TV/Movies Megathread

[The Brain]

OK, Makaveli.

[CountDeMoney]

Go back to whacking off to The Two Towers on a constant loop, tard.

[The Brain]

 

[11B4V]

Finally watched The Wrestler. It was good and Marisa Tomei well....... . She had me sold since My Cousin Vinnie.

I need to catch Warrior. Heard it was good.

Watched that Hanks/Roberts flick with the other half last weekend. Julia......

[CountDeMoney]

Finally watched The Wrestler. It was good and Marisa Tomei well....... . She had me sold since My Cousin Vinnie.

Yeah, we had to wait 20 years for those titties, but what the hell, right?  We got 'em. 
Oh, and the movie was good, too.

I need to catch Warrior. Heard it was good.

IMHO, best "sports" movie in years, hands down.

Watched that Hanks/Roberts flick with the other half last weekend. Julia......

To each their own, I guess. 

[CountDeMoney]

Ugh, Titanic is on.  CLICK

I don't know what was worse: being forced to see repeated viewing of Titanic, or Rent.

[Admiral Yi]

Watched that Hanks/Roberts flick with the other half last weekend. Julia......

That movie was a mess. 

[Darth Wagtaros]

Ugh, Titanic is on.  CLICK

I don't know what was worse: being forced to see repeated viewing of Titanic, or Rent.

I thought it was done when the fucking boat sank. I rose to my feet and ran to the back of the theater thinking we could leave.  But no, it went on for what seemed like another miserable hour.

[11B4V]

Watched that Hanks/Roberts flick with the other half last weekend. Julia......

That movie was a mess.

It's a chick movie and you have to do your time.

[Ideologue]

The Dark Knight Rises.

I should have known better than to doubt Christopher Nolan. Excellent movie to end his trilogy.

Thought it flawed but interesting, like the Dark Knight before it.

I was dismayed by how, I dunno, reactionary it seemed?  You know how the Joker was sort of a stand-in for terrorism?  Bane and his army are sort of a stand-in for poor people.  I think I missed the part where Occupy Wall Street obtained a neutron/fusion/atomic (as it is described throughout the film ) device and used the threat of its use to carve out their own city-state.  But maybe Tim was sick that day?

Anyway, two things really bother me about the script:

1)seriously, WTF was the device that Tate and Wayne were building?  It was, I guess, a fusion reactor, that was somehow capable of being converted into a thermonculear bomb (not how thermonuclear weapons work, Dr. Teller).  Bruce is all like "OMG we can't turn this beast on, in the wrong hands it could be a weapon!"  There are like 10,000 thermonuclear weapons on Earth, Dr. Oppenheimer.  You're a little late to the destroyer of worlds party.  The lethal application of fusion is well understood and available to about eight or nine different nations, including the one you live in, which invented it.  In like 1951.  P.S. if you were really worried about your NUCLEAR MATERIALS being used as a weapon, maybe you should have complied with the applicable DoEnergy regulations, which I am not intimately familiar with but which I suspect probably prohibit building a secret nuclear reactor-and-apparently-also-a-bomb underneath a city of millions.
2)[spoiler]Maybe not 100% spoiler but OK--what, precisely, was the point of Bane's, and I guess Talia's, social experiment?  They had a bomb that could be triggered if they were interfered with, but which was going to go off at the end of a certain amount of time regardless of what they did.  I guess they could have put it back into the reactor to stabilize it--this was established--but they seemed to have neither the plans nor desire to do so.  Indeed, their goal was explicitly to finish Ra's al-Ghul's work--btw, I was disappointed by all the intimate connections to the shitty Batnolan film, although I appreciated that the plot wasn't quite as retarded as Begins' "microwave gun + fear toxin + L-train = some kind of threat?" story.  So, uh, if their goal was to destroy Gotham... why didn't they destroy Gotham in the six months they were sitting unopposed and planning to destroy Gotham?[/spoiler]

[Syt]

I was dismayed by how, I dunno, reactionary it seemed?  You know how the Joker was sort of a stand-in for terrorism?  Bane and his army are sort of a stand-in for poor people.  I think I missed the part where Occupy Wall Street obtained a neutron/fusion/atomic (as it is described throughout the film )

In that case you'll like this commentary on the next CoD (written by David Goyer who co-wrote Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises):

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/raul-menendez-99.php

This latest turn into the realm of modern politics is more disturbing than a heap of dead bomb vest guys outside a stairwell on a survival map. Goyer has managed to take the cold brutality of drone warfare - a terrifying reality - and somehow create commentary that we need to watch out for the gullible Occupy movement. It isn't a creepy arms manufacturer or a rogue general, not even the drones themselves going haywire, it is literally the "Messiah of the 99%" who subverts our drones and starts shooting at us. Because you let him on Youtube. You did this. You broke our arsenal of liberty and it's your fault.

The message, that populism is dangerous and shut up and love your 1% drone overlords, will no doubt be buried under plenty of rappelling, helicoptering and sniping, but it is the most vile war and class war apologism of the series. Goyer throws his lot in with the powerful against the powerless, creating ghost armies to fight from our own extravagant military. He blames the poor and those pursuing social justice for a future doomsday monologue that might as well involve a rogue hand and precious bodily fluids.

[Ideologue]

The weird thing is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too--most of the mega-rich in DKR are complete scumbags too, with the only exception being Bruce Wayne and his intimate associates.  Maybe the point is that the only moral authority is Batman, and when Batman does something, it's ok... for Batman.  If so, that's not a terribly useful point.

The Dark Knight could be reduced to the dull assertion that Batman is the Philosopher King, too (and how dare Lucius Fox question his methods), but at least there was a relatively meaty moral issue there.  I don't think anyone's gonna walk out of DKR saying "Bane challenged my worldview."  At least the Joker, possibly the most one-dimensional character in all comics and film, managed to do that.  (As a caveat, Tom Hardy is great as Bane, and Bane is very physically intimidating, very cool, and there is a great shout-out to Knightfall halfway through, but in DKR Bane is [spoiler]ultimately a lackey, and no matter how good the execution, that's really disappointing.  Also he gets taken out like a punk with hilariously little fanfare.)[/spoiler]

Or, maybe the answer is much simpler: the Dark Knight Rises is a movie that clothes itself in relevance, but has nothing it actually wants to say.

It's not even that I don't want to see class warfare with the huddled masses as the antagonists.  It's that they take the idea that "violent revolution is bad" and "poor people, if given the chance, will kill rich people" and do nothing with it--I mean, hell, even the scenes where they have a kangaroo court are being run by a crazy fucking supervillain (great cameo, though), who doles out crazy fucking supervillain verdicts.  They ignore any of the issues they went out of their way to raise because they're too interested in the logistics of the Bat-cycle, the Bat-Osprey, and Bat-H-Bomb to pay attention to them.  The violent proletarian revolution that's supposed to be occurring is less important than the fact it's snowing, and that's a kind of failure.

It's also not that I have any particular problem with a straight-up supervillain story, which is what DKR amounts to, but like I said, it speaks of weighty matters and then drops them, leaving this odd-shaped and distracting hole in the movie.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this, but the exposition telling the audience who Bane is in the early scenes is some of the clumsiest shit I've ever seen.  It's only about one step removed from Alfred googling him on the Bat-computer and just showing a screenshot of his Wikipedia page.

All that said, it's still pretty good, and probably my favorite of the Batnolan films.  But, as expected, it is my third least favorite Christopher Nolan film.

[Ideologue]

I don't think Goyer co-wrote DKR though.  The Nolans hate poor people all by themselves.

[katmai]

I don't think Goyer co-wrote DKR though.  The Nolans hate poor people all by themselves.

He is attributed with story credit.

[Ideologue]

I don't think Goyer co-wrote DKR though.  The Nolans hate poor people all by themselves.

He is attributed with story credit.

Fair enough.

Oh, and one last thing: [spoiler]it occurred to me that maybe there was a way to make the ending satisfying.  Batman apparently had the ability to wipe records throughout the Internet and throughout state and private intranets, through the workings of an invasive "clean slate" program--a preposterous technology, as explicitly stated in the film, although maybe less so than a fusion reactor that someone really dumb decided to stick a uranium rod in, but maybe not considering that I know, from personal experience, large numbers of records are still kept on paper, difficult to access but also impossible to destroy at the push of a button even if such tech did exist.  Whereas at least you could throw some fissionable material into a tokomak, I guess.

However, if there was something close to a theme in the film, it was "starting over from scratch, and making it right this time."  At the end, Bruce Wayne has ceded the role of Batman to live a relatively normal, and one surmises happy, life.  He's wiped the records of Selina Kyle so that she can start over with him.  Even Bane and Talia, by way of Ra's al-Ghul's rantings, essentially wanted to start Gotham, perhaps all civilization, over, if only by devastating it.  Hell, I'd bet good money than there's a deleted scene where Jim Gordon gets back together with his wife.  The notion is a powerful and seductive one--all those "criminals," rounded up and subject to massive sentences under the vaguely fascist Dent Act, all the people who took part in the looting and rioting, all the billionaires whose money was lost--all have to start over.  And a new Batman--I'm gonna pretend his "legal name" was "Richard Grayson" and not "Robin" because the latter would be really stupid--will be there to police the disorder that will inevitably occur when all Gotham is given a second chance to do things right.

But nah, Selina Kyle gets the magic key to a new life, even though thousands of people who did the exact same sort of things she did, and arguably had even less choice, are no doubt being convicted of treason to the United States, acts which led to the deaths and suffering of millions of people.  A heel-face turn is no defense, not even a moral one, given her level of involvement, and the heinousness of what she's helped happen.  But Bruce gives her, and her alone, a second chance.

Because Italy or whatever non-destroyed part of the world that was is nice this time of year, and because he wants to fuck her.[/spoiler]

That is unbelievably weak; and it's even weaker coming from Batman.