It’s been a very tough year for Matt Lauer. The Today Show host has come under extreme fire for how he and NBC fired Ann Curry , while his program has sank to second in the ratings behind Good Morning America . Speaking to The Daily Beast about the departure of his ex-colleague, Lauer admits it didn’t exactly go smoothly. “I don’t think the show and the network handled the transition well,” says Lauer . “You don’t have to be Einstein to know that. It clearly did not help us. We were seen as a family, and we didn’t handle a family matter well.” Today is still struggling to recover, as Lauer says the series has been “kicked around a lot” but a lot of the damage has been “self-inflicted.” Having been the top-rated morning program for 16 years, Today now draws nearly one million fewer households than Good Morning America on a daily basis. What has led to this reversal? “We want people to feel good about a portion of their morning and we got away from that,” Lauer said, adding that much of the darkness is gone, by design.” Lauer concludes, however, that he’s the “luckiest guy I know” and he hopes to use the ratings decline as motivation: “Who’s going to feel sorry for me? Nobody. In some ways being number-two in the ratings is a real shot in the arm, a kick in the pants. It makes you hungrier – I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have a fire lit under your ass.”
Sarah Silverman, Michael Cera, Tim and Eric (from Tim & Eric Awesome Show) and Reggie Watts have launched a new, Google-funded YouTube channel, JASH. Each of them will get their own section within the channel where they have creative control as well as production and editing equipment at their disposal. The channel’s name, “JASH,” stands for “Just Attitude So Hey.” JASH The channel is one of 60 Original Channels that are essentially a blank check to each individual or group, funded by Google, YouTube’s parent company. JASH debuted at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference with a five-minute video jokingly explaining that its purpose is to replace all YouTube videos. Silverman told The Hollywood Reporter: “This [JASH] is what we think is funny. It may not be your cup of tea, but there’s no testing involved, there’s no second-guessing of what a 14-year-old boy would like.” “It’s just a place to do stuff and fail or not fail.” Cera added, “it’s about quality over quantity.”
Missing mothers, lost wives, abusive and indifferent father substitutes — Looper may be a movie powered by time travel, but its emotional fuel is abandonment. The new film from Brick director Rian Johnson is a clever, clever contraption about trading in your future to feed your present, and the lost boys and regretful men who willingly embrace such a bargain already believe they have nothing to live for or look forward to. Thirty years of kicking around with a lot of cash in your pocket looks like a pretty good bargain when you’re gazing down at it from in front of all that time, but when those last few days are running out, you might not be so ready to go. Looper may not have the bell-ringing resonance of Chris Marker’s La Jetée , one of its touchstones, but it’s a jaunty match-up of genre and character drama that’s far smarter and more finely wrought than almost anything else in the multiplexes. The film’s set a few decades in the future, where technology’s a little better and life in general is worse, at least in the Kansas metropolis in which Joe ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ) lives. Looper ‘s setting of a midlevel Midwestern city and the ragged, lived-in feeling of its 2044 are a pleasingly off-kilter approach to its sci-fi premise. We don’t know what the government’s like in this year, or what the larger world’s become because it’s not so important to Joe, a young man who’s building up cash reserves and easing his off-hours with drugs until he’s free to move to France. Joe’s a looper, a job he explains with a matter-of-fact lack of curiosity: when time travel is invented a few years from his present, it’s instantly outlawed and used only by organized crime for assassinations. Murders will have become so hard to hide that it’s easier to send targets back to Joe’s era, where they can be neatly offed and disposed of by eager young men like our hero, guys who have accepted their own disposability. Joe’s self-interest is central to both the film’s premise and the way it avoids most of the tougher theoretical questions about time travel, paradoxes, how the technology works and whether people are using it for more ambitious purposes. He doesn’t care. He started out on the streets, and looping has provided him with a nice apartment and enough money to get high and to buy time with his favorite working girl Suzie (Piper Perabo). Like the town in which he lives, Joe’s nowhere near the top of the food chain, and has no interest in climbing. He’s just waiting on his big payout that will come once he closes his loop by killing off his future self — part of the devil’s bargain that all loopers make. Looper is built around our buying Bruce Willis as Joe’s future self, a feat that rests more on a wry impersonation by a prosthetics-aided (and very good) Gordon-Levitt than on the older actor. When the tougher and more world-weary Old Joe is sent back in time to die, he arrives with a mission in mind, but his younger self has no desire to hear it. The scenes in which the two Joes confront each other at a diner are among the film’s best. Youth and experience are unable to relate — even though they’re technically the same person — because their priorities are completely different. It’s an amusing and dishearteningly well-articulated take on how useless it would be to be able to offer your younger self advice when your younger self isn’t ready to hear it. While it’s no looper contract, we do trade in our future for present enjoyment in small ways all the time (by, for instance, taking up smoking or by spending money instead of saving it). Looper offers an even-handed look at both perspectives, even as it sends Old Joe off to make a terrible exchange on behalf of the future and follows younger Joe as he goes on the run and ends up taking shelter on a farm on which a woman named Sara (Emily Blunt) lives with her young son Cid (Pierce Gagnon). After a stylishly noir first half that’s simultaneously futuristic and retro — “20th-century affectation,” Joe’s boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) sneers at his employee’s preference for ties — Looper becomes more thoughtful and a little more jumbled in its second section, as it slows down for Joe to find some human connection for the first time in his adult life. With touches of The Terminator , the aforementioned Marker film and the inspired-by-it 12 Monkeys , a classic episode of The Twilight Zone and more, Looper is aware of its sci-fi legacy, but manages plenty of unique touches all its own. The depiction of Kansas is one, combining future tech and a farming lifestyle unchanged by the advance in time. A sequence in which Joe’s colleague Seth (Paul Dano) meets an unfortunate fate is innovative in its horror. But despite the fleet-footed flash of its storytelling, what’s most impressive about Johnson’s movie is its dark-edged faith in people being able to change despite the path on which they’ve been set. If all we’ll ever be is a product of the circumstances in which we grew up, then time travel’s almost unnecessary — the future’s predetermined. It’s choosing something new that may be as clear a sign as we ever get of a soul. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
It’s hard to say who really won, or if nobody won, or if everyone won last night when filmmaker Joe Swanberg ( LOL , Hannah Takes The Stairs ) and Badass Digest critic Devin Faraci took their creative differences to the boxing ring at the Fantastic Debates, an annual Fantastic Fest highlight that combines traditional debate with actual fisticuffs. Technically, their topic of debate was “Mumblecore is catshit and is giving a bad name to independent films,” though given Swanberg’s position as the micro-indie movement’s poster child, the fight got personal as soon as it began. Faraci had the audience going early with opening remarks (full transcript below) laced with pointed barbs that had the capacity crowd cheering. “[Mumblecore] is a bunch of middle class white kids whining about their ennui, about their middle class white lives in front of a camera, without a script, without good actors,” he proclaimed. “Here’s what you need to make a mumblecore movie: A sense of entitlement, white skin, and Greta Gerwig.” It’s safe to say Faraci’s anti-mumblecore attack/not-so-friendly roast had the support of the audience, but to his credit, Swanberg (who had no films in the fest and flew in for the debate) deftly countered. “True to form I haven’t prepared notes like Devin,” he began, turning the focus back on Faraci. “Maybe us mumblecore filmmakers are making movies from the heart that are connecting with you in a way that makes you a little bit uncomfortable.” Faraci nailed exactly what so many film-watchers dislike about mumblecore films — the unscripted, self-obsessed feeling of privileged white hipsterism that dominates them — but while he had the audience’s minds, Swanberg captured their hearts with the best counter-argument he could have used. “When you use your voice to try and squash people who are young, who are just coming up, who are figuring out the kind of filmmaker they want to be and the kinds of films they want to make,” said Swanberg, “all you’re doing is discouraging creative people from becoming who they are.” It was a passionate, personal, highly entertaining exchange of ideas and philosophies about film and filmmaking filled with complexities of the critic-artist relationship as old as time. And then they entered the ring. Although Faraci and Swanberg were preceded by dueling twin sister filmmakers Jen and Sylvia Soska ( American Mary ) who kicked each other while dressed as Mortal Kombat characters, and were followed by the night’s title card between Fantastic Fest founder Tim League and actual Tae Kwan Do Grandmaster/motivational speaker/ Miami Connection star Y.K. Kim, the critic-filmmaker bout was the best, and most alarming, of the night. Punches landed hard. Contact lenses were lost. In an event traditionally more tongue-in-cheek sideshow than serious fight, Faraci hit the mat but kept going for two rounds with Swanberg, who had director Ti West as his cornerman and wore a shirt that read “The Silver Bullet,” a nod to one of his own films and a symbolic weapon for taking down certain hirsute mythological creatures. What started out as a wildly entertaining exchange of barbs turned harrowing as the physical match wore on. But neither contender pulled any punches, at the podium or in the ring, Fantastic Fest got its best Debate in memory, and this morning Faraci and Swanberg’s intellectual bout is as much the talk of the fest as their knock-down rumble. In any case, the two bruisers made up after hours, somewhat , in true Fantastic Fest fashion. I guess that’s a win-win for everyone? Read the full transcript below. Devin Faraci: Joe, I really want to thank you for coming down to Austin, Texas to talk. I understand that last night you and your wife wanted to have some Chinese food, and Magnolia is now releasing that into 100 theaters next weekend. I’m here not because I hate Joe Swanberg – that’s just a plus – but because I love independent cinema. I love indie movies! They’re the beating heart of film. This is the best, the brightest, our greatest directors from Oscar Micheaux to Roger Corman to Dennis Hopper to Katherine Bigelow, Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson’s independent cinema. These are people without big means, these are people with big dreams, big visions – and usually, take note, a script. Even Cassavetes who didn’t have the scripts had these amazing actors, incredibly trained naturalistic actors whose qualifications were much more than just being willing to simulate sex onscreen with the director. You are the opposite of everything that’s great about indie film. It’s the laziest form of filmmaking. It’s a bunch of middle class white kids whining about their ennui, about their middle class white lives in front of a camera, without a script, without good actors. Here’s what you need to make a mumblecore movie: A sense of entitlement, white skin, and Greta Gerwig. To me, the word “core” at the end of mumblecore sounds like it should be something punk rock, something amazing, something edgy, instead of the blandest, most self-indulgent bullshit and only at the narcissists who make it. Your audience, pretty much, is you. Joe Swanberg: Well, true to form I haven’t prepared notes like Devin. I heard you use the word “lazy” just now yet also it seems to be the case that I’ve made more movies than almost any American filmmaker so that seems to be a contradiction. Additionally, if my audience is just me why do I make a living as a filmmaker and why do you seem to have seen so many of my films? Maybe you recognize yourself in those movies, Devin. Maybe us mumblecore filmmakers are making movies from the heart that are connecting with you in a way that makes you a little bit uncomfortable, possibly in your underpants area. Maybe they’re a little too familiar. Maybe the awkward fumblings of the sexual scenes hit a little too close to home, so rather than embrace these films you put up a wall of defense. I also heard you mention Roger Corman, another filmmaker who in his time was accused of being lazy, amateurish, sloppy, all these things – now he’s a hero of yours. Maybe you’ve got to give these mumblecore movies another 25 years before you see the true impact they make. Mostly, I’m out there doing it, Devin. I’m making movies. I’m getting my friends together with no money, we’re going out there and doing it, we’re putting ourselves on the line for shitheads like you to take cheap shots from behind your computer! There wouldn’t be a you without a me, Devin. Faraci: You’re right, you have made more films than most American filmmakers. Hitler killed more Jews than most other people. True, your early films were full of your heart, and your soul, and your dick, and then you moved past short subjects into longer movies. It is important that people keep making movies. I do agree that having no money should never be a roadblock for any filmmaker out there. Having no talent, that’s a whole other matter entirely. Swanberg: I’m going to ignore the cheap shots. You know, we both came of age in a really amazing time when the technology has allowed me to have a voice and the technology has allowed you to have a voice. And I think that, unfortunately, when you use your voice to try and squash people who are young, who are just coming up, who are figuring out the kind of filmmaker they want to be and the kinds of films they want to make, all you’re doing is discouraging creative people from becoming who they are. I think the next time you see a movie that you really hate, you might want to reflect on it for more than 25 minutes before you write a review. You write reviews faster than I make movies. Faraci: I do agree, I think that young filmmakers out there who are working hard should be supported, they should have places like Fantastic Fest to come and show the work they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that every single thought that they ever had has to become a 65-minute motion picture. At the end of the day I think making movies isn’t just about getting your friends together and turning a camera on. It’s about creating something that speaks to people, something that has a soul, something that has narrative. I think you need to have one of these things: amazing craft, amazing script, amazing actors. At this point, when Kevin Smith is beating you in all three of those, I don’t know what to say. But I do want to say, Joe, I do respect that you came down here. This is not easy, this is not your crowd. I think this was very big of you. And I look forward to punching you right in the face in a couple minutes. Swanberg: I don’t have much to say Devin, except that I’m going to be making a lot more films for the rest of my life, most of them you’ll be watching. I’ll never read another word you write. I think you’ve demonstrated an incredibly close-minded view of what cinema can be, by referencing just script, or just narrative, or just those things. I think you have a lot to learn. I’m excited for you to learn it. Mostly I’m excited to put the gloves on and beat the shit out of you. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Big Apple Pizza owner Scott Van Nuzer received a visit from President Barack Obama Sunday in Fort Pierce, Fla., and reacted with a giant bear hug for the POTUS. Yelp trolls responded a little less positively. Irate, presumably conservative users flooded the rate and review website shortly afterward, sending Big Apple Pizza’s overall rating into a tailspin. “Talk about committing business suicide. After picking up Obama, your books are gonna be in the red pretty soon. Not too smart,” one “reviewer” posted . The commenter from Cottonwood, Ariz., 2,200 miles away, gave him 1/5 stars. Harsh. Hours later, though, Van Nuzer’s establishment had staged a comeback. Another Yelp commenter retaliated, “Really, conservatards? You try to trash a man’s business because he likes a different political candidate than you?” “What scum you all are. SCOTT VAN DUZER IS MY HERO!” Of the 229 comments listed on the page (30 “filtered,” one axed for violating terms of service), only two are pre-Obama bear hug. His overall rating is currently 5/5. The oldest review, posted in 2010, offers this assessment: “Nice variety of food for lunch or dinner. Love the Pizza, wings, subs, best stromboli in town. Great atmosphere in newly renovated dinning area, and flat screen TV’s … staff make you feel right at home. Special people and good food make for a local favorite.” Must have been what Obama read before deciding on Big Apple. Decision 2012:
The Bourne Legacy is a passable movie that has the peculiar misfortune of being part of a very successful, influential and distinctive franchise. Box office-wise, this is probably not going to be much of a hardship, but in terms of content and style it definitely suffers in comparison. The Bourne predecessors, particularly the two directed by Paul Greengrass, are by my count some of the most exhilarating action movies in recent cinematic history. The Bourne Legacy is not. Still, it has two very good leads in Jeremy Renner and Rachel Weisz and a few tense, rangy sequences in a half-restored house in the Maryland woods and in the sterile confines of a high-security lab. Tony Gilroy , who worked on the screenplays for the past three films in the series, gets a bump up to director in this installment (he also shares a writing credit), but, that jowly opening fight in Duplicity aside, he’s no great facilitator of action scenes. Gilroy also has to reverse engineer this ungainly “sidequel” to fit around the existing mythology of the previous trilogy without overlapping it too much — Jason Bourne ( Matt Damon ) himself is mentioned many times while never appearing, but his actions are what spur the events in this film, which takes place in approximately the same time frame as The Bourne Ultimatum . The result is a convoluted back-end story that’s grouted around what’s happened before, but is essentially the tale of a brutal clean- and cover-up. Bourne looked for clues to his identity and his reason for being; Cross (Renner), the hero of The Bourne Legacy , is just trying to stay whole. It’s a process that’s more complicated than straightforward survival for him. Cross is an agent of Outcome, which, like Blackbriar, is a successor program to Bourne’s black ops Treadstone operation. The twist for Outcome participants is that they’ve had their physical and mental abilities enhanced by a carefully managed regimen of space age pills adjusted for their specific chemistry — “chems” are what Cross calls them, and the frequency of his insistent demands for them could be the basis a decent drinking game (it turns out he’s got a good reason for not wanting to degrade back to his standard self). Out of fear it’ll be discovered in the Blackbriar/Jason Bourne fallout, Outcome is shut down and everyone involved, agents and scientists alike, are killed. Cross happens to escape the burn down, and goes in search of the sole surviving doctor from the lab, Marta Shearing (Weisz). She’s been made a target herself, and before you know it the two are off and running to a facility in the Philippines where they hope to stabilize Cross’ condition while the National Research Assay Group, led by Eric Byer (Edward Norton), use all the technology and operatives at their disposal to track them down. Renner’s Aaron Cross is no Jason Bourne, in welcome ways. Where Bourne was half traumatized boy scout, half instinctual killing machine, Cross’ eyes are wide open — he’s had no mental break, no soul-deep shock from which to recover, no dark past to rediscover. He’s also matter-of-fact and funny, with traces of the worldly swagger Renner showed as his disturbingly fearless bomb disposal expert in The Hurt Locker ; in the midst of the on-the-go running that makes up most of the film, he manages to get a laugh out of the outrage he displays when Marta reveals she doesn’t know his name. Weisz plays her character as a dorkily committed, slightly scattered professional who’s always focused on the results of rather than the reasons behind her work, and who’s only slowly realizing the seriousness of what she’s been involved in. There’s not much time for nookie in The Bourne Legacy ‘s multinational pursuit, but the pair have the crackle of legitimate chemistry, enough to make you want more scenes of them together and less of them in visually garbled clashes and chases. The Bourne Legacy mimics the nigh revelatory look of the second and third Bourne movies without sharing their stomach-dropping sense of space and awareness of the physicality of their characters (the cinematographer is Oliver Wood, who also shot The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy ). The brief fight scenes seem edited together punch by punch, while a race across Manila rooftops recalls the Tangier sequence in Ultimatum without its clammy-palmed tautness — it looks more like your now-standard blockbuster parkour display. The aspects of The Bourne Legacy that work, chief among them Renner and Weisz, feel like they should somehow be salvaged and put into their own potentially more standard action movie. As is, the film feels hampered by its own franchise, by the shoehorned-in scenes in which David Strathairn, Joan Allen, Albert Finney and others continue their covert agency cold wars that are now once removed from what’s happened to our current protagonist, and by the awkward extended intro in which Cross has been sent on a kind of probationary exercise into the wilds of Alaska during which he literally wrestles a wolf. And as the latest bureaucrat-cum-villain, Norton has distressingly little to do but bark orders at techs operating computers, the lone flashback to a past interaction with Cross giving no great sense of tie between the two, or weight to the high-tech cat-and-mouse game. Like much of the movie, Norton’s presence has a patient, diligent quality to it, as if what’s on screen is just a slog to get through before some promised fun in the next installment. Follow Alison Willmore on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Joel Bush proposed to girlfriend Jennifer Orr the other night on the state capital grounds in Austin, Texas, with no one around but the two of them. So he thought. Photographer Patrick Lu happened upon the couple, took some amazing candid shots of the moment and them posted them on Austin’s Reddit . Hoping to share them with the newly-engaged couple (Jen said yes, thank god), he wrote, “Did any of you propose at the capital last night?” Lu received 1,400 “up” votes (the most ever in that sub-reddit), but didn’t even need to track down his mystery man: Bush himself found the post. “The thread found me through friends,” Bush said, adding that he’s active in the Austin tech meetup scene, so “I’m not surprised it found me.” Bush says he unwittingly got the best of both worlds, with a private moment shared by just the two of them, yet fantastic photos to cherish forever. Lu said Reddit was a logical spot to look for the soon-to-be-newlyweds. “Austin is actually a growing haven for tech companies and startups, and I had a gut feeling that the couple worked somewhere in that space. With techies, you have a lot of Redditors. I figured someone would have recognized them eventually.” Not even 48 hours later, it turned out.
So, The Dark Knight Rises happened. But as much as Christopher Nolan’s Batman finale tied the themes of the entire trilogy together with emotion and weight, capping what began in Batman Begins and continued in The Dark Knight with a full-circle completion of Bruce Wayne’s journey as a hero and symbol of hope in Gotham City and the world, well, there were just a dozen too many plot holes and contrivances along the way to ignore. Or were there? Let’s dive right into spoiler territory and navigate the WTF-iest of TDKR ‘s more perplexing leaps of logic, shall we? SPOILERS FOLLOW, OBVIOUSLY. Bane’s Overly Complicated 5-Month Plan Let’s start with the dastardly terrorist plot that sets TDKR in motion. Bane gets slimy exec guy Daggett to hire Selina Kyle to steal Bruce Wayne’s fingerprints to make some fraudulent deals (via very public hostage-taking assault on the stock exchange) in order to force Wayne Enterprises into Miranda Tate/Talia al Ghul’s hands, so they can bankrupt the billionaire superhero whose identity they already know and then manipulate him into giving them the technology that can be fashioned into a nuclear bomb. *Gasps for breath* Then Bane destroys Gotham with a few neat set pieces (the football stadium explosion and the simultaneous bridge attack are superb, I’ll admit) thereby cutting Gotham City off from the rest of the world, unleashing the prison population into the streets, and imposing chaos on the citizenry… but only for about 5 months, until his bomb will nuke the city anyway — conveniently enough, the perfect amount of time to leech hope from the people of Gotham AND allow Bruce to recover from a broken back, climb out of the pit, trek across the globe with no ID and no money and no smart phone, sneak back into Gotham City, and save the day! Bruce Wayne and Miranda Tate’s Out of Nowhere Hookup If The Notebook taught us anything, it’s that two attractive people caught in the rain will get to boinking sooner or later. That’s just what happens. So of course Bruce, who’s been grieving the loss of his beloved Rachel for 8 years, will fall into sexytime with the pretty board member who he’s never so much as locked eyes with until like two days ago, let alone had any meaningful chemistry with. IT’S SEX RAIN. GET OVER IT. There must be missing footage on the cutting room floor that sets up Bruce and Miranda’s chemistry better, and maybe even shows us a bit of the action, so to speak. There must . Why would Gotham’s preeminent costumed detective superhero let down his guard enough to leave a strange lady sleeping in their fireside bed, alone in his house of secrets, where the push of a button on a desk opens the door to the Bat-cave? Especially since she herself has mysterious scars and secrets of her own? Probable answer : The back-on-the-saddle hubris that led Batman to ruin the cops’ pursuit of Bane in his first return to crimefighting also makes him underestimate Talia. Bedding her is a step forward in his return to life and becoming a whole man once again after nursing his broken heart (and likely being a celibate creepy old mansion hermit). And maybe he spent a few hours offscreen in his Bat-cave Googling Miranda and doing an extensive background check on her before going there, only the League of Shadows has really, really good hackers and fake identity engineers on their payroll, in addition to prison doctors and Mongolian-chic wardrobe stylists. Terrible Hand-to-Hand Fight Action That Makes No Damn Sense Bane’s a hulking, physically superior adversary who can kill people with his finger and batters Batman (admittedly, an over-the-hill, hasn’t hit the gym in 8 years Batman) around like a rag doll — which explains why their first fight in the sewers is so awkwardly one-sided. But once Batman recovers from his broken back, does a few prison push-ups, and then suits up after focusing his anger into his workout regimen for months… their fist fights look pretty much the same. There’s a shot on the City Hall steps where Batman leaps ahead of Bane, then turns to face him like a kid on a playground that made me groan. In no way does Batman seem to have learned from his past failures against Bane; he doesn’t employ strategy or gadgetry to defeat his stronger nemesis. When Bane grabs a shotgun, of all things, to finish the Caped Crusader, it’s Catwoman who offs Bane with a blast from the Batpod. And then we forget Bane was even in this movie for the rest of the film. Sigh. Side note : It’s worth acknowledging that the entirety of TDKR ‘s final act is constructed so that the people around Batman must step up individually to help save Gotham. The fact that Batman can’t do it all by himself, and can’t even defeat Bane alone, reinforces the theme. Maybe he’s getting too old for this shit after all. Still, it’s not very satisfying when the individual parts don’t make total sense on their own, is it? Batman’s Superhuman Time Management Before zooming off in the Bat with nuclear bomb in tow, and shortly after returning to the city after five months in the middle of nowhere prison with about a day to save the world, Batman somehow manages to put all of his legal affairs in order, leaves the pearl necklace for Selina (heh) and detailed instructions to Blake in a duffel bag at his lawyer’s office, sets a gasoline fire on the bridge in the shape of the Bat, saves Gordon in the nick of time, saves Blake in the nick of time, and fixes the Bat-symbol. I don’t know how he does it! Literally. Best explanation: He’s Batman. Enough said? Bruce/Batman’s Coincidental Death Are you telling me that nobody notices that Batman “dies” in a blaze of glory the same day that Gotham’s most famous billionaire playboy also dies, leaving his estate to a bunch of orphans and willing his duffel bag of spelunking gear to some junior cop? Which brings me to… Bruce and Selina’s European Vacation I don’t believe that A) Emo Alfred would sit there on his fancy-sad vacay, see Bruce at the next table, alive and well, and not go give him a huge weepy hug, or B) a presumed dead billionaire playboy like Bruce Wayne can just go brunching in the open in France or whatever Florence and not be recognized. I kinda dig the idea that with nothing left in the Wayne coffers Bruce and Selina have retired to the French Riviera Italy to live off of her burgling money. Possible answer: This is just Alfred’s fantasy version of what he’s always wished to see, and Batman/Bruce Wayne is really dead, and Chris Nolan has Incepted us all over again. Selina’s Special Friend, Wink Wink Presuming Selina Kyle has a more than friendly relationship with Juno Temple’s minx-in-training is a stretch, though they certainly seem to be BFFs/roommates/collaborators, ladies from the wrong side of the tracks trying to hustle their way up the food chain. That said: What’s up with that one hug? You know what I’m talking about. Temple pretty much disappears once the movie gets going, but maybe she has additional scenes that flesh out their relationship that didn’t make the edit. Discuss. Possible answer that I hope isn’t the case: Selina is bisexual and uses her sensuality as a tool against male marks… until she falls for Bruce/Batman and runs away with him to live happily ever after, leaving her girlfriend behind in Gotham. Ten bucks says this comes into play in the eventual TDKR XXX porn parody. Good luck, Robin! The good news: You’ve got a cave full of fancy toys and extra Bat-suits. The bad news: There’s no money left to finance the operation. At least you know where the Bat is parked, on top of some building under some camo tarp. No one else will find it there, obviously. Probable answer: Blake will take up the Batman cowl and figure out his own way of doing things, thus launching an entirely new Bat-series which I’ll totally watch because Joseph Gordon-Levitt was the best thing about TDKR . Room For The Justice League? So WB wants to carve out a superhero super-team up, a la The Avengers , around DC’s Justice League. Fair enough. But if folks like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and Superman exist in the same universe, where the hell are they during Batman’s five-month absence from Gotham City? If the Justice League is possible in this film world — and maybe it’s not, since Nolan’s said to be done with his Batman storytelling, and despite his involvement in Man of Steel perhaps the two franchises aren’t designed to co-exist just yet — then you have to think some other superhero out there would have swooped by to prevent the total destruction of one of America’s biggest metropolitan populations, especially given that even the U.S. government has been rendered useless, leaving the entire city in the hands of a madman. Does it really matter? Either any potential Justice League spin-off will not connect to the TDKR world, or it’ll conveniently take place after the events of TDKR . This will likely be explained away or disregarded if/when the Justice League movie moves forward. — Phew . All that said, TDKR was visually breathtaking and thematically resonant. Plus, it was Batman! At least there were no codpieces or Schumacherisms to complain about. So there will inevitably be two kinds of people: Those who can’t help but be irked by the plot holes riddled throughout TDKR , and those who don’t care and love it anyway. Where do you stand? Was this the movie Bat-fans deserved, or the one they needed? Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Call it the most disappointing $16 billion raised in investment history. Facebook stock is off to a rocky start after its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO), jumping more than 10 percent in the first few minutes of trading before sellers swept into the market and that gain evaporated. “The stock is trading right at the IPO price ,” one expert told the L.A. Times. “They didn’t want that in a million years. A traditional IPO is up 10% or 15%.” The stock most recently hovered at about $40, only $2 above what shares were priced at late Thursday. Shares touched $38 multiple times during trading. Investors also had to deal with a nearly three-hour delay for the stock to open. The Nasdaq kept the stock halted as it processed a crush of buy and sell orders. The inauspicious opening after the Facebook IPO suggests that retail investors paid close attention to reports of soft financials and big selling by insiders. Still, Facebook raised $16 billion in what will go down as the third-largest public offering in U.S. history and the biggest ever for a technology company. Could be worse, right? Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rang the Nasdaq opening bell from company headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Eduardo Saverin , one of the company’s co-founders, made news this week by giving up U.S. citizenship as a means of limiting his tax liability.
