You should still watch it for sure! It's exciting and cool and all, it's just not as good as Dark Knight Rises, which had much better dialogue and much fewer plot holes and much less cheese. But for the same reasons Ashtray and Demonrail and Dude McDude say it doesn't deserve such harsh criticism, it deserves to be seen. There's enough good stuff in there to make it entertaining as long as you can take it with a grain of salt

we're all wrong. however, i'm assuming you think you're right about something which makes me feel pity for you

That makes no sense.

We're talking about two very different sorts of entertainment. Film is routed in fiction, almost always (of course music can be too, but it's a totally different medium of expression and deserves to be recognized as such). Film near always leaves little to the imagination. The visuals, the music, the emotions are all laid out for you. It's not always as obvious in music (thought you of all people would have realized this). We're talking about trying to tear apart and point out the faults in a film about a guy that dresses up in a bat costume swinging from building to building driving completely outrageous vehicles of all varieties and fighting bad guys w/ all sorts of insane issues. THE WHOLE THING IS UNREALISTIC AND FAKE! I mean, why not just go ahead and say Star Wars sucks? haha

go watch it, in a big screen because it's the only place it makes sense. your dream man gary oldman is in it. yes, he plays a goody-goody, and unfortunately he's not there as much as you'd like, but still. you can swoon in his surround-sound raspy voice and watch his face tower over 10 meters high where you can inspect every craggy furrow of his skin.

to use one of those analogies from admission exams:

catwoman : !@#$%! :: gordon: porks

yes? yes! now go catch a matinee so you can pay half price. have fun!

Plus points:

x5 Seeing it will give you an entry point the next time someone brings it up in conversation at a party.

x5 It's very good

Negative points:

x5 The coolest thing anyone could say to anyone who brings it up at a party is that they've never heard of it, or batman.

x5 Iron Man is better

Thanks guys.

Yess. Just what I like to say irl. "I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying yer wrong"

I thought the plot was great. I thought Bale stepped it up big time after the last film. Oldman for sure too. I didnt think it was too long or anything either.
My only gripe was that there were way too many one liners in this film...and some pretty cheesey lines.

There were also a lot of unintentional funny moments.

"Not this cop"
and the way a certain someone dies..super cheese.

I thought it ended the trilogy beautifully though.

I really laughed at the one-liner that went something like "So that's how that feel"

I wish he said that in bruce's voice though, instead of the batvoice...noone was there haha...

Exactly. Also, It would be hilarious to see him lose the voice act in the middle of a sentence. There's a lot of stuff in the batman persona that is so easy to poke fun at.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRs30...eature=related

good fast food cinema

Couldn't understand Bane sometimes but whatever he was still great get over it.

About the ending. Autopilot. Get over it he's fucking Batman and would totally pull something like that.

My only complaint is that it felt rushed sometimes like maybe there was too much story or something. Specifically when he is in the underground prison. I felt like that was way rushed and should have been more epic. I mean he's got a fuckedupass back and he has to fix it and learn to walk again and jump that impossible jump as well as prepare to go back an fight Bane and it was all done in like 20 minutes. Now that I think about it, where was he anyway when he got out of the hole and had to go back to Gotham.

Anyway it doesn't really matter as I understand it would have made the movie even more insanely long and as long as you know it was an epic and grueling experience they don't really need to show it. It just felt like more of a montage at times especially that part is all I'm sayin. But it was a badass movies and I don't even like movies most of the time,

Yeah I wish they would have taken more time with his recovery process.

But I really liked the idea of the TV in front of him, watching gothem burn.

The scene when they hung the bodies from the bridge was intense, especially with Bruce's reaction.

In some ways I feel like this is similar to batman begins, besides all the obvious correlations they put in.

I mean Bale stole the show, and most of the other performances were pretty tacky.

It felt like the best "batman" film, but maybe not the best "film" if that makes sense.

But they had so many things I wanted in it, t hat I can't complain too badly about the one liners...and at the same time...we're watching a super hero movie...made mostly for kids...I wish I could have seen this trilogy at 14.

The grave with the roses. nailed it.
batman in his suit without his mask on. nailed it.
return of the batcave. nailed it.
batman getting some tail in the batsuit. nailed it.
batman getting his ass handed to him. nailed it.
& somehow they managed to fit in robin (something i was always against), and nailed it. Even if it was the dude from 3rd rock.

I need to see it in IMAX for sure.

I could only imagine how insane t his movie would have been if Heath ledger was still alive. You know the Joker would have been involved and not scarecrow. Even tho I love cillian murphy and scarecrow you know that he was just thrown in AGAIN for ANOTHER cameo because the Joker couldnt be. Oh well.

I would say it's better than fast food cinema.

But it's still just a superhero movie.

It's not a goddamn "superhero" movie. It's a hero's journey, definitely, but I didn't see any super human powers or activity. Christ, they even turned Bane's mask into an opiate inhalant device to avoid to whole "Venom" superstrength bullshit. That was deliberate.

It was a totally human film, and it was epic and allegorical and poetic. It deserves to be acknowledged as something more than a cheap-thrills fantasy film. It's not THOR, or the fucking Hulk. At the very least it deserves to be analyzed on a different dimension than those movies. It should be compared, if anything, to the Godfather, which is the only other trilogy that I can think of to compare it to.

I still need to see it again. I'm starting to wonder if there was any expository explanation for why Batman was able to defeat the man who so pitifully whooped his ass just a few months earlier, especially since he was recovering from a multiple-vertebrae fracture-- apart from finally realizing that when the guycrowds who's kicking your ass is breathing through a mask, you HIT THE FUCKING MASK andinto dont, for instance, try to "scare" him byget turning off the lights-- because I didn't catch anything the first time around.

Also, I want to see if Bruce managed to literally walk across the world in a realistic time frame, which given his complete lack of funds, and his only recently healed BROKEN BACK, does not seem likely.

I agree that the movie should have been longer. I would not haveI complained if it had been 3+ hours.

It has now been 2 weeks since I saw of, and I haven't stopped thinking about it for more than a few hours here and there.

I am thinking Best Picture and Best Director nod. The academy expanded that category to ten films because of the shit they took after excluding the Dark Knight.

Batman is a superhero.

He is the only superhero without super powers, but it's a superhero film.

Doesn't matter how it's presented.


There are many, many unrealistic things about this trilogy.

It's grounded realism, not pure realism.

Horse shit. It doesn't compare to The Godfather.

Too many times it Batman they have to tick the right action film boxes, too many times they have stupidly shit one liners. Sure it's one of the cleverer of the superhero films out there (deal with it, Batman will always be in the superhero category) but it'll never truly break away from that tag.

Yeah....dood severian. Its fucking Batman.

exactly

CASE CLOSED!

yes, but the fact that he's a superhero means that the suspension of disbelief required of all fiction must be further exerted when watching this kind of stuff.

i don't think evolghost or anyone says the movie is not worth discussing, it's just that it needs to be done within reasonable parameters-- getting lost on minutia about logic and plausibility is Very Deeply Silly when you begin with the premise that *it's fucking batman* . it needs to be fun, compelling, exciting, thrilling, not fit an exacting timeline like in a police investigation.

apples to apples, oranges to oranges, etc.

this is not necessarily for you, but for those who are missing the point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief

if people need batman to be a fucking documentary about the real man who saved the real gotham city then i'll have to concur with sway.

i didn't mean you! your comments are thorough, but reasonable.

im in the middle of watching captain america btw.

BUT HEY IT'S GOTTA BE REAL, OR...! :D

(the chick speaks to him of his "genetic code" haaa haaa haaa)

I'm a big Godfather fan but would still say, as the conclusion to a saga, DKR absolutely pisses on Godfather III. Still, while I prefer the Godfather saga overall (and tend to see GIII more as a mistake than a conclusion) the comparison isn't ridiculous. The Godfather is an epic, more 'serious' version of the standard gangster film just as Nolan's Batman is an epic, more 'serious' version of the standard action/superhero film. I've heard more than one critic describe Nolan as making arthouse superhero films, just as they once said Coppola was making arthouse gangster movies. In that sense, rather than try to compare them, we could say that, with his Batman films, Nolan has done for the superhero film roughly what Coppola did for the gangster film with his first two Godfather films. Time will ultimately tell but I certainly think there's some potential truth in that.

Fuck off

Alicia silverstone is batgirl....fuck yeah.

was that in the 90s or are you talking bout a future pic?

i'm srsly asking

Batman and robin now?

At 14, I knew Batman Forever was fucking horrible, and at 16 I took my cousins to B&R, expecting a flop. I was astonished by the reality of how awful it actually was. It was a real stab in the heart for someone who grew up with Burton's films, which though disappointing in retrospect, were pretty much my favorite movies as a kid. They relied too heavily on visual effects, and were pretty thin in story, but in 1989 it was a pretty goddamn cool thing to see such a dark depiction of Batman on screen. And Batman Returns still packs a punch. Devito was perfect as the Penguin. Way, way, way too menacing and horrific for any child under 15 (seriously, I remember feeling my spine tingle in the theatre a bit when DeVito was giving his little speech to his penguins) but still a great performance..... but even Returns had a crap plot. Watch it today and tell me you feel differently.

Needless to say, I had given up on the hope of ever seeing a serious, realistic, quality Batman film in 95. Even when previews for Begins were coming up I held onto my doubts. I knee Nolan was damn good, and it features 2 of my favorite actors, but I was not convinced that it wouldn't suck until the credits rolled.

Christopher Nolan, you saved Batman, and gave hope to a jaded pessimist who thought his favorite American hero was dead.

What a stupid interview. I don't see much difference between Nolan making a serious film about a guy in a cape and Cronenberg making a serious film about a guy who becomes a fly.

really? you don't agree with this?

Christopher Nolan’s best movie is Memento, and that is an interesting movie. I don’t think his Batman movies are half as interesting though they’re 20 million times the expense… superhero movie, by definition, you know, it’s comic book. It’s for kids. It’s adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying, you know, Dark Knight Rises is, you know, “supreme cinema art,” I don’t think they know what the f— they’re talking about.


i do, i swear, and i don't mean it in a confrontational way. it's adolescent, hence the fun, and it's not supreme cinema art.

they fly was a million tons more psychological and a great horror movie the the psychological-not-gory sense of horror-- though i'm no horror movie expert, i loved the fly.

scanners!!!!!

Fair enough. I'm not that big a fan of The Fly but it still seems a bit disingenuous of him to sniff at a superhero movie when the premise of The Fly isn't that far removed from that of Spiderman.

I'd be the first to say that DKR isn't God's gift to cinema but then neither is anything that Cronenberg's ever done, and overall I'd say that Nolan is a far better director (while Cronenberg just seems to read more interesting books).

The Dark Knight is. It absolutely is. The only performance I've seen in the last ten years to rival Ledger's Joker is Daniel Day Lewis's excellent performance in There Will be Blood. But the Dark Knight (and possibly TDKR; I have to see it again to be sure) is one of the finest mainstream/high-budget films of the modern era. It is a crime opera and an absolute epic, and if the Godfather is supreme cinema art, so is The Dark Knight. It is flawless.




Cronenberg must forgetting that his Oscar nominated "A History of Violence" comes from a graphic novel origin.

i just don't see it. i see a big expensive movie that was well made considering but it doesn't make my heart beat faster with delight or anything.

graphic novel doesn't necessarily equate superhero narratives. and regardless of what cronenberg may remember, history of violence was so much more profound and interesting than dark night rises that it bears no comparison.


ah, see, the thing is im a huge cronenberg fan. i love his stuff-- crash, existenz, dead ringers, history of violence, eastern promises.... almost everything really. the only one i haven't liked much was spider.

but notice cronenberg's words-- he's not saying that nolan is a bad director. he says nolan is interesting and that his best movie is memento, and with this i agree. what he's criticizing is nolan's choice of projects and his working for big studios-- in other words, he's sorta calling him a sellout.

scanners is fucking brilliant and so is the fly

Cronenberg's pretty right about what he's saying.

I'm sorry, but I must respectfully call bullshit here. There are many Batman stories that are just as high in literary merit as violence, and the two are fully comparable. The lack of a cape and cowl on a main character does not make the story higher in literary merit.

I just think his criticisms show a surprising lack of insight, and a very narrow view on hits part. Which is disappointing since the guy is such a great filmmaker. Not that anything he's done has shit on Inception or the Dark Knight trilogy.

I wasn't comparing comic to comic, only movie to movie. Noisefield made a straw man argument that Cronenberg's criticism wasn't valid because of the source for his screenplay. I mistakenly bit with "Sandman" in mind (which has nothing to do with either, only with the potential beauty of the graphic novel).

Bottom line is that Cronenberg has made more and consistenly much more interesting movies than Nolan (except for the ones i haven't seen haa haa). Cronenberg just isn't as successful because his stuff is not dumb enough for a rollercoaster ride theme. I'm not blaming Nolan per se, he showed lots of promise at the start, but shit, you know how many movie executives have a hand in the sort of stuff he makes?


the dark night trilogy is a series of above-average summer blockbusters that only blow the minds of the highly impressionable. it can be great fun, but it's not "great art," and wanting to hype it as some sort of supreme achievement of the human spirit just makes me want to tear it apart (translation: fanbois are ruining my fun).

i know i often come across as a patronizing cunt (i don't try to, i'm just wired that way), but i'm not saying this out of snobbery-- i love trashy stuff, but i love trashy stuff that doesn't pretend to be something else. e.g.-- spartacus blood and sand is about sex and gore and i gave it 5 netflix stars because it does what it promises very well. it doesn't provide you with the meaning of life or questions about what it means to be human, and it doesn't provide you with complex moral dilemmas-- it gives you tits, ass, and chopped-off heads, plus some cheesy effects that make you go "yeaaah!!". the same way for example a pb&j is yummy but it's not a french pastry, and calling it "classic American cuisine" isn't going to add subtle layers of exquisite flavor to it.

for my money, avengers was better than batman this summer, and then 3 summers ago or whenever that was, iron man was better than the joker movie. if the joker guy hadn't ODed before his movie i don't think the hype would have been so huge. hype loves a tragedy.

okay, to be fair, i haven't seen inception, but netflix predicts i'll only give it 3 stars, and that shit knows me so well it's usually pretty accurate within 1/2 star. so i'll watch it, but i'm not expecting anything great, and the trailer stinks and it stank when it came out which is why i didn't see it in the first place. do you think it will be better or more revolutionary than "Videodrome"? i'll find out i suppose. on the other hand, netflix expects i'll give "13 assassins" and "the black power of mixtape" 5 stars each.

See Inception. If you haven't, you really can't make an argument. No offense.

even if inception was some great fucking masterpiece the likes of which humanity has never seen before, the batmans remain nothing more than three above-average summer blockbusters that take themselves too seriously without actually delivering the goods in the serious department, so inception couldn't save you even if i watched it 100 times.