georgesalbertedouardbrutusgilles:
… When The Dark Knight Rises starts rising, it looks like Bruce Wayne/Batman is about to succumb to his neurological disease when Andy Sachs from The Devil Wears Prada (this is a crossover film, by the way, wherein we learn that Andy is now obsessed with erasing all history of her old Facebook account) poses as a cater waitress to steal Bruce’s fingerprints but ends up stealing 10% of his limited awareness of the outside world. This becomes the film’s tertiary “Bruce Wayne/Batman is sort of in love with someone” story line. The primary story line ends up being about Bruce Wayne/Batman having impromptu back surgery in a Turkish prison and training for a “Climb Out of the Well to Win Your Freedom” Contest. He finally gets out of the well, and then there’s a bomb, and everyone in Gotham City is very scared and confused so they put Cillian Murphy on a giant pile of mahogany desks so that he can order rich people to walk into frozen water and die. Meanwhile, Hannibal Lecter (played by Dwayne Johnson, formerly known as The Rock) has asthma, and we learn that he’s in cahoots with the original “Climb Out of the Well to Win Your Freedom” Contest winner, who slept with Bruce Wayne earlier in the film because she also stole 10% of his limited awareness of the outside world. Alfred cries, and Batman ties the bomb to a helicopter. Everyone thinks Batman is dead so they make a statue, but it turns out Bruce Wayne and Andy Sachs are murdering socialites and assuming false identities in Italy, setting the scene for the next film, The Talented Mr. Dark Knight Wears Prada. (There’s a chance I could be getting some of the details wrong. I got very sleepy during the middle seven hours.)
1. I kept remembering this post and waiting for the movie to become as wackadoo as described. But the movie is dull, underplotted, and overlong. I felt aggrieved when I left.
2. I was surprised to find myself anxious in the theater re: safety. I checked out each person who stood up or bent down. I kept an eye on men sitting by themselves. I was anxious enough to consider leaving—there is a yogurt place in the parking lot—but around the four-hour mark I settled down.
3. When oppressed people (movie’s word) are freed, they run into the streets shooting guns at will and turning rich people out of their homes. I am surprised the director restrained himself from making the prison mob all black—just kidding, black people aren’t allowed in Gotham City unless they’ve received their Magical Negro certification. People who talk about oppression are just trying to redistribute power to themselves. Also they are terrorists. It is as if Sean Hannity cowrote the screenplay; maybe we can call it even after Cornel West consulted on that second Matrix movie.
I’m down with key components of Bane’s political program: prison abolition and wealth redistribution. I look forward to learning about Batman’s plan for righting structural injustice.
4. Even if everything else about the movie was good, that fucking football scene, with the British kid singing the national anthem in a falsetto, is the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, a clip from a movie Frank Drebbin would watch in The Naked Gun.
