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

Freeman and Madsen in The Magic of Belle Isle.

The Magic of Belle Isle is a warm, human, feel-good experience about bringing out the best in people, one that brings out Morgan Freeman’s best performance in years. He plays a grizzled old drunk named Monte Wildhorn, a once-revered author of epic western novels suffering from writer’s block who has become so miserable and depressed since losing his wife to cancer that he has retired his career to the inside of a bottle of sour mash whiskey. Cynical, reclusive and partially dependant on a motorized wheelchair, he has come to a small lakeside community in upstate New York to escape from the pressures of responsibility, reality and people—by drinking himself into a stupor. Unfortunately, the summer house his nephew has found for him to hide away in comes equipped with a dependant dog named Ringo the owner left behind, an annoyingly friendly community of covered-dish suppers and a compassionate next-door neighbor named Charlotte O’Neil (Virginia Madsen), a single mom with three daughters. Against his best instincts, Monte develops a fondness for them all, especially the 9-year-old infatuated with science fiction who wants to be a writer. Reluctantly, he becomes her mentor, dispensing advice about style, imagination and inspiration (“Most of the time real life doesn’t measure up to what’s in your head”). The smallest and youngest girl loves elephants, so he gets his old typewriter out from under the mothballs and writes a story about a pachyderm named Tony, a story that eventually leads to a series. You already know what’s coming: it turns out that this is the summer when Monte decides to rejoin the human race. After an amalgam of shared experiences—measured gently with brush strokes of sweetness and learning-—at summer’s ends he has not only reactivated his mind and his career, but found his dormant heart as well.

Reunited with Rob Reiner, who directed him in The Bucket List, Mr. Freeman’s unwavering dignity, charm and intelligence are put to good use. Ms. Madsen is wasted, but her no-nonsense honesty is in evidence, too. I admire her unglazed presence and naturalism as well as her deglamorized Hollywood look. In every role, no matter how diverse, she always seems to come from another saner, nicer place than the movies. Mr. Reiner, who has often shown a fondness for earlier, less complex periods in America’s past, is the perfect director to bring out these qualities. The screenplay, which he wrote with Guy Thomas and Andrew Scheinman, sometimes seems hokey, sentimental and totally predictable, but in a film this affectionate these are welcome qualities. The kids text and talk on cell phones, but the whole movie seems to take place in another time—before the plague of reality TV, when people still knew how to take the time out of a busy day to  communicate through conversation and feelings. (Monte writes bestsellers and doesn’t even know how to use a computer.) The best thing about the film is the gentle way Mr. Reiner allows his characters to develop until their troubles become part of the human coil. You can quarrel with the smiley-face outcome of every ordeal, but the tenderness and optimism are so powerful and ingratiating that only a viewer with the darkest sensibility will go away untouched. When the waning days of summer signal fall’s impending arrival, you feel like these characters are old friends, and the magic of Belle Isle is self-evident.

rreed@observer.com

THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE

Running Time 109 minutes

Written by Guy Thomas, Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman

Directed by Rob Reiner

Starring Morgan Freeman, Virginia Madsen and Madeline Carroll

3/4

Freeman.

Three things that make everybody happy: Christmas, ice cream and dolphins. A delightful new family film called Dolphin Tale is not a Christmas story; it takes place in Florida, so you wouldn’t know it even if it was. But you get everything else, and the way things are going at the movies these days, two out of three ain’t bad.

This is the kind of movie with end credits for days, postproduction edits for years, and nobody cares. What matters is how lovable the dolphin is, and on that score everyone can rest easy. The star of this unbelievably heroic true story is a real-life female dolphin named Winter who, while swimming off the Florida coast as a baby six years ago, got trapped in a lobster cage and washed to shore, tied in fishermen ropes, her tail fin severely damaged, and unable to move. Near death and struggling to breathe, she was discovered on the beach by a shy, lonely, 11-year-old boy named Sawyer Nelson, then rescued and transported by ambulance to the Clearwater Marine Hospital and Aquarium by a dedicated veteran marine biologist, Dr. Clay Haskett (Harry Connick Jr.), who spent years trying to teach the injured dolphin how to swim again. Sadly, Winter eventually lost the fight and her tail was amputated. But her story was just beginning. The movie chronicles the struggles of a valiant animal who wouldn’t give up, and the people who became her family in the fight for survival. The greatest miracle of all is the meticulous research and painstaking laboratory testing by a brilliant prosthetics inventor, Dr. Cameron McCarthy (Morgan Freeman), that eventually led to Winter’s recovery. The revolutionary tail that acts as a rudder is a custom-fitted silicon gel sleeve that now serves as a model for physically challenged humans and marine life throughout the world. The names have been changed and some of the situations invented to make a more emotionally satisfying movie, but the facts are well documented and Winter is still swimming up a storm with her new tail in Clearwater, where she is a big tourist attraction, a symbol of courage and determination for millions, and an inspiration for disabled men, women, children and fish alike.

Winter’s rehab is long and arduous, but she never forgets Sawyer, the boy who freed her (played by Nathan Gamble), or his new friend Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), who lives on a houseboat with her father (Connick) and grandfather (Kris Kristofferson). The two kids in the movie who bond through their passion for dolphins are excellent, as are the adults, including Ashley Judd as Sawyer’s mother and Frances Sternhagen as the board member who fights to save the marine hospital from being closed by the state and sold to a hotel developer. After a hurricane, so much property is destroyed that homes are found for all of the animals except Winter, and the decision is made to put the dolphin down. It’s the children who come up with a plan to save their beloved friend and the hospital too, by launching their own website and selling tickets to see the miracle dolphin in action on the Internet. Everyone is transported and transformed, including Sawyer’s cousin, a former swimming champ who has lost the use of one leg in the U.S. Army. The movie often seems too good to be true, but by the end I wanted a dolphin just like Winter for my own swimming pool.

The director is Charles Martin Smith, best known as the actor who worked with wolves in the 1983 film Never Cry Wolf. He’s also directed horror films, but clearly he works better with animals than people. Anyone fascinated with the phenomenon of how dolphins rank second only to golden retrievers in their boundless ability to bond with humans will be bowled over by this movie. I saw it in a Sunday afternoon preview with an audience of children who were quiet, mesmerized and completely enraptured. No wonder. As the first dolphin in history who has ever survived without a tail, Winter is friendly, loving, emotional, playful, brave and intelligent. Before her Dolphin Tale is over, I dare even the most jaded cynic not to shed a tear of admiration and joy.

rreed@observer.com

DOLPHIN TALE

Running Time 113 minutes

Written by Karen Janszen and Noam Dromi

Directed by Charles Martin Smith

Starring Morgan Freeman, Ashley Judd and Harry Connick Jr.

3/4

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Morgan Freeman (Patrick McMullan)

“My second favorite film of all time is Shawshank Redemption,” raved Star Jones, wearing a striped hat and cream dress to Monday’s Mandela Day luncheon at the Pool Room at the Four Seasons, “but I want you to know that I watched The Sum of All Fears for the 14th time last night.” Which is to say, she is a major fan of Morgan Freeman, “a huge, huge, huge fan.” Ms. Jones was in the right place—Mr. Freeman, who’d portrayed Nelson Mandela in Invictus, was the luncheon’s host. The Observer didn’t see Ms. Jones speaking with Mr. Freeman, but she did spend several tense minutes before lunch standing by the table of her former View couchmate Barbara Walters and ABC’s Robin Roberts. Ms. Roberts conversed freely, but Ms. Walters, jaw set, did not deign to turn around.

Ms. Jones, however, said she was fine seeing the woman who’d fired her and written less-than-glowingly about her in a memoir, insisting such feuding was not her wont. She touched The Observer’s hand and assured us, “Adult women don’t act like that.”

Aside from the chill emanating from Ms. Walters’s seat at the power table (where she was later joined by Christiane Amanpour and an iPad-toting Arthur Sulzberger Jr.), the afternoon, celebrating Mr. Mandela’s 93rd birthday, was all about love. Brian Williams bragged to a fellow partygoer about his daughter Allison’s new job: “She just completed an HBO series with Lena Dunham!” The media contingent stuck together, with Al Roker, Hoda Kotb and Ann Curry forming a Today show scrum by the pool before lunch began. Ms. Kotb eventually broke off for a close conversation with Mr. Freeman, and was a bit starstruck. “I loved Shawshank Redemption,” she said. “I know it’s an oldie but goodie. When I’m talking to him—I was just watching his mouth move, and all I could think about was him in Shawshank. I’m sure he was telling interesting stories, but I was just like this!” She hung her mouth open, charmingly feigning a stupor.

As for Mr. Mandela, Ms. Kotb was wistful that she had not yet met him. “It’s almost like every now and then in your life, you get to meet a legend. It happens so infrequently, even in our business. It’s what he stands for, and the feeling of meeting someone so late in their life, especially after all he’s been through.

“I’m just really looking forward to it. There are a lot of really cool people here, but the guest of honor is the guest of honor.” Unfortunately, Mr. Mandela remained in South Africa.

Time editor Rick Stengel and Mr. Freeman told stories in honor of Mr. Mandela, before the lunch of steak frites was served. Mr. Freeman won over the crowd with a charming story that included a pitch-perfect impersonation of Nelson Mandela anointing Mr. Freeman the man to play him on film.

Mr. Freeman told The Observer that he hadn’t informed his friend of the event. “I haven’t talked to him, in fact, since I was there last year. A lot of people are trying to get to him, and they’re all ‘close friends,’”—here Mr. Freeman widened his eyes as though to question their closeness. “You take it upon yourself not to be too pushy.”

Never fear, though! Mr. Mandela was aware of luncheon: “Zelda—his assistant—she tells him everything. So he knows.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton overflowed with love for Mr. Mandela, who has been rumored to be in ill health: “I think he’s certainly, probably, one of the greatest historic figures of all time. I was there in the antiapartheid movement, I was there in 1994 when he was elected president of South Africa. So, I celebrate his birthday every year.” As for Mr. Freeman, the Rev. Sharpton couldn’t pick a favorite movie. “That’s a real tough one. Lean on Me was all right, but that would be hard to say.”

Cathie Black, the recently appointed, more-recently departed head of New York’s public schools and onetime Hearst honchette, was thrilled to honor Mr. Mandela. “I think all of us honor him with great respect for the amazing life that he has led,” Ms. Black said, “and there’s a particular affinity, since we launched the Oprah Winfrey magazine in South Africa probably about eight or nine years ago. And that’s why I’m here!” (When asked her favorite Morgan Freeman movie, Ms. Black said, “I can’t answer that question” and walked briskly away.)

Ms. Black recently returned from a month spent in France and Italy with her husband, “and now I’m going to enjoy my summer and think about my next-next.” Was anyone hungering to employ her, The Observer wondered? “I’m not dealing with any of it in the summer!” There would surely be many lunches between this midsummer afternoon and Ms. Black’s next-next.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Edited by Daisy Prince

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nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

If I went to Clint Eastwood’s rousing, rah-rah Invictus with less enthusiasm than some of my colleagues, it’s because I am weary of all these worthy filmmakers churning out movies about South Africa nobody wants to see, and I dreaded one more exposure to starving babies and racial violence. I am happy to report that Invictus has none of this. It’s about sports and politics, and how South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, combined both to close the gap between opposing black and white factions and lead his country to the 1995 Rugby World Cup title. The film is flawed, rambling and much too long, but in the end it leaves the audience cheering.

Invictus begins when Mandela (Morgan Freeman) is freed, after 27 years in prison, to govern a free South Africa. Twenty-three million people went to the polls and voted side by side, black and white, in a united effort to restore peace and world respect after decades of the hell known as apartheid. Mandela inherits a new country riddled with crime, unemployment, resentment, rage and fear. Tension reigns between the once-oppressed blacks and the hated white “Afrikaners” who are now a minority but are still in control of the police, the military and the economy. Desperate to build a “rainbow nation” based on compassion, restraint and generosity, the newly sworn-in Mandela’s first bold move is to restore the national passion for rugby signified by South Africa’s almost totally white team, the Springboks, defying his own cabinet in the process, and then enlisting the team captain, Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to help him heal the wounds of both the blacks and the whites who used to beat and torture them. The two men discover a lot in common: leading by example, meeting challenges with patriotic songs, and feeding each other the mutual inspiration to achieve racial harmony with a peace that is colorblind. Mr. Eastwood catalogs every strategy, game by game, and the last 40 minutes detail the day of the big match. Persuading Mr. Freeman to tackle the role of Mandela didn’t require much arm-twisting. He craved it from inception, bought the movie rights to Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by journalist John Carlin, the book with the long-winded title on which Invictus is based, hired a transported South African now living in California named Anthony Peckham to write the screenplay and talked his friend Clint Eastwood into directing. So Mr. Freeman as Mandela is no accident. The casting seemed preordained. You could say the movie would never have happened without him. Although hardly accidental, the casting paid off. From everything I have seen of Mr. Mandela, and from the memories I have of meeting him personally on several occasions, Mr. Freeman gets everything right: the walk, the cadences in the voice, the out-front and straight-ahead posture and the inner radiance that connect his thoughts and his words with visible facial computations—many of the qualities that make Mr. Mandela an inspiring leader. You’ve heard about wearing your heart on your sleeve; Mr. Freeman’s is reflected in his eyes. With American presidents, actors do caricatures. With Mandela, Mr. Freeman doesn’t bother with impersonation. He merely activates the elegance and dignity within himself. The best thing about the movie is that he does it all without genuflecting or sanctifying a world leader who has always been, first and foremost, a man with a strong sense of humanity. The script makes it clear that Mr. Mandela is no saint. While he devoted himself to uniting a polarized nation, he neglected his family. His children resented him bitterly, two wives divorced him and there is evidence that he was no stranger to loneliness.

Matt Damon is more hobbled with accents than Mr. Freeman, and they don’t all come together at the same time. Not exactly dream casting as the captain and star of the controversial Springboks, Mr. Damon first sounds French, then like a ratchety-voiced Afrikaner in a patois that is hard to understand, and almost always out of place. Unrecognizable in his little green and gold silk shorts with peroxided hair, bulging thighs and a white-bread weight gain, he’s a big, blond, beefed-up Muscle McGurk. Having said all of that, I admit he is also sincere, dedicated and very worth watching. He must have spent the past two years locked in a gym.

The overuse of the South African national anthem gets boring; the movie needs a pair of scissors; and the use of obvious symbolism is often unsettling. Naming the movie after a corny poem Mandela reads aloud in a flashback to his prison cell is a stretch. O.K., we get the symbol of a changing society. But the scene of cops in a white patrol car parked outside the stadium who chase away a black street urchin and then share their radio with the kid as the Springboks head for victory, all of them screaming and hugging each other, suddenly oblivious to skin color, followed by a close-up of a white hand and a black hand clutching the World Cup together? Subtlety is not a strength here, but pandering to heart-tugging cliches in a Clint Eastwood film is downright embarrassing.

rreed@observer.com

It's 2 a.m. and you awake with a jerk, alone in your fully lit apartment and still on the couch. On TV, the credits of some movie you've already seen a billion times are scrolling by. It feels like rock bottom. And we know, because we're just like you: single.

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to The Shawshank Redemption [starting @ 12:10 a.m. on Starz in Black]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: We wouldn’t go so far as to call The Shawshank Redemption played out, but after seeing it at least once a year for the past 15 years, let’s just say that some of the luster has worn off. Of course, therein lies the rub: If we happen to stumble upon the film while idly flipping channels, it is simply impossible for us to move on to something else. Shawshank invariably draws us in like a moth to a flame.

Touting hope before Barack Obama made it cool again, The Shawshank Redemption is one of the all-time male tearjerkers; we’re talking Brian’s Song–level crying here. What always gets us is the combination of Thomas Newman’s iconic musical score (guaranteed to draw waterworks from even the most heartless) and the underlying message: Shawshank isn’t just peddling hope, but the idea that great friendships can endure anything—including the 500 yards of awful foulness that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins, at the pinnacle of his cold fish persona) had to crawl through to gain his freedom. When discussing the lives of Andy and his BFF, Red (Morgan Freeman, perfectly wistful), C.S. Lewis’ quote about friendship giving value to survival never seemed more appropriate.

If there’s a reason why we don’t love-love Shawshank like we used to, though, it might be because of Frank Darabont. When the film was released in 1994, Mr. Darabont seemed poised to become the next great populist director—Frank Capra by way of John Ford. Instead, as the have years passed, it seems more and more clear that he was nothing but a one-hit wonder. And while we’d like to say that a great movie doesn’t lose anything when its director fails to make good on the promise it pointed toward, we simply cannot. Mr. Darabont is like the Dexys Midnight Runners of filmmakers.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: While it would be very easy for us to sit through the entire movie (again), we can’t very well stay up until past 2:30 a.m. when we have work tomorrow! So we’ll cut out at 12:42 a.m., 32 minutes into the film, when, while tarring a roof at the prison, Andy uses his banker’s background to sate the financially troubled Captain Hadley (Clancy Brown, forever doomed to play sadistic monsters after Shawshank) and score his buddies a few beers in the process. If hope can’t set you free, sometimes a little alcohol can. …

Graydon Carter bought the lease on the Monkey Bar on East 54th Street. One of his partners told the Post, "It's just going to be a little bar in Midtown." Just like the Waverly Inn is a little bar in the West Village! [P6]

Scarlett Johansson is still talking about being friends with Barack Obama on the Internet. [Newsday]

Morgan Freeman and his wife are divorcing, just days after he wrecked a car with their mutual "friend" in the passenger seat. [NYDN]

A woman was found dead on a rooftop after attending Lil' Kim's birthday party at Spotlight Live in Times Square. [TMZ]

Donald Trump bought a golf course in Colts Neck, N.J. [P6]

Simon Doonan has a new bit of fashion advice! Click the player below to watch.

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So whom did we nab? Screenwriter David Goyer! “This film is intense intense,” he said. “It’s about escalation, both good and bad.” What’s new about this Batman? “He’s the most realistic. In both films, we made sure that the technology he uses is based on technology that is being used or developed by the Department of Defense right now.” Now that’s truly scary. …

“More intelligent and more human,” said Michael Caine, who plays Bat-butler Alfred Pennyworth, wearing a black suit created for him by his recently deceased English tailor (“I can’t get any more alterations!”), when asked about the updated superhero.

Lauren Conrad of the splashy reality series The Hills was crowing about her maiden visit to the Hamptons. “It was great,” she said. “Beautiful.”

But overall, the mood was muted. A black carpet lined the entrance to the theater, and the absence of the late Heath Ledger (the Joker) was palpable. “I’m very thankful to have worked with him,” said the actor Chin Han. “He was so inventive—it was invigorating.”

cbankoff@observer.com