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

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

still pissed off about the daylight thing

someone said upthread, the daylight thing was cool for a few moments in the other 2 movies like wow seeing them in their costumes in the day adds a nice reality to them, but yeah...it was too much for me, I think.

plus I feel like Nolan's kind of a night-time palette guy? Like, the Joker's costume was so well designed for darkness, to be kind of bright without being circusy. And batman's costume, even in the dark is textured and, as Nina Garcia would say, very editorial (lol)

The daylight, I feel like he loses a bit of his steez, imo

yeah it feels like half of his non b-man movies might've had less daylight than d-knight rises

this movie kinda hit a sweet spot in being good enough to be a satisfying summer blockbuster but not so 'good' that moron fanboys genuinely believe it should be nominated for best picture

xp

hmmmm trying to remember. i think there's a lot of daylight in most of them. inception wasn't too nighty. nor momento iirc. ("iirc" would be a good alternate title for that movie.)

this movie kinda hit a sweet spot in being good enough to be a satisfying summer blockbuster but not so 'good' that moron fanboys genuinely believe it should be nominated for best picture

― balls, Tuesday, October 9, 2012 7:00 PM Bookmark

Yeah, I mean essentially it just dialed back the quality from TDK to the level of, like, a pretty damned good superhero movie. I'd rank Spider-Man 2 above it, and tie it with maybe Iron Man.

insomnia's all day all da time

like the dark knight being constructed well enough and begging to be taken seriously so much leads to you possibly actually taking it seriously and finding that the entire thing is really very very dumb (and then having to deal w/ fanboys who, having never dealt w/ serious grownup art before, don't get that something that is capable of being scrutinized /= something that will stand up to scrutiny). tdr was more sloppily constructed and less forceful in its pretensions and as a result i didn't mind that somehow this one was even dumber. if anything it was a relief.

otm

xxposts hrm...well then maybe I can caveat my musings to say that I mean Nolan as darkness-dude w/r/t the Dark Knight trilogy? That saves me from being completely rong, kind of? lol

Daylight is one of the reasons the last Terminator sucked so.

BAN ALL DAYLIGHT

BANE, ALL DAYLIGHT

^ accurate tagline for this one

http://twitter.com/TebowIsAmish/status/235560717426753536

How far would a plane continue to fly if its wings fell off mid flight? Like based on its altitude, groundspeed, flight path, etc.?

About like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hedLTEbhjJ0

this would be the worst movie of the year if prometheus hadn't come out.

oh c'mon you really don't think there were worst movies than those 2?

worst=worse

Finally watched this today... If the bare minimum theme for a Batman movie is "will I be entertained for however long I have to sit through this?" then TDKR was completely successful. I haven't followed Batman in print since the mid-90s so I kept wondering if the bits and pieces of characters and plots that didn't make any sense were just slalom flags to keep the current nerds happy while Nolan plays Bat Katamari Damashī.

Scene at the Pit Prison felt like a perfect cliffhanger break point from the 60s-era two-parters. Really wanted a scene where Gotham News Network airs a Bane propaganda video that ends with him growling out in Bane-voice "Will Batman fix his back and escape the Pit Prison of Death? Who has the detonator for the atom bomb? And just who is the mysterious Catwoman? Stay tuned... same bat time, same bat channel!"

A+ thread BTW.

BTW, despite just seeing it a few hours ago, I have already forgotten most of what happened except that I was disappointed that there was no Bat Snake Plissken scene to get into Gotham.

Considering writing a long blog post about how movie urban planning has entered an uncanny valley. Gotham looks so good-but-not-quite-real that it's creepy as hell - I can't imagine anyone living there outside of background extra cannon fodder.

oh c'mon you really don't think there were worst movies than those 2?

― RIP Gramp C (some dude), Tuesday, December 4, 2012 11:28 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not that i saw!

Considering writing a long blog post about how movie urban planning has entered an uncanny valley. Gotham looks so good-but-not-quite-real that it's creepy as hell - I can't imagine anyone living there outside of background extra cannon fodder.

maybe i just hate nolan but this has everything to do with nolan

that great critical post about him someone put here, i think from emerson? saying that nolan only wants you to pay attention to one thing at a time, so he leads you by the hand from one scene to the next. doesn't spend any time working in the periphery, both in the script and in the set design.

gotham also just looked like it was constructed with the world's largest/bleakest duplo set

oh c'mon you really don't think there were worst movies than those 2?

― RIP Gramp C (some dude), Tuesday, December 4, 2012 11:28 PM

not that i saw!

― Author ~ Coach ~ Goddess (s1ocki), Tuesday, December 4, 2012 8:49 PM

i'd recommend you see dark shadows and the dictator, except i wouldn't