Hit Movie Can Affect Election & Other Stories
I went to see Batman, the Dark Knight Rises last night. Here’s what I got out of it.
1. I think the movie is going to negatively affect Mitt Romney’s chances of becoming President. The villain of the piece is a monstrous, sweaty, hairy giant who kills people by grabbing their heads and twisting until the neck snaps. He wears chest armor and a complicated sort of mask over his nose and mouth that makes him sound a bit like Darth Vader. His name is Bain.
2. The prison building where Bain throws Batman after beating him up so badly is really a dump. It has very few amenities, and all the prisoners, dressed in rags, mingle one with the other. After a long time there, though, one of these prisoners, a nice Jewish man with a beard and a Yiddish accent helps Batman get better by stretching his back so an errant vertebra can snap back into place. Before the Jewish man was thrown in this dump, he says, he was a doctor.
3. There was a slight sense of anxiety in the audience watching this movie. Things had happened in Aurora, Colorado. Of course, they couldn’t happen here. Could they?
4. I think I know exactly where the crazy man in Aurora started shooting. There’s the spot in the movie where Bain, with his mask and breastplate, comes out with his semi-automatic weapons in what appears to be the Gotham Stock Exchange, and begins randomly killing everybody.
5. Gotham, which is Batman’s home, is a massive city with many skyscrapers, but from the skyscrapers you can’t tell what real-life city it is. But signs all say “Gotham.” There’s maybe 500 police cars in this movie, all with GC POLICE on the side. (About half of them get flipped over and come apart before the movie ends.) It’s the Gotham Bank, the Gotham Stock Exchange and so forth and so on. However, as the movie progresses, more and more, the city becomes Manhattan. You are flying over the Citibank building, you’re on the 59th Street Bridge with the top of the tram structure to Roosevelt Island just behind it, you’re on Riverside Drive. The CGI people either ran out of money or just plain gave up.
6. Leaving the theater, my wife wondered how this crazy man could know what Bain would look like before the movie came out? That night in Aurora was the movie premiere. Well, there were the previews you could download, I reminded her.
7. The plot of the movie gets very complicated in the second hour. It’s as if the movie was supposed to be four hours, but they had to cut it to two. I could follow all the twists and turns, but when Batman’s girlfriend turns out to be Bain’s daughter avenging what they did to her father to turn him into this monster Bain, I really didn’t give a crap. Did I just give anything away?
8. I talked my wife into going to this movie. It had gotten such good reviews. But it’s pretty violent. A girly girl movie it is not. There were women I saw in the theater who closed their eyes in these spots. This is not Sleepless in Seattle.