Bale in The Dark Knight Rises.

“Get with the program!” scolds another letter from a brainwashed fan of the Batman-as-seen-through-the-pretentiousness-of-the-Christopher-Nolan trilogy, “You are a dinosaur!” He’s probably right, and I probably would—if I could only make one lick of sense out of what this nonsense is all about. Silly pop-culture comic book cinema about grown men in rubber masks and Styrofoam jock straps is bad enough, but incomprehensible gibberish to boot is just plain unacceptable. Halfheartedly, I give The Dark Knight Rises—the third and final Batflick in the Nolan trilogy—one star for eardrum-busting sound effects and glaucoma-inducing computerized images in blinding Imax, but talk about stretching things. That’s all most immature audiences require for their hard-earned money these days. The rest of it should not be reviewed by anyone over the age of 12.

As caped crusaders go, I prefer Superman, Spider Man and, above all, Captain Marvel, who has been criminally ignored by the movies so far. (Can’t you just see Michael Fassbender staring into the camera hissing “Shazam!”?) And as Batman goes, I had a lot more fun when he was fighting off Catwoman and The Joker at the Saturday afternoon double features of my youth in his campy bat cave with his jailbait roommate Robin. Drat! Christopher Nolan sent Bruce Wayne to a shrink and Batman lost his mojo. I like one caption writer’s description of the Batman epics as “car porn for geeks and gearheads.” But that doesn’t make The Dark Knight Rises any better. Trash is trash, but when it costs an estimated $250 million (bat food compared to The Amazing Spider-Man’s $137 million), the charges turn criminal and someone should subject the garbage man to a citizen’s arrest.

Like all previous flicks directed by Christopher Nolan and written by his brother Jonathan, this one defies logic and reeks of repulsive, bloated self-importance (not to be confused with anything resembling narrative) and the arrogant conviction that no matter how slick, obtuse, confounding or incompetent it gets, the fanboys will slobber approval. Only a fool would tackle a synopsis, but briefly: We open eight years after Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) vanished in disgrace, recovering from wounds inflicted by The Joker (Heath Ledger) and taking the fall for the death of phony hero and secretly corrupt D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckart). Haunted by the pain and tragedy of past losses and living in seclusion under Gotham City, the 73-year-old superhero—having first risen under the tutelage of Bob Kane in 1939—is lured back into the daylight by neo-noir villains like sexy cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and a monstrous drug-fueled terrorist with a mumblecore voice named Bane (British muscle McGurk Tom Hardy), who commands an army of killers living in the sewers with a face covered by a gas mask (he speaks through a wind tunnel); old friends like police commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), corporate officer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Bruce’s longtime butler Alfred (Michael Caine); and new allies like idealistic cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the cunning, enigmatic billionaire socialite philanthropist Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who joins the board of Bruce Wayne Enterprises to save the empire from going under and turns out to be too good to be true. The coherence ends there. Sick and bent over—his X-rays have him looking like matchsticks—Batman comes out of retirement to the musical accompaniment of Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” digs the Batmobile out of mothballs and hobbles off to bring the world back into balance, starting with the Stock Exchange. The rest of the movie, which runs just under three hours, is an interminable barrage of exploding football fields, flying cars, computer-generated images of crumbling skyscrapers and bridges and raging mobs fleeing the nuclear destruction of Gotham City. When all else fails, Bane threatens to destroy the human race in 23 days with one brash act, and Bruce ends up flat on his back, in more ways than one.

Christian Bale mumbles and whispers through an echo chamber, changing his appearance and his voice for reasons known only to Mr. Nolan. Michael Caine chews holes through his dialogue with a peat-bog Cockney accent so thick you can’t understand what he’s talking about anyway. You can hoke it all up with crushing violence, but that doesn’t make it pleasurable. Amid an endlessly contrived pile of red herrings, Marian Cotillard’s character seems like something they went back and invented in post-production, while Anne Hathaway, who turns out to be Batwoman in mufti, comes off as a cold, karate-chopping zombie with cleavage. There are so many plot twists I stopped counting. The Nolan brothers seem to be making it up as they go along. Not one character is developed beyond a flat, one-dimensional cardboard paper-doll construct without heart and soul, not to mention flesh and blood. Not one of these distractions invades the plot for any purpose except to extend the running time. Speaking lines they cannot possibly understand, not one actor makes any attempt to be believable. So manufactured and synthetic that they eventually lose all sense of reality, they’re like reconstituted orange juice and processed cheese. If The Dark Knight Rises is finally the funeral of Batman forever (promises, promises!), trendy technology once again triumphs over artistry, professionalism, taste and good clean fun.

Turning a mosh pit of mystical comic book gimmicks into a money pit of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Christopher Nolan gives new meaning to both DUI and DWI—“Directing Under the Influence” and “Directing While Intoxicated”—while raking in millions. I’ll have what he’s having.

rreed@observer.com

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Running Time 164 minutes

Written by Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer (story)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman

1/4

The Gotham Observer (DewGothamCity.com)

When picking publications to model your fictitious newspaper on, we obviously have a bias. Still, it's nice to see that the Warner Bros.' viral marketing team agreed with us, as their late-June campaign for The Dark Knight Rises included clues to unlock the Gotham Observer, a newspaper that bears resemblance to our own organization in title only.

(We would never lead with a cover story on a 'Festivity Day'...even if it was in honor of a fallen district attorney. Or if we did, we'd make the led much snappier.)

Here are the pages of the fictional newspaper, which you can click to enlarge:

Well, obviously there are glaring discrepancies between Gotham's Observer and its New York counterpart. For one, we don't have a horoscope section. Secondly, these stories belie weekly publication...this seems more like a daily rag.

Still, if you want some clues about the upcoming film--which opens in eight days!!--the sports section gives a little more information on what those football stadium shots are all about. And now we know that Matthew Modine is in the film, we guess. Did we know that already? It's hard to keep track of the gazillion things Christopher Nolan is stuffing into epic finale of his Batman saga.

The sound of a million geeks screaming (Warner Bros.)

Since the tickets sold out in January for the July 20th premiere of Christopher Nolan's third Batman installment, Warner Bros. probably doesn't have to hype The Dark Knight Rises any more. We mean, obviously they will spend a billion more dollars on advertising and marketing tie-ins, but for once we'd like to see a big blockbuster just completely stop all promotions one month before it hits theaters.

Although that would probably lead Copyranter or someone at Ad Age to claim this as the most ingenious viral marketing stunt ever. And then everyone would do it. And then movie trailer editors and distributors would be out of business in months. We need this hundredth The Dark Knight Rises trailer. For the good of Gotham, and all its residents.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ASQqjK47c04#!

Too bad this is the most confusing trailer to the movie we've seen yet, and somehow manages not to include either of its female leads (Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle/Catwoman and Marion Cotillard as Miranda Tate). It's just a lot of mob scenes, and Tom Hardy trying to outdo Christian Bale in a "ridiculous voice" contest.

We liked it better when they were just exploding our bridges backwards.

Where does he get such wonderful toys?

So, this definitely means The Dark Knight Rises will feature at least some background shots of Zuccotti Park, right? We hope it involves an epic guerrilla film-making stunt wherein Christian Bale running through a General Assembly meeting in a rubber suit and leaving behind a powerful sleeping sedative gas? He was never here...you got that kid? You got that?

Batman versus Anonymous

It just keeps rolling in today: first MTV decided that when seven strangers get together and stop being polite and start being real, at least one of them should be protesting in Zuccotti Park. Now a tipster "involved in the production" of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises has leaked to The LA Times that Liberty Plaza would be a great backdrop in Gotham.

But are these the smelly hippies that are city deserves? Would the Batman tolerate the General Assembly? Let's discuss!

We do know that the latest Batman film will be shooting in New York, because we went to the auditions. But could a high-budget movie really use all those protesters in a scene without their consent? That's a boring hypothetical question! Here's a more interesting hypothetical: if transplanted in Gotham, would OWS immediately start picketing outside Bruce Wayne's mega-mansion, or wait a couple days? And as for the Dark Knight himself, what side of the picket line would the vigilante fall on?

In Batman Begins, we are introduced to the Wayne family by way of Bruce's father's contribution to the city... a buzzing transportation system. Never mind that the union of this train would probably be on strike with the Occupiers, since Batman himself  destroyed it in his epic battle with Liam Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul at the end of the first film. So now a mother of three with two part-time jobs and no health insurance will have to walk to work instead of taking the Wayne Monorail (or whatever)? Thanks, Batman. Point: 1 %

On the other hand, Batman hates corporate greed, as evidenced by the fact that he fires Rutger Hauer as the head of Wayne Enterprises and replaces him with Morgan Freeman. Point: 99 %

But wait, doesn't he actually use most of Wayne Enterprises - most likely a publicly traded company - as cover to buy and expense all his "wonderful toys"? Point: 1%

Add to that his George Bush-era surveillance tendencies as well as a complete disregard for the laws that govern society, and you basically have a Tony Balogna-on-steroids situation. One thousand points: 1 %

Batman may protect Gotham from itself, but he's a moral grey area when it comes to tourists who don't contribute to the city's economy. Occupy Wall Street could even make a good villain for Batman in the form of "Anonymous Man," who would wear a Guy Fawkes mask at all times and speak in an annoying computer voice, of course.

Sam Sandek, a potential extra for "The Dark Knight Rises"

It was with mixed feelings that The New York Observer went to a casting call for extras on Christopher Nolan's grand finale of the Batman films, The Dark Knight Rises. On the one hand: it was Saturday afternoon, and Occupy Wall Street protesters were preparing to gather near the Brooklyn Bridge in preparation for their doomed march. On the other...we really wanted to be in a Batman movie. Even if we weren't exactly what the Warner Bros. people had in mind when they put out this casting call last week:

Grant Wilfley Casting, Inc. is casting extras for the new Warner Bros. film Magnus Rex. Producers state: “Take part in the urban action adventure coming to the streets of New York City.” Shoots Oct. 29-Nov. 11, 2011 in NYC.
Seeking—Extras: male and female, 18+, all ethnicities, no experience necessary, to play law enforcement within a city besieged by crime and corruption, specific roles include Guards, Soldiers, and Police Officers, seeking physically fit athletes, people with military and/or law enforcement training/experience, weapons training, and/or martial arts training.
Open call will be held Oct. 1, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. & 2-4 p.m. at Metropolitan Pavilion, 110 W. 19th St. (btwn. Sixth & Seventh aves.), NYC. Bring photo ID (i.e. driver’s license, state ID, student ID, etc.); talent must be able to provide valid unexpired ID to fill out I-9 at time of hiring. Seeking nonunion talent at this call; SAG members who are not already registered with GWCI should also attend the open call. For more info (including time/location details for SAG registration), visit www.gwcnyc.com or call (212) 685-3168. There are no sign-up fees. Professional pay provided. SAG Background Actors Contract.

Full disclosure: We do not look like guards, soldiers, or anyone with military experience. However, logic would follow that the reason Gotham is so messed up and Arkham Asylum patients can walk out into the streets any time they damn choose is because there are a couple weaklings hiding amongst the city's finest. It's with this mental attitude that we showed up, ID in hand, to the Metropolitan Pavillion at 2 p.m.

We didn't know what to expect. A lot of brawny guys who were looking for work now that Law & Order officially doesn't need more patrolmen? A bunch of comic book geeks? Or, option number three:

Total chick-fest! Apparently we weren't the only women who decided that their lack of receding hairline and bury demeanour should exclude them from being thwarted by insane people in crazy outfits. In fact, wouldn't women be more supesceptible to the charms of Thomas Hardy as Bane?

In the spirit of good citizen journalism, we got in line and found 2o-year-old Sam Sandak (that's him with the tattoo), a Tisch student did extra work to raise money for his film. "I'd be in this for free though," Mr. Sandak told us, "Chris Nolan is the fucking man." The young Los Angeles native had experience with Central Casting on West Coast, he informed us, and had already been in the background of several features, including the HBO film, Cinema Verite.

"Usually if you're an extra, they keep you sort of netted off from the talent," Mr. Sandek told us, "It's a lot of waiting around." That was fine. People who have been occupying Wall Street these past to weeks know that sometimes you wait around in a netted area for hours and don't get paid at all. (Unless pepper-spray can now be traded for goods and services in this country. Which it can't. Yet.)

The line moved relatively quickly and were were soon seated in the back of a room full of folding chairs. Each chair had a form to fill out containing our necessary stats. It was surprisingly hard, as we had no idea how our bust size differed from our bra size. We made a bunch of the numbers up, actually. Please don't think that we actually know what our waist to hip ratio is.

The people in charge of the casting cattle call got things rolling right off the bat. "Who here has any military training?" they asked. A few big men raised their hands.

"Police training?"

A lot more hands were raised. (Wow, seriously? What were they doing auditioning for movies?)

"Any firemen in this crowd?"

No hands were raised. Those gifted with army or police experience got to go over to a special table and have their photo taken. The rest of us had to wait. We turned to the couple next to us: a striking boyfriend/girlfriend couple that looked super buff. Robert Buesing was a 6'4 Wall Street finance guy who rowed in his spare time. His girlfriend, Jessica Kopcho, was 5'11, also a rower, and played soccer for fun when she wasn't working for her post-back laureate in medicine. It was a first time casting experience for both of them. We doubted that they had ever read Frank Miller's Dark Knight graphic novels, although Mr. Buesing did laugh at our joke about the dour faces the former military/policemen were making in their photos: "Why so serious?" This is them, by the way. Look for these two in the big climax of the new Batman film where a bunch of stuff blows up and everyone goes running.

Other things heard at the casting call:

Girl with a shaved mohawk one row behind us, with evident pride): "My friend was an extra in Waterboy."

Blonde chubby woman woman sitting near the front: "After this I'm going to the Strand and applying for a job."

Buff Latino man several chairs down: I heard Cillian Murphy is going to be in this. Do you think I can tweet about that, or is that against the rules?

Finally, it was our row's turn to get our photo taken. We tried to look tough. Snap, snap: we had two seconds in front of the camera before the next person was ushered in. Now we know what the term cattle call referred to; we felt like a piece of meat. That is until we heard the casting lady ask the photographer as we were leaving to read out our number for her to circle on her sheet. Her special sheet of people that were definitely going to be cast in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises to then be picked out of the swarms of extras for a speaking part, before rising to stardom following a brief affair with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. You know, that sheet.

As we were leaving we expected to see another line trailing out the door. But it had started to rain, and apparently that's enough to persuade even the most hardcore superhero fans to stay indoors and rewatch the Iron Man movies instead of auditioning for the coolest thing ever.

However, we did talk to some New York Film Academy students on our way out. They weren't here to audition, but wanted to see if they could find someone to fill in for a missing actress in their movie. We considered for a moment...but it was raining. Even Bruce Wayne takes a day off for inclement weather, right?

1. Buy Twitter Validation From Famous People Like LeVar Burton

Twitchange says it seeks to use the power of Twitter and Twitter celebs to do good things. Non-celebrity tweeters get to bid on a chance to "be followed by their favorite celebrity on Twitter, retweeted, or mentioned by them in a special tweet!" The full list of celeb tweeters available is here and the website claims proceeds will go to numerous worthwhile charities. There are names like Justin Bieber, Rainn Wilson and Alicia Keys on the list but our sentimental favorite is actor, director and educator LeVar Burton. Who doesn't love this guy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1BrWVDwVPM

2. Calling Christopher Nolan on the Red Courtesy Phone

This frightening young man really wants to be the Joker. Please get in touch with him, Christopher Nolan; the safety of his home community may be at stake.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DW_0VnuceTY&feature=player_embedded

3. A Cow, A Cow, a Very Tiny Cow

The Guinness Book of World Records is about to come out, so some of the record-holders got together to hang out for the cameras. Our favorite is 33-inch high Swallow, a tiny cow from West Yorkshire in the UK. Swallow (who doesn't really have enough screen time in the video below) gives an idea as to where the fashion accessory pets of the future may be headed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXRukUa7N4A&feature=player_embedded

I saw Public Enemies last night—and plenty of critics have already weighed in about how cool and beautiful and entertaining the movie is (Rex Reed called it “one of the best movies of the year”). But here’s what I took away from it: my total and unabashed girl-crush on Marion Cotillard is still going and stronger than ever.

            The 33-year-old actress (and, hooray to her being born in the mid-’70s!) first got noticed by sharp-eyed American audiences in Tim Burton’s 2003 Big Fish, and then again—by the very few people who saw it, anyway—in the Russell Crowe bomb A Good Year in 2006. She’s beautiful in that classic, old-fashioned way, with fine delicate bones (so French!) and coy kitten eyes. Of course, there has never been a shortage of beautiful women trying to make it in Hollywood. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, came La Vie en Rose and her incredible performance as Little Sparrow Édith Piaf. Everyone loves to to poke fun at how all a beautiful actress needs to do to win awards is to ugly themselves up a bit (see The Hours, Monster, Monster’s Ball), but Ms. Cotillard’s performance went beyond the cosmetic: The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote, “Marion Cotillard’s feral portrait of the French singer Édith Piaf as a captive wild animal hurling herself at the bars of her cage is the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I’ve ever encountered in a film.” Agreed! And for those who never got around to seeing the film—which, considering it only made a little over $10 million in the U.S, is probably most of you—all one needed to fall in love with Marion Cotillard was to see her sweep through last year’s Oscars, pristine in a white and silver Jean Paul Gaultier mermaid gown, to win the Best Actress statue and give one of the more charming acceptance speeches in recent memory: “Thank you, life … thank you, love! It’s true there are some angels in this city.” (For added charm, check out her singing in the press room of the Academy Awards.)  

            In Public Enemies, it’s 100 percent believable that Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger would risk imprisonment and death just to be with her (see the movie for the hottest come-on line in recent memory) and, not for nothing, the high-cheekbone quotient onscreen is rather overwhelming when they appear together. Plus, there’s just something about Cotillard, an understated and intelligent elegance that seems to belong in the turn of a different century. Is this the reason why she’s not part of the Us Weekly cycle of starlets? Whatever it is, it’s an appreciated whiff of fresh air, away from the interchangeable uber-toned, fake-breasted and extension’d brigade that seems to make up the heft of those glossy pages.

            She’ll next appear in November in Rob Marshall’s highly (and I mean highly) anticipated Nine, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren (if it’s half as good as this trailer, we’re all in for a treat). Next year will have her starring in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight follow-up, Inception, co-starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Michael Caine. So, three cheers for the rise of Mademoiselle Cotillard!

If that one sentence about Inception makes you scratch your head, you are not alone. Call us skeptical (and certainly overly reactionary) but those kinds of sci-fi movies never seem to work. They either feel cold and clinical (Steven Soderbergh's remake of Solaris), schlocky and ridiculous (Paul S.W. Anderson's Event Horizon) or overly esoteric and impenetrable (Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain). And despite our intense love for The Dark Knight, Mr. Nolan has not yet proved to us that he's an automatic director; the type of filmmaker where the mere mention of his name can make us breathless with anticipation. Obviously the Batman films are fantastic, though that kind of goes without saying. But Memento does not hold up like you would think/hope, and it's best if we don't even get started on the twin failures of The Prestige and Insomnia. So, our respect for Mr. Nolan aside, it will be with great trepidation that we approach Inception when it hits theaters sometime in summer of 2010.

But! More important than all that is what happens with the sequel to The Dark Knight! Well, Mr. Nolan hasn't actually agreed to do it just yet. And though it is assumed that he'll eventually sign on to direct (hint: ka-ching!), up to now he has been very non-committal. Maybe Mr. Nolan is waiting because he realizes he can never replicate the success of The Dark Knight. Anything he does that relates to Batman will be scrutinized and dismissed because of the previous film. ("It wasn't as good as the last one!") If he goes that route and decides to pass on doing another one, we'd certainly respect his choice. However it's clear that with or without Mr. Nolan, Warner Brothers is going to make a sequel to The Dark Knight--grossing one billion dollars worldwide will do that to a studio. And as fans, the proposition of a Christopher Nolan-less Batman film is a little scary. You know what? Screw artistic integrity and careful career management, Mr. Nolan! Let's get this Dark Knight sequel moving.