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

So, saw it in IMAX this morning and was thrilled with it. It might not have the pacing of BB or the highs of TDK but it seemed the richest of them all.

Is it silly to say it sagged in all the right places? After the terrific opening 45 mins or so, it was like a film that knew the audience was prepared to let it take its time in the middle section. When you don't want a film to end, you might as well do your pissing around in that part.

People have complained about Hans Zimmer score, and maybe that one's attitude to it is pivotal – for me the whole thing is hanging off that pulse of Bruce Wayne's soul and I wouldn't be without it.

Couple of disappointments: the football stadium scene and Marion Cotillard.

Was tempted to go and see it again in a regular cinema this afternoon but I'll wait till tomorrow I think.

xpost Yeah, I liked that - at least for the first half of the movie - they were really willing to work the angle that the whole Batman thing is a terrible idea. Granted that TDK really devoted itself to the moral questions stirred up by vigilantism, and it's not as much of a major theme here, there was still lots of material gotten out of it, especially in the Bruce/Alfred scenes that basically ask, are you REALLY doing this for the good of the people? Because they seemed to be getting along fine for the last few years, and you really screwed up that car chase with Bane, and by the way, you are absolutely going to get yourself killed if you try to fight that guy. Plus Catwoman raising the privilege question - in a different movie, this would just be played for irony, sort of like the relationship with Rachel in the first movie: if you only KNEW that this guy helped people as Batman, you wouldn't think to criticize him as a billionaire playboy. But here, there's the sense that Catwoman's RIGHT, Bruce is a shut-in detached from doing anything helpful in the world, so what moral high ground does he have to stand on, even if he does suit up again and beat up some crooks?

The second half of the movie kind of chucks that in favor of "we need Batman to save the day," although they also did a good job developing the "Gotham works to save itself" angle. Batman's necessary to turn the tide and get the bomb out of there, but if it weren't for the ticking bomb clock, you get the sense that Gordon and JG-L might have been able to get their underground together and beat Bane on their own. I think that's enough to justify all the scenes of them planning things, meeting in basements, organizing the orphans, etc. - - - without that stuff, it'd feel like a perfunctory part of the story and it really would just be "ahh, sod it, you need Wayne to take the law into his own hands to solve everything."

(How DID Bane learn Batman's identity, again? Not that it'd be so hard to figure out, but it sort of slipped by me, I think.)

i think from hanging out with r'as al ghul (and talia), who knew him before he was batman?

oh right, yeah!

Kind of funny that he doesn't make that more central to his plan actually. I mean, usually when supervillains learn a hero's identity they really leverage that. I mean, he uses his knowledge of Batman to gain access to all the gear, and twist the knife in Wayne by using his toys against him, but he doesn't make a thing out of the identity itself, the way he does with Gordon's (convenient) speech about Dent.

tbf, they used Bruce Wayne's pet project to hijack the city, used knowledge of his identity to bankrupt him personally, destroyed him physically as Batman, and stuck the knife in (metaphorically, at first) by raiding the weapons he wished hadn't existed to begin with

I mean, they did everything short of taking away Alfred, sullying the memory of his unrequited love, and torching his house. But the first two were done in the movie anyway, and Ra's al Ghul destroyed his home in the first film.

Oh yeah, and ruining the rep of Harvey Dent, which he basically threw away his life to uphold.

Thing about that 'the truth about Dent' speech -- exactly why should Bane be believed, anyway?

Because he was in the position of authority at that moment; Gordon was impotent and banished.

tbf, they used Bruce Wayne's pet project to hijack the city, used knowledge of his identity to bankrupt him personally, destroyed him physically as Batman, and stuck the knife in (metaphorically, at first) by raiding the weapons he wished hadn't existed to begin with

― hot sauce delivery device (mh), Monday, July 23, 2012 5:03 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean, they did everything short of taking away Alfred, sullying the memory of his unrequited love, and torching his house. But the first two were done in the movie anyway, and Ra's al Ghul destroyed his home in the first film.

― hot sauce delivery device (mh), Monday, July 23, 2012 5:04 PM Bookmark

yeah this is all legit - - - I just mean that there was not even teasing of him, like, revealing Batman's identity to the city. Maybe just because that was already used for a plotline in TDK, I dunno. I'm definitely not complaining that they didn't go for the obvious route with this plot, it just surprised me given the conventions of the genre. And the number of times that Bruce restates that the reason he got a mask was to protect the people around him, an odd thing to say since a) didn't work very well and b) in the first movie, he gets the mask for the same reason Bane has his and that the Joker got his makeup: he wants to scare people and make an impression.

To be fair, I have no clue how his identity is a secret in the comics, either.

I'll probably see this again in stunning IMAX late this week, but I think as far as set pieces go, plotwise- and choreography-wise, the bar meetup with Selina Kyle and Daggett's rep was the sequel to the Joker bank robbery.

Same as here - the only villains that know are too fixated on him to risk anyone else getting a shot.

All Nolan's films (caveat: I've not seen Following) seem to me to exist in weird, hermetically-sealed, uncanny, unreal bubbles, where the main characters exist and pretty much no one else does. They have a really solipsistic air to them.

...

It's kind of like the internet, or twitter as microcosm thereof; it's very easy to just talk to and see the same people over and over again, and lose perspective of "real life" outside of your own networks.

Responding to your whole post but didn't want to italicize all of it:

This is all so, so OTM. There's something about Nolan's films that relate to monomania and thoroughness. And there's even something about the rhythm of his movies that's really impressive in its force and concentration. The way there's little, if anything, superfluous that's shown. No time for browsing or exploring the world around the story. You don't really think much about what Gotham City is like outside the movie because the film doesn't encourage that, or make it seem worthy of thought. this is a great contrast from Tim Burton's Batman where, even if you hated the movie, you should admit that the set-design and the atmosphere was remarkable.

Nolan's the perfect director for comic books because there's something about the comic book and superhero format, and Nolan's sensibilities, that tap into the teenage male mind (bear with me). The devotion that teen boys (of all ages, perhaps) give to the franchise and Nolan is astounding, and I've thought myself how, if I were a bit younger, how I too would've loved this film series to death. Part of that is the idea of superheroes: their monomania and ability for self-sacrifice, the delusions of grandeur and self-seriousness, obsession and thoroughness being a part of their mental make-up; those are magnified when you're a teenager. It's like the insult that goes around now online, where nerds are referred to as being autistism cases, or aspies. It's been debated in the last few years (most notably by social scientist Simon Baron Cohen -- Sasha's first cousin) that autism may be a severe case of the male mind. I think there's something related to that that makes these Nolan movies so religiously defended by teenage boys. It's hard to define.

There's something to Nolan's films, both in terms of their subject matter but also their "No time for atmosphere and superfluities" tone that is, sorta, autistic. But then isn't Bruce Wayne kind of an autistic genius and a bit of a monomaniac? ALL Nolan characters, as mouthy mentioned and I've noticed as well, are monomaniacs.

They all have one thing, one goal, on their mind and their whole existence seems to revolve around it. You'll never see a Nolan protagonist change his "character goal" halfway through a film I don't think. He has some obsession and the entire movie, and everyone elses life in the movie, is supplementing that guy's obsession.

Everything is a self-containing little world -- a child's toy train set -- in these movies. And the reason why you probably relate it to social networking and the internet, aside from the fact it can feel self-containing, is because the internet encourages monomania. Whatever your interests are you can always find a way to dig in deeper. Before the internet we all had our interests but at some point the returns really would start to diminish, and you picked up another hobby or just got bored because you ran out of resources for your obsession. A sense of proportion and a breezy "let's just browse! Let's not take this too seriously" attitude is the enemy

1,000 word internet message board post condemning monomania.

lol it was good though

^

movie was balls tho

i'm sort of with you but there IS a sense of atmosphere in these movies, a definite consistency in set design, etc. very concrete, filled with sharp angles and huge structures and a minuscule (but extremely consistent nonetheless) color scheme. it's sort of eccentric in its lack of eccentricity. it wouldn't make much sense to really explore it, but i guess the fact that nolan chose that sort of design over something tim burton would do also proves your point. (and it's one of the reasons the joker worked well in TDK -- there were like three colors in that costume that pretty much didn't exist anywhere else in any of these movies)

i don't think 'autistic' is the right word, bc that word encompasses a much wider spectrum than just 'the teenage brony'. the massive death-threaty support for this movie goes beyond that. going by the handful of obsessives on my fbook feed, a lot of it has to do with the hype. i would bet there's a big overlap between people who got way too excited about TDKR and people who consider MBDTF the best record of the past decade, and not just because they were both immensely popular.

but the most important thing is that nolan and his brother are enormous manchildren and it's clear on every page of every script and neither of them know it.

speaking of which, i'm planning on watching insomnia just to see if there's a nolan film out there that won't make me vomit all over myself, if only because he didn't write it. i don't have the same hope for the prestige.

it's like a comic book w/ only close-ups and panorama shots

Part of that is the idea of superheroes: their monomania and ability for self-sacrifice, the delusions of grandeur and self-seriousness, obsession and thoroughness being a part of their mental make-up; those are magnified when you're a teenager.

There is a superhero, that we should introduce you to, that is called Spiderman.

There's also about 1000 others that don't fit into your ludicrously restricted definition, but that's the main one that you should be embarrassed for missing.

Having a cool costume is like 80% of being a superhero.

this was fun provided you don't actually think about it.

the weirdest thing about nolan is that he invites and encourages you to think about his movies, and then when you do you realize how stupid they are.

http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7lz42w2pK1qcbfxf.png

hahaha

the weirdest thing about nolan is that he invites and encourages you to think about his movies, and then when you do you realize how stupid they are.

― call all destroyer, Tuesday, July 24, 2012 8:19 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

exactly my problem with memento.

why am i bothering to figure this shit out??

lol, I rewatched Memento the other day. Wasn't there a special version with a mode that let you watch the movie in chronological order? That sounds like the stupidest idea imaginable, unless you're one of those dudes who finds his movies mysterious and cerebral but you didn't quite get the plot until you watched that way.

referring to that dude I met at a pizza place who obviously didn't quite get Inception but was intrigued

cunga: "Part of that is the idea of superheroes: their monomania and ability for self-sacrifice, the delusions of grandeur and self-seriousness, obsession and thoroughness being a part of their mental make-up; those are magnified when you're a teenager."

There is a superhero, that we should introduce you to, that is called Spiderman.

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, July 24, 2012 12:08 AM (8 hours ago)

spiderman may lack batman's self-important obsessiveness, but he's self-sacrificing (the basic moral lesson of his origin story) and, in being a good guy who exists mostly to fight bad guys, he expresses a teenage power fantasy. cunga got a bit too caught up in batman's particulars, but he's otm in general about the superhero's appeal being essentially male and adolescent.

I managed to avoid nearly all promo for this so completely forgot Tom Hardy was in it. I couldn't work out who was playing Bane so decided it was Al Murray
http://www.offwestend.com/files/AM_BOF_PosterB.jpg

woh sorry huge

xp

you know i disagree, based on 1) the crowd at comic con being half female and 2) the number of teenage and adult girls i know who like female superheroes like wonder woman and catwoman and have t-shirts / posters / etc

that said most of the girls i know who are into comics are into stuff other than typical marvel/dc hero comics and the ones who are into wonder woman / catwoman don't actually read comics

it's a little bit like arguing that toy trucks are a male power fantasy, seems like it has as much to do w/ social norms as power fantasies

i also think it's a bit shitty to reduce comics to power fantasies, yes comics can be violent / sexist / include power fantasies, but i am sure many people are into the morality and justice aspect, the overcoming of challenges, the difficulty of shifting identity (ie adolescence and adulthood), etc

I have met a number of women who like comics, but they've been underestimated and under-marketed to.

Really don't get all the airmchair psychology about comics. When i was a kid, i loved comics, had tons of them, even had subscriptions to X-men, etc. I wasn't really aware of overarching narratives about the sacrifice of blah blah I was into cool drawings and that's pretty much it. Cool looking characters, big titted women, futuristic spaceships, and storylines that are pretty much incomprehensible in the context of real reality. Maybe i am in the minority here, but when i really think back to when i was a kid reading comics, it was mostly for purely aesthetic gratification.

watched insomnia. essentially left me feeling the same as all his movies: "oh, ok. *IS NOW THINKING OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING*"

morbs posted this emerson bit in another thread a year ago, it's all otm: http://movies.msn.com/story/taxing-movie-people/christopher-nolan/

In his landmark auteurist critical reference "The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968," Andrew Sarris constructed a personal pantheon of great directors, relegating lesser lights to categories such as "Strained Seriousness" and "Less Than Meets the Eye." If I were to make a Venn diagram to represent the overlap of those two classifications, Christopher Nolan would be right in the middle.

Let me say up front that I don't think Nolan is a bad or thoroughly incompetent director, just a successfully pedestrian one. His Comic-Con fan base makes extravagant claims for each new film — particularly since Nolan began producing his graphic-novel blockbusters with "Batman Begins" in 2005 — but the movies are hobbled by thesis-statement screenplays that strain for significance and an ungainly directing style that seems incapable of, and uninterested in, illustrating more than one thing at a time: "Look at this. Now look at this. Now look at this. Now here's some dialogue to explain the movie's fictional rules. Now a character will tell you what he represents and what his goals are." And so on ... You won't experience the thrill of discovery while looking around in a Nolan frame. You'll see the one thing he wants you to see, but everything around it is dead space.

To me, Nolan's movies seem more like business proposals — PowerPoint presentations for hypothetical pictures that somebody might flesh out one day — than works that live and breathe on their own. That's because (to switch metaphors) Nolan can sometimes hit the right note, but he gets only one at a time. He doesn't do chords, and he can't make the music resonate. As AD Jameson demonstrated in an essay about the piecemeal opening of "Inception": "Nolan can accomplish in thirteen shots what it takes most directors six to do! (His closest rival here is, once again, the not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Bryan Singer.)"

That may sound "technical," but we're talking about directorial style, and how a movie is visualized has everything to do with how it plays. Nolan's sensibility is like a beginning language student who is still translating every word individually: One. Word. At. A. Time. This isn't just a matter of directorial efficiency, though that's part of it. It has to do with fluency in the medium, with making use of a cinematic vocabulary — composition, rhythm, flow — to create meaningful associations across space and time. Next to, say, David Fincher or the Coen brothers or Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg (all quite different stylists), Nolan resembles the author of those Dick and Jane books for young readers: "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Run, run, run." Fine for first-graders, but a bit rudimentary for adults.

If Nolan's visual style were more engaging, perhaps he and his brother Jonathan's shortcomings as screenwriters would be less taxing. They rely almost exclusively on expository dialog to move the stories along, so the characters spend most of their time spelling out how they intend to get from A to B to C in the plot, and what obstacles they will have to overcome in order to do so. Listening to the straight-from-the-operating-manual speeches from "The Dark Knight" and "Inception," I can't help but think of Terry Gilliams' bridge keeper from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail": "He who approacheth the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, e're the other side he see." At least Tim knew how to rhyme.

In "The Dark Knight," characters announce the movie's themes in the form of lectures to the audience while the movie is playing. "Inception" has no discernible themes because it consists of nothing but game rules, most of them arbitrary. Since the movie's "dreams" aren't dreams at all, and have little connection to the ways in which the human mind actually works, what we're left with is an overblown, complicated (but not complex) version of 3-D tic-tac-toe. We're constantly reminded of the regulations and restrictions the game master has put in place for operating on and between the levels... but so what? What does it all signify? I'd much rather watch a movie that's actually about something.

god i literally have nothing to say about insomnia. his movies don't just provide you nothing to actually sink yr teeth into, they take away your ability to think about anything else. my skull is more hollow than it was before. sure, it's all a game to him, but i've played games and they usually don't hold my consciousness hostage.

i also think it's a bit shitty to reduce comics to power fantasies, yes comics can be violent / sexist / include power fantasies, but i am sure many people are into the morality and justice aspect, the overcoming of challenges, the difficulty of shifting identity (ie adolescence and adulthood), etc

― the late great, Tuesday, July 24, 2012 3:50 PM (Yesterday)

not to be a dick, but most of those things reduce pretty easily to power fantasy. "morality and justice", as distributed by any individual = a power fantasy. "the overcoming of challenges" (in the context of heroic fiction) = a power fantasy.

the superhero comic, as a genre, is about as pure a reduction of the adolescent male power fantasy as can be imagined (tied with "action" as a cinematic genre, i suppose). there's nothing wrong with this. there's nothing wrong with power fantasies, but i don't see any reason not to call them what they are.

and morbs otmfm

Seriously though, if you mull over the words Spiderman and power, is there nothing else that comes to mind?

i would bet there's a big overlap between people who got way too excited about TDKR and people who consider MBDTF the best record of the past decade,

I'm pretty out of touch with what people listen to out there and everything, but MBDTF still has resonance?

Insomnia felt like getting out of town and up to Alaska, though.

I think I am at the point where I can't imagine Nolan making a movie I'll like again. He's become such a shitty filmmaker (maybe he always was and I was just fooled by Following/Memento because they weren't 7 HOURS LONG). Point about "all exposition, all the time" above is OTM and when the speechifying stops its just poorly edited action scenes and explosions (actually fine with the latter, but gotta have some film framing things blowing up.)

What fantasies does Rocket Raccoon fulfill?

never heard of Furries then?