The Dark Knight Trilogy (Christopher Nolan, 2005-2012)

[flyonthewall2983]

Gotcha. I'm pretty much a n00b at that stuff, so I had no idea.

[domino harvey]

Titanic's primary draw was with teenage girls who would go back seven or eight times, and their boyfriends/brothers/&c were often dragged with them. There's no love story in the Dark Night, or at least not one powerful enough to cater to such a market. This will do amazing business, no doubt, but it doesn't have the right genetic makeup to best a film like Titanic.

[flyonthewall2983]

Just curious, but did anyone here actually like Titanic as a film based solely on it's own merits and excluding everything else?

[tavernier]

No.

[mfunk9786]

I wouldn't be surprised if this surpasses the 3-day opening weekend record, though. Like someone already said here, if people are going to see it at 7:00am because the 3:20am is sold out, goddamn.

[Murdoch]

Titanic is the all-time US domestic box office champ, but what is the highest grossing movie in terms of international gross? Is it still Titanic?

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Just curious, but did anyone here actually like Titanic as a film based solely on it's own merits and excluding everything else?

I'm still having trouble forgetting that damn Celine Dion song (and its music video!) so I'll go with a "no" also.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

M ichael Bay's The Dark Knight

Funny if true. Funny if not, actually.

[Haggai]

Titanic is the all-time US domestic box office champ, but what is the highest grossing movie in terms of international gross? Is it still Titanic?

Titanic is the all-time domestic leader in unadjusted box office, and the all-time international leader by a substantially bigger margin. About 2/3 of its international box office came from outside the U.S. It made well over a billion dollars just from non-U.S. markets.

Now, with adjustments for inflation, a handful of movies are ahead of Titanic on the all-time domestic list, including Gone With the Wind and Star Wars (those numbers include various re-releases over the years). I don't think anyone tracks all-time international numbers with inflation adjustments; it might be too hard to come up with any reasonable numbers on that.

[moviscop]

Due to demand, some theaters are adding 6 AM screenings.

I went to get tickets 2 weeks before the showing and the midnight IMAX showing is sold out. My friends and I had to get tickets for the 3AM on IMAX. It will be a doozie.

[exte]

Just curious, but did anyone here actually like Titanic as a film based solely on it's own merits and excluding everything else?

Yes.

[Abulafia]

I've read a lot of scripts, but that "Bay" script is just brilliant. The person who really wrote it deserves a shiny medal. Hilarious. =D>

Also, Nick Cage is the only actor who could do that the proper justice.

[GoldenPilgrim]

I managed to grab tickets to the Free Tuesday IMAX showing, 9:00 P.M. None of this 3 in the morning nonsense.

I doubt there are any left but just in case... (The final reward to the final Viral game)

[domino harvey]

I can't wait til Armond White trashes this film and faces the wrath of "the general public" he romanticizes.

[Antoine Doinel]

The Joker sets off a bomb.

8 minutes of behind the scenes footage.

[Jeff]

Here is a transcript of Roeper and Michael Phillips' take that I snagged from another forum. This makes three times that I've seen it compared to Heat. I'm officially excited.

Richard Roeper:
"Christopher Nolan's Gotham City Epic is one of the best movies of the year, and SHOULD MERIT consideration for a Best Picture Nomination. This is a rich, complex, visually thrilling peice of pop entertainment. As strong as any Super Hero Epic I've EVER seen."

"It'll be an upset if Ledger, ISN'T, nominated for best supporting actor... And it won't be a sympothy vote Either... He creates a Joker that is one of the most memorable screen characters of the decade."

"Writer/Director Nolan has fashioned a near Masterpiece here. Maybe the best Superhero movie ever made... Even with the lead in a Bat-Suit, 'The Dark Knight' has the authentic feel of a crime Epic like 'Heat' or 'The Departed'. It's a Great Film, I say see it. In fact, SEE IT TWICE"

Michael Phillips:
"I would see it twice, and I'm looking forward to it. This film really is one of the great achievements of the year"

"And the wonderful thing about this screenplay, and the way Christopher Nolan has directed this picture, is you don't over exploit a terrific villian. He's in the film just the right amount. And all the scenes really land. And they're kinda creepily funny. And alot of it is really truly menacing. And the balance is perfect.

And it's so hard to get the kinda creepy/funny balance right in a comic book picture. Look at Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 'Batman'. Which to me was over exploit... Ya know, ya know, fun..."

Roeper:
"He was a Clown... It was a clown performance."

Phillips:
"But it's NOTHING compared to what Ledger's into."

Roeper:
"And you're right also about this being really an ensemble peice. Even Christain Bale, he has about the same amount of screen time as Batman/Bruce Wayne as Aaron Echart does as Harvey Dent. Each character, Gary Oldman gets his moment. Everyone has their moment"

Phillips:
"And not flashy too... Ya know. There's one extremely flashy performance, and it's the right one. Everybody esle seems very invested. Even people very familiar to ALL of us. Ya know Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, they're actually, all the work is just a little better. A little more, Ya know, a little more perfect."

Roeper:
"But that's it. As I mentioned, that's why it reminded me of movies like 'Heat' or 'The Departed'. Obviously we're dealing in Super Hero Genre here, BUT played authentically by everybody else. This is the world they live in, Gotham City..."

Roeper:
"You know you mentioned the running time of 2 and a half hours. I'm telling you it's the fastest 2 and a half hours I've spent at the movies in years. There's never a moment where I was going 'Aw jeez. They coulda cut 15 minutes out of this film'. It zips right along."

[flyonthewall2983]

The last quote from Roper is, oddly enough, the same way I felt about the running time in Heat. It's really cool to hear that a superhero movie is attempting (and succeeding, as far as I can tell) to balance out the comic-book stuff with a gritty reality that is only reserved for crime and suspense stories.

[Jeff]

Turns out some Bat-Nerd has uploaded the Ebert & Roeper segment to YouTube. It's hand-held cam in front of the TV, but it's entirely watchable. They really liked it.

[tavernier]

Yes, but this is Roeper we're talking about....Roeper, dammit!

[domino harvey]

Well, I was in the ballpark: New York Magazine (not Press) hands out the first Dark Knight pan

[John Cope]

But the psychological twists in The Dark Knight—especially the transformation of Dent into “Two-Face”—are baffling as drama. They play as if they’d been penned by Oxford philosophy majors trying to tone up a piece of American pop—to turn it into an uncivil Shavian dialogue, Don Juan in Hell with mutilations and truck crashes.

Sounds awesome!

[domino harvey]

Well, glancing at RottenTomatoes commenters, it appears the review will be counted as a positive notice regardless due to it being marked a "Critic's Choice"-- which is okay because he sort of seems wishy-washy on the film either way.

[Jeff]

Edelstein is my favorite film critic, and his take has dampened my enthusiasm. David Denby didn't like it much either:

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks. All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber.

Yuck. Nothing turns me off more in an action movie than dark, quick-cut fight scenes photographed in extreme close-up. I'm taking Denby's review with a grain of salt though, because he also said:

Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman”

Burton's films haven't aged well at all for me, and I loved the tone and execution of Batman Begins, so I'm hopeful for The Dark Knight.

[Haggai]

The fight scenes were the one thing I really disliked about Batman Begins (well, that and Katie Holmes, but they've fixed that particular problem this time around), and Denby's description sounds like they've taken the same approach in this sequel. Not that I should have expected otherwise. I thought everything else about the first film was very good, so I'm still definitely going to check this one out, but I'll be sure to calibrate my expectations to account for the continuing presence of poorly constructed fights.

[Finch]

I also thought the fight scenes in Batman Begins were poorly shot and edited and to see Denby stating that they are still filming all of it in close-up dampens my own enthusiasm for the film a bit. You'd have thought that second time round Nolan would have figured out how to stage a fight scene properly. Over at CHUD their reviewer too pointed out that the action scenes in The Dark Knight were lacking. In spite of this, I'm still expecting a cracking film.