[Movies] Interstellar (2014)

High concept science fiction movies aren't all that common - they're obviously not very appealing to the general market, and that tends to make them less enticing to studio executives. And it was a bit of a surprise to find out that Christopher Nolan had decided to take on such a project given his general body of work. Inception certainly demonstrated that he can handle such complex plot lines in how he translates the story into a beautiful visual narrative. But this still felt a bit further afield.

Interstellar is a big science fiction movie complete with ambiguous trailers that talk about a need for humanity to leave the planet to escape...something. And while this is a decent enough quick summary of what the movie is generally about. it does not capture the complexity of the tale and the obvious effort to try and be as accurate as possible when it comes to how it depicts various concepts from modern physics and other related science fields.

Tobie and I definitely wanted to see this movie in a proper theater as opposed to home video given Nolan's past work. And as expected, it was a brilliant experience that was slightly dampened by our annoying audience that laughed at weird moments and generally struggled with the concepts presented in the film. But that's life in the big city for you.

[Movies] The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Christopher Nolan has become quite the "it" director these days, or at least within geek (and critic's) circles. And it's a pretty fair assessment given his contribution to the movie industry, even if at times people feel his movies are a tad high brow.

Now his work with the Batman franchise has been especially interesting given how he has pretty much executed a masterful reboot of the franchise that feels a lot like what Year One did for the comic book Batman. Taking on a somewhat grittier and yet also more realistic approach to the character that still left him larger than life and yet also very human.

I don't think any of us could have accurately predicted where he'd take this iconic character nor how successful his Batman movies would become. And yet here we are with the third and final installment of his cinema masterpiece and it's certainly been a wild ride. And this movie is definitely quite the pay-off for the past 7-ish years of living with Nolan's Batman.

[Comics] Who Is Bane? And Which Catwoman?

With the recent announcement of Anne Hathaway and Tom Hardy being cast as Catwoman and Bane in the upcoming Chris Nolan Batman movie, apparently there's a lot of people asking one question. And no, it's not the question of Tom Hardy being gay and/or single.

Instead, I was surprised to find out that a lot of people are asking who Bane is and what the heck this all means. At first the question surprised me - Bane is to Doomsday as Batman is to Superman, generally speaking. But then when you get down to it, people probably only remembered that Batman got his back broken without caring by whom.

Image via WikipediaAnd all we have to remember of Bane is his horrible misrepresentation in the 1997 disaster action comedy known as Batman & Robin. With that in mind, now it makes sense why everyone is scrambling to explain who he is while the rest of the core geek world already knows who he is and his strange evolution from evil bad guy to unusual anti-hero.

Thankfully, there are a lot of geeky resources online to help you with your troubles in order to explain who Bane is while the rest of us geeks contemplate the greater questions in life such as whether or not Anne Hathaway will be more of a Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman or a Halle Berry Catwoman. *shudders

Your search probably started with the ever boring wiki-styler entries over at Wikipedia or the DC Database, but that's no real fun.

More recently hardcore geek sites have started to write their own guides to this dash wrestler-style character. The Geekosystem feature is a nice simple narrative that should quickly get you up to speed in all things Bane. However the real gem is the much more detailed io9 backgrounder on Bane, his history and what he;s doing now in terms of the comic book universe. Plus the post is generously littered with great images of the character and how he's evolved over the years.

And if that's not enough for you to figure out who Bane is and why he's worthy of being the next Batman villain, then I don't know how else to help you.

In the meantime, what if Anne Hathaway ends up being a Julie Newmar kind of Catwoman...or even an Eartha Kitt one? Now that boggles the mind.

[Movies] Inception (2010)

Dreams tend to be depicted in movies in a particular way. When we talk of dream sequences, we can expect the edges of the screen to fudge out a bit or the camera does a soft focus on the central figure in the dream. Some dreams have clouds generated by fog machines. Others have the shimmer of stars around the actors as a clear signal that THIS IS A DREAM.

In Hollywood, dream sequences have become synonymous with fantastical elements. This means being able to fly under your own power or channeling M.C. Escher in how the shots are organized. It can mean people mutating into monsters or your deepest, darkest sexual desires being realized. It normally means the excessive use of color to make the world seem almost alien and of course the classic tropes like your inability to read given the use of a different side of the brain while dreaming.

So when Chris Nolan, a skilled writer-director decided to take on dreams, I'm sure Hollywood executives were expecting a lot of the aforementioned patterns and other predictable sequences. I doubt anyone could have truly predicted what he would finally come up with in the form of this magnificent movie.