Showing posts with label The Dark Knight Rises. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Dark Knight Rises. Show all posts

Friday, July 20, 2012

The Dark Knight Rises | SPOILER FREE Easter Eggs!

Who the hell nails a cup to the side of a building??
*The following contain no spoilers whatsoever.*

  • First and foremost: NO POST-CREDITS SCENE. Nolan don't play that game. You get a Bat insignia made out of something at the start, and a simple title card at the end. So, relax. Head out and hit the bathroom with confidence.
  • Listen for a police officer's joke about a "giant alligator" in the sewers.
  • Holly Robinson gets a couple scenes. And yes, she does appear to be rather young and of questionable character. And yes, she appears to also have some sort of off-putingly close, Saphic relationship in one of those scenes.

That's really about it. I can recall laughing a single "Ha!" a couple times at certain bits, but–frankly–they're all kind of centered around plot elements. Overall review: excellent. A three act play, as with the others, with multiple perspectives meeting at the head, same as the others. Unlike other failed trilogies, this one has a sense of being "closed." I won't say 'ending,' but the story we've had these past few years feels wrapped up without ending the whole universe–I'm looking at you Matrix Revolutions.


Oh, and actually, Alfred died in the jungle hunting that bandit he mentioned in Batman Begins and this has all been his last fevered dream. At the end Leonardo DiCaprio walks out and says, "That was fucked."

THE END

Thursday, July 19, 2012

The Dark Knight Rises … In My Pants

So today I will be viewing Christopher Nolan's entire Dark Knight series starting at 6:30 p.m.

The funny thing is my ticket came with a free "Dark Knight Corn," a small popcorn exclusive to this marathon. Why didn't they just go ahead and call it "Bat-Corn?" Is Nolan's trilogy too dark to engage in self-referential metahumor? Even out of continuity?

You could top in with Bat-Butter (milked from the winged mammals?) and Bat-Salts (Joker may be faceless now, but the rest of us need not be). Store it in the Bat Cave's Bat-Fridge, next to the Bat Shark Repellent.


I'll have my traditional no-spoiler Easter Egg post some time around 3 a.m., but I'm confident it'll read something to the effect of "It was awesome, go see it now. Twice."

You know, so long as they don't end up revealing Bruce actually died as a kid and this has all been the delusions of his vengeance-racked father of grief-stricken, homicidal mother.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Friday, April 27, 2012

The Problem with Nice Weather is it Brings Out the Shut-Ins

"Bugger this, lads! It's Spring! Let's all run into the streets and arsed!"
Pretty much since Easter I've been dealing with the most insane customers I've ever come across. Today, it was explained to me that the reason for this is the recently clement weather patterns: basement-dwellers, those fearful of intemperate climes, and just the generally too-anal-retentive-to-handle-Winter pour forth from their hoarder caverns and venture out into the wider world to bring misery and madness to the naturally more sociable denizens of their provincial realms.

In fancy talk, "all the crazies come out."

Let's see, today I had to argue with a woman that $49 and a $50 gift card, regardless of to what or when they were applied, will always total $99. When I was done, another customer gave me the middle-aged woman equivalent of Mad Props for beating math into another living creature. (This of course caused the Universe to send the original client back for Round 2, but I was expecting this.)

Earlier this week, a woman called and demanded I wander into a particular section of our store to look for a product that may or may not have been there, but refused to think hard enough to try and remember a title, or an author, or any information at all. When I took so long, with help of the department lead mind you, to find said product, she called back, and immediately said to who picked up the phone, "I just spoke to some jerk named David." She then went through the same process with this employee, admitted the product was not in the store and was a special order, but then refused to give her name or contact information because "She runs her own business." Then she used her daughter's name instead, got no result obviously, demanded to speak to the manager, and then hung up in the intervening 30 seconds.

So I'm a jerk now. A jerk who can't do maths.

And screw it. The day after Easter, a woman called in and accused me of being racist. On Easter. Said I helped a white woman before her. Yes, because she rounded a table and got two inched from my face to ask me to get her something instead of waiting on line for my return from the previous customer.

She called me "white boy with curly hair" to my manager. (My other manager was "Tall Skinny Girl.") Called us "those type of people." Said we had no idea what she was feeling.

No ma'am, the two Jewish men have no idea what it's like to be discriminated against. At Easter. And somehow, I don't think she would be consoled by the notion that my family is a smidge African. Had she asked for special treatment I wouldn't even be upset, really; that's just file suit culture. But instead she wished only to yell and complain and to have been victimized.

I have no tolerance for people wishing to play the martyr. I don't even have pity. If you want to self-flagellate, have at it, kid. Go crazy. All I'm going to do is ignore you, and maybe make you out to be a batshit character in a long joke somewhere down the line, and everyone will just assume you're entirely fictitious. All you do is make my life better. So have fun making a scene. I can take any abuse you throw at me, and all I have to to is take three aspirin and a ten minute sigh-break after you leave.

Because your life's so sad, the greatest thing you can aspire to be is a victim.

I'm, just a racist jerk who can't do math, and tells long-ass stories.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2 | More Like "Neville Longbottom Is Kickass, Pt 1"

This was the first Potter film I've seen in a theater since I think the one with the flamey cup. I know I saw Order of the Phoenix as a download before watching Deathly Hallows 1, but I also know I only saw this last one as a download, so either I blocked a viewing from my memory somewhere or things have gone a bit stupefied.

I got to the theater about 15 minutes before the movie was supposed to start, but it was sold out. From the machine it was sold out, and those things usually spit out tickets for hours after a showing is marked "SOLD OUT" in the ticket booths. As I was going in a second time to get a ticket to the next showing an hour later, a second 7 p.m. showtime popped up on the screen, which I grabbed.

The theater was empty. I mean empty-empty. It was me and some house lights and not even a pre-previews commercial real. I had to go outside and ask the ticket-taker lady what was up, she showed me that, yes, there was a showing starting right then, and she pointed me to Margaret, the floor manager in a black blazer who promised me the same. Apparently, they had just opened up a second showing five minutes beforehand. As I was Tweeting this and firing off "Don't Call Me" texts, a few other people wandered in. All-in-all, I think there were maybe ten of us for the whole show. It was pretty great. I took my favorite seat and spread my legs out and sipped from my contraband water bottle.

*SEMI-SPOILERS*

Nothing here should really be a spoiler. The book's been out for years, and I was definitely the only person in the theater who never read even one of the books.

Best Parts of the Movie:

  • The Dark Knight Rises teaser trailer – Mostly stock footage from Batman Begins, but with a voiceover between Jim Gordon, looking like he's got emphysema and a spinal tap, lying on his side on a hospital gurney with an oxygen mask. (Maybe he got snapped in half by Bane?) and–it really seems like–Bruce Wayne, discussing the need for him to return as Batman. Except Bruce is all whiny about coming back and Jim's like 'YOU RAN AWAY WHEN WE NEEDED YOU.' Then there's footage of a very tired looking Batman getting into a fist fight with Bane and it's awesome. Lots of slides purporting this to be the "Conclusion" to the "journey."
  • Neville Longbottom Kicks A Lot of Ass – I mean a lot of it. Apparently, while Harry, Ron, and Hermione dropped out to systematically murder parts of Sorcerer-Hitler's old man soul, Neville was left as the Big Man At Hogwarts and grew like 8 inches.

  • Harry calls out Snape instead of some long, drawn-out and sneaky plot. Then McGonagall is a little badass.

  • Just a whole lot of good, old-fashioned, on-screen murder. I mean just tons of it. When you don't care about the characters, at least. Everyone who died heroically in the book which people got pissed about, they still die off-camera just like the sweet owl and the guy with the weird eye in the last movie. BUT. This time you get to see their corpses tragically laid out. (I'm still pissed about the cute-as-hell girl with the purple hair.)


  • Mrs. Weasley gets to be hella cool.
     
  • Snape gets fleshed out and vindicated in about 7 minutes of straight flashback/reveal.

  • The epilogue is BEFORE the credits, so no waiting for once. Also, at least in David Yates' mind, Emma Watson ages beautifully. I mean 19 years and she still only looks about 20? I'd get behind that even if our kids did turn out gingery.

Lame Crap:

"Pissing your pants stops fire magic, right?"
  • Draco Malfoy is kind of seriously underused. Similarly, Ginny's fairly useless, in this and every movie.

    "It's STEP, SPIN, STEP, TWIRL, Potter! Get it right!"
  • The final duel between Harry and Voldemort is kind of poorly paced in the final moments. It just sort of ends suddenly and with a whimper. It's realistic (as would be possible for a magical duel in a war zone), but it still feels very un-Hollywood.

  • The epilogue is literally introduced by a "19 Years Later" white-on-black title card. Not very creative.

  • For that matter, the "aging" I kept hearing great things about for the epilogue kind of blew.