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

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?

Touché

He was a turtle.

I watched the 'forwards' version of Memento on DVD once; it was rubbish.

I don't even know if I think Nolan's a good filmmaker or a rubbish filmmaker or what at this point. I find something compelling about some of (most of?) his films, but I'm not sure how much that actually has to do with him and how much is happenstance. We've talked at length (probably in the Inception thread) about him being very conscious that he's "making films"; part of me thinks this is a really interesting approach, a very clever acknowledgement of artifice and fabrication, and part of me thinks it's very strange, borderline-spectrum behaviour.

All this considered, actors, and good actors at that, obviously seem to enjoy working with him. Obviously post Dark Knight that may be because they know they're going to get massive payout from being in his films, but the cohesion of the 'troupe' or company he's built up suggests they all get along and believe in what he's doing.

What most bothers me about Nolan is his use of violence to make those expository points resonate.

I'm anticipating a lot of shit for this post, but its kind of been on my mind since seeing this movie and I felt like tossing it out there. I don't think Nolan is a "great" director, I think he's a really good director as far as the medium of summer blockbusters go. What kind of bugs me, I guess, is that people bemoan (and rightfully so!) the laundry list of really stupid blockbusters we get each summer (Transformers, G.I. Joe, Battleship, I could go on and on...) and here we have a director who is at least trying to do something different within the context of tentpole franchises and I'm grateful for at least that much. Does he always succeed? No. He's not as "interesting" or thought-provoking as he likes to think he is, but I'll take a Dark Knight Rises or Inception any day of the week over three-quarters of the action movies released in any given summer.

^^ i tell ya, it's weird coming onto the internet and seeing how much people hate Christopher Nolan!

with inception i was just happy someone had thought up a movie all by themselves and got funding to make it without it having to be about some property that had already been marketed to the target demographic when they were children (savings!). but gawd. i said something like this on the thread but the second time i saw it i was stoned and it was like being locked in a series of progressively tinier boxes. then morbs said "i prefer to let a filmmaker enter my mind alone."

I dunno, jon. To me beneath the carapace of Big Ideas Nolan's movies are as dumb as the movies you hate

they're really not though. They overreach themselves (and i kinda hated this one) but compared to something like Transformers? forget about it

If you think any of Nolan's movies are as dumb as Transformers 2 then I don't know what else to really say. But, y'know, I'm just a dude and not paid to be a movie critic so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Yeah, Nolan is on a different planet to Transformers 2, which left me feeling both insulted and idiotic.

I can't credit a guy for his intentions, esp when in the case of Batman Begins the Big Ideas come in the form of Jedi koans.

One noxious thing shared by Nolan and his Autobot confreres: most of those movies are way over two hours long.

Now that's something I'm not that keen on. Like 90s albums all being 77 minutes because that's how much you could fit on a CD.

otm, just because you can make it that long doesn't mean you should. i'm guessing Avatar 2 is going to push 4 hours at this rate.

i am honestly a bit amazed if you guys are not trolling and are seriously debating whether Nolan's movies are dumb as Michael Bay's, but ugh why am i feeding into this

I'd like to know, and I'm pretty sure I asked this on the Inception thread, if people think Nolan's films are dumb, what films do they think are smart?

I don't look for thoughtful blow-up movies!

basically I want them short and with actors who don't look doleful.

How do you feel about Die Hard?

I love it.

i kind of liked IOZ's take on the nolan style (if you can overlook a rape analogy):

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/07/deception.html

The visual experience of Inception left me with the distinct impression that I had been drugged by a circa-1999 Tom Ford for Gucci ad and then mercilessly date-raped by his shiny partner, a Lexus commercial. I kept expecting "The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection" to dash across the screen in some boldly sans-serif font. I kept expecting the lease options.

With the recent series of Aaron Sorkin analyses going around, I've been scared that someone is going to write a successful article comparing Nolan's world view with Sorkin's, that I will agree with it, and then my enjoyment of Nolan films will be killed.

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/07/the-dark-knight-is-no-capitalist/

I could poke holes in the politics and logic all day, but it's really only the internal holes in the plot that bother me. Lots of material for people to churn, though.

I think one of the reasons Nolan's films are so popular among a certain subset of young men is precisely because they take themselves so seriously. this is the appeal! the reason TDK worked so well was Ledger + the brilliant idea "let's do a Batman movie that looks and feels like Heat." i really don't get this eternal anxiety amongst critics that a movie is pulling one over on you. hence this constant debate over whether movies are smart or dumb.

In "The Dark Knight," characters announce the movie's themes in the form of lectures to the audience while the movie is playing.

so do the characters in Paradise Lost. This is not in itself a criticism.

now, Nolan is no Michael Mann as a director, for me at least. He's doesn't have as seductive a style. but i think his more successful films like TDK and The Prestige (I don't think I liked TDKR very much) are pretty intense examinations of intellectual problems, and i think there's actually an emotional urgency in how they are engaged in those movies. I think at times this can be aesthetically thrilling.

those poor anxious male Metacritic watchers

ha, remind me to leave death threats in the comments for every critics who smugly writes "this movie isn't as smart as it thinks it is."

nice post ryan

my problem with nolan's films has never been that they're dumb, but that they're dull. they're smart enough, i suppose, but they're so self-important and ploddingly literal - so devoid of wit, joy, perversity and imagination - that they feel like illustrative museum dioramas. "wit" is key there. die hard doesn't grapple with heady ideas, but it at least has the grace and good taste to take itself lightly, to pass with a smile. that's expresses a kind of intelligence, imo.

in comparison to that, nolan's films are like listening in while a moderately intelligent person explains, in painstaking detail, with pie charts and statistical corroboration, that they are, in fact, a genius. there's nothing smart or interesting about that, and certainly nothing witty or graceful. if you want to make movies that wear a heavy-duty serious face for three fucking hours, you better pay it off with some kind of artistic reward. afaic, nolan's film's can't manage this. they're like being pelted with dimly-lit intensity bricks, and they mean nothing more than that he's spent a lot of time working out the intricacies.

I get where you are going contenderizer and I really appreciate that you are taking the time to address it, but honestly I think I disagree that there isn't any "wit, joy, perversity and imagination" in Nolan's films. I think there are examples of all four, specifically in the Batman films. But, yeah, it does get heavy-handed at times.

the contende rizes

well, hyperbole, you know...

the only real spark in the two batman films i've seen came from heath ledger. the contrast between his lunatic performance and the inert action_puzzle.xls cinematic landscape into which he'd been dropped gave the dark knight its only truly memorable moments. i did like harvey dent's grossout makeup though.

Another problem with these movies is the nullity Bruce Wayne/Batman, thanks to Bale's performance. He's hard to take seriously.

*the nullity of

I like that nullity. Thought Michael Keaton had some of it about him, too. Bruce Wayne almost doesn't have a character, a personality, he's a cypher, an empty vessel.

I realize that's how fans of the comic like him but it's not a good defense ("He's SUPPOSED to be boring!").

when your iconic protagonist is a nullity, what else do we concentrate on – Nolan's big ideas?

* explosions
* hero building himself back up from nothing
* thrilling leaps of faith
* underground resistance plots
* a bomb is going to go off
* anne hathaway is hot
* there is a bat-plane
* this is a popcorn movie guys