When you describe Nolan's action sequences you sound as if you're describing Michael Bay movies. I honestly don't get that impression. You can criticize TDKR for a lot of things, notably for being overlong, having a lousy script (although Bane has some nice lines, but that has probably more to do with his English accent), for Marion Cotillard's pointless character, but that scene wanta posted has none of the close-ups, jittery editing and lack of visual clarity you have been stressing, without actually telling us what is particularly clumsy about it. I find it pretty impressive, especially in that way it handles things happening in different places at once: you have Bane walking underground, policemen looking for him, the pitch, bridges exploding, future Robin in his car, all at the same time, and the sense of Bane's manoeuvres closing down on a whole city is rendered effectively with a good sense of rythm between each set-piece, a good sense of spacce, and the way Bane says "that's a lovely lovely voice" adds a nice little irony. And the pitch collapsing is a pretty awesome thing in itself. The boat scene in TDK was similar in this way, but here even more stuff is happening. Interstellar has some beautiful sequences. Yes so it explains the theory of relativity in a not so subtle way to the audience, yes so it has the line "love is the only thing that transcends time and space", but that very line encapsulates a certain boldness in its storytelling. How many movies have a guy plinging into a black hole? I think some scenes attained a sort of "mathematical-aesthetic" beauty, in its dealing with the infinite whilst retaining a human element (artifically? perhaps), that some of Borges' short stories have.

Inception was definitely pretending to be clever whereas it was just a succession of action sequences stringed together by half-baked dream theory (with the most uncreative and drab dream sequences ever put to the screen), but I don't think his Batman films are pretending to be that clever. Well-crafted pieces of cinema, with your traditional superhero themes plugging into post 9/11 trauma, yes. The difference with other films perhaps is that Nolan (because he's English perhaps?) seems to be more negative about American society, emphasizes its divisions and its hypocrisy instead of showing what a great united country it is (like Emmerich and Michael Bay often do). TDKR has a definite anarchic theme (if banks and prisons started to go down, lower classes will be out for a vengeance - the boat scene in TDK has a similar theme, the elite and the preterite and with all the simplifications and generalizations such a division can spawn), there is a certain cynicism in Nolan's films that differentiates them from other films of the same genre, a cynicism which may be easily mistaken for cleverness, because saying things and people are bad always seems cleverer and "bolder", and perhaps they are in a way (that said I haven't seen a whole lot of other recent superhero movies but didn't Nolan's films contribute to the kind of "is it really worth saving these people who don't deserve it" fashion?). You can criticize Nolan for trying to make a "realistic" superhero film instead of following the comic-book tradition that Burton was more respectful of, but I think it's interesting.

nolan said that book was a big influence before the film even came out though so i think he gets away with that one.

Music is really, really good in the original too.

When you describe Nolan's action sequences you sound as if you're describing Michael Bay movies. I honestly don't get that impression. You can criticize TDKR for a lot of things, notably for being overlong, having a lousy script (although Bane has some nice lines, but that has probably more to do with his English accent), for Marion Cotillard's pointless character, but that scene wanta posted has none of the close-ups, jittery editing and lack of visual clarity you have been stressing, without actually telling us what is particularly clumsy about it. I find it pretty impressive, especially in that way it handles things happening in different places at once: you have Bane walking underground, policemen looking for him, the pitch, bridges exploding, future Robin in his car, all at the same time, and the sense of Bane's manoeuvres closing down on a whole city is rendered effectively with a good sense of rythm between each set-piece, a good sense of spacce, and the way Bane says "that's a lovely lovely voice" adds a nice little irony. And the pitch collapsing is a pretty awesome thing in itself. The boat scene in TDK was similar in this way, but here even more stuff is happening. Interstellar has some beautiful sequences. Yes so it explains the theory of relativity in a not so subtle way to the audience, yes so it has the line "love is the only thing that transcends time and space", but that very line encapsulates a certain boldness in its storytelling. How many movies have a guy plinging into a black hole? I think some scenes attained a sort of "mathematical-aesthetic" beauty, in its dealing with the infinite whilst retaining a human element (artifically? perhaps), that some of Borges' short stories have.

Inception was definitely pretending to be clever whereas it was just a succession of action sequences stringed together by half-baked dream theory (with the most uncreative and drab dream sequences ever put to the screen), but I don't think his Batman films are pretending to be that clever. Well-crafted pieces of cinema, with your traditional superhero themes plugging into post 9/11 trauma, yes. The difference with other films perhaps is that Nolan (because he's English perhaps?) seems to be more negative about American society, emphasizes its divisions and its hypocrisy instead of showing what a great united country it is (like Emmerich and Michael Bay often do). TDKR has a definite anarchic theme (if banks and prisons started to go down, lower classes will be out for a vengeance - the boat scene in TDK has a similar theme, the elite and the preterite and with all the simplifications and generalizations such a division can spawn), there is a certain cynicism in Nolan's films that differentiates them from other films of the same genre, a cynicism which may be easily mistaken for cleverness, because saying things and people are bad always seems cleverer and "bolder", and perhaps they are in a way (that said I haven't seen a whole lot of other recent superhero movies but didn't Nolan's films contribute to the kind of "is it really worth saving these people who don't deserve it" fashion?). You can criticize Nolan for trying to make a "realistic" superhero film instead of following the comic-book tradition that Burton was more respectful of, but I think it's interesting.

that spindle scene creeped me out so much as a kid, the music, the lighting, the use of green, the dark castle, Aurora's trance and the way she slowly climbs up the stairs, so much creepy atmosphere packed into that one scene.

Yeah I forgot to mention the excellent score, Once Upon A Dream is a lovely song, and Maleficent's theme is chilling to the bone, that spindle scene creeped me out so much as a kid, the music, the lighting, the use of green, the dark castle, Aurora's trance and the way she slowly climbs up the stairs, so much creepy atmosphere packed into that one scene.

One of the things I fucking love about golden age Disney is the emphasis on visual storytelling, not to say that's absent in modern animation, it's not, but animation nowadays is so much more dialogue based.

I'm actually interested in why you like it from the perspective of form and style. Is there actually anything worthy here or do you just have a "caring about the well-madeness of the film" off switch that I don't have? I don't think I'm enough of a snob to write off a film just because it's a big budget superhero movie. As everyone knows I'm no big fan of the genre but I was able to appreciate the first Iron Man, and as problematic as the Nolan Batmans are they show a modicum of basic Hollywood craftsmanship. I went into this film expecting to have my politics offended but willing to put that at bay to try and be titillated by a nice Hollywood yarn. But this film (and I feel the same way about the abhorrent Captain America) is just ugly. I think for most moviegoers the very small subtleties of the camera movements, actorly detail, and editing are something they don't notice, or if they do notice them it's like some kind of bonus to the story rather than the actual building blocks of the cinematic experience. Meanwhile, I've spent years training my brain to be more sensitive to those subtleties in movies, and so for me this thing was unbearable. The camera is constantly moving around for seemingly no other reason than the practical one of "well we need to swing it around a bit so that we can get all 10 characters in the shot," with absolutely no regard for how these movements end up feeling. The editing is similarly over-practical, tone-deaf, and numbing with no regard for how long we need to see an image to let it sink in. The actorly gestures and tones of voice are in-your-face, with each character having basically one boringly repetitive manner of speaking, which would be fine if it were organized into some kind of pleasing push-and-pull or give-and-take, but instead Thor and Captain America's strained seriousness just clash with Iron Man and Hulk's sarcasm (except of course for those predictable moments when they reverse those roles and we're supposed to laugh). Combine all these stylistic problems and it doesn't matter how interconnected and detailed your characterization and plotting are because the cinematic expression is an absolute unendurable cacophony. I'm not asking for this to be Seven Samurai. I was hoping--what with all the hype of this being "good contemporary Hollywood"--that it would at least be up to the craftsmanship standards (only craftsmanship! not even thematic standards, just craftsmanship standards!) of Brad Bird, Kathryn Bigelow, Christopher Nolan, Ang Lee, or even any one of the Harry Potter directors, but I guess that was asking too much.

So has anyone seen Maleficent and how fucking bad is it? I know it's bad, I just want to know how bad.