The Dark Knight Rises: highlights and lowlights
Just saw The Dark Knight Rises. Highlights of the film, no spoilers. This film gave me No Man's Land arc feelings (especially with the chalked Batman graffiti), which are the best feelings.
* Beautiful beautiful Boston-accented Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Who I kept calling Arthur in my head throughout the entire film. And he drove cars like a Masshole, which is perfectly in-character.
* Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were great as always. Michael Caine, especially, made me cry.
* Gary Oldman had all my feelings, and he was absolutely the heart of this film. He is so very human and wreckable and does his best. I loved him and JGL's Blake teaming up. I loved the entire Gotham City PD entirely and fiercely. I would have watched an entire film about them without the godamn Batman. I need to get my hands on Gotham Central stat. I wonder if our local comic book store has it. I need to go over and check the place out anyway.
* Anne Hathaway was attractively competent, and I loved Catwoman's sass and ninja moves (not to mention the goggles that tilt up on her head and resemble cat ears!) but she didn't have a lot of stage presence.
* Marion Cotillard was perfect as always. I don't think she got enough time or room to show her tremendous acting chops (a failure I also noted in Inception), but it's always great to see her in anything.
* Tom Hardy's arms need their own zip code. I blame Jeremy Renner for giving me a ridiculous thing for arms. I liked his performance a lot, but I wish post production hadn't messed with his voice. Also ditto about the acting chops thing, although he did his best with what he was given. They also edited out his gorgeous tattoos, which I can understand, but...aslkskajla, I looove theeem.
* I still don't care about Bale's Bruce Wayne and his fucking manpain problems. I only have Inception for reference, but does Nolan have a thing for annoying main characters with manpain + more interesting side characters that we actually write the fanfiction about?
* The technology in this film seemed to be a blatant one-up of the technology in the last film. Why did Batman need a plane? That dances close to a deus ex machina in the street chases, although I understand the underground/above ground contrast, but I don't think the plane was necessary. Well...it kind of was important, but that would give away some of the plot. I just wasn't as emotionally attached to it as his previous tech.
* Everybody in this film had a fridged woman in their pasts (except Blake, who was a breath of fresh air. Maybe because he has Eames waiting for him at home), and it really started ticking me off.
* The motivations in the film weren't really that strong to me.
* In my opinion, not as good as Avengers, but still pretty good. There was this one fanboy who attempted to shout me down because he was a much more hardcore comic book fan, and he thought the Dark Knight was better, and obviously he was right because he was a 'better fan' or whatever. Fuck that.
There are two different kinds of fandoms, I've been told. One set of fans show their dedication by knowing every single thing about the canon (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc) down to the gritty details. Another set of fans show their dedication through fanfiction, fan art, things that deviate from and explore the canon. Neither are better than the other, but they're different, and I've always tended towards the latter group while many of my friends have gravitated to the former. I think that fanboy was of the former and an asshole about it.