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

*files lawsuit*

*demotes the Capitaine to corporal*

Haah! Hey - I can't help that I've always found TDK a tedious slog for the most part. I was going in to watch TDKR last night with major apprehension and then that wonderful Bond-esque opening sequence happened. Then Anne Hathaway's Irma Vep-ish Catwoman. Followed by crazy adventures under Gotham (Nolan sure loves his subterranea), across the world (How did he make it back to Gotham?), a much faster pace due to some loopy, off the cuff editing and leads who for once seemed to be having fun with the ridiculousness of it all.

I'll be on KP Duty in the barracks.

i def could see someone saying it's their favorite of the nolan's because it comes the closest to the '60s batman of the three

Thanks for the underhanded challops there.

i can see someone saying it's their favourite because the first was massively flawed through having an awful villain and the second has that dreadful bombship dragging sequence and doesn't know what to do with twoface. all three have clunking flaws so it's really a take-your-pick

though personally even though serious batman is serious in TDK ledger makes it work for me and if you're going to talk about set-pieces i think TDK has plenty better than the opening of TDKR

Xp Also - how does it resemble the 60s Batman? Enlighten me.

i don't really get the "twoface was bungled" take on TDK, which seems increasingly common, I thought Eckhart was great

1) batman is in it xp

eckhardt was fine, effects were terrible, story once he got disfigured was kind of ... mangled, i suppose? just trying to do too much, too soon.

CJV you praised Irma Vep-ish Catwoman, crazy adventures, loopy off the cuff editing and actors finally enjoying the ridiculousness. The movie also has batman running around with a bomb before throwing it into the ocean.

also fight scenes that are basically BOFF! POW! PUNCH!

if only the blackgate prisoners in the climax had numbers on their shirts

You're stretching. What fight scene isn't BOFF! BANG! POW!?! So I guess the same goes for the TDK? Joker's in it. And there's a bank robbery. Pretty 60s!

2) he wears a mask and has a butler

you're responding to what i wrote with "well the other had a bank robbery" and I'm stretching?

the qualities you say distinguish TDKR from TDK pretty blatantly bring it closer to the '60s batman, even if TDK had the joker and a bank robbery

if TDK had wide shots of people brawling i don't remember them

if by closer you mean "minutely, almost imperceptibly closer if you squint" then croops is right

Burning a giant pile of money = best movie

i don't really get the "twoface was bungled" take on TDK, which seems increasingly common, I thought Eckhart was great

― da croupier, Saturday, September 1, 2012 2:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eckhardt was fine, effects were terrible, story once he got disfigured was kind of ... mangled, i suppose? just trying to do too much, too soon.

― Randy Carol (darraghmac), Saturday, September 1, 2012 2:48 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i understand why they did it storywise but it felt so weak that he was basically Two Face for five minutes at the end of the movie and only a handful of people saw him. when i think of the movie i remember Harvey Dent but Two Face never pops into my head unless someone brings him up, it just kinda leaves such little impression.

at it's worst nolan's revisionism seems to think it's above the standard batman comic while still needing to acknowledge it. because he was allergic to the standard "crime lord with aggressive visual aesthetic" bat-nemesis, two-face couldn't stand around screaming "oh god i love the number 2" while henchmen caused chaos, but dent still had to BE two-face. because eckhart was great and dent made such an impression, i guess i don't understand why people are so disappointed by the lack of two-face qua two-face, especially in comparison to say, Batman Forever.

and just in case this is why anyone's scoffing at the observation, i'm not saying TDKR is so much like '60s batman everyone who loves adam west should delight in it, i'm saying that the distinctions between the films CJV made happen to line up nicely with the qualities of '60s batman. If anything i'm trying to dignify the challop of liking TDKR the most ("yes it's campier and more frantic, that's what I want from Batman movies!").

i think these movies are much more comic booky than most people characterize them as. has Nolan said anything particular condescending about the source material in interviews or is that just a vibe people pick up in the movies?

they're definitely comic booky but I shouldn't have to explain the pretensions of a filmmaker who turns robin into an adult police officer who worships batman but never wears a costume...but is still literally named robin at the end of the film.

ha that was tonally challenging alright

another example of nolan steering clear of the more campy elements of the iconography to the point of absurdity - turning the batmobile into a tank the shape of a charcoal brisket.

that was something but i don't know if it was pretension so much as a really awkward way to have their cake and eat it too (as far as indicating who he'll become at the end without showing it, or by broadcasting it at the beginning of the movie by having him be named Dick Grayson). kind of in the same way having a very specific story arc for Dent meant making Two Face basically a cameo. (xpost)

the tank-like batmobile is derived from the Dark Knight Returns surely

if you don't know nolan is pretentious i don't know what to tell you

oh he definitely is, that just didn't seem like a prime example. anyway he seems comic book pretentious to me.

his "let's evolve the bat narrative" mentality has definitely been found in comic books, and i like some of the changes he's overseen, but i think his antipathy to overly blatant bat-camp leads him down some embarrassing paths, as it has comic book authors. i'm not trying to apply some false binary where either he's comic booky or not.

Actually belongs in the Batman Begins thread but whatevs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7enjABApKWE

hahaha that's somehow really great even though you know exactly what it's going to be from the title.

you guys are ridiculous, tom hardy is far and away the best thing about this movie, don't cry because you didn't get to see his mouth

― joaquin haus-partizan (s1ocki), Tuesday, July 31, 2012 7:53 AM (2 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is otm even if he sounds like a more actorly version of seth mcfarlane in hellboy 2

michael caine cried in every scene i think

also seconding that link way upthread that said the climbing stuff was moronic; it maybe made sense dramatically but it was so wrong that i was def pulled out of the narrative for a sec

i have no idea what was good about Tom Hardy's performance that any number of people couldn't have done just as well. totally the weak link of the movie for me, especially considering how good Hathaway was.

haha im the complete opposite because hathaway felt so disposable to me.

tho its funny in retrospect that bane ended up just being another one of hardy's sensitive bad boys

i loved his goofy muffled voice. fun to imitate.

he was definitely one of the funnier parts of the movie. i just don't get what was impressive about his performance.

he did some pretty serious acting with his eyeballs, bro.

with his eyeballs, BROTHER!

i'm not saying he put in a ~Great Performance~, i'm saying he was more fun than anything else in this very serious, very stupid movie

he was only fun in the sense that he was the stupidest thing about it!

whoa now let's not go crazy, there are a lot of candidates for that title

true...i just felt like a lot of the movie's problems can be traced back to Bane in one way or another

you could say he was the... BUGABOO of the movie

omg

finally saw this on Saturday

p much everything I thought has been said upthread, but for posterity

- overall I really enjoyed it; cried at the end when I thought b-man was dead, happy tears when he wasn't, the whole nine.

- hathaway's catwoman was cool. I heard someone on a podcast (can't remember who now) talk about the complaints that she was too glib/quippy, but that in the context of the life she's led up to that point, it's more of a defense mechanism so even when b-man rolls into gotham after being gone and her face sorta reads ! thank god! she's all 'thought you were dead', whatevs. I just liked the way she played it, where you could often read the emotion on her face but she was guarding herself by what she chose to say
that being said her and b-man's attraction wasn't really set up a whole lot. maybe there were cut scenes? idk

- lots of daylight. and the city itself is now clearly, mostly NYC (pittsburgh bridges/heinz field notwithstanding), where before it was kind of a city *like* Chicago, *like* NYC but not either of those places exactly. I felt like once they were doing those aerial shots and showing us it's NYC, it just took me out of the batman world more than I wanted? It always felt like a batman movie grounded in realism before...whereas now with the daylight and definite location shots, it started to feel like a real movie that just happened to have batman in it. which I didn't like quite as much.

- but I loved seeing Bane out in broad daylight. the showdown between the thugs and the cops in the street was p cool

- loved bane's voice, felt very bond villain to me. I liked that this huge muscle bound monster was contrasted by an almost aristocratic, mastermind-y voice. it gave you the feeling that there was more to the character than they were showing you, allowing you to guess at the layers? idk. sad crying eyes killed me. loved that scene.

anyway mostly yay, just lots of little niggly bits that kind of bugged me but not really.

loved the who's who of cameos. Ben Mendelsohn! That guy from Torchwood! That guy from Stargate SG1!

"b-man" really cracking me up