Good.
Setting aside my personal feelings about the death penalty, which is too complex an issue to examine in a pithy link post, there is no doubt to be had about this guy's guilt, and I'm glad punches aren't being pulled.
Electric Shadow
Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Gotham
The new Batman movie is a very close spiritual sibling to Fred Zinneman's High Noon, both in thematic choices as well as delivery on expectations. The two films do not match up identically, mind you, but the similarities are too numerous to ignore. Those similarities are largely the reason that I enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises so much.
Hrmph Dark Knight Hmphmhhmppphhh
I just got out of a press screening of The Dark Knight Rises. I'll have thoughts about the film itself later on, but for now I had to get this out:
Who is it that still allows AMC to set their sound on "extra quiet" for press screenings?
What's the point of even doing these things unless the sound presentation is at least reasonably audible?
I had to lean in so far just to hear what everyone on screen was saying (not just Bane, everybody) that by the end of the movie, I had pushed my head through the screen and halfway into the center channel speaker. Nothing was more audible than a muffled mumble throughout the entire runtime.
Saying something to the press rep resulted in a microscopic uptick in the sound volume. AMC wouldn't dare blast their speakers at acceptable operating levels, since that might requirte them to...I don't know...give a good goddamn?
The worst thing about this is that we freeloading critic-types didn't get unique treatment. This is how most mass-market moviegoers will hear the movie, or rather, not hear The Dark Knight Rises.
If Christopher Nolan or Thomas Tull had been there this morning, the projection and/or management staff would all be jobless. If anyone still cared in the mass-market ehibition business, it never would have happened in the first place.
Rotten Dark Knights of Fandom
Regarding fan outrage taking the form of death threats and other violence here's Devin Faraci, reporting at Badass Digest yesterday:
Rotten Tomatoes was forced to go to tweet a reminder that any commenters who broke their basic terms of service (which I'm sure include things like 'Don't make death threats') would be banned from the site. That they would feel the need to do this only hours after the first negative reviews hit shows the force of the onslaught. There are thousands of hate comments still standing, with many having been deleted by a surely overworked moderator.
Since originally posting, he's issued an update that Rotten Tomatoes has disabled commenting in advance of instituting a Facebook-backed, anti-anonymity system.
It's terrible that fandom has devolved into this sort of statistic-obsession, rather than the fandom-positive nature it once had.