On July 18 2012 22:18 corumjhaelen wrote: I think I provided some pretty good arguments in my posts, but hey, I'm just a hater I guess. The bandwagon on Nolan is just due to the fact that he's pretty good at making his viewers think they are smart with cheap plot tricks and idiotic pseudo-philosophical background.
Well, my favorite Noland film is "The Prestige," which is relatively devoid of what most people (generally) ascribe to "Inception."
As for his movies, I don't really get the sense that he tries to force "pseudo-philosophical" things into them. I would be the first to leap onto it if he did, but I just don't get the feeling that he does.
I find that his movies deal with very practical struggles, the kind that the average person finds himself faced with.
My favorite, The Prestige, is really just 1-2 hour focus on obsession.
Even Batman struggles with the idea of being a hero. What is best? To fight like a dark knight, or let a rightious prosecutor do the work? What part of me is doing this for my own sake? What part of me is doing this for the sake of other people?
In memento we have the almost unavoidable question of what makes a person. Do I do the things I do because of my inherent personality? Or because I am forced by the outside world? It's classic nature/nurture.
None of it can really be called pseudo-philosophical. I would admit that it is philosophy 101, but it isn't pseudo in any way, imo anyway.
I think he can make a lot of people feel smart because he introduces very basic moral questions. He doesn't try to go very deep, but he doesn't ignore it either. I think that is a very good position for an action film to possess.
The very fact that he puts these questions out there puts him above the average. You might argue that the average is very low, but he still goes beyond the average imo.
Nolan is surely above average as a director. I think people get a bit anti because on many forums people are comparing Nolan to Kubrick or other top directors.
My biggest gripe with both Batman and Inception is that i feel like stuff happens that break immersion. Like Nolan decided that something should happen even though it goes against human nature, common sense, or believability.
I gave an example of the hospital scene where i'd much rather have had something smaller i size and more believable instead of a fucking planned demolition of an entire building complex. Same with the fat guy with a bomb, it goes of at the perfect timing (right after police find it). The weirdest part of that scene is that the joker has a hostage and 3-4 policemen pointing guns at him. The station explodes and 5 seconds later all police are gone and just the joker is standing, you don't survive that shit just because you know it's coming. Same with the hostage that is left alone with the most dangerous villain in Gotham, in a interrogation room filled with long slivers of sharp broken glass...
There's alot of stuff like this in the film, and also alot of character decisions i find wierd. Two face just buys into the jokers lame bullshit about everything being Batmans fault. To me it breaks immersion because it's not logical nor believable. One could argue that twoface is damaged but it could have been handled better.
Inception has even more of that stuff but lets not get into it.
On July 18 2012 14:35 Aerisky wrote: You should have seen the stuff flying around in the inception thread yo :<
Seems Christopher Nolan's more recent movies have all been very polarizing somehow; almost everyone is either part of the pro/hype camp, or part of the con/reactionary camp >.<
Not really polarizing, just a very loud anti-minority, as is the case with any big or even good movie these days.
Each of his latest films has received wide acclaim and box office succes. You just get people that feel the need to remind people that they have seen black/white movies and talk about how much more exciting of an action movie Citizen Kane is.
Yeah fair enough, with the ratings it has gotten, you just have to mark it down as a small but vocal anti-group. Though I think it's a bit unfair to generalize their opinions that way. I'm sure they do have their own reasons for disliking the movie, and not necessarily out of spite or love for old "classics".
Of course, some people have very valid complaints, and some can even articulate them properly, but on average I find the reaction to just be one of anti-popularity.
I won't claim that popularity makes right, there are plenty of things that are popular which aren't exactly high quality entertainment, but when so many people love something, and so many critics give it almost unanimous praise, people on the other end are going to have to do better than:
"It's an average movie"
or for those who have seen the inside of a film class
"He breaks the 180 rule"
You can say that Nolan's films are average, and I would be on the complete opposite end of that debate, but at least provide a few arguments for that position.
Nolan's films receive tons of praise, so well thought out criticism would be a welcome change of pace, but we rarely get that. When you say his movies are average, it goes against not just what the majority thinks, but even what the critics think, so what is it? Do those people have some deeper insight? Did they see something we are missing?
Right now you just have the majority of people, which love his films, and the occasional voice that disagrees. The level of debate is so low because people just exchange "it's great" and "it's horrible". Nobody really explains their arguments, it is just a repeated chanting of one's position.
Ok, I take that as an invitation for debate...
To begin, I'd like to make a couple of things clear: I'm not writing about Nolan's movies in general but about the Dark Knight trilogy, especially The Dark Knight. Also, I don't think that Batman Begins or The Dark Knight are bad movies. However, I'm not that impressed either.
To elaborate further, I wasn't too impressed by Batman Begins, and I think that The Dark Knight was above-average as far as action movies go (so I'm not really in the "It's an average movie"-crowd, but close enough, so for the sake of argument let's pretend that I am). However, especially The Dark Knight received the lion's share of its praise for the characterization of the Joker, and this praise was awarded to Heath Ledger post mortem... and I can't help to think that his untimely death had a big influence on the reception of the movie. To put it simply, The Dark Knight felt overhyped. Call it the James Dean-effect if you want.
Contains spoilers regarding The Dark Knight, not the new movie:+ Show Spoiler +
Now, even though I agree that Heath Ledger was certainly very good in that role, I think that the movie as a whole wasn't. Firstly, I think that the premise of a "more realistic" Batman movie is absurd. That doesn't mean that I'm a spandex salesman, but a "realistic" Batman should just put himself into Arkham Asylum. If billionaire Bruce Wayne wants to do good, then I'm sure that there are perfectly legal ways for him to do more good than by sponsoring himself as a costumed vigilante. That lamborghini he crashes to stop just one guy could probably feed Gotham City's homeless for a week, nevermind that Gotham's police force may be underpaid and corrupt to the bone because a good part of the city's budget goes into cleaning the streets after a night of car chases with a fucking landraider. That said, I don't want a Batman movie to be "more realistic", but I also don't take it as a quality seal over other superhero movies that work under similarly absurd premises.
Secondly, parts of TDK feel like a montage rather than a coherent story. The most obvious thing is when Bruce Wayne leaves the party at his manor when the Joker and his henchmen show up, comes back as Batman, rescues one girl, and then... cut. Does he have a mobile phone in that utility belt? If so, why not call the police to the party? Why not take the Joker down right then and there? What does the Joker do (to Bruce's guests) after Batman leaves? Nevermind. Another example would be the whole escapade where Batman travels to Hong Kong. It starts with Dent and Gordon asking Batman to kidnap a gangster, and to bring him from Hong Kong back to Gotham City. Interestingly, they don't know that Batman is a billionaire, so why can they assume that he's even able to pull that stunt off? One would imagine that what we see from the abduction is only part of the problem, and that it's quite expensive to get a recently kidnapped citizen out of China, especially given that he has influential friends and realistically also the state forces looking for him. I won't even go to the point where the international relations between China and the USA come into play. The whole subplot ends when we see that Bruce Wayne has literally the worst alibi in the world, an alibi that, amongst others, a whole troupe of ballet dancers could disprove. All that to establish Dent as a "successful" crime fighter...
Third, some characterizations seem awfully pushed. Traumatized people usually don't become superheros or supervillains, so it takes a little more than eight-degree-burns to convince me that Dent goes from philantroph to psychopath from one scene to another. Yes, we were already shown that he was frustrated before; but we were also shown how he would put himself in the line of fire for the greater good before his face melted. And somehow I get the impression that I could be a Joker-esque criminal mastermind as well in Gotham City, given that police and mob (not to mention hospital or harbor security personnel) are completely incompetent... especially if I make up my plans post-hoc. Sure, turning Dent to the dark side was my plan all along; luckily, I didn't kill him in the process, even though I sure tried multiple times, because that would have seriously fucked up my gambit.
Last, what some critics have taken as clever and stunning moral lemmata strikes me as the sledgehammer-version. For example, Batman builds big brother's wet dream of a surveillance system - I won't even ask how Bruce Wayne does this, probably even all by himself, because otherwise all the technicians involved should now know about his secret identity. Entrace Lucius Fox, who has scruples... then agrees to use the system, only to destroy it afterwards. So, what's the purpose of this moral dilemma in the movie? Is it just there to be a moral dilemma, or does it have any other implications? Does it justify what could be interpreted as a deus ex machina that allows the movie to just skip to the next action scene? Why would Batman even need such a deus ex machina, given that he's supposed to be "the world's greatest detective" and not the world's biggest fascist? On a sidenote, as a viewer, I feel perfectly able to understand that there's a moral dilemma without explicitly and ad nauseam being told that there's a moral dilemma. Those are George Lucas-level dialogues where characterization is expressed by the characters speaking about their characterization.
It's been a while that I've seen Batman Begins, so I won't give similar examples for that one. I hope that I have made myself clear as to why I don't regard the Dark Knight trilogy (or at least the parts I have seen so far) as brilliant movies that ought to be shelved back to back with the masterpieces. I don't think that they are bad movies, and TDK is even above-average as far as action flicks go... but if try to hold them to higher standards, as I did in the paragraphs above, they don't meet these standards.
That said, I hope that the new movie will be just as entertaining as TDK, and I'll be sure to see it some day - because I like superhero movies, not because I expect it to be anything more than a decent action movie.
On a completely unrelated note, I disagree on your evaluation of popularity. Why shouldn't a movie that appeals to the average viewer be an average movie? Isn't that part of what makes it average - that it appeals to the average taste? I'd argue that Bach is a better componist than Kate Perry. I'd say that Lem is a better fantasy author than Rowling. Maybe a majority of people would disagree here, and sales figures certainly do, but does that even matter? Isn't that more a case of average taste being terrible and good taste being rare? To take this to the extreme, doesn't Parker have an objectively better taste in wine than 99% of us?
On July 18 2012 22:43 karpo wrote: Nolan is surely above average as a director. I think people get a bit anti because on many forums people are comparing Nolan to Kubrick or other top directors.
My biggest gripe with both Batman and Inception is that i feel like stuff happens that break immersion. Like Nolan decided that something should happen even though it goes against human nature, common sense, or believability.
I gave an example of the hospital scene where i'd much rather have had something smaller i size and more believable instead of a fucking planned demolition of an entire building complex. Same with the fat guy with a bomb, it goes of at the perfect timing (right after police find it). The weirdest part of that scene is that the joker has a hostage and 3-4 policemen pointing guns at him. The station explodes and 5 seconds later all police are gone and just the joker is standing, you don't survive that shit just because you know it's coming.
There's alot of stuff like this in the film, and also alot of character decisions i find wierd. Two face just buys into the jokers lame bullshit about everything being Batmans fault. To me it breaks immersion because it's not logical nor believable. One could argue that twoface is damaged but it could have been handled better.
Inception has even more of that stuff but lets not get into it.
I haven't seen many people make that comparison, but I'll accept that you saw that. It is true that people have Nolan in high regard, I won't deny that I am one of those people.
Myself, I am someone that doesn't really mind small leaps in logic that much. I find it very difficult to appreciate movies that are "realistic." I don't enjoy people swapping quick dialogue and talking over one another, in that regard I am more a Sorkin-person, prefering the impossibly witty exchanges that only occur in Hollywood productions.
I accept such small violations of reality, as long as they provide exciting scenes or good performances/dialogue.
I don't think there is anything wrong with movies existing in a "movie realm" where people accept things that wouldn't ever occur in real life.
For movies, I feel that the sweet spot are the batman films. In some way you can accept that it could happen in real life, but if it was actually real-life, you know it would never ever happen. In my opinion, Nolan really knows how to balance on that line between realistic, and movie-universe.
I won't argue that he puts down a super realistic super-hero universe. I will only argue that he understands that the comic-hero world will never be realistic, but he still manages to portray it as realistic within the bounds of the movie-universe.
I truthfully believe that movies can portray their own "reality." A sort of hybrid between "yeah this could happen," whilst also allowing for more extrovert performances like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
Perhaps it is the alcohol speaking, but I believe realism in movies can go beyond what is considered realistic in real life, and I find that Nolan really knows how to balance that line.
On July 18 2012 22:43 karpo wrote: Nolan is surely above average as a director. I think people get a bit anti because on many forums people are comparing Nolan to Kubrick or other top directors.
My biggest gripe with both Batman and Inception is that i feel like stuff happens that break immersion. Like Nolan decided that something should happen even though it goes against human nature, common sense, or believability.
I gave an example of the hospital scene where i'd much rather have had something smaller i size and more believable instead of a fucking planned demolition of an entire building complex. Same with the fat guy with a bomb, it goes of at the perfect timing (right after police find it). The weirdest part of that scene is that the joker has a hostage and 3-4 policemen pointing guns at him. The station explodes and 5 seconds later all police are gone and just the joker is standing, you don't survive that shit just because you know it's coming.
There's alot of stuff like this in the film, and also alot of character decisions i find wierd. Two face just buys into the jokers lame bullshit about everything being Batmans fault. To me it breaks immersion because it's not logical nor believable. One could argue that twoface is damaged but it could have been handled better.
Inception has even more of that stuff but lets not get into it.
I haven't seen many people make that comparison, but I'll accept that you saw that. It is true that people have Nolan in high regard, I won't deny that I am one of those people.
Myself, I am someone that doesn't really mind small leaps in logic that much. I find it very difficult to appreciate movies that are "realistic." I don't enjoy people swapping quick dialogue and talking over one another, in that regard I am more a Sorkin-person, prefering the impossibly witty exchanges that only occur in Hollywood productions.
I accept such small violations of reality, as long as they provide exciting scenes or good performances/dialogue.
I don't think there is anything wrong with movies existing in a "movie realm" where people accept things that wouldn't ever occur in real life.
For movies, I feel that the sweet spot are the batman films. In some way you can accept that it could happen in real life, but if it was actually real-life, you know it would never ever happen. In my opinion, Nolan really knows how to balance on that line between realistic, and movie-universe.
I won't argue that he puts down a super realistic super-hero universe. I will only argue that he understands that the comic-hero world will never be realistic, but he still manages to portray it as realistic within the bounds of the movie-universe.
I truthfully believe that movies can portray their own "reality." A sort of hybrid between "yeah this could happen," whilst also allowing for more extrovert performances like Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
Perhaps it is the alcohol speaking, but I believe realism in movies can go beyond what is considered realistic in real life, and I find that Nolan really knows how to balance that line.
Then that's where we disagree. I think it's just a case of suspension of disbelief. I can watch Pans Labyrinth or Jacobs Ladder and never break suspension of disbelief, yet in every Nolan movie it happens over and over. It's just a matter of taste i guess.
While I may not agree with you 100%, I definitely understand what you're saying and hold the same opinion on essentially everything.
At the end of the day, I find this movie franchise enjoyable because it's, in general, very entertaining and just a nice watch. While I don't completely turn off my brain, I definitely don't have to think too hard during the course of the movie and must ignore some of the plot holes and the breaks in suspension of disbelief. Some of your criticisms just have to come with the superhero genre. Nolan's vision isn't a radical departure from the comic books, and as such, it inherently carries some of the same lack of believability. There probably isn't any reason to hold it up as an artistic masterpiece for sure.
I think it just incorporates and conveys very basic themes--which are admittedly largely absent from other blockbuster action or superhero movies--effectively to a large audience and fulfills its intended purpose of entertainment and/or profitability. In that, the movie is a success but no artistic triumph of course. Cheers!
On July 18 2012 22:48 Poffel wrote: Ok, I take that as an invitation for debate...
To begin, I'd like to make a couple of things clear: I'm not writing about Nolan's movies in general but about the Dark Knight trilogy, especially The Dark Knight. Also, I don't think that Batman Begins or The Dark Knight are bad movies. However, I'm not that impressed either.
To elaborate further, I wasn't too impressed by Batman Begins, and I think that The Dark Knight was above-average as far as action movies go (so I'm not really in the "It's an average movie"-crowd, but close enough, so for the sake of argument let's pretend that I am). However, especially The Dark Knight received the lion's share of its praise for the characterization of the Joker, and this praise was awarded to Heath Ledger post mortem... and I can't help to think that his untimely death had a big influence on the reception of the movie. To put it simply, The Dark Knight felt overhyped. Call it the James Dean-effect if you want.
I'll try to reply as best as I can. Please excuse any mistakes in terms of grammar, I am not at my best.
I will agree to keep the debate focused around the Batman trilogy. I'll also admit that, whilst the performance of Heath as the Joker was largely earned, it also partly earns its fame from being Heath's last role.
Contains spoilers regarding The Dark Knight, not the new movie:Now, even though I agree that Heath Ledger was certainly very good in that role, I think that the movie as a whole wasn't. Firstly, I think that the premise of a "more realistic" Batman movie is absurd. That doesn't mean that I'm a spandex salesman, but a "realistic" Batman should just put himself into Arkham Asylum. If billionaire Bruce Wayne wants to do good, then I'm sure that there are perfectly legal ways for him to do more good than by sponsoring himself as a costumed vigilante. That lamborghini he crashes to stop just one guy could probably feed Gotham City's homeless for a week, nevermind that Gotham's police force may be underpaid and corrupt to the bone because a good part of the city's budget goes into cleaning the streets after a night of car chases with a fucking landraider. That said, I don't want a Batman movie to be "more realistic", but I also don't take it as a quality seal over other superhero movies that work under similarly absurd premises.
Part of me agrees, part of me disagrees.
Like I mentioned in an earlier post, I feel that reality in movies and reality in...well...reality, aren't the same thing. We can experience something as realistic in a movie, whilst never believing it in real life. A billionaire turned super hero would be one of those.
Sure, Bruce Wayne would in reality be more likely to donate to a soup kitchen than put on a bat-suit, but Nolan attempts to portray it as realistic as possible, almost becoming a crime movie.
I think your desire to just have it be a hero movie without any attempt for realism isn't a bad perspective, just a different one from Noland. I like that he tries to keep it realistic, but I won't claim that that is what makes it better. It is just a different take on the material, not better, not worse, just different.
I think that is a valid point to make, but not one that Noland should take to heart. Some people will appreciate it, others will not. Just a matter of taste.
Secondly, parts of TDK feel like a montage rather than a coherent story. The most obvious thing is when Bruce Wayne leaves the party at his manor when the Joker and his henchmen show up, comes back as Batman, rescues one girl, and then... cut. Does he have a mobile phone in that utility belt? If so, why not call the police to the party? Why not take the Joker down right then and there? What does the Joker do (to Bruce's guests) after Batman leaves? Nevermind. Another example would be the whole escapade where Batman travels to Hong Kong. It starts with Dent and Gordon asking Batman to kidnap a gangster, and to bring him from Hong Kong back to Gotham City. Interestingly, they don't know that Batman is a billionaire, so why can they assume that he's even able to pull that stunt off? One would imagine that what we see from the abduction is only part of the problem, and that it's quite expensive to get a recently kidnapped citizen out of China, especially given that he has influential friends and realistically also the state forces looking for him. I won't even go to the point where the international relations between China and the USA come into play. The whole subplot ends when we see that Bruce Wayne has literally the worst alibi in the world, an alibi that, amongst others, a whole troupe of ballet dancers could disprove. All that to establish Dent as a "successful" crime fighter...
Again, I feel that it exists within the world of movie-reality where the movie is realistic in the world of movies, though not realistic in the sense of our world.
In the end, realisim must bend to the whims of movie-making. Batman could take down the Joker at the party, but that wouldn't be exciting. I'll admit that that is a weakness. The best movie scripts don't need to make that compremise between exciting story and realism. So, surely a weakness, but in my opinion not large enough to pose a serious detriment to the overall movie.
As for the second half, I think this is just another clash of realism and movie-realism. A completely fictional movie wouldn't deal at all with the fact that China doesn't extradite. Movie-realism makes that middle-ground where the movie acknowledges it, but doesn't make an hour-long tangent about how difficult it is to kidnap a Chinese national from China (aka impossible without causing a political riot).
Third, some characterizations seem awfully pushed. Traumatized people usually don't become superheros or supervillains, so it takes a little more than eight-degree-burns to convince me that Dent goes from philantroph to psychopath from one scene to another. Yes, we were already shown that he was frustrated before; but we were also shown how he would put himself in the line of fire for the greater good before his face melted. And somehow I get the impression that I could be a Joker-esque criminal mastermind as well in Gotham City, given that police and mob (not to mention hospital or harbor security personnel) are completely incompetent... especially if I make up my plans post-hoc. Sure, turning Dent to the dark side was my plan all along; luckily, I didn't kill him in the process, even though I sure tried multiple times, because that would have seriously fucked up my gambit.
The Joker's goal wasn't to trick Dent, it just happened to be convient, that is the vibe I got from the story.
As for Dent's turn to the evil, I'll agree that it could have been done a great deal better, but for me as a viewer, I found it "good enough." Sure, it could have been done better, but it was good enough for me to accept the twist. I feel that this is a problem that can almost never be fixed.
To really portray a "fall from grace" story, that can take an entire movie. I think Noland displayed the minium. You can complain about that, but I feel that it was done "good enough" for it to be believable.
Last, what some critics have taken as clever and stunning moral lemmata strikes me as the sledgehammer-version. For example, Batman builds big brother's wet dream of a surveillance system - I won't even ask how Bruce Wayne does this, probably even all by himself, because otherwise all the technicians involved should now know about his secret identity. Entrace Lucius Fox, who has scruples... then agrees to use the system, only to destroy it afterwards. So, what's the purpose of this moral dilemma in the movie? Is it just there to be a moral dilemma, or does it have any other implications? Does it justify what could be interpreted as a deus ex machina that allows the movie to just skip to the next action scene? Why would Batman even need such a deus ex machina, given that he's supposed to be "the world's greatest detective" and not the world's biggest fascist? On a sidenote, as a viewer, I feel perfectly able to understand that there's a moral dilemma without explicitly and ad nauseam being told that there's a moral dilemma. Those are George Lucas-level dialogues where characterization is expressed by the characters speaking about their characterization.
The last act is the weakest and most obviously contains forced moral choices. I won't deny that it is the weakest of the acts.
It might not provide the most exciting of debates, but I agree with you that TDK has a weak final act. The idea of the Joker using two ships is just too forced and too textbook-morality.
It's been a while that I've seen Batman Begins, so I won't give similar examples for that one. I hope that I have made myself clear as to why I don't regard the Dark Knight trilogy (or at least the parts I have seen so far) as brilliant movies that ought to be shelved back to back with the masterpieces. I don't think that they are bad movies, and TDK is even above-average as far as action flicks go... but if try to hold them to higher standards, as I did in the paragraphs above, they don't meet these standards.
That said, I hope that the new movie will be just as entertaining as TDK, and I'll be sure to see it some day - because I like superhero movies, not because I expect it to be anything more than a decent action movie.
On a completely unrelated note, I disagree on your evaluation of popularity. Why shouldn't a movie that appeals to the average viewer be an average movie? Isn't that part of what makes it average - that it appeals to the average taste? I'd argue that Bach is a better componist than Kate Perry. I'd say that Lem is a better fantasy author than Rowling. Maybe a majority of people would disagree here, and sales figures certainly do, but does that even matter? Isn't that more a case of average taste being terrible and good taste being rare? To take this to the extreme, doesn't Parker have an objectively better taste in wine than 99% of us?
Honestly, I might not be entirely lucid, but I think we actually agree on the majority of points.
The Batman movies aren't masterpieces, but they are above average (Agreed.)
The final act is the weakest (Agreed).
As for your tangent on popularity, I don't think I can give that a proper respond at this point, I will respond to it at a later point.
I never planned on seeing the TDNR because I think 2 hours and 45 minutes is too long for a movie no matter how good it is. Now that I found out that Donald Trump has given it a good review I am going to see it just too support him.
I do not watch many movies but after seeing The Dark Knight, I can not wait for this movie to come out. Also, I did not enjoy Batman Begins that much compared to The Dark Knight.
Just got back from an early screening that my friend won tickets to. Not going to spoil it for anybody but it was well worth the wait, time, and money. Nolan is Tarentino status: Both have never have directed a movie that I have not thourghly enjoyed from start to finish. Rank 3/1/2 in my preference of the trilogy.
On July 19 2012 04:27 Iteachextra wrote: I never planned on seeing the TDKR because I think 2 hours and 45 minutes is too long for a movie no matter how good it is. Now that I found out that Donald Trump has given it a good review I am going to see it just too support him. + Show Spoiler +
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxyPQ4_Xeqc
Fixed it for you ^^
Also, it's 2 hours and 45 minutes?! All the better, really getting our money's worth. In fact, I prefer long movies because (if well-directed and overall good) it's just more entertainment value.
Nolan also weighed in on conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh's contention that the villain in the movie, Bane, was an attempt to make a disparaging link to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital.
"I'm not sure how to address something that bizarre, to be honest. I really don't have an answer for it, it's a very peculiar comment to make," he said.
Nolan also weighed in on conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh's contention that the villain in the movie, Bane, was an attempt to make a disparaging link to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's former company Bain Capital.
"I'm not sure how to address something that bizarre, to be honest. I really don't have an answer for it, it's a very peculiar comment to make," he said.
I'm at a loss as to what to think about that. I guess I'll just go with the "lolwut" response.
HAHAHAHAHAHA oh my goodness, thanks for the share.
I love how he's literally just sort of confused c:
Limbaugh is un-American, clearly he has never read Batman comments growing up and has failed to realize that Bane is by no means new to the franchise. At all. Heck, I don't even read comics for the most part but somehow know that there's a guy named Bane.
On July 18 2012 14:35 Aerisky wrote: You should have seen the stuff flying around in the inception thread yo :<
Seems Christopher Nolan's more recent movies have all been very polarizing somehow; almost everyone is either part of the pro/hype camp, or part of the con/reactionary camp >.<
Not really polarizing, just a very loud anti-minority, as is the case with any big or even good movie these days.
Each of his latest films has received wide acclaim and box office succes. You just get people that feel the need to remind people that they have seen black/white movies and talk about how much more exciting of an action movie Citizen Kane is.
Yeah fair enough, with the ratings it has gotten, you just have to mark it down as a small but vocal anti-group. Though I think it's a bit unfair to generalize their opinions that way. I'm sure they do have their own reasons for disliking the movie, and not necessarily out of spite or love for old "classics".
Of course, some people have very valid complaints, and some can even articulate them properly, but on average I find the reaction to just be one of anti-popularity.
I won't claim that popularity makes right, there are plenty of things that are popular which aren't exactly high quality entertainment, but when so many people love something, and so many critics give it almost unanimous praise, people on the other end are going to have to do better than:
"It's an average movie"
or for those who have seen the inside of a film class
"He breaks the 180 rule"
You can say that Nolan's films are average, and I would be on the complete opposite end of that debate, but at least provide a few arguments for that position.
Nolan's films receive tons of praise, so well thought out criticism would be a welcome change of pace, but we rarely get that. When you say his movies are average, it goes against not just what the majority thinks, but even what the critics think, so what is it? Do those people have some deeper insight? Did they see something we are missing?
Right now you just have the majority of people, which love his films, and the occasional voice that disagrees. The level of debate is so low because people just exchange "it's great" and "it's horrible". Nobody really explains their arguments, it is just a repeated chanting of one's position.
Ok, I take that as an invitation for debate...
To begin, I'd like to make a couple of things clear: I'm not writing about Nolan's movies in general but about the Dark Knight trilogy, especially The Dark Knight. Also, I don't think that Batman Begins or The Dark Knight are bad movies. However, I'm not that impressed either.
To elaborate further, I wasn't too impressed by Batman Begins, and I think that The Dark Knight was above-average as far as action movies go (so I'm not really in the "It's an average movie"-crowd, but close enough, so for the sake of argument let's pretend that I am). However, especially The Dark Knight received the lion's share of its praise for the characterization of the Joker, and this praise was awarded to Heath Ledger post mortem... and I can't help to think that his untimely death had a big influence on the reception of the movie. To put it simply, The Dark Knight felt overhyped. Call it the James Dean-effect if you want.
Contains spoilers regarding The Dark Knight, not the new movie:+ Show Spoiler +
Now, even though I agree that Heath Ledger was certainly very good in that role, I think that the movie as a whole wasn't. Firstly, I think that the premise of a "more realistic" Batman movie is absurd. That doesn't mean that I'm a spandex salesman, but a "realistic" Batman should just put himself into Arkham Asylum. If billionaire Bruce Wayne wants to do good, then I'm sure that there are perfectly legal ways for him to do more good than by sponsoring himself as a costumed vigilante. That lamborghini he crashes to stop just one guy could probably feed Gotham City's homeless for a week, nevermind that Gotham's police force may be underpaid and corrupt to the bone because a good part of the city's budget goes into cleaning the streets after a night of car chases with a fucking landraider. That said, I don't want a Batman movie to be "more realistic", but I also don't take it as a quality seal over other superhero movies that work under similarly absurd premises.
Secondly, parts of TDK feel like a montage rather than a coherent story. The most obvious thing is when Bruce Wayne leaves the party at his manor when the Joker and his henchmen show up, comes back as Batman, rescues one girl, and then... cut. Does he have a mobile phone in that utility belt? If so, why not call the police to the party? Why not take the Joker down right then and there? What does the Joker do (to Bruce's guests) after Batman leaves? Nevermind. Another example would be the whole escapade where Batman travels to Hong Kong. It starts with Dent and Gordon asking Batman to kidnap a gangster, and to bring him from Hong Kong back to Gotham City. Interestingly, they don't know that Batman is a billionaire, so why can they assume that he's even able to pull that stunt off? One would imagine that what we see from the abduction is only part of the problem, and that it's quite expensive to get a recently kidnapped citizen out of China, especially given that he has influential friends and realistically also the state forces looking for him. I won't even go to the point where the international relations between China and the USA come into play. The whole subplot ends when we see that Bruce Wayne has literally the worst alibi in the world, an alibi that, amongst others, a whole troupe of ballet dancers could disprove. All that to establish Dent as a "successful" crime fighter...
Third, some characterizations seem awfully pushed. Traumatized people usually don't become superheros or supervillains, so it takes a little more than eight-degree-burns to convince me that Dent goes from philantroph to psychopath from one scene to another. Yes, we were already shown that he was frustrated before; but we were also shown how he would put himself in the line of fire for the greater good before his face melted. And somehow I get the impression that I could be a Joker-esque criminal mastermind as well in Gotham City, given that police and mob (not to mention hospital or harbor security personnel) are completely incompetent... especially if I make up my plans post-hoc. Sure, turning Dent to the dark side was my plan all along; luckily, I didn't kill him in the process, even though I sure tried multiple times, because that would have seriously fucked up my gambit.
Last, what some critics have taken as clever and stunning moral lemmata strikes me as the sledgehammer-version. For example, Batman builds big brother's wet dream of a surveillance system - I won't even ask how Bruce Wayne does this, probably even all by himself, because otherwise all the technicians involved should now know about his secret identity. Entrace Lucius Fox, who has scruples... then agrees to use the system, only to destroy it afterwards. So, what's the purpose of this moral dilemma in the movie? Is it just there to be a moral dilemma, or does it have any other implications? Does it justify what could be interpreted as a deus ex machina that allows the movie to just skip to the next action scene? Why would Batman even need such a deus ex machina, given that he's supposed to be "the world's greatest detective" and not the world's biggest fascist? On a sidenote, as a viewer, I feel perfectly able to understand that there's a moral dilemma without explicitly and ad nauseam being told that there's a moral dilemma. Those are George Lucas-level dialogues where characterization is expressed by the characters speaking about their characterization.
It's been a while that I've seen Batman Begins, so I won't give similar examples for that one. I hope that I have made myself clear as to why I don't regard the Dark Knight trilogy (or at least the parts I have seen so far) as brilliant movies that ought to be shelved back to back with the masterpieces. I don't think that they are bad movies, and TDK is even above-average as far as action flicks go... but if try to hold them to higher standards, as I did in the paragraphs above, they don't meet these standards.
That said, I hope that the new movie will be just as entertaining as TDK, and I'll be sure to see it some day - because I like superhero movies, not because I expect it to be anything more than a decent action movie.
On a completely unrelated note, I disagree on your evaluation of popularity. Why shouldn't a movie that appeals to the average viewer be an average movie? Isn't that part of what makes it average - that it appeals to the average taste? I'd argue that Bach is a better componist than Kate Perry. I'd say that Lem is a better fantasy author than Rowling. Maybe a majority of people would disagree here, and sales figures certainly do, but does that even matter? Isn't that more a case of average taste being terrible and good taste being rare? To take this to the extreme, doesn't Parker have an objectively better taste in wine than 99% of us?
I'd like to quickly toss some ideas in.
I think there are some things that you fundamentally aren't grasping about TDK and the Batman Trilogy in general.
1) The whole point is that donating to a soup kitchen or scrapping his fancy cars and feeding everybody for a day isn't going to change anything in the long run. There's probably a point to be made about his father trying similar tactics to no avail.
2) I see where you're coming from when talking about how parts of the movie were kind of rushed/pieced together. However, I don't think they would qualify as actual plot holes or something that would take me out of the movie.
Why didn't he call the cops after saving Rachel? What does it matter? the Joker is a criminal mastermind, it doesn't seem unlikely that he has some kind of escape route.
How did Gordon and Dent know he was a billionaire? They didn't. They know he's a single man who seems to be better than the entire Gotham City Police Department when it comes to catching bad guys and, more importantly, he's outside the law so he's their only chance.
I agree that Dent's transformation seemed forced. There's definitely a case to be made that he has always felt somewhat under appreciated and this was kind of just a tipping point, but they never really conveyed that.
3) As somebody else already pointed out, it wasn't the Joker's plan to turn Dent, it just happened that way... which is what the Joker is all about: chaos. He said a couple times that he doesn't have plans.
I personally don't understand the Batman hate (actually I didn't even know it existed until 15 minutes ago!). They're well cast, well acted, the scores are amazing, they have tremendous replay value, there are deep, long argued philosophical ideas embedded (the noble lie). What else would you want? I know you don't "hate" the movies, but I think to merely say they're "above average as far as action movies go" is just soooo off the mark.
EPT
