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

xp

oh right, the cop. he was *awesome*

i've only seen him in inception but i'll be keeping an eye out for him in the future

i wish they'd used gordon more, but i feel like we have a pretty good read on his character anyway

i think this movie suffers mainly in comparison to the last two, no way anybody could really live up to that joker and the action scenes are just *okay* veering into *stupid* (i.e. flying batmobile dogfights straight out transformers movie)

there's no "mega moments" in this movie. the airplane hijacking was pretty flat compared to the bank robbery in tdk, the climbing-out-of-pit scene was a poor substitute for the part where they are gordon has to drive the joker cross-town w/ batman running interference. also there was no "trippy" part, which i think nolan is good at (thinking like inception dream sequences and/or the ninjitsu-on-shrooms bits from the first one)

i felt better about it when i saw it was clooney because he is v v sympathetic to the political views of our "enemies" in the middle east

i thought it was kinda crummy. its sort of a realization of the caricatured arguments people used against TDK - too long, too serious, too ponderous, etc. i thought the dark knight was fun and exciting! but this was a drag. so long and sloppy. nolan still can't shoot action... theres little suspense or tension, character motivations are often muddled or hidden... catwoman's the first thing that should've been cut

i was really expecting that they were building up to bruce taking a dunk in the lazarus pit to fix his fucked up knees and back, but they pussed out on that. they pussed out on ra's being immortal too, with that stupid-ass fade out to show that hes a hallucination. i thought TKD's tone was appropriate because it was a sprawling crime drama with a cape added, but this should've been pulpier

"total recall" looks more "i, robot" / "minority report" than "fifth element"

because PKD and Moebius have so much in common eh

there's some things to like about it though. bale was surprisingly good, he's usually really boring when he's in action movie mode. hardy's bane voice was a fun and silly little flourish that i liked a lot, but he also did some pretty intense acting with his eyes. i liked how the guys in the worst prison on earth are just like greek pensioners or something... making batman tea on a hot plate... ehh this prison...its not so bad

i thought it was funny when catwoman laid a smooch on bats before he went off to martyr himself for allah, because there was like no chemistry between them before then, and batman basically had a non-reaction where he yanked himself away from her kiss. nolanbot must've been going 'time for some of this "romance" ive been hearing about' but it was so unconvincing

***SPOILER***

the scene where batman's dragging the nuke out to the middle of the ocean seriously made me think of the part from the 60s batman where hes carrying a huge cartoon bomb over his head

Hand it to Nolan, though, for actually, in 2012, going from "Bale and Cotillard kiss and embrace" to "cut to roaring fireplace."

lol

***SPOILER***

the scene where batman's dragging the nuke out to the middle of the ocean seriously made me think of the part from the 60s batman where hes carrying a huge cartoon bomb over his head

― Black_vegeta (Hungry4Ass), Friday, 20 July 2012 20:50 (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SPOILERRRR
(can we just make this thread all spoilers from now on)
i really thought this bit was gonna be "no sweat i'll just go dump it on brooklyn". on which subject such a weird part of this was seeing New York on screen - thought it was both probably ballsy & super distressing to be shooting downtown manhattan w/smoke pouring out of it, collapsing bridges &c.

found this exciting, partly because of the alternately thunderous & ridiculous score, which with this being a concluding film you get to just have in overdrive, all the time, at the expense of conversation, even over just clerical scenes of morgan freeman talking to bruce wayne. the film wasn't as rhythmically strung together as the last couple, so it felt kinda sprawly, & like we were dipping in & out of threads rather than having to process a lot at once. & i thought nolan coulda listened to some of fitzgerald's advice about killing one's darlings. JLG picking up the bag was dope. the president is surely the least imaginative casting choice in the world, that guy is just forever a senator in something. batman in daylight was generally kinda strange. i have a long thing i can't be quite bothered to write right now about how well the joker clicks with nolan's non-comic-book-Batman universe, & how that dynamic's sorta ruined by a more storybook/less psychological villain - like the joker's character, his various limits and ideology, papers over a lot of the comics-in-the-real-world flaws in a way that a guy who you could just stab in the head doesn't. you know? he makes it metaphysical, & it being physical makes things ridiculous. bain's desire for revolution maybe could've been set up a lil better. MVPs: g oldman + marion cotillard.

but y'know this was fun etc. i wish nolan had stopped just after alfred's last glance, though; from a guy who ended his leo dicaprio movie the way he did i thought he might understand the value of not beating the audience over the head with confirmation of something hinted at.

LOL @ shakey moe, PKD fanboy

lemme guess, the piano was concealing an empathy box

i don't know maybe you thought the visual design for blade runner came from hr giger too

or you forgot the innovative fail that is every straight-faced pkd film

character motivations are often muddled or hidden

i would argue this is not true if you're partial to the "right" comic versions

here's another bit

a bunch of people said stuff about "ambiguous ending"

there's no fucking ambiguous ending, the ending was spelled out in 100 foot high letters called DARK KNIGHT FOREVER

this was pretty bad

and Bane's voice was ridiculous

i liked how the guys in the worst prison on earth are just like greek pensioners or something... making batman tea on a hot plate... ehh this prison...its not so bad

for real. Welcome...TO HELL. Cup of tea anyone?

Anne Hathaway was even better than that time she was a parrot in Rio.

or you forgot the innovative fail that is every straight-faced pkd film

no I just didn't get why you thought a movie should look like Fifth Element even tho it has nothing in common with Fifth Element or its source material

unless you think all sci-fi movies should look the same these days. oh wait they do

(albeit not like the 5th Element)

what would you compare total recall to?

a pile of shit?

for real. Welcome...TO HELL. Cup of tea anyone?

― Number None

but don't you understand, bane already came back and killed all of the bad guys when he "extracted a terrible revenge"

he says it's the worst prison because it will offer him hope

it sure doesn't look like Moebius or Metal Hurlant

xp

okey doke

i don't want to talk about something you don't know anything about shakey

lol

but it looked the same in the flashbacks late great

like blade runner, the fifth element borrows a great deal from the airtight garage as well as other moebius & old MH stuff. the original total recall less so, though there's clearly some influence (very poorly articulated, i'd argue).

fwiw, i too was bummed by the boring minority report flatness of the future depicted in the new TR preview. i'd prefer something more colorfully exaggerated, perhaps along the lines of the fifth element.

btw "something you don't know anything about" shakey is which moebius i'm talking about and what parts of total recall i'm talking about

number none did you miss the part where they gang-raped her mom to death and then dragged bane down into the basement, smoked bath salts and snacked on his face?

yeah but it was still quite pleasantly lit

see that's the part that gives you hope, the part that scares the bat

beyond the level of flat visual design there are similar images in moebius and total recall, like the expanding heads, skeleton-view gag, the brain bug in the nose

i think maybe shakey mo is taking the "everything is shit" position and i missed that

btw "something you don't know anything about" shakey is which moebius i'm talking about and what parts of total recall i'm talking about

oh you tease

more lolz xp

just gonna put this Moebius Batman here
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-iatdgEyOf_Q/T1tgxTkg76I/AAAAAAAAfoY/tng0KNYTP4k/s1600/Batman+Moebius.jpg

i'm not sure there's a movie that ever nailed that side of moebius

yeah but it was still quite pleasantly lit

^^ nolan in a nutshell!

So Nolan won't direct another Batman film but WILL HE DO NIGHTWING?

A little disappointed by this, truth be told. Fun and exciting but nowhere near as good as the second one.

superman preview looked lame

so bummed about that Superman movie

didn't even get a Superman trailer to complain about

chillwave nostalgia superman

Actually, you know what I did find encouraging about the Supes trailer? It looked nothing like a Zack Snyder movie.

oh i dunno, there's probably a magical owl of gahoole in the fortress of solitude

Saw this tonight. My friend was a bit disappointed, but I really liked it. Felt like there were a few more clunky lines in this ("not every cop!") than the last one. Agree it would have been better not to see what Alfred was looking at. But overall, I thought it was pretty great.

Gordon trying to find the right truck really reminded me of one of the early levels of Jungle Strike on the Mega Drive...

Also thought the supporting cast/cameos were uniformly v good, eg Burn Gorman. He didn't have too exciting a role but that guy just has the most fascinatingly blank face..

This thread -- and certainly this post -- needs to be SPOILER tagged.

- Still not sure how much I'm attracted to Anne Hathaway. Is she nice-cute or a sex bomb? I'll let you guys know when I have the answer. Unbelievably, Catsuit didn't answer the question.

- lol at the heavy handed handling of exposition in the first few scenes "Boy, life sure is peaceful in Gotham since Batman took off for good the past eight years. Yep, with Harvey Dent a hero and Bruce Wayne living in solitude, this city..."

- This was better than I remember Dark Knight being. All the "Harvey Dent was a hero/Batman a villain" subplots were too inside baseball and TL;DR for me. Batman is obviously a good guy, "surely Gotham knows that" I thought. It feels like Ledger's death had something to do with all the confusion between the second and third movies. If they could've used the Joker like they wanted to it would've been seamless perhaps.

- People are bringing up character motivation gaps, and in his review Ebert mentioned Bane's unclear motivation for wanting to destroy Gotham.

In Robert Warshow's 1950s criticism of comic books he specifically mentions the crude way that comics deal with villains, and their reasons for doing evil, as a corrupting influence on the minds of children -- it doesn't promote a nuanced look at the human condition and whatnot. "Evil people are evil because they love to perpetuate evil and create chaos," is as far as the origins and reasons for evil go in these movies. Don't know why Ebert suddenly and only now notices this with comic book villains. As if any of these bad dudes have a complex political philosophy ever.

- The movie's conservative politics. Even if it's just a coincidence that Bane's street team of williamsburg child soldiers resemble Occupy, there's also Cat Woman's "I don't know what your hang up is with using guns" remark to Batman after she saves his life, which felt like a reference and rebuke to every superhero's hypocritical fear of dishing out violence via the bullet.

- How much do you wanna bet Nolan wanted to go with the ambiguous ending, maybe, as someone mentioned, ending the film on Caine's reaction shot, and not letting the audience know if he saw Bruce alive, but then someone took him aside and said "Chris, listen, do you want to spend the rest of your life fielding questions from geeks about whether or not Batman lived or died at the end of the film? And you thought the ending of Inception made your life a nightmare..." And then Nolan went on and made the ending as explicit and "HE LIVES. BATMAN LIVES. BATMAN 4EVER" as he did.

- The ending sets up Nolan to leave as director and continue as producer. Someone else can figure out a way to make the fourth movie work after he wrapped it up pretty neatly. So his legacy as director of the franchise will remain solid but he can still collect that sweet, sweet producer $$$ in the future.

one of the problems w anne is she's nice cute and at worst bitchy princess, cat woman should be lazy sultry sex bomb, anne is petulant and high-strung. maybe she's a reboot too.

exposition = lol old folks ... anyway i thought bane was a basic terrorist, motivated by hazy politics but driven by personal hatred?

anyway ilx aside i don't know that it's necessarily right-wing to call OWS williamsburg child soldiers, a spade is a spade