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

JFTR principal photography on this movie started in May 2011, about four months before Occupy Wall Street, which means the screenplay was locked down even earlier, so "inspiration" may not be the word we want here. It's not like "eat the rich" as a concept was invented at Zucotti Park.

And having just rewatched The Dark Knight earlier today, it's not like those themes weren't there either.

out of touch how?

― the late great, Sunday, July 22, 2012 8:05 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

in that the nolan bros seem completely unaware of how young people/poor people behave

specifically their bloodlust

also the whole uncontested 'cops are heroic heroes' thing which just looks freakishly politicized following one of the biggest storylines out of the movement

but yeah it makes a bit more sense that the script was just badly timed, i seem to forget how recently occupy started

yeah i don't like cop culture in movies nor am i a big fan of class warfare but i think in this case it's about as pertinent as criticizing the first film's portrayal of psychiatry

one thing i am kinda fuzzy about: how did bane and crew figure out the special forces thing so quickly?

erm, pretty sure bane's politics and the infrastructure of the revolution/new government or whatever was pretty central to the film

"not a big fan of class warfare"...heh, guess i understand that occupy dig from yesterday

Talia clued them in about it, and they showed up with about the same amazing response time as the SWAT team did at the beginning in response to the text message from the Congressman's phone.

following one of the biggest storylines out of the movement

again, its important to note the timeline here, that the screenplay was done well before any of the storylines "out of the movement" could've been that huge of a direct inspiration

oh i agree kevin but like someone else said, "eat the rich" / french revolution is a very, very old story

i didn't really perceive any direct connection to OWS

oh right, thalia, thanks

like i am concerned about ethics of biotech research and i enjoyed prometheus but i'm not going to be taking a hard look at prometheus w/r/t that

well yea for one thing his politics were terribly simplistic - if bane was supposed to be some romney dis they at least seemed to allow his politics to be some kind of hysterical national review projection of what revolutionary politics are, so as to please everyone

xp fwiw i didn't get any OWS vibe at all from he film but i may have missed something

the*

i think i was prepped to expect OWSesque stuff. definitely read one or two things about the film that mentioned it. the scarecrow court at least struck me as like rush limbaugh's paranoid fantasy of how OWS would turn out.

i definitely got a vibe. shooting ended midway thru november, it wouldn't surprise me if nolan switched some things around toward the end to make it seem more timely.

scarecrow thing is straight out of revolutionary war political cartoonage

he's wearing a tweed jacket and a tattered judges' robe and the bench is a huge pile of books and desks and shit and those scenes are all laffs anyway. nolan is twee-r director than wes anderson in his man-child way, lighten up.

gee sorry? i don't disagree with the last sentence

no i just mean it's not really a very nightmarish nightmare, in comic book terms pretty retro, maybe back to late 70s?

like "walk the plank of ice" vs "firing squads"

ok the special forces dudes hung on the bridge was pretty nasty but that happens in fantasy movies too

I got zero occupy vibes and a lot of revolutionary vibes tbh

half expected the ones who chose execution to be led to a guillotine

Hey, Gordon reads from the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the funeral service for a reason.

^^^^

if bane was supposed to be some romney dis

Dude, no-one including Rush Limbaugh actually believes this.

changing topic: i'm not a comics reader but shouldn't JGL have been nightwing? or the replacement batman in the bane storyline? 'robin' just seemed weird to me

Nightwing is Robin, isn't he? I don't think NW has enough cache outside of comicbook readers to fit Nolan's universe.

Well there's no character in the comics with the first name Robin. It was just a dumb, throwaway line.

Blake having the first name Robin (and not using it because it's a bit wet) is far more plausible than Dick Grayson choosing it as his superhero name...

enh, it was inspired by Robin Hood

im choosing to believe that his name is John Robin

Dudes hung on the bridge was probably meant to evoke images of the incident with Blackwater in Falljuah, Iraq.

it probably was

in that the nolan bros seem completely unaware of how young people/poor people behave

specifically their bloodlust

― NASCAR, surfing, raising chickens, owning land (zachlyon), Monday, 23 July 2012 01:14 (10 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they just shouldn't have cast the budget-jared-leto guy/w-a-beard, who had no other character definition other than bearded, young, alt-guy. a lot of the bit players in this were too perfunctory, i think - the blond cop, the gravelly president, i mean the russian nuclear scientist - this kinda thing coulda defined gotham a little better, it felt kinda dry & straightforward.

Allow me to pontificate a moment.

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.

Memento justifies this by being about someone with a neurological condition that essentially hermetically seals him (in the very split second of the present). Insomnia justifies it by being about the disconnent of sleep-deprivation. The Prestige does it less, but is a period piece, so already has a big helpijng hand of suspension of disbelief.

The Batman films kind of justify it by being comicbook films - nothing exists outside the panel in a comic (except what you imagine / infer). Inception justifies it by being a dream. It's like the city within the film Dark City, or the film set of The Truman Show; a stage, a show, a construct, a fabrication, rather than a (Mike Leigh-esque, perhaps) attempt to represent / document / explore the real world.

Depending on your mindset this can either work really well, and allow you to focus purely on plot, character, and action, or else leave everything feeling just a little odd. In the hands of a really good director / story, it can become the point of the film - as in Dark City and The Truman Show, and as attempted in Inception; the characters becoming as uncomfortable in the weird, hermetic bubble as the audience, and coming to some kind of self-awareness of their role as characters.

Nolan's Gotham is as much a drawing, a caricature, a set, as Burton's, but it's almost photo-realistic, as it were, which makes it more uncanny, and either more successful (when everything comes together and transcends, as in TDK), or a little more uncomfortable and unacceptable. It can create a bit of cognitive dissonance in the viewer; "that building is clearly real, I recognise it from real life, but that bit-part character is clearly not-real; I don't understand how they are meant to fit together".

Or something.

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.

I never feel like I'm in Nolan's films, like he's transporting me to Gotham; I always feel like I'm watching a film. If that makes sense. I don't know if that's genius or just odd. Or inept, almost.

It's probably because you're watching a film.

Yeah, but you watch, I dunno, Annie Hall, or even Star Wars, and you can imagine stuff happening, people existing, outside the frame.

Nothing exists outside the frame in Nolan's movies. Which is why, when he doens't explain something (like how Bruce Wayne gets back into Gotham) it feels odd.

Stock-exchange sequence seemed to lose some punch by having the big moment be a news headline rather than some instant moment when the big trade becomes clear to Bruce Wayne.

I felt like the reveal that Bane just beat Batman down /directly below the Wayne military vault/ wasn't quite as much of a point as it could have been.

great post, scick. goes well with the sicinski piece morbs posted. though i liked memento and parts of the dark knight, i just don't get what people see in nolan.

the gravelly president

This was William Devane, yeah? Who I think was the first American actor allowed to play JFK post-1963 in The Missiles of October.

Talked this over w/ a few friends yesterday. We agreed the biggest letdown about the movie is that all of the Nolans' efforts to fold in themes of class struggle and revolutionary fervor end up being moot in the final reels, when it turns into a standard ticking-clock action movie.

Well to be fair all three of the Nolan Batman movies are ticking-clock action movies!

Well, sure, but Dark Knight managed to follow through on its themes in an engaging way (even if not totally convincing) while doing that.

welp this was a chore to sit through

yeh

all i remember is a bunch of slapdash shit held together with an unrelenting bombastic orchestra score. and a lol 'rocky v' training sequence in a hole