Out Now – 20th July 2012

The Dark Knight Rises
It’s the summer movie so big that no other significant release dares to open on the same day. Batman is back! Woooo! Yeah! Batman! For the third and final instalment in Nolan’s trilogy Batman is joined by Tom Hardy as Bane, Anne Hathaway as Catwoman (though never called Catwoman), and most excitingly Joseph Gordon-Levitt as some policeman. It’s dark. It’s gritty. It’s a little bit self-important. It’s Batman. Only one question remains; will Nolan finally use the Batman theme song?

Batman

Something from Nothing: The Art of Rap (limited release)
Ice-T directs a documentary on the history of rap. Everyone is involved; Bun B, B-Real, Busy Bee, Grandmaster Caz, Ice Cube, Chuck D, Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Eminem, Big Daddy Kane, Ras Kass, Kool Keith, KRS-One, MC Lyte, Marley Marl, Melle Mel, Q-Tip, Redman, Puerto Rico, Chino XL, Xzibit, Immortal Technique, Baggy Trousers, Flat White, House MD, Green-T, Kumquat, IPATD-256, Lemonhead, and Mild Concern.*

In Your Hands (limited release)
Kristin Scott Thomas continues to star in Frenchy films. This time she is a kidnapped woman who gets a small dose of Stockholm Syndrome. Someone on IMDb says, “you feel that the not untold story anyway is told one too many time.” What more could I possibly say?

Revenge of the Electric Car (limited release)
5+ years ago Chris Paine made the intriguing documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? which looked at the strange events surrounding the death of the electric car as major companies recalled electric models and had them destroyed for no reason other than to maintain oil companies dominance in the fuel market. Now with electric cars back on the rise Chris Paine documents this resurgence and we all feel a little bit less uneasy.

Swandown (limited release)
Documentary following Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair as they pedal a plastic swan 160 miles from Hastings to Hackney. Sounds like fun.

Lola Versus (limited release)
Indie flick about a woman called Lola, played by mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig, who breaks up with her fiancé three weeks before her wedding. Reviews aren’t great but what really matters is that the film’s website has an infographic telling you how to survive a break-up. Bookmark it now.

The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best (limited release)
What seems like a three star film in which “a singer-songwriter hits the road with a self-appointed music revolutionary.”

I Am Bruce Lee (limited release)
It’s a documentary about Bruce Lee. Obviously.

Interview with a Hitman (limited release)
“An elite hitman returns to erase his past only to find that somebody has messed with his future.” Sadly I don’t think this involves any time travel. For a film about time travel and assassins we’re going to have to wait for Looper.

*I only made up some of those.

The Best is Yet to Come: 2012

As much as we are obliged to look back over the year just gone, we are obliged to look ahead at the year just beginning. It’s always exciting to look at the next twelve months and all the exciting treats that are coming to our screens. Below are my personal picks of the films worth seeing in 2012, and I’m hoping there will be many more besides, a few gems I haven’t even heard of yet.

The Dark Knight Rises – Trailer Dissection

With so many people rediscovering our teaser dissection for The Dark Knight Rises, I thought it only fair to provide a dissection of the full trailer, and give people something slightly more worth their time. It is Christmas after all. And as the only comment on the previous dissection was “This isn’t much of a dissection”, I am going to take this way too far and show every single shot from the trailer regardless of interest or sanity.

If you haven’t seen the trailer yet it is embedded below:

Now onto the dissection…

The Dark Knight Rises – Teaser Dissection

Below refers to the early teaser trailer, for the dissection of the full trailer click here.

The very nature of a teaser trailer is that it doesn’t give you a whole lot to go on, and The Dark Knight takes this to a new level, containing the minimal amount of new footage imaginable. It’s almost as bad as early trailers for The Social Network.
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Despite the lack of new footage bootleg versions of the trailer were posted as soon as it was leaked, and Collider even ran a description of the teaser as news. Madness.

Happy to join in with the craziness, we have a look at every single bit of new footage in the trailer below:

Your Week in Promo Materials

We’ve probably talked about this before but every time an exciting new trailer or poster is released we find ourselves in a state of panic deciding whether to bother posting it. The world of film blogging is saturated with every single poster and teaser trailer that rolls along and we don’t want to bury our valuable Harry Potter charts in a sea of weak posters.

As a result here is an incomplete run-down of recent trailers and posters. We’ve removed anything not worthy of comment. Anybody else underwhelmed by the latest Sherlock Holmes posters?

Posters
Big buzz builders so far this week were posters for The Thing and The Dark Knight Rises.

While pretty, the poster for The Dark Knight Rises reveals nothing and is as unexciting as anything related to Christopher Nolan can be, which still leaves plenty of room for excitement. The poster for The Thing is more my type of thing. It looks different to most horror films, no monochrome pictures of horrific images/small children/torture devices/all the above and gives a tantalising glimpse of the thing itself transforming from/into a human. Can’t wait for The Thing to let me down.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Play Robin/Black Mask/The Riddler/The Holiday Killer/Batman/Michael Caine

There’s a reason we stopped posting “news” about castings and films in development so much, and this past week has been a reassurance that we’re doing the right thing. Way back when, Gordon-Levitt was rumoured to be in The Dark Knight Rises as possibly The Riddler. Then it was announced that he wasn’t.

Not long ago he was back in the running for the film and then recently was “officially” confirmed to be playing Alberto Falcon and my Google Alert went wild. Now a source has claimed that he isn’t actually playing Falcon… which trumps the previous fictitious official announcement.

Oh internet, how you run with a rumour until it is reported as news on the biggest film sites. We’re just going to sit back and wait until there’s some kind of proof. If you do need wild speculation reported as facts and instant notification when a new poster is released, there’s always Empire.