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the slow knife / frantic and snowblind
I went dressed as the Handmaid; by far the best cosplayer was a guy crossplaying as Catwoman, in an v-cut leather jacket and high-heeled boots.
I spent the first half of The Dark Knight Rises fully prepared to come home and say that it wasn't that good. I was wrong. It did the slow knife amazingly well, although it probably was slower than was remotely necessary (the entire Foley subplot could have been removed without doing any harm to the story at ALL). It wasn't immersing me at all for the longest time, which felt like a let-down after the constant and beautiful stress of TDK, but when it pulled the threads together it did it right.
It left me a lot to think about. This, Avengers fandom, is why I am not into you; having witty characters to bounce off each other is not what makes me care. Give me something to relate to and spend days thinking about and I'll be a lot more interested.
The way the landscape got bigger while simultaneously caving in reminded me weirdly much of MGS4. DKR is less bleak overall, and the storytelling is better, but after Bale walked in on a crutch the similarity was just there for me. There is even a Metal Gear in an underground hangar! near enough.
Marion Cotillard stole it for me, but there was a lot of good acting. It's kinda amazing that Bale has ended up being one of the weaker performers in this series. Tom Hardy was good but I thought that Bane's presence was severely weakened by the fact that his voice wasn't projecting from his mouth like it would from a normal character - it's hard to be bowled over by a performance when it is making no aural sense as a human being. His gradual humanisation was beautiful and I am sure he has a great future as the fandom woobie.
Anne Hathaway's Catwoman was brilliant but it was odd that she came out of it seeming like the most lighthearted element of the story. One thing I really appreciated was that when she and Batman were both involved in action scenes, she was very often foreground and he was very often background, and she's forthright about being more violent than he is. JGL's Blake was...well...here I have made my final, predictable descent into shipping Batman/Robin (WHAT AGE GAP), and all because he got up in Bruce's shit and started talking about smiling at the mirror. Oh. Oh. You. He established a great story and we all left wanting a JGL Nightwing movie but convinced it would be a total trainwreck if it ever happened. It was appropriate that Nakki was there when I finally gave in and started shipping it, though.
There were a lot of 'for the love of god just kiss him' action poses - Bane got several, Blake got one during the lovely reunion scene; it seemed weird that Hathaway's were the only ones that got taken up on. There wasn't as much pure chemistry as there was between the three mains in TDK but it was more sensitive, here, and the story had provided that added scope and time to develop. I have high hopes for the fandom but I'm not sure I'll get involved.
I feel like I'm just waffling about superficial things above. There were problems. There were a lot of problems, some of them along the lines of the Batcopter's ability to go out to sea at ~288mph and the fact that everyone is going to die of radiation poisoning in a couple of months, some of them more human and structural. M was saying that he's essentially suspicious of Nolan's conservatism and doesn't like to pick at the story too much, but I really enjoyed the French Revolution schtick of Crane's kangaroo court and the drama of the anarchic Gotham. The timeframe of that world passed very quickly, and I found myself really interested in how life worked there, how power was exercised and how negotiations with the outside were carried out and so on, and I'd love to see stories set in it. I want fics about the upside. I want fics about how Miranda spent her time there, especially.
As I said, it took me a long time to get immersed; pretty much until Bruce went to prison. Before that, I just felt like I was seeing all the action/thriller moves, all the cop cars and talking into gadgets, from a distance. I spent the first half missing Ledger's hold on the tension but, I'll admit, the slow knife got me. It was pure dumbness on my part, I knew more than enough Batlore to have seen it coming, but I didn't. Oh dear god was that a great villain performance and some excellent writing backing it up. ♥
The Bat is partly an empty iconic space that we all fill with stuff, and obviously Solid Snake filled a part of it as of the moment Bruce hobbled in on a crutch (and Nolan's pushing the character through the floor with the goal of not having to write about him again, of freeing him from superhumanity, and of literal bridge-burning)...but he wasn't alone in there; yeah, i am predictable, Blake's walking in and hitting on him was just lampshading what was already going on in my head. Blake's monologue about masking the anger was also the place where it got personal, for me. Maybe I love Nolan's Batman partly because of the permission it offers for my own anger. (And at the end, I was inevitably thinking of a promise-to-self I laid down in D:eletion, bite me.)
The whole thing was a kick up the butt to finish Snowblind, too, and a reminder that it'll never be good enough. However many horrible mistakes get in there, Nolan's storytelling is verging on literary and it makes other Hollywood action-makers look way out of their depth, never mind those of us who just write for fun.
I spent the first half of The Dark Knight Rises fully prepared to come home and say that it wasn't that good. I was wrong. It did the slow knife amazingly well, although it probably was slower than was remotely necessary (the entire Foley subplot could have been removed without doing any harm to the story at ALL). It wasn't immersing me at all for the longest time, which felt like a let-down after the constant and beautiful stress of TDK, but when it pulled the threads together it did it right.
It left me a lot to think about. This, Avengers fandom, is why I am not into you; having witty characters to bounce off each other is not what makes me care. Give me something to relate to and spend days thinking about and I'll be a lot more interested.
The way the landscape got bigger while simultaneously caving in reminded me weirdly much of MGS4. DKR is less bleak overall, and the storytelling is better, but after Bale walked in on a crutch the similarity was just there for me. There is even a Metal Gear in an underground hangar! near enough.
Marion Cotillard stole it for me, but there was a lot of good acting. It's kinda amazing that Bale has ended up being one of the weaker performers in this series. Tom Hardy was good but I thought that Bane's presence was severely weakened by the fact that his voice wasn't projecting from his mouth like it would from a normal character - it's hard to be bowled over by a performance when it is making no aural sense as a human being. His gradual humanisation was beautiful and I am sure he has a great future as the fandom woobie.
Anne Hathaway's Catwoman was brilliant but it was odd that she came out of it seeming like the most lighthearted element of the story. One thing I really appreciated was that when she and Batman were both involved in action scenes, she was very often foreground and he was very often background, and she's forthright about being more violent than he is. JGL's Blake was...well...here I have made my final, predictable descent into shipping Batman/Robin (WHAT AGE GAP), and all because he got up in Bruce's shit and started talking about smiling at the mirror. Oh. Oh. You. He established a great story and we all left wanting a JGL Nightwing movie but convinced it would be a total trainwreck if it ever happened. It was appropriate that Nakki was there when I finally gave in and started shipping it, though.
There were a lot of 'for the love of god just kiss him' action poses - Bane got several, Blake got one during the lovely reunion scene; it seemed weird that Hathaway's were the only ones that got taken up on. There wasn't as much pure chemistry as there was between the three mains in TDK but it was more sensitive, here, and the story had provided that added scope and time to develop. I have high hopes for the fandom but I'm not sure I'll get involved.
I feel like I'm just waffling about superficial things above. There were problems. There were a lot of problems, some of them along the lines of the Batcopter's ability to go out to sea at ~288mph and the fact that everyone is going to die of radiation poisoning in a couple of months, some of them more human and structural. M was saying that he's essentially suspicious of Nolan's conservatism and doesn't like to pick at the story too much, but I really enjoyed the French Revolution schtick of Crane's kangaroo court and the drama of the anarchic Gotham. The timeframe of that world passed very quickly, and I found myself really interested in how life worked there, how power was exercised and how negotiations with the outside were carried out and so on, and I'd love to see stories set in it. I want fics about the upside. I want fics about how Miranda spent her time there, especially.
As I said, it took me a long time to get immersed; pretty much until Bruce went to prison. Before that, I just felt like I was seeing all the action/thriller moves, all the cop cars and talking into gadgets, from a distance. I spent the first half missing Ledger's hold on the tension but, I'll admit, the slow knife got me. It was pure dumbness on my part, I knew more than enough Batlore to have seen it coming, but I didn't. Oh dear god was that a great villain performance and some excellent writing backing it up. ♥
The Bat is partly an empty iconic space that we all fill with stuff, and obviously Solid Snake filled a part of it as of the moment Bruce hobbled in on a crutch (and Nolan's pushing the character through the floor with the goal of not having to write about him again, of freeing him from superhumanity, and of literal bridge-burning)...but he wasn't alone in there; yeah, i am predictable, Blake's walking in and hitting on him was just lampshading what was already going on in my head. Blake's monologue about masking the anger was also the place where it got personal, for me. Maybe I love Nolan's Batman partly because of the permission it offers for my own anger. (And at the end, I was inevitably thinking of a promise-to-self I laid down in D:eletion, bite me.)
The whole thing was a kick up the butt to finish Snowblind, too, and a reminder that it'll never be good enough. However many horrible mistakes get in there, Nolan's storytelling is verging on literary and it makes other Hollywood action-makers look way out of their depth, never mind those of us who just write for fun.