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

didn't even get a Superman trailer to complain about

chillwave nostalgia superman

Actually, you know what I did find encouraging about the Supes trailer? It looked nothing like a Zack Snyder movie.

oh i dunno, there's probably a magical owl of gahoole in the fortress of solitude

Saw this tonight. My friend was a bit disappointed, but I really liked it. Felt like there were a few more clunky lines in this ("not every cop!") than the last one. Agree it would have been better not to see what Alfred was looking at. But overall, I thought it was pretty great.

Gordon trying to find the right truck really reminded me of one of the early levels of Jungle Strike on the Mega Drive...

Also thought the supporting cast/cameos were uniformly v good, eg Burn Gorman. He didn't have too exciting a role but that guy just has the most fascinatingly blank face..

This thread -- and certainly this post -- needs to be SPOILER tagged.

- Still not sure how much I'm attracted to Anne Hathaway. Is she nice-cute or a sex bomb? I'll let you guys know when I have the answer. Unbelievably, Catsuit didn't answer the question.

- lol at the heavy handed handling of exposition in the first few scenes "Boy, life sure is peaceful in Gotham since Batman took off for good the past eight years. Yep, with Harvey Dent a hero and Bruce Wayne living in solitude, this city..."

- This was better than I remember Dark Knight being. All the "Harvey Dent was a hero/Batman a villain" subplots were too inside baseball and TL;DR for me. Batman is obviously a good guy, "surely Gotham knows that" I thought. It feels like Ledger's death had something to do with all the confusion between the second and third movies. If they could've used the Joker like they wanted to it would've been seamless perhaps.

- People are bringing up character motivation gaps, and in his review Ebert mentioned Bane's unclear motivation for wanting to destroy Gotham.

In Robert Warshow's 1950s criticism of comic books he specifically mentions the crude way that comics deal with villains, and their reasons for doing evil, as a corrupting influence on the minds of children -- it doesn't promote a nuanced look at the human condition and whatnot. "Evil people are evil because they love to perpetuate evil and create chaos," is as far as the origins and reasons for evil go in these movies. Don't know why Ebert suddenly and only now notices this with comic book villains. As if any of these bad dudes have a complex political philosophy ever.

- The movie's conservative politics. Even if it's just a coincidence that Bane's street team of williamsburg child soldiers resemble Occupy, there's also Cat Woman's "I don't know what your hang up is with using guns" remark to Batman after she saves his life, which felt like a reference and rebuke to every superhero's hypocritical fear of dishing out violence via the bullet.

- How much do you wanna bet Nolan wanted to go with the ambiguous ending, maybe, as someone mentioned, ending the film on Caine's reaction shot, and not letting the audience know if he saw Bruce alive, but then someone took him aside and said "Chris, listen, do you want to spend the rest of your life fielding questions from geeks about whether or not Batman lived or died at the end of the film? And you thought the ending of Inception made your life a nightmare..." And then Nolan went on and made the ending as explicit and "HE LIVES. BATMAN LIVES. BATMAN 4EVER" as he did.

- The ending sets up Nolan to leave as director and continue as producer. Someone else can figure out a way to make the fourth movie work after he wrapped it up pretty neatly. So his legacy as director of the franchise will remain solid but he can still collect that sweet, sweet producer $$$ in the future.

one of the problems w anne is she's nice cute and at worst bitchy princess, cat woman should be lazy sultry sex bomb, anne is petulant and high-strung. maybe she's a reboot too.

exposition = lol old folks ... anyway i thought bane was a basic terrorist, motivated by hazy politics but driven by personal hatred?

anyway ilx aside i don't know that it's necessarily right-wing to call OWS williamsburg child soldiers, a spade is a spade

How much do you wanna bet Nolan wanted to go with the ambiguous ending, maybe, as someone mentioned, ending the film on Caine's reaction shot, and not letting the audience know if he saw Bruce alive, but then someone took him aside and said "Chris, listen, do you want to spend the rest of your life fielding questions from geeks about whether or not Batman lived or died at the end of the film? And you thought the ending of Inception made your life a nightmare..." And then Nolan went on and made the ending as explicit and "HE LIVES. BATMAN LIVES. BATMAN 4EVER" as he did.

I agree, I think that is what happened - the Caine reaction shot would/should be enough, but I have been on the internet long enough to know that there would have been thousands of butthurt "ZOMG DID BATMAN LIVE OR DIE I'M SO CONFUSED" reactions if Nolan didn't make it clear by including the shot of Bruce and Selina.

I can imagine, and I wince, when I think of what the IMDb message board for the movie would be like if they had gone for the ambiguous ending.

one of the problems w anne is she's nice cute and at worst bitchy princess, cat woman should be lazy sultry sex bomb, anne is petulant and high-strung. maybe she's a reboot too.

Who would've been a better casting though? I couldn't think of any Hollywood actresses that would've been better for the role, even with Hathaway's weaknesses. I'll still take Hathaway over sexier beasts like Jessica Biel or ScarJo for that role.

While we're on the subject of Batsex, I was hoping this movie would finally clear up whether Bruce Wayne actually sleeps with those models he is seen out on the town with when he's in playboy mode, or if he casually dismisses them out of the limo ("Get out, get out! it's all an act.") once they're out of the paparazzi's' sight. 'Batman Begins" posed a question I wanted answered.

i've always assumed that batman was essentially asexual and rather misogynist besides.

The movie hews close to comic continuity there, in that the one person he has canonically had sex with is Talia :)

My father referred to "Liam Neeson's character" as Rajon Rondo this evening.

yeah i thought it was a great shoehorning of bane into "the dark knight returns" minus the frank miller shit part

nolan just deep nerd zinged all of hollywood, even w/ ras al ghul hints i didn't see that coming at all

if this doesn't deserve massive spoiler alert i don't know what does

embarrassed by how excited i was to see burn gorman here. also thomas lennon!

thomas lennon played a doctor in memento too, which is really weird and jarring whenever i watch that. is he buds with noles or something???

hathaway's fine or whatever. i mean i dont think shes funny or interesting to watch but the problem is that the character is in there at all. catwoman just takes up space and exists so batman can prove to alfred that hes not gay. she should've been hacked out of the movie and bruce's relationship with talia given more meat - so the reveal at the end might've had some impact, instead of just being an event that happened and that the audience impassively observes

but now she can be in the squeequel

what's the scene in the cafe like at the end? from reading about it it sounds great! like a.. heartwarming, romantic finish after all that grimness.

Yeah, I'd cosign that description.

I don't know many non-fictional people with a complex political philosophy, to be honest. Villains usually have some motivation or other, the Batman films have just had Ra's as generic Kill-The-West terrorists and Joker as an amoral psychopath. Bane and Talia are pretty well-definted by comparison - she's revenging her father, he's dopey about her.

Massive massive spoilers in my 2000 word blog post about being mildly disappointed on first viewing - http://sickmouthy.com/2012/07/21/the-dark-knight-rises-disappointing/

One last dumb complaint spoiler

Bane was less intimidating and became a second banana with the introduction of Talia. You're hoping for a clever or thoughtful way for Batman to get the upper hand on a guy who seems every bit a stronger fighter than Batman, but when they finally have a rematch Bane's just no longer the better fighter -- that's it! On any given Sunday anyone can defeat anyone, I guess. Oh, and Batman figured out to punch him, literally, in the mouth (that weakness reminded me of that scene in Dumb and Dumber, when they're discussing Harry wearing a bulleproof vest: "But what if he shot you in the face??") And, of course, Bane is eventually taken down by a bullet. Although that seemed to be less of a bullet than the kind of laser beam blast that fired out of "guns" in children's cartoons in the 80s and 90s. It's just classic comic book arbitrariness when it comes to violence and injury. It's a lot like pro wrestling in that regard (why is Shawn Michael's kick to the face so much more devastating than another wrestler's kick? Because Shawn Michael's kick is a Finishing Move, that's why).

When I'm sitting in the theater none of these complaints seem reasonable -- I'm not sure I even think of them or notice them until later. I'm having just good clean fun, generally. It's related to the part of my brain that, if I stumble on a Toys R Us in a foreign part of the city, says "All right! Found a toys R Us!!" and only a second later, after gaining my compusure, does it tell me "You're a grown man and that store offers nothing to you any more." suspension of disbelief and intelligence maybe.

Bane was a fun villain, and a great contrast with the Joker. Fun popcorn movie. All of the IMAX stuff looked great.

Definitely fun, some very exciting scenes, but ultimately a little disappointing because it's not as good as the first two, the emotional beats weren't there. Hardy was great. Hathaway was all right, exceeded my expectations. I hardly consider it a curse to be in the same company as Return of the Jedi, trilogy-wise.

(Also yeah the politics are a little 'HRM')

Bane was less intimidating and became a second banana with the introduction of Talia. You're hoping for a clever or thoughtful way for Batman to get the upper hand on a guy who seems every bit a stronger fighter than Batman, but when they finally have a rematch Bane's just no longer the better fighter -- that's it! On any given Sunday anyone can defeat anyone, I guess. Oh, and Batman figured out to punch him, literally, in the mouth (that weakness reminded me of that scene in Dumb and Dumber, when they're discussing Harry wearing a bulleproof vest: "But what if he shot you in the face??") And, of course, Bane is eventually taken down by a bullet. Although that seemed to be less of a bullet than the kind of laser beam blast that fired out of "guns" in children's cartoons in the 80s and 90s. It's just classic comic book arbitrariness when it comes to violence and injury. It's a lot like pro wrestling in that regard (why is Shawn Michael's kick to the face so much more devastating than another wrestler's kick? Because Shawn Michael's kick is a Finishing Move, that's why).

Yeah, I hoped they were going to do the dynamic of the Mutant Leader fights from DKR where Batman loses the first fight because he fights angry and wins the second one because he fights like an absolute cunt. I guess he could maybe have used his bionic wall-destroying foot to kick Bane in the face at some point?

Watched this in a small cinema for £5, but the sound system was so bad I could make out like 30% of what Bane said; thought he had a double-tracked Neesonvoice at first. Bane and Two Face both had some anticlimactic fuckin deaths man

I hope Cillian Murphy just gets to turn up and be a jackass for 2-3 minutes in every movie from the next batch too

Yeah, I hoped they were going to do the dynamic of the Mutant Leader fights from DKR where Batman loses the first fight because he fights angry and wins the second one because he fights like an absolute cunt. I guess he could maybe have used his bionic wall-destroying foot to kick Bane in the face at some point?

given that it was probably not realistic to expect them to use Sting vs Vader as the template, I mean

o yeah, how did Wayne get back into locked-down Gotham?

He's the goddamn Batman, how do YOU think he got back into Gotham?

under an aid truck probably

that's some pre-batman league of shadows basic skills

and batman is better than bane when he comes back because it's all about facing your fear and believing in what you're fighting for maaaaan

also, he wasn't all throwing himself willy-nilly at him like he did the first time. bane totally pulled a rope-a-dope the first time, then just hit him really fucking hard!

bane might not be dead

you're right about two face! how did he die, anyway? did gordon shoot him?

bane is muhammad ali

two face already had severe trauma, was running around with half a face, then fell several stories on to uneven ground!

It felt slightly ambiguous whether Dent died or not at the end of TDK, if the funeral service was fake, etc. but I'll chalk that up to the filmmakers not being sure if they were going to use him again. If they were able to get Ledger back they probably would've gotten Eckhart back too...

I always just thought it was funny how a (gunshot-wounded?) batman survived that fall but the insane villain didn't

also of the three other villains up to that point two just went to jail and one was an immortal who blew up off screen so I maybe wasn't sure where the bar was for villain deadness

Will Smith as Ali would've been a great Bane.

i think liam can keep coming back dead jedi style and we can chalk it up to ninja hypnosis.

i say keep two face locked up and bring back a new joker

bane eventually became an antihero, right?

maybe in the universe where he never became a scientologist

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/528866_268228676610276_712433066_n.jpg

and batman is better than bane when he comes back because it's all about facing your fear and believing in what you're fighting for maaaaan

― the late great, Saturday, July 21, 2012 11:25 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/267298_o.gif

they shouldnt have cut the part where batman tebowed after climbing out the pit

for the first few minutes of that airplane scene i was like, wait, why is rand paul in this movie

overhyped scene imo

that was carcetti from the wire, dude

overhyped scene imo

― the late great, Sunday, 22 July 2012 06:36 (3 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah, there wasn't one memorable set piece in this thing