So I saw Batman again and I must admit, now that I've had time to consolidate my thoughts, I really like it. It kicks ass! Christian Bale has never been better. Anne Hathaway turned out to be the perfect choice for Cat Woman. Tom Hardy made a great Bane, and the design for Bane was an interesting, gritty take on what is usually just a juggernaut in a wrestling mask with pipes sticking out of his back. Gary Oldman was great. Michael Caine was great for the ten minutes or so he was around. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt also did a good job of playing the guy who's so obviously Robin it's not even funny.
What I would have loved is some mention of the Joker. I know they wanted to leave him out as a courtesy to Heath Ledger, but I don't see why they had to eliminate any mention of his character. In the end it meant they had to go out of their way to work around his absence. What we do get is a kind of presence through abscence. At the beginning of TDKR, the good guys are still suffering deep psychological problems because of what the Joker did (in short: causing Harvey Dent to be Two-Face and also blowing some stuff up). Because Harvey Dent was like Jesus to the people of Gotham, commissioner Gordon decided to blame his crimes on Batman, who had no choice but to disappear. So at the beginning of this movie, Bruce Wayne is hiding in his mansion with a cane and some classic hermit minge, while Gordon is torn up inside about having to revere the man who tried to kill his family.
Something must be said about the way they write Gordon here. It's such an interesting conflict to explore. Unfortunately we don't get much to time with him because before long he's been worked over by Bane's men and is in hospital for much of the movie. This has come to be something that happens in every Nolan Batman film. Someone, be it the Joker or Bane, will shoot Gordon and he'll disappear for a while, only to suddenly reappear when the opportunity presents itself. In the last movie he was pretending to be a SWAT team member for some weird fucking reason I can't recall. None of this is to say he gets sidelined though. No, the award for shunning a major character entirely from your film goes to Alfred, who is nowhere to be found during the whole Bane taking over Gotham episode and leaves me with the conclusion that he must have been in a coma. That's literally five Alfred-less months of movie time. It's also time he could have spent tracking down Bruce and bringing a rope to help him out of the Earth's asshole.
That brings me to the prison. I loved the whole training montage thing with Bruce bulking up so that he could escape and defeat Bane. But I don't quite buy that this hole in the ground is an inescapable prison. I'm fairly certain the guy from Prisonbreak would have taken one look at that thing and laughed. But without it, we wouldn't have Batman rising from the depths of Siberussiastan or wherever he is, thus giving us a key thematic moment of the movie and also honouring the title.
Catwoman was awesome. They didn't make her a woman who dresses as a cat and hangs out with cats, thank god. Instead they made her a burglar whose goggles give the impression of cat's ears when sitting on top of her head. Nothing about the way they handled her character screams camp, stupid or Halle Berry. It's all done well and in good taste. She also manages to be the one funny character in a film otherwise extremely dark. It's always good to see a male screenwriter pen a good female character. I've always found it rare for us guys to make women appear realistic and engaging on paper. As much as I love Breaking Bad, every single brawd in that show is fucking shocking. The same goes for Lost and about a million other populer shows/films. Even in Nolan's Batman, all we'd ever had until now was Rachel, played by Katie Holmes and Donnie Darko's sister respectively. But she was an awful, whiny damsel-in-distress who gave nothing to the story other than excuses for Bruce to put on the batsuit and jump off buildings (because someone had thrown her off). Now we have Anne Hathaway's Catwoman, who can join Signourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley and Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in the fairly empty Hollywood female character hall of fame.
However I should probably also point out another problem with this movie. A female problem. Chris Nolan has now given us six reimaginings of famous Batman villains. There's Ledger's Joker, Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul, Cillian Murphy's (somewhat underrated) Scarecrow, Aaron Eckhart's Two-Face and Tom Hardy's Bane - all of whom are awesome. Then there's fucking Marion Cotillard's Talia Al Ghul, who is such a corny ass-pull of a character, and shows up so late in the movie, that I've come to hate her almost as much as how they did Venom in Spiderman 3. She exists just long enough for us to not care about her, and her death scene is one of the most hilarious I've seen in a long time. Speaking of villains, I would have loved to see Cillian Murphy do something during the final battle. He appears earlier in the movie, pretending to be a judge as he sentences civilians to death by...walking on ice. But the best thing about his cameo is the scarecrow-like appearance of his gown. It's almost as if Nolan realized how much people hated The Scarecrow's lack of costume in the previous movies and decided to stuff straw into his shirt for this one. I still would have liked him to put that piece of burlap over his head though. Ra's Al Ghul also pops up briefly despite being dead and delivers some exposition while mentioning that there are "other forms of immortality" before literally fading into nothing like the out-of-place ghostly apparition he is. I was almost expecting him to turn up later as a storm cloud sitting in the sky, maybe chatting with Mufasa.
Come to think of it, the plot of this movie is a lot like the Lion King. No really. Batman is exiled and spends time with a couple of odd balls before working up the strength to return. Meanwhile his enemy has turned his home town into an apocalyptic nightmare. It's not exactly verbatim what the Lion King was about, but it definitely tells the same basic story. But what this movie lack in Elton John music, it makes up for with the epic might of Hans Zimmer. The soundtraack does two things simultaneously and flawlessly: it gears you up for some ass-kicking while also filling you with the emotional weight of each scene. When Bane broke Batman's back and swaggered off with a piece of his broken mask, I wasn't thinking "meh, he'll be fine", I was like "OH MY GOD NOOOOO BATMAN'S DEAD WHYYYYYYYYY!!!!". And when he finally climbed out of that hole I was so inspired by the uplifiting roar of every brass instrument imagineable that I forgot there was absolutely no way he was going to be able to return to Gotham. What with every road in and out of the city either destroyed or blocked by the military.
Seriously, what the fuck is with that? How did Bruce get back into the city? Can someone explain that to me? If you can give me a decent explanation I will give you money. I'm serious, I'm that confused. Was there a secret underground tunnel that only he knew about? Did he teleport? I guess I'll just have to file that one away with the question of what happened after Batman rescued Rachel from The Joker at his penthouse party in the last movie. Remember that? Heath Ledger shows up at his place, threatens his guests and then throws his girlfriend out the window. Batman follows suit and manages to save her. But then it's the next scene and all of that happened last night. So what? Did the Joker just leave? Did Batman decide he'd had enough for the night and wouldn't go upstairs to follow up on the crazy clown breaking shit in his house? What?!
Finally, it seems like I can't finish this post without at least mentioning Bane's voice. As much as I loved Bane's character, particularly his design, I hated his voice. It was like a combination of Darth Vader and Sean Connery, only muffled. A lot of the time I couldn't understand a thing he was saying. I think all those who criticized the Batman voice from the Dark Knight will probably have fun tearing into Bane, because even I was annoyed at this, and I love the Batman voice. I don't care how cheesy it sounds to other people - to me it's the epitomy of awesome.
HOOCCCKKEEYYY PAAAADDDSSSSSS!!!
That is all.
Sunday, 29 July 2012
Sunday, 22 July 2012
The Dark Knight Rises
I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this movie because I'd rather see it again first. The cinema I saw it in was a reasonably decent one, but for some reason the sound seemed just a little bit off and the picture just ever so slightly blurry or hard to adjust to and it bugged me from start to finish. As for the movie itself, my thoughts are mixed.
(Spoilers)
The good:
(Spoilers)
The good:
- All the performances.
- The soundtrack, of course.
- The dark look and feel from the first two movies is carried over into this one flawlessly.
- The fact that characters like Catwoman and even that little cop dude had something important to do in the movie.
- Bane was different from previous villains and not just a rehash of The Joker or Two-Face etc. Also he was awesome.
- The action scenes were awesome.
- It tries to be smart and thematic while also entertaining.
- Even after post production tampering Bane's voice was still hard to understand in places.
- This movie nearly disregards the Dark Knight and is more a sequel to Batman Begins. In fact, everything Batman achieved in the Dark Knight counts for shit in this one.
- A hole in the ground with no guards or anything so restricting as a ceiling is supposed to be an inescapable prison.
- Using a piece of rope to fix a crippling back injury.
- How the fuck did Bruce get back into Gotham city after escaping the prison?
- Alfred crying in every scene.
- After three epic films, the chief villain and the final and biggest threat of the series is a woman in a gown who to the best of my knowledge technically isn't a villain in the comics anyway.
- Robin? Fuck off Chris O' Donnell.
- Wayne is Batman in this movie for what feels like about ten minutes.
- He gets over his apparent lack of cartilage problem quite easily.
- In the Dark Knight, the Joker wanted to create chaos in Gotham and show everyone what happens to people's morals when you strip away any kind of order. He brought down Harvey Dent, Gotham's "white knight", and tried to do the same to its "dark knight". He also made a shit ton of money and burned it all just to prove a point. In this movie, all Bane and Leonardo De Caprio's dream wife want to do is blow shit up.
Monday, 16 July 2012
The Paranormal and Me
Last week I posted a review of Slenderman's computer game, which had me sitting as far away from the screen as possible with the volume turned way down as I navigated his forest maze of atmospheric horror. One of the reasons the myth is so addictively frightening to everyone since he emerged online is the idea that the more you know about him, the more interested he is in you, So if you're reading about him he's probably watching you, standing quietly behind you right now as you read this sentence.
And so it's time for my ghost story of the day (which I swear is 100% true). Yesterday I was walking home from the gym in the dark and I noticed the Slenderman symbol (a circle with a cross through it) spray-painted on a fence with the words "FOUND YOU" sprayed beneath in eerily large and spiky letters. I won't say it didn't give me a shock. But I also felt exhilarated for several reasons. Clearly other people are interested enough in obscure stuff to risk getting fined in an attempt to freak out other obscure stuff enthusiasts. Also I thought maybe I was experiencing a genuine encounter with the paranormal. I tried to take a picture of this piece of memetic street-art with my phone and found that it didn't show up on the screen - the way vampires don't show up in mirrors or photos or whatever it is they used to do before they just sparkled and moped. So either I hallucinated what was on that fence, or more likely it wasn't there because my phone camera is just a piece of shit that doesn't work in the dark even with a streetlight shining on what I was trying to capture. Or maybe Slenderman is fucking with me. Who knows?
It just goes to show that sometimes things show up where you least expect them to. I don't generally expect some obscure fact I'm blogging about to appear sprayed on a wall near my house, for much the same reason that I'm surprised when two people I know from very different circumstances turn out to have been best friends since childhood. It's so unlikely that it's almost a religious experience. Or fate. Or aliens...
Cue the X Files theme (dadadadadada woooooooo weeeeeee wooooooo weeeeeeee).
And so it's time for my ghost story of the day (which I swear is 100% true). Yesterday I was walking home from the gym in the dark and I noticed the Slenderman symbol (a circle with a cross through it) spray-painted on a fence with the words "FOUND YOU" sprayed beneath in eerily large and spiky letters. I won't say it didn't give me a shock. But I also felt exhilarated for several reasons. Clearly other people are interested enough in obscure stuff to risk getting fined in an attempt to freak out other obscure stuff enthusiasts. Also I thought maybe I was experiencing a genuine encounter with the paranormal. I tried to take a picture of this piece of memetic street-art with my phone and found that it didn't show up on the screen - the way vampires don't show up in mirrors or photos or whatever it is they used to do before they just sparkled and moped. So either I hallucinated what was on that fence, or more likely it wasn't there because my phone camera is just a piece of shit that doesn't work in the dark even with a streetlight shining on what I was trying to capture. Or maybe Slenderman is fucking with me. Who knows?
It just goes to show that sometimes things show up where you least expect them to. I don't generally expect some obscure fact I'm blogging about to appear sprayed on a wall near my house, for much the same reason that I'm surprised when two people I know from very different circumstances turn out to have been best friends since childhood. It's so unlikely that it's almost a religious experience. Or fate. Or aliens...
Cue the X Files theme (dadadadadada woooooooo weeeeeee wooooooo weeeeeeee).
Monday, 9 July 2012
Slender
The onslaught of pop culture continues in this post with my discovery of a computer game I played for about ten seconds before raping the escape button and fleeing in terror. Based on the ever-expanding, ridiculously populer Slenderman mythos, Slender is a game which lets one experience the nightmare of being stalked by the internet's very own version of the boogeyman for themselves.
Slenderman has been characterized over the last couple of years on forums as a tall, human-like creature who appears to wear a suit. His main gimmick is looking creepy and standing ominously in the background of old photographs. But apparently he also eats children. From what I can remember he was invented on a website called Something Awful as part of a competition to create your own urban legend or something like that. Since his conception he has appeared in numerous, Blair Witch style documentary/found footage Youtube series and now he has his own game.
I'm a fan of Slenderman. He's a perfect of example of the kinds of messed-up things that can only exist because of the internet. People show how strange and creative they can be when given the opportunity to express themselves to the world. Take this blog for example; these posts and the pointless crap I address in them are the product of me being given the freedom to say what I want and when I want. If it weren't for the internet there wouldn't be a Slenderman and you wouldn't know what I think of him and there wouldn't be hundreds of videos on Youtube showing roughly human-shaped whales singing pop songs in something vaguely resembling their original key. Slenderman is an extreme example of this liberty, because he came about as a result of countless people adding to his bizarre mythology, and seemingly independant of each other too.
But my God is the game scary!
The player spawns in a forest somewhere with nothing but a torch and I guess a camera, since you can zoom in and out on the scenery and it makes that camera zooming sound when you do. You have no weapons and your torch's battery is slowly running out. Straight away the game establishes just how vulnerable and isolated you are.
Your objective is to locate eight pieces of paper, which sounds easy enough. But they're scattered all over the game and once you find the first one the music immediately changes, signalling Slenderman's arrival somewhere on the map. From that moment on you're only hope is to keep moving and find those pieces of paper before he collects your soul or whatever the fuck it is he does to his victims.
What's so effective about this scenario is that the music continues to become more intense, and your wiry opponent more and more relentless, as you find each sheet. If he is near you the screen will fill with static and in order to survive the encounter you'll have to run. Like I said there are no weapons, so running is the only thing you can do. Often you'll see him lurking in the distance. If you turn the other way, the worst thing you can then do is turn back to see if he's still there, because most of the time he'll have teleported right up you and you'll shit yourself and lose the game simultaneously. This represents one of the cleverer aspects of the game, in that it uses your naturally curious and paranoid state of mind to your disadvantage.
If you're interested in playing this game, make sure you do so during the day and make sure there are other people around. Otherwise you'll turn into a catatonic mess. However you might find comfort in the very indie/primitive look of this game. It looks more like a prototype than a finished game, and if the mythos continues to enjoy popularity, I'm sure someone will release an improved version like they've done with Minecraft and other indie-type games.
Slenderman has been characterized over the last couple of years on forums as a tall, human-like creature who appears to wear a suit. His main gimmick is looking creepy and standing ominously in the background of old photographs. But apparently he also eats children. From what I can remember he was invented on a website called Something Awful as part of a competition to create your own urban legend or something like that. Since his conception he has appeared in numerous, Blair Witch style documentary/found footage Youtube series and now he has his own game.
I'm a fan of Slenderman. He's a perfect of example of the kinds of messed-up things that can only exist because of the internet. People show how strange and creative they can be when given the opportunity to express themselves to the world. Take this blog for example; these posts and the pointless crap I address in them are the product of me being given the freedom to say what I want and when I want. If it weren't for the internet there wouldn't be a Slenderman and you wouldn't know what I think of him and there wouldn't be hundreds of videos on Youtube showing roughly human-shaped whales singing pop songs in something vaguely resembling their original key. Slenderman is an extreme example of this liberty, because he came about as a result of countless people adding to his bizarre mythology, and seemingly independant of each other too.
But my God is the game scary!
The player spawns in a forest somewhere with nothing but a torch and I guess a camera, since you can zoom in and out on the scenery and it makes that camera zooming sound when you do. You have no weapons and your torch's battery is slowly running out. Straight away the game establishes just how vulnerable and isolated you are.
Your objective is to locate eight pieces of paper, which sounds easy enough. But they're scattered all over the game and once you find the first one the music immediately changes, signalling Slenderman's arrival somewhere on the map. From that moment on you're only hope is to keep moving and find those pieces of paper before he collects your soul or whatever the fuck it is he does to his victims.
What's so effective about this scenario is that the music continues to become more intense, and your wiry opponent more and more relentless, as you find each sheet. If he is near you the screen will fill with static and in order to survive the encounter you'll have to run. Like I said there are no weapons, so running is the only thing you can do. Often you'll see him lurking in the distance. If you turn the other way, the worst thing you can then do is turn back to see if he's still there, because most of the time he'll have teleported right up you and you'll shit yourself and lose the game simultaneously. This represents one of the cleverer aspects of the game, in that it uses your naturally curious and paranoid state of mind to your disadvantage.
If you're interested in playing this game, make sure you do so during the day and make sure there are other people around. Otherwise you'll turn into a catatonic mess. However you might find comfort in the very indie/primitive look of this game. It looks more like a prototype than a finished game, and if the mythos continues to enjoy popularity, I'm sure someone will release an improved version like they've done with Minecraft and other indie-type games.
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