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

what's amazing is how despite the relatively bleak story the dark knight is such a fun movie whereas TDKR just feels so joyless. like Nolan was basically "look I don't like how this story ends and neither will you but this tale must be told for posterity".

yeah totes magotes

the tdk was something i kinda despised in principle but in reality was pretty damn entertained by. tdkr's dreariness almost works as a tuomas 'actually batman and robin is the best batman story ever told' argument cuz the stuff i find most (ie actually) entertaining about it are the most pronounced schumaker elements. it's even made watching some other movies more enjoyable, highly recommend watching warrior and substituting bane ad-libs for tom hardy's dialogue.

its weird that this was nolan going 'i'm gonna make a michael bay movie and make this a crazy fun time' but hes too much of a tightass to really cut loose and do that. still feel like the biggest missed opportunity was the fakeout with neeson, would've been so ballsy and inappropriate and cool to make him actually undead mastermind behind whole thing

missed opp revealing cotillard so late too. she could have been an incred secondary villain instead of the whole "jon voight mission impossible" shit they did. neeson would have been a welcome return.

I liked him in almost everything I saw him in, led by (in order) Magnolia, Capote, Boogie Nights, Happiness, Almost Famous, Moneyball, Love Liza, The Big Lebowski...a few others, too--I must have seen more than one film just because he was in it. (One of the few times he lost me was, Academy Award notwithstanding, the role he'll probably be most remembered for, Lancaster Dodd.) I wrote about him (sort of) soon after first noticing him. A couple of things to look forward to (maybe they've been mentioned already):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2920808/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_5
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1972571/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_4

wrong thred

I relocated it. The tech wing of Bane's mercenary army was messing with my account.

The Dark Knight being a "bad movie" is one of the worst challops i've ever seen on this board
Rises' only redeeming quality is probably that hilarious Bane voice though

Still love this.

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

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, July 25, 2012

_______________________________________________

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.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, July 25, 2012

keaton's bruce wayne wasn't such a nullity, or at least he wasn't the same nullity as bale. keaton's wayne was very smart, but socially awkward, stammering, unsure of himself, and seemed to be really struggling with the insanity of him being "the batman." bale strips away all of that complexity, and gives us a hyper-confident, hyper-masculine bruce wayne. that's not "bad," it's just more of a nullity, and -- to me -- a less interesting character.

i've never seen TDKR all the way through. finally, yesterday, i caught the last hour and a half, or so. and i saw the first batman/bane fight at some point. bane was a cooler villain than i figured he would be.

it would be more interesting if hollywood declared an indefinite moritorium on superhero movies.

― Daniel, Esq., Thursday, January 20, 2011

still seriously believe this, and if the 2016 GOP nominee campaigns on this platform, i might have to vote republican.

It's all so old hat now. I say turn Batman evil and psychotic.

― Daniel, Esq., Monday, September 21, 2009

also, hey!, that's apparently where they're taking the next version of batman, starring the actor born to play him.

?

i thought the new batman was supposed to be old and bitter and the villain in the new movie.

But the actor?

joeks

http://cdn.mos.totalfilm.com/images/o/opinion-why-a-ben-affleck-batman-is-a-good-idea-143379-a-1377259402-470-75.jpg

how old is batman, anyway? twenties would be too young to be all "WHERE IS HE?" forties would be too old; he'd want to sit on a sofa and watch modern family. i guess it's thirties, but that makes for an awfully tight timeframe if he took eight years off after being falsely accused of killing some police officers, before his slap-fights with bane.

he's 75 this year iirc

that is too old to fight crime. he should move to a 55-and-older retirement community, like the one i'm moving to next year.

people are retiring, what would you have me do

it's cool. there's maybe a special retirement community for aging superheros, like batman and robin and mermaid-man and barnacle-boy. they don't get along, sadly.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/43536776.jpg

super-egos.

Hardy's Bane is great in p much the same way Young Thug is

you know what would've been cool, at the end when the mansion is turned into an orphanage, the new headmaster rolls out and its patrick stewart in a wheelchair. think about THAT

― joaquin haus-partizan (s1ocki), Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:29 (2 years ago) Permalink

or BANE, who having survived the shooting, realizes there are better uses for his inexplicably saucy inexplicably british wit

― da croupier, Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:32 (2 years ago) Permalink

i've said "no BROTHER, they expect two of US in the WRECKage" a bunch of times since i saw it

― joaquin haus-partizan (s1ocki), Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:34 (2 years ago) Permalink

you have to say it into a cup for the full effect

― da croupier, Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:34 (2 years ago) Permalink

his voice is mad fun to imitate

― WheatusVEVO (Hungry4Ass), Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:35 (2 years ago) Permalink

Would like to see Carcetti as the CIA bad guy in a Bourne movie now.

― Earth, Wind & Fire & Alabama (Eazy), Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:36 (2 years ago) Permalink

xpost his voice is sean connery under a bucket and i claim my 5

― all yoga attacks are fire based (rogermexico.), Thursday, 2 August 2012 04:36 (2 years ago) Permalink

Love the turn into sheer comedy this thread took at a certain point, after after watching DKR again today I've been reading the thread and laughing like a loon.

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.

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, October 9, 2012 7:02 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

baffled at myself for ever expressing this opinion. it's a dull, gray slog that makes no sense thematically as a "makes u think" movie, and bungles several plot moves that would be really crucial to having it pay off as an exciting thrill-ride blockbuster. caught a bit of it on TV the other night and it's just unbearable without the momentum of the first viewing carrying you through. but somehow it's the tedious and irrelevant matthew modine subplot that really drives this home for me - if you can't figure out that that needs to be left on the cutting room floor, how can i have any confidence that any of the thematic garbling is intentional? and this is while they leave out two huge things that could have (a) been great, entertaining setpieces and (b) pay off some kind of character arc for batman - - - showing how the fuck he gets back into occupied, locked-down gotham, and showing him defeat bane in some kind of interesting way that involves tactics even one iota different from what he tried the first time. it seems to come down to, well, catwoman is now on his side rather than on the fence. zzz.

so many blown opportunities, especially after the way that the previous film (though certainly bloated bloated) found ways to give you batman setpieces in the middle of its psychological mind-game crime thriller. even the essentially gratuitous hong kong trip was fun to watch and showed batman doing bat-stuff while playing out the 'above-the-law' theme. frankly this in no way needed to be a 'trilogy,' but there was certainly room left to tell a really cool story here. oh well. i still like bane and catwoman even if the former is really ill-defined (and gets less interesting the more we learn about him). the voice is fun to do, though, everyone's OTM about that.

'the dark knight' was such a sprawling yet fairly coherent and swift movie with these scenes or twists that made reasonable sense, but yeah TDKR is like a TED talk with explosions.

also i said it previously but considering how lived in and gritty the first two films felt it's amazing how this movie just felt like it was on a set with zero going on outside the margins of the screen.

Which is a huge problem when the main story is about a villain taking over a whole city! That's kind of a big deal, I mean they base whole movies on this kind of thing (like, idk, The Siege) but it comes halfway through this one and never feels even remotely real. I'm okay with there not being crowds of bystanders reacting to the big chase seen in the second film, but JGL walking the empty streets of Gotham not only doesn't make sense, it lowers the stakes tremendously - apparently the only people at risk from the bomb are the cops (who probably would have been protected from the bomb by being buried deep underground), one schoolbus of kids, and a bunch of people huddled around Lucius in that one building (which may be the same group of people, I can't remember).

ironic that, iirc, the first two were shot in Chicago and the third in actual Gotham.

wasn't DKR shot in Pittsburgh?

I had convinced myself the first one was Toronto made over and CGI'ed to look like Movie City, the second was barely-disguised Chicago, and the third was not-even-trying-at-all Manhattan.

a terrible, terrible movie, and i'm glad we all finally agree

I have watched this movie twice, and still feel like I don't quite understand the plot.

Things are bad and one must rasp.

And the iDENtiTY of the TRIGger Man is... a MYSTERY!

your problem here stems from assuming that there is an understandable plot imo

This isn't the worst film ever, or even close, but it's probably the most *failed* recent film I can think of in terms of aspirations vs. results. Seems like the dark days before Marvel hit their stride.

nolan's greatest crime was paving the way for zack snyder's reign of terror

At least BvS has trainwreck appeal. DKR is just boring.

they really should have shown Batman getting that giant fire bat symbol ready. using rappelling rope to get into position, taping the outline with painter's tape, spraying layers of flammable coating, etc. probably took him that whole afternoon

I'd settle for seeing him get into the impregnable, sealed-off city, which would have actually made a cool set piece. Between that and the incredibly uninteresting second fight with Bane it's pretty clear this movie was written in like two lazy afternoons and they never went back and thought about anything again, even by the measure of "what would be cool and satisfying in an action-adventure movie?"

just remembered that bruce wayne's devastating spinal injury in this is solved by having some guy punch him really hard in the back

helluva movie

I just checked the Wikipedia page to see how Bruce Wayne overcame his backache and I realized that I'd completely forgotten that Catwoman and Talia Al Ghul were in this thing, and that I'd also forgotten basically the entire movie. And then realized that I don't think I could piece together even a rudimentary summary of any of the three Nolan films. I remember that Morgan Freeman and My Cocaine were in them. And Cillian Murphy (forgot about Scarecrow), and Heath Ledger, of course. Just remembered that Maggie Gyllenhaal replaced Katie Holmes. Ummm...a hospital exploded at some point? Oh, Liam Neeson. Aaron Eckhart. I mostly just remember who was in them. Tom Hardy. What did they do in these things? I don't know. I really don't. Gary Oldman. That football stadium...collapsed, maybe? Sheesh. Oh, Batman made that truck flip over. That was pretty cool. I could probably relate the events of the first Burton Batman minute-by-minute but I guess I probably saw that 852 times as opposed to the one time I saw each of the Nolans.

xpost!!! bizarro!!

We could be doing so much more with this perpetual mind meld, brother.

Maybe its workmanlike lameness is just a tribute to Chuck Dizon

I think Nolan might be the master of completely ephemeral spectacle. Even most bad blockbuster-y movies have at least a scene or two that sticks with me, but I genuinely remember almost nothing about any of his films.

lol so otm.

the first two Burton films are still my favorite

I've enjoyed and often even loved every Nolan movie I've seen on first viewing, eventually I learned that these movies absolutely do not hold up to repeat viewings, or even reminiscing.

We could be doing so much more with this perpetual mind meld, brother.

it's starting to freak me out a little, honestly!

this movie is the biggest pile of shit in the world