Jessica -

re: the whitefont: hee! That is totally Nolan loving puzzles, which I enjoy, but it is a bit much on a second viewing.

I know he wanted to shoot some footage of OWS at one point but... the movie had already been in production for months before Occupy started; I'd be genuinely stunned if they were rewriting at that point. I've seen political readings elsewhere that are much more extreme, so this isn't all directed at you; I'm just venting the arguments I keep writing and deleting elsewhere... But in order to see it as a condemnation of OWS I think you have to ignore how the One Percent (and authority in general) is presented.

Like, Dagget's certainly not there to demonstrate that the free market is awesome. Mayor Batmanuel is disloyal, Gordon's a liar, the Dep Com is a coward, the Senator is a slimeball, the President is useless, and the state cops are SUCH dicks. Oh, and Wayne's a lunatic, obviously. Frankly, Blake could twiddle his thumbs through the movie and still come out of it a hero.

I do think it would have helped to some average-Joe non-orphan characters, but... then you also have to work them in, and the movie's even longer. I'd be fine with that personally, but I felt that way about TDK and am not a representative sample.

I do think it helped me on a second viewing to understand that Bane's speeches aren't meant for the people in Gotham. They're performances for the rest of the world, so that they believe this is a populist uprising. And what Anne said with less babbling: I don't see it so much as "this side is good and that side is bad" as "if the system is this corrupt, eventually there will be a reaction."

Sort of an aside but this is why the phone-shenanigans in TDK read to me as a question, not propaganda. If it was an endorsement of wiretapping, Lucius would say, "I know you're a good person and won't abuse this power, so it's fine." Instead Bruce goes out of his way to give control of it to Lucius, who thinks it's terrible, and destroys it once it's served a specific purpose. That doesn't map to what happened in reality. Although if the NSA said "We're gonna let the ACLU decide when we're have a good reason to eavesdrop," I'd be cooler with it.

I LESS THAN THREE THIS MOVIE even while finding it unsettling and strange. Or, much more likely, because.

I still have no desire to re-watch The Dark Knight (I don't *dislike* it; but...well, I've already said it: too grim for me), but while I found The Dark Knight Rises unsettling, I need to see it again. For the last half hour alone.

Sort of an aside but this is why the phone-shenanigans in TDK read to me as a question, not propaganda. If it was an endorsement of wiretapping, Lucius would say, "I know you're a good person and won't abuse this power, so it's fine." Instead Bruce goes out of his way to give control of it to Lucius, who thinks it's terrible, and destroys it once it's served a specific purpose.

It still makes me laugh that there's one throwaway line in Avengers about S.H.I.E.L.D. wiretapping/scanning all laptops/spectrometers, etc., to look for the Flebotunum Cube. Like, "Yup, we do this shit all the time, but it's cool: we're S.H.I.E.L.D."

Same thing with the difference between Bruce and Lucius being all "This clean energy project could DESTROY THE PLANET," and Tony Stark being all "Check out Stark Tower, BITCHES."

I love Marvel.

I do think it helped me on a second viewing to understand that

Yes, very much so. He's posturing. The crowd reaction to him is not positive, especially after he kills off the Russian scientist.

All of which makes me wonder about his rationale for waiting to destroy Gotham. He told Wayne that it was to allow Gotham to start hoping again before destroying it, or something like that. Which he would achieve by... rendering the city a war zone cut off from the rest of the world? That'll bring back the will to live.

The problem is that right after the stadium scene, we get a montage of nice old Jewish ladies on Fifth Avenue being pulled out of their homes and beaten up by what look an awful lot like regular average people. And there's no counter-montage of regular people being upset that their city has been taken over by terrorists.

Way too much of this movie is 9/11 porn for me not to take that shit personally.

So I went to see Beasts of the Southern Wild last night, and... had to rush out of the theater halfway through and into the restroom to [deleted for TMI].

Second movie this year I've had to leave because of motion-sickness caused by the hand-held camera technique (the first was The Hunger Games). At this rate, I'll be forced to ahem all the new releases, although I had no problems at all with The Avengers.

... PJ isn't shooting The Hobbit with handheld cameras, right?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I remember that happening after Bane 1) reveals the truth about Dent, and 2) opens up Blackgate. Which is why we see Selina & Holly in the trashed mansion later.

I don't know, I mostly think if Nolan intended to make an explicit propaganda piece, he'd do a better job of it.

billytea - It's not that he wants to restore hope, exactly, but he wants to maintain a sliver of it. So they'll be tortured the way he was. (It's also easier to maintain control that way, of course.)

I love Bridesmaids, but shouldn't there be more black people in/at Maya Rudolph's wedding? I can't believe I watched it three times before I thought that...I guess I do have some white privilege after all. Everybody I ever knew that had a big wedding like that, had some annoying cousin that they have to include on pain of Drama. Wanda Sykes could have played her aunt or something(Although I know the wedding is only part of the point of the movie, and I know there are other funny black comediennes besides Wanda, but I think she's hilarious.)

I saw the movie again over the weekend (TDKR) in Imax this time which was just fucking awesome and I still really like the damn movie.

Jessica, I get where you are coming from, but I don't think you can take most of the politics of the movie seriously at all. What Bane wanted (rather, what Talia wanted and Bane wanted what Talia wanted) was to see NYC fall. Their justification for this is Ra's Al Ghul's from the first movie. NYC became corrupt and like the League of Shadows brought down Rome (and other cities before), they were using NYC as a symbol of modern day corruption. So the chaos in NYC with the rich's possessions being taken and the police being killed was all orchestrated by Bane. There was no justice in any of that (see the sentencing hearings).

The one part of the movie that I do take seriously is the failure of institutions. I kind of feel like that was the heart of the trilogy and that Batman himself had to be created to fill a gap. And the end of the movie really did seem to be about the strength of individuals over institutions.

That said, this is not a uniform message about institutions, it seems to me. Most of the cops showed a LOT of bravery in this film (say unlike the previous film where they were complicit in a lot of bad shit). Taken together, I almost feel like Nolan doesn't want the trilogy to say anything clear about politics except that institutions and individuals can be corrupted under the right circumstances, which is like a universal truth anyway.

Unrelated to anything happening here--I think it's a valid question in a TV show, with characters or worlds that have set up clear expectations to say "But why did they do that?"

But with a movie, when you ask "Why did they make the decision that's the movie's premise?" isn't it sometimes sufficient that that's why someone made a movie? If I'm the sort of person that freezes in a conflict and gets bitten by the zombie right away, no one is paying to see my apocalypse story. You're going to pay to see the one where someone did something *not* immediately normal, and escapes--or has luck that saves their lives--or something.

I mean, up to a point, the reason is "because that's the story I chose to film--if you need your story, you film it."

That isn't to explain away incomprehensible fiction, or even unlikely fiction that's framed badly--but the thing about unlikely is that someone does do it, otherwise we'd have called it impossible. And sometimes they do that too. Not every possibility is going to get a movie made out of it. We're not all stranger than fiction. Usually we're too boring for it. Or at least clumsily paced, and unevenly plotted.

If I'm the sort of person that freezes in a conflict and gets bitten by the zombie right away, no one is paying to see my apocalypse story.

What you are in that case is a bit character in a Stephen King novel. We'll get to know you just enough to wonder why we bothered wasting our time reading about you before you die and the plot moves on.

Mostly, though, we'll wonder why we had to read about you picking your nose before you died.