The Feel Bad Movie of the Summer

Let me get the obvious admission out of the way right up front.

Yes, I did.

Despite vows that "The Dark Knight" movie from several summers back had sworn me off this movie franchise for good, I somehow wound up seeing the final and what will hopefully be the last movie starring this version of the Caped Crusader.

Why, you ask?  Curiosity, I reply with a shrug.

Admittedly, the headlines behind the opening night shooting raised my interest level to higher proportions.  And the critical reviews for "The Dark Knight Rises" were almost universal in lauding this film as the ultimate triumph of creative genius.  Like the last edition of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, this movie will earn Hollywood's highest honor as the Oscar winner for Best Picture.  

Hmmmmm,  I say.  Oh, I understand why you went, you retort.

Best Picture Oscar?   Er, not now, kiddies.  Regardless of the movie's merits, the Colorado debacle has created a palatable stench around this film that will likely turn off most Academy voters.  Other than some technical award nominations, "The Dark Knight Rises" should be heavily ignored come next February.  

And rightfully so.  

Because, once again, I will attest that film reviewers today don't know a good movie when they see one.  Primarily because they never have.  They have been sucked into a world of entertainment where mediocrity can look a lot better if you print a pretty picture and blow a lot of shit up, two things that this Dark Knight does very well.  One more time, we find people confusing style with substance and, trust me, when I tell you that the immensely overrated director Christopher Nolan has included a lot of the former and none of the latter.

For those of you still in your comas from the last Dark Knight installment, Gotham City is in a bad way.  First of all,  it doesn't look like Chicago anymore, which is where the last one was filmed.  This time around, they used New York City and invoked some bad memories which I will discuss later.  Anyway, anarchy is in the streets with some guy named Bain leading the psychotic charge and this is no buddy of Mitt Romney.  You really don't know what this guy is pissed about because that would mean the writer would have had to pen some dialogue in between explosions.  But, Bain walks around like some bargain basement Darth Vader with a breathing apparatus that no health insurance company would approve.  In the first five minutes, he conducts a mid-air skyjacking that was done a lot more realistically by Roger Moore as James Bond about thirty years ago.   Meanwhile, the sequence is so overly computer-generated and video-game-like that you expect to see a score counter in the upper left hand corner of the screen.  

Our hero, Bruce Wayne/Batman/whatever, is in hiding and wants nothing to do with crime fighting anymore.  Who can blame him?  I saw the last movie, too.    We know that Batman is in the throes of a moral dilemma because not one word he utters is coherent.  Christian Bale, who really is not as good an actor as his agent tells him he is, mutters and stammers constantly, making the viewer in the theater look for a remote control that can turn up the volume.  What did he say?  What did he say now?  Did the explosion in the last scene make me completely deaf?  Every three minutes, there's another new question for the audience.  Of course, the biggest one remains over the entire affair.  Why did I bother coming at all?

In this edition, we get to meet Catwoman, played tongue-in-cheek by Anne Hathaway, and Julie Newmar should be losing no sleep over her performance.  Catwoman's along to get off a few comic zingers while kicking the shit out of anybody who gets in her way.   The dichotomy really doesn't work.  But, then again, nothing really does in this mess concocted by the bloated ruminations of director Nolan.  

The usual supporting characters from this series are back, but, of course, Michael Caine and the dependably annoying Morgan Freeman will show up to do any movie at any time or any place.  Neither actor has employed a script reader for years.  As long as there are fresh doughnuts on the craft services table in the morning, you can count on these two clowns to be in your movie.  Call them now to ensure that they will be available for the home movies of your Thanksgiving family gathering.

"The Dark Knight Rises," with its inexplicably running time of either three hours or three weeks, takes itself way too seriously, but, naturally, everything Christopher Nolan ever films is overzealous to a fault.  Here's a guy who has the darkest view of life imaginable and wants you to share in his distorted vision, like it or not.  At the same time, there's amazingly not an original thought in the entire film, and its ending is a complete and utter rip-off of the final three minutes of "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol."  

What makes "The Dark Knight Rises" most reprehensible is the way Nolan tries to equate this Gotham City and its disasters to 9/11.  Yes, folks, that 9/11. 

Let's see, there are threats to a city by some lunatic who is leading a group that will blow up the entire town.  He starts with destroying a public place populated by innocent citizens, in this case, fans at a pro football stadium.  Oh, and about three thousand cops are buried alive.  Meanwhile, white dust is visible all over the streets of the financial district, which looks eerily like visions of Wall Street eleven years ago.  If that's not enough for your stomach, Nolan has the sheer audacity to include an overhead show of a smoking lower Manhattan with the new World Trade Center clearly visible in the center of the screen.

Shame on you, asshole.  

If Hollywood would ever attempt to make an allegory about that sad day in American history, it would be successful in the right hands.  Steven Spielberg, most certainly Clint Eastwood, and maybe even Ron Howard.  This hack, however, tries to equate it all to a comic book hero and that is criminally wrong.  That alone should get Christopher Nolan banned from making lunch reservations at the Ivy for the next decade.

Sadly, amidst all this rubble, there's one shining and single light.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt is perhaps one of the best young actors working today and he commands every scene he's in as an honest policeman.   Whether it be comedy, action, or drama, this guy knows what's he doing.  Unfortunately, he's set up to be the character of Robin in the final moments and I really hope he thinks twice before signing onto another film franchise engineered by Christopher Nolan.  He deserves better than that.  

But, then again, when it comes to movies like "The Dark Knight Rises," who doesn't?  It's certainly not worth the time, the money, the effort...

Or the bloodshed.

Dinner last night:  Chinese chicken salad.