPOILERS*

the idea of all the necessary steps i would have to take to see this - like, i'd have to put clothes on, and walk to the cinema, and buy a ticket, and consider snack and beverage options, and sit through the trailers - just seems impossibly daunting, risk-to-reward wise

Bane in the comix was meant to be South American too I think.

"The Dark Knight Rises was gloriously the best moment of my life in a movie theatre. It stands alone, peerless in the pantheon of superhero movies."

So says some shmuck in a user review on metacritic.

what a twat amirite

is tom hardy any good? i feel like the reason (well, the other reason) people latched on to ledger so much in the last one was that he seemed to have been the only person in the movie who'd been given permission to act. nolan seems to always end up with shitty over-naturalistic performances one hundred percent of the time and it's a really irritating fit with his scripts and his visual style. n.b. i am sure there are counterexamples (batvoice) but don't bother me with them

I love Hardy but you can't tell if it's him in this; dunno if that's a good or bad thing. He's certainly scary and mean and tough, but it could almost be anyone. Would want to watch this again and then watch Bronson again and compare.

he is good. its not a centerpiece performance like ledger's, more like just a guy doing his job really well a la cillian murphy

i had a real problem with Hardy's Bane voice

i mean, everyone he casts always does their job really well, it's just .... enhh

except maybe david bowie, predictably enough

like i said upthread, i dug the voice a lot. its silly, but its the kind of flourish that the movie needed more of.

but it just made Bane ridiculous to me, which removed any sense of menace from his confrontations with Batman. He never shut up either

i thought he was ridiculous AND menacing, which is a great combo!

Mendiculous!

I liked Bowie in The Prestige! Closer to "Bowie playing Tesla as Bowie" of course.

Bowie playing Tesla as Bowie wearing David Brent's Hair

tbf i think the prestige would have worked equally well had the entire cast been brechtian mimes that couldn't act! that's why it's frustrating to see people, y'know, acting

"We have an eccentric fantasy Tesla in this movie" is pretty obv followed by "we have to cast David Bowie" imo

Or Iggy Pop.

IMAGINE THAT.

That's weird, no.

http://needcoffee.cachefly.net/needcoffee/uploads/2012/05/david-bowie-tesla.jpg

I wasn't really down with The Prestige, but Bowie Tesla was a great source of entertainment

I think The Prestige might actually be my favorite Nolan movie. Having the punchline be "HE WAS TWINS ALL ALONG, IDIOT" is pretty LOL.

That is WHO HE IS.

the prestige owns

Love the Prestige. The punchline is that Hugh has a scientific cloning device. Which I loved. I loved the total dip into fantasy. For better or for worse, Nolan makes movies that seem to be hyper aware they are movies.

Nah that's the first half the punch line -- look at what I sacrifice! Then the second part hits and you realize that possibly cloning/dying is maybe not as bad as Bale's character living half a life the whole time

Em totally didn't recognise bale as the servant dude so she was literally blown-away at that reveal, whereas I'd clocked it was him the second he came onscreen.

Had no idea Bowie was going to make an appearance when we first saw it, and both went, "wait, wtf...? Bowie? No, surely; shit!" cos he was pretty much retired from music by that point as I recall. Had to look up tesla too cos I'd never heard of him so assumed he was made-up.

I keep syaing that all Nolan's films are super conscious of their status as films.

Had to look up tesla too cos I'd never heard of him so assumed he was made-up.

honest to god what the fuck is wrong with you

hey I only know Tesla thanks to (a) the band (b) an old Jack Palance episode of "Ripley's Believe It Or Not"

lol british

I've never come across a band called Tesla nor heard of that TV show, nor am I interested that much in the history of electricity and how the Americans stole it.

and that attitude is exactly HOW we stole it, pal

That and electrocuting elephants

Hey, what was with all the Batman hanging up his cape and cowl nonsense? Was the implication that Gotham was somehow 100% crime free? Since when did Batman not care about petty thieves and criminals?

Also, I can no longer watch Michael Caine without thinking of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFIQIpC5_wY

yeah in the scenes where caine was doing his 'broken voice' i immediately thought of that clip

me too

Me three.

The Prestige is ludicrous but I love it.

SM you should read about Tesla he's fascinating

Hey, what was with all the Batman hanging up his cape and cowl nonsense? Was the implication that Gotham was somehow 100% crime free? Since when did Batman not care about petty thieves and criminals?

His body was badly wounded(presumably from the big fall he took at the end of TDK?) and, being demoralized both by Rachel's death, his failure to save Dent, and the burden of now having his Bat identity's reputation be just as shattered as his Wayne one, he seems to have taken this (consciously or subconsciously) as the cue to retire. I get the impression he convinced himself it wasn't even possible for him to continue. Would have been nice to get some kind of flashback or opening credits montage of the events immediately after TDK; I get the intrigue of starting from "EIGHT YEARS LATER" and piecing it back together, but here it does leave some weird gappy questions.

Oh I've read about him subsequently, and yes, absolutely fascinating.

How comes it's a superhero trope that when the superhero disappears, the criminals wreak unfettered havoc, but not in this movie? (Talking about pre-Bane and his militia). Also, gimpy Batman could still kick criminal butt. And what about other cities? Come on, Batman, show some initiative!

Because Nolan's main thematic arc is that Batman's very presence causes crime; that's what the whole escalation thing in TDK was about; "we but semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We buy bullet-proof vests, they buy armor-piercing rounds".

Yeah, essentially the story they're pitching is that Batman is sort of the brief period of martial law that's "necessary" (or is it?) to kick Gotham out of the cycle of corruption and fear that it was in circa Batman Begins. By The Dark Knight the system is righting itself, Gotham is capable of dealing with the more "ordinary" criminals, but now Batman has stirred up sociopaths like the Joker (and to some extent Bane) whose goal isn't profit or comfort, but to fuck with Gotham and with Batman in particular. Of course, this is undermined by having Ra's and Scarecrow antedate Batman, but you get the idea.

Thinking back on Oldman again, the guy really disappears into a role frighteningly well. Contrasting him in my head in this movie (and the previous two) with, say, George Smiley and on the one hand, yeah it's the same guy playing him but it's almost hard to sense it.

Of course me being me I'm also thinking of the scene where Tom Hardy as Rikki Tarr gets beaten up by Cumberbatch while Smiley watches and now in this film we have Tom Hardy going "Yeah about that" to a cowering Oldman near the start. Kinda. (Also lolling at the idea of Cumberbatch even slightly being able to beat up a Baneified Hardy.)

Ha, yes!

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/real-message-of-the-dark-knight-rises.html

"There is, however, one strain of thought that runs consistently through not only TDKR but the entire trilogy: an almost pathological New York–centrism. All three movies are about powerful criminal gangs that are fanatically devoted the reducing the quality of life in one particular municipality, Gotham, which is obviously New York City.

Two unstated assumptions are at work here: First, there is no point in unleashing this sort of hell on any other city, despite their being softer targets lacking superhero protection. And second, at no point can things get bad enough that the people of this city will actually, you know, leave. They can endure blackouts, nerve gas attacks, sadistic attempts to make them kill each other, and evil clown rampages, and they will simply think to themselves, “This is pretty bad, but what am I going to do, move to Jersey?” In this way, the Dark Knight trilogy is merely the flip side of a Nora Ephron movie."

At what point did Gary fucking Oldman become so avuncular? Was it Harry Potter that did it?

xpost -- Thing is, as I understand the numerous comic arcs that Nolan's movies have drawn from, that kind of obsessive focus/inability and-or lack of desire to leave is essentially built into the premise. There's always going to be a lot of people in Gotham, shit happens of all kinds over the decades, there's no sense of people leaving en masse. I figure if you know this, you're not surprised at Nolan's use of it; if you don't know this, you are or can be.

Bar Pompeii, has any city in world history ever suffered people leaving it in this way?