Oh I'm sorry, Did I Break Your Conversation........Well Allow Me A Movie Thread by S&T

[N41D]

It was distracting as hell to me but I didn't hate it. There were parts I wondered why it sounded like Optimus Prime doing a Connery impression.

It just bugged me that it was amplified so much like he was always speaking into a microphone.

 

[mronegative]

I thought the pit was done really well, and they really showed out on Bale in this one.....and, I really liked the way they did Bane's voice, and this was even with TDK imo.........

Bane's voice was good at times but sometimes too sean connery. Bale showed out.

It was distracting as hell to me but I didn't hate it. There were parts I wondered why it sounded like Optimus Prime doing a Connery impression.

It just bugged me that it was amplified so much like he was always speaking into a microphone.

these

It feels as though most people were just like as long as you could understand him, it's good....nah. He sounded like an autotuned Seth MacFarlane voice. And they turned the volume all the way up and kept it there. You could tell it was it's own channel of audio and about as loud as that loud *** film score. It's like they overfixed his voice, when they dubbed every line of his over, cuz they were shook people wouldn't understand it and get mad. But they kept about the same volume for the whole movie. Bag over his head? Across the room? Right next to you? Head turned away from the camera? Yelling? Whispering? Mad? Sad? Talking into a speaker? Same volume.

And the prison scene was the worst. When he was giving that speech in front of it, it felt like his voice was out of sync. It's not that it wasn't effective, cuz sometimes...it was fine, but for the most part, it took me out of the film and killed the little bits of drama he tried to create.

The pit was terrible and its not as good as TDK. which is fine. it had the chance but missed alot of opprotunities

That's what it really comes down to with me. I get the time constraints, but they just missed the mark in the moment. Nolan got the big themes and ideas all there on the screen, but the details and little machinations were just off or ignored or overlooked everywhere.

It's like gymnastics. He reached for some ridiculous, huge idea stuff and even if the form was sloppy and shaky and he just barely hit his marks and the landing was real suspect too...he had a huge starting score..higher than Avengers or Watchmen or The Dark Knight, but I can't co-sign that system. Everyone starts at 10 then gets deductions in my book.

 

[michael415]

Anyone remember The Jersey 

Show was mad cheesy but still a great watch haha

 

[Master Zik]

Something interesting I came across about Tim Burton's Batman and what he had planned for Robin in relation to the ending of TDKR

There’s a neat site out there that details Burton’s various plans for Batman Forever (the film was mostly in the planning stages when Burton left the project), and they have a link to David Walker’s original script for Batman Returns, and it features a number of scenes for Wayans, who was to be called “The Kid” throughout most of the movie, until towards the end….

Spoiler: Warning: Spoiler!

Batman squeals his Ski-boat to a stop and vaults off it.
The Kid rushes up and flips him the pinwheel object.

THE KID
Guess I won’t be needing to borrow
the descrambler anymore. At least
not for a while…We save the city
or what?

BATMAN
Getting there. I owe you two.
Got a name?

THE KID
Yeah…..but I like to be
called…Robin…

BATMAN
Nice name…Oh Robin…

When Batman turns back around, the Kid, ROBIN, is gone.
Batman smiles at the utilization of one of his own traits.
Losing the smile, Batman fires up a grapple to a high
echelon of rollercoaster track. He swooshes upward.

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/10/30/comic-book-legends-revealed-179/

Should I assume Nolan knew about what Tim intended to do and paid homage or is this coincidence or did he straight up steal this whole ending since after Tim got took off the sequel as director he posted up the script online for everyone to see what he was going to do?

On another note I did not know AT ALL Wayans was picked to be Robin In Burton's Batman Returns. Given what the role would've probably been by some of what he had planned seems it would've been cool.

 

[N41D]

I was listening to a podcast today and somebody said Bane sounded like he was doing a Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood bit.

 

[duba169]

You now have my permission to drink your milkshake!

 

[mronegative]

Just a baby in a pit. A baby in a pit!

 

[noskey]

I... drink... your... Gotham. I drink it up!

 

[hymen man]

"I did what your brother couldn't. I broke you and I beat you.' Daniel Baneview.

 

[darthska]

Nah, 'Optimus Prime impersonating Connery' NAILED IT!!!

 

[venom lyrix]

Review: Total Recall - starring Collin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, and Jessica Biel - http://wp.me/p2CCWq-1sl

 

[duba169]

you know we were talking about trilogy's and i forgot one

major league

yes im serious

even the third one

 

[dland24]

Round 2 of TDKR....but this time on IMAX. Enjoyed it just as much as the first time. Christopher Nolan is the man.

 

[DeadsetAce]

even the third one

:x :x

 

[finallyfamous]

You're trolling Dub.

Major League 1 & 2

Back to the minors tho? No

 

[Master Zik]

After watching it twice I really really really liked TDKR. Won't rate it with the rest but it really impressed me. Would've liked more Alfred than anything.

Didn't have problems with how he got from the pit back to Gotham despite it being a stretch. There were a lot of parts where we saw him one place and the very next scene he was suddenly somewhere else helping someone just in time. The autopilot bomb radius thing didn't bother me either since Bruce fixed it months earlier (which makes me question exactly how long he was in the pit). I just assumed he got out before he even flew it over the bridges, just programmed it where to go.

My problem was for 150 minutes Bane was badass and then after the Talia twist he goes out like a punk, I also had a huge problem with the mask and all you had to do was rip those little things by the mouth to defeat him. You telling me in their first fight Bats aint hit him anywhere near there? Come to the rematch he's easily taking those things apart and Bane is getting handled easily. Plus I could not help but laugh the whole tie @ "WHERE'S THE TRIGGER!!!!!???" My last little problem was how the bomb was treated through out the end, shooting missiles and other explosives at the truck with the bomb in it, then the way Bats drags it out the truck to fly it over the bay? C'mon son that's just insane. But none of that bothered me so much that it took away from the overall experience of the film.

 

[mronegative]

does ska have Dub's pw or something?

and yea Zik...their whole thing was, the nuke's gonna get way unstable in ~5 months...
...this dude is dragging it down main street like he's wiping his *** with Gotham.

 

[duba169]

I just watched the third today somehow I had it deep in my DVR I chuckled here and there. Got Soriano and tanaka in there. the announcer in always gold I don't give a damn

easily take it over the third spider man or third x men.

also i watched Alien 3 for the first time and it was pretty good. I' watched the assembly cut though so I'm not sure how much worse the theatrical one was. So easy to see it's a Fincher movie lols. I really do think he's overrated, But I loved the social Network. Renders the Aliens ending pointless in ways but I can understand why he went with that direction.

It was definitley the darkest Alien.especially dissecting the little girl I was surprised they did that. But obviously can't touch the first 2. The ending was good.

it's funny how the effects seem more dated even though it was made in the 90's. That's my main gripe. It just looked cartoony sometimes.


it wasn't as horrible as I've heard. I still gotta see the 4th I guess, but that one even the plot sounds terrible.

 

[duba169]

I know I must be way behind but I'm watching trekkies for the first time and it's insane

funny, depressing, pitiful, scary, interesting moments. must watch documentary. You could argue that sports fans are just as bad in many ways . Some of these people gotta be nuts though..

I never got into star trek but I'm a HUGE sci fi fan. Maybe i should give it a shot. Might be too outdated now.

 

[N41D]

I know I must be way behind but I'm watching trekkies for the first time and it's insane
funny, depressing, pitiful, scary, interesting moments. must watch documentary. You could argue that sports fans are just as bad in many ways

. Some of these people gotta be nuts though..
I never got into star trek but I'm a HUGE sci fi fan. Maybe i should give it a shot. Might be too outdated now.

It's really crazy to think about it that way but it really is true...

And I've wanted to give the old series a shot. I like the original Star Trek movie and Wrath of Khan is 

 I really loved JJ Abrams' reboot. Feel like I'm the same way and should just dive into it. But with my summer break over and heading back to work tomorrow, might have to wait until next summer. 

 

[Master Zik]

Yall been slipping. Star Trek TNG is The movies aren't that great but the show itself on the episodic format with an underlying plot progressing in the background throughout the season is what's really good. Admittedly, I only got in to it the past few years by watching reruns.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise Data, Worf, #1, smashing that empath chick or the doctor Romulans, The Borg

The OG is cool as well but I've only seen the movies.

/Trekkie nerd mode

 

[CP1708]

True Blues posted this in the General thread, but it won't let me quote it for some reason???? :\

Anyway, I love this article, even tho it has 75 words that are way too big for me.

Guest Post: Liberalism’s Dark Knight and Christopher Nolan’s Defense of Civil Society

By Jeff Spross and Zack Beauchamp on Jul 26, 2012 at 2:07 pm

There’s a lazy, irritating strain running through the critical reaction to The Dark Knight Rises. It assumes that because the protagonist is a rich philanthropist and the villain an Occupy-soundalike terrorist, the film is taking a hard-right stand on today’s political issues. You see this move from some on the left, who go as far as calling the film fascist. Others on the right are eager to deny the supposedly legitimizing Bat-mantle to liberals or to tie the Occupy movement to Bane’s unremitting violence.

It’s true that Christopher Nolan’s films blanch at armed revolution, but it’s also true that his films have nothing specific to say about the main debates that define popular American politics. Rather, the real message of the trilogy is philosophical in character: Nolan is mounting a layered defense of liberal democracy against its authoritarian opponents. The Dark Knight trilogy is saying something that most Americans assume implicitly – that best government is one that respects the rights of its citizens.

To start with The Dark Knight Rises, if the is film a dig at advocates for economic justice, it’s an extraordinarily anemic one. Virtually no screen-time is dedicated to Gotham’s social dynamics or violence by the people against elites. It’s not clear if regular Gotham citizens, or just Bane’s mercenaries and hangers-on, are participating in mass looting depicted on screen. There’s no evidence of downtrodden masses cheering Bane’s arrival. By contrast, the film is peppered with little asides about the consequences of inequality: the traders at Gotham’s stock exchange are arrogant and self-absorbed, Selina Kyle’s jabs at Bruce Wayne’s wealth have bite, and Bane’s bankrollers are vulture capitalists. Viewed in this light, what’s wrong with Bane isn’t his left-wing “motivation:” indeed, that’s almost immediately shown to be an insincere fig leaf for public consumption. Rather, Bane is a villain because he uses the slaughter of innocent people as a means to attain his ends.

Giving Bane some slightly sympathetic lines is par for the course in this morally complex trilogy. Indeed, one clear continuity between the three films is that Nolan consistently puts legitimate critiques of Gotham in the mouths of the trilogy’s villains. No one, not even Batman, would argue with Ra’s Al Ghul’s claim that Gotham was a thoroughly corrupt city. Rather, Al Ghul’s mistake is concluding this entitles him to serve as Gotham’s executioner. In Batman Begins’ first act — in a scene suffused with class tension — Wayne refuses an order to behead a working class farmer as punishment for a crime. In The Dark Knight Rises, Batman’s first rule for Catwoman is “no killing.” Neither as Batman nor himself does Bruce Wayne argue that Gotham’s social structure as it stands is morally defensible. Rather, he suggests that the city is worth reforming rather than destroying.

The Joker’s nihilistic assault on “schemers” also contains some seeds of truth. When the Joker tells Harvey Dent that “no one panics when things go ‘according to plan’ — even if the plan is horrifying,” the example he uses highlights the differing ways society reacts to the deaths of soldiers and poor gang members versus rich leaders. That argument, that chaos is fair, is instrumental in transforming Dent into Two-Face. Gotham’s White Knight goes on a murder spree in part because the Joker isn’t completely wrong. Again, the reason these people are villians isn’t their diagnosis of society’s problems – it’s their cure, a murderous assault on the city’s existing political order.

Ross Douthat and John Podheretz are right in this, at least: The Dark Knight Rises does indeed endorse a kind of Burkean small-c conservatism — a preference for incremental reform over convulsively deconstructive revolt. But that’s hard to square with the modern American conservative/Republican movement, which just produced a budget seeking to dismantle many of the social institutions Americans have relied on since the New Deal and the Great Society. Shoehorning Occupy into a “the Dark Knight movies are conservative” narrative requires a reductive stereotyping of the Occupiers, simplifying the nebulous movement into a collective of radical anarchists and ignoring its respect for liberal democratic forms — as demonstrated by the general assemblies — as well as the fact that it hasn’t really damaged anything other than public grass.

The best way to understand Nolan’s political argument, such as it is, is to step away from contemporary political disputes and pick up an old essay: Judith Shklar’s “The Liberalism of Fear.” Shklar argues that the most universally acceptable moral foundation for individual rights and democracy isn’t any particular religious faith or abstract moral theory – rather, it’s that we’re all scared. We’re scared of the unchecked power of both our fellow citizens and the state, and want a political system capable of reigning in both. As she puts it, “liberalism’s deepest grounding is in place from the first, in the conviction of the earliest defenders of toleration, born in horror, that cruelty is an absolute evil, an offense against God or humanity.”

Fear, of course, is the emotion that most suffuses the Dark Knight trilogy. In Batman Begins, terror of the powerful criminal underworld (the Scarecrow’s fear gas being the literal instantiation of the idea) overwhelms the power of social institutions to address them. Batman’s role, in Bruce’s words, is to “fight injustice” by turning “fear against those who prey on the fearful.” Batman is a terrifying totem meant to restore the balance of fear between the anarchic private world and the gutless public sphere.

In The Dark Knight, Nolan continues his examination of the terror of anarchy, as personified in the Joker, but introduces its twin concern for liberal theorists like Shklar: the potential for the state and allied institutions to abuse their enormous power. The universal surveillance device Batman uses to find the Joker, while seemingly necessary, is recognized by every character who encounters it to be too dangerous to entrust to anyone. Lucius Fox’s revulsion at the device — “This is too much power for one person” — is clearly shared by Wayne, as the machine is rigged to self-destruct after use. Bruce’s boast to Alfred that “Batman has no limits” is proven false: Batman must have limits. There must be lines he cannot cross, as no one person or institution — no matter how well-intentioned — can be trusted with unlimited power. Further, the film culminates in a heroic act of mutual respect between fellow citizens on boats rigged to explode, suggesting the answer to the Joker’s challenge isn’t to abandon planning but rather to broaden our range of moral concern for the harm power can do to our fellow citizens.

Finally, The Dark Knight Rises ties the twin fears together, suggesting that the fear that pervades our lives can be turned, as Shklar suggests, to productive purposes. Bruce can only escape the prison he is consigned to once he accepts his fear as an essential part of life. In other moments, Alfred chastises him for not trusting the citizens of Gotham enough — for turning away from communal life and shared institutions to the lonely Batmissions, for never wondering whether Gotham needed Bruce Wayne more than Batman. This resonates with Shklar’s claim that “when we think politically, we are afraid not only for ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a society of fearful people.” By accepting his own fear and finally hanging up the Batsuit, Bruce comes to understand the basic motivation behind a liberal political order in Shklar’s terms: the amelioration of one’s own fear and everyone else’s.

There’s an important caveat to add here: Nolan’s treatment of the “democracy” half of “liberal democracy” is far more cursory. That Nolan doesn’t dwell on the social dynamics of pre-Bane or Bane-occupied Gotham suggests he isn’t interested in casting advocates for economic justice in a bad light, but it also means we don’t get a visceral sense of how the people feel about anything or how they express that feeling through Gotham’s democratic institutions. The most important democratic action in the films ― like the passage of the Dent Act ― happens off-screen, with at best questionable consequences.

Part of this is just Nolan’s style of filmmaking. It’s impersonal if one’s feeling charitable, cold if one isn’t. He tends to treat his characters as cogs in a narrative machine rather than flesh-and-blood humans. This style of filmmaking can be good for exploring broad themes, but it’s a bad vehicle for depicting democratic politics, which after all is the jockeying between the particular needs, moral beliefs, and cultural quirks of different human groups.

That said, Nolan does manage to make a case for the democratic part of liberal democracy, even if it’s done in super-abstract form. The central struggle between the Batman and Joker is often described as a “battle for Gotham’s soul,” but it’s equally well understood as a struggle for Gotham’s democratic character. Harvey Dent’s psyche is the key front in their war because he’s both seemingly incorruptible and one of Gotham’s elected officials, reforming the system from the inside. Further, the moment at which the Joker truly terrifies Gotham is when he mounts an assault on Gotham’s judge, police commissioner, district attorney, and, ultimately, mayor. Dent compares Batman to a Roman protector during a suspension of democracy, and Batman spends the rest of the film trying to extricate himself from that role and rebuild Gotham’s legitimate democratic governing order. Dent, an elected official, is the key symbol because he represents the possibility for Gothamites to take their city back through open and legitimate means.

These themes do carry over into The Dark Knight Rises, even if the somewhat weaker screenplay limits the complexity of the examination. While the fact that Dent’s legacy is a seemingly authoritarian crime act founded on a lie might undermine Dent as democratic symbol — though it interestingly suggests Bane might be blowback for the Dent Act — one of The Dark Knight Rises’ key sequences ends up supporting the prior film’s embrace of democratic values. Bane takes over the city not in block-by-block battles or inside city hall; he does it at a football game, one of the great gatherings in contemporary American public life and in the one time we see an en-masse congregation of Gotham’s citizens. He terrifies Gothamites (and, indeed, they’re clearly shown to be terrified) not only by threatening nuclear apocalypse, but by blowing up the Mayor — the elected official the Joker missed. That this takes place right after the last words of the National Anthem helps to drive the point home: Bane’s hostile takeover is not an attempt to liberate the people but rather to destroy Gotham’s democracy and the public sphere that works to sustain it.

While Bane and each of Nolan’s other villains attempt to exploit fear for ideological projects, revenge, or simple fun, Batman aims to channel it — to make his opponents’ legitimate grievances subjects for debate in an orderly system rather than through violent resolution. To entrust Gotham to heroes “with a face,” as he says in The Dark Knight, and to democratize Batman as a symbol that can be embodied by anyone. It’s not that Christopher Nolan is taking a side in our political debates. He’s simply defending a particular system through which we address them.

 

[DeadsetAce]

^ interesting read. but i dunno, it sometimes annoys me when people dig so deep into movies (i know, that sounds bad), especially when things get tied to politics all the time. like even if that's nolan's intention. it just bugs me to think of it that way. just how i feel though

 

[duba169]

I don't think it's a case of digging too deep. I thought some of the same things but In more lamens terms when watching the trilogy.

 

[DeadsetAce]

^ yeah not so much with that one, but in general. i remember in college there was this one poly sci kid who would put a political spin on every movie. i wanted to put my fist through his jaw