Oh, dear, I think I'm in the hard-working, long-suffering parts that would either be an Oscar-winning drama--probably with Sally Field being stoic and plucky and rural--or glossed over with a montage with noble, heart-stirring music. Maybe I'll get a glorious "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" moment.

I'm in the "She's waiting for something to shake her out of her rut" part of the movie, with a voiceover of me declaiming that 40 isn't "middle-aged," blah blah blah.

But I'd prefer this be a quirkyfun movie where "getting out of my rut" means something new and fun, not a trauma-laden movie where "getting out of my rut" is preceded by the loss of my dearest love. I'll keep him in my rut, thanks ever so.

I like ruts. They're comfortable.

Hmm, maybe I'll petition the Great Script Writer for one of those "Everyone thought they were a mild-mannered couple that just seemed to be getting by, but they had a dark secret that was about to be blown out into the open." Kind of like RED with spoiled cats.

I think I'm in the montage part of the movie that lets the writer establish Wacky Things Happen, Okay?, and sets the groundwork for the Really Big Wacky Things that are about to happen.

I'm tired of being Katherine Heigl in the tight-assed part of the movie. Oh, okay, Katherine Heigl has an accident in the tight-assed. rut-driven part of the movie.

heh. Has this already been posted?

[link]

I saw Hope Springs last night and I really liked it a lot. The acting from all three leads was totally wonderful and the script was much deeper and wiser than the stupid trailer implies. It was funny, but in a truthful way. It is all about intimacy and sex and communication and what love really is--so if you like that kinda stuff--go.

1) Zoe Saldana to play Nina Simone: [link]

Hmm. I like Saldana, but she feel too waifish to play Simone.

2) Robert Pattison will play T.E Lawrence in Werner Herzog's Gertrude Bell project (Naomi Watts to play the title role): [link]

The notion of Herzog giving relationship advice to RPats cracks me the hell up.

3) Went to see Beasts of the Southern Wild yesterday. What an extraordinary film. I'm still thinking about it.

Late to the party but Emmett and I finally saw TDKR last night (in IMAX). Damn, that was expensive, but it was the right choice. All future viewings will seem Less Epic.

I've also gone back and read all the white font, so I'm finally up to date in this thread.

Re: Jess' qualms about the politics. I thought the politics in the story were a bit incoherent, but if anything there was a pro-Occupy slant tempered by "And that's how you get ants the French Revolution."

Like several others, I was completely surprised by the Talia reveal. And dag, I read the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neill Ras stories when they originally came out in the early seventies. Those were my earliest Batman comics/exposure (aside from Adam West).

This was my formative Batman storyline.

But I didn't feel stupid about not getting it because I was just wrapped up in the story, and they kept deviating from canon in lots of places.

My Places Of Quibble:

1) Five months to not only recover from a broken back but get back into fighting shape? Because a dude in prison punched you in the vertebrae and hung you from a rope? Then you go climb a wall and do a deadfall of 30 some feet that should displace your back several times over? I kept thinking, "Well Lucius will apparently have some nano-back-fixing app that will need to be injected...

2) Nuclear bomb was still too close and the fallout should've killed everybody in Gotham within the year from radiation poisoning.

The one thing I learned form our attempted "Spiral" rewrite was just how freakin' hard it is to get all the plot points, exposition, season-arc and character beats aligned.

So I was extremely impressed with the script/story that managed to incorporate huge chunks of the extensive No Man's Land, Knightfall and Ras Al Ghul stories, reference and integrate the first two movies into a coherent trilogy, advance the character arcs of Bruce Wayne, Alfred and Jim Gordon, AND give complete character arcs for four new characters in Selina, Blake, Bane and Talia. All while telling the story of this particular movie.

Seriously, that's incredible.

At some point in the movie I realized that I wasn't watching the Bruce Wayne from the comics but rather a very specific Bruce Wayne that exists in this trilogy. That while Nolan obviously knew his batlore and drew on it heavily and to great effect, that Bale's performance and this story were their own thing. And that was good. It had a little more emotional heft for me thinking about this Bruce taking an 8 year hiatus, having wrecked knees, and grieving for Rachel so fully and willing to die for Gotham, and walk away from the mission.

All things that comics Batman probably wouldn't do.

Concur with all the assessments of the acting in the movie. JGL - heart of the story. Loved his working class accent and hard-earned hopefulness. Loved Hathaway's Catwoman who was both of the comics and not. Though as ita notes, she didn't reference earlier performances of the character. Hardy was SO menacing and powerful. Caine and Oldman were excellent, as we would expect and given some great, complex scenes to play. But mostly I was taken by Bale's performance in this. The sadness in it. The humanity.