About a year ago, I told you that I found out Christopher Nolan’s final Batman movie, “The Dark Knight Rises,” was coming to theaters.
I also told you that upon hearing this, my enthusiasm, which is normally very safely bridled, became unbridled. I was throwing open windows. Screaming incoherent phrases. Searching the internet with such intensity for rumors about the film that I generally contributed nothing to society.
I also predicted that Anne Hathaway, joining Nolan’s cast to play Catwoman, would be
Ride that enormous motorcycle, Anne. (Photo from http://www.herocomplex.latimes.com)
excellent in the role despite most of her acting experience coming in chick flicks and who up to this point has only been, say, in the upper 90th percentile of actresses.
But something just happens when actors join Nolan’s movies.
Take the case of Heath Ledger, which went like this. Upper 90th percentile actor Heath Ledger signs as the Joker in “The Dark Knight.” Decides he needs to rent a hotel room for a month and live alone there like he actually is the Joker. Performs the role of a psychopath better than any actor ever has. Now considered upper 99th percentile actor.
According to Geoff Boucher, who writes on a lovely Los Angeles Times superhero movie blog called “Hero Complex,” Hathaway has taken similar steps to “become” her character. She heard Bob Kane, one of the creators of Batman, based the character of Catwoman largely on Hedy Lamarr, an actress who appeared in most of her movies from 1930-50. Hathaway studied the subtleties of Lamarr’s movie personas to perfect her Catwoman.
“I know this sounds odd, but her breathing is extraordinary,” Hathaway said, according to the Boucher’s article. “She takes these long, deep, languid breaths and exhales slowly. There’s a shot of her in [the 1933 film] ‘Ecstasy’ exhaling a cigarette and I took probably five breaths during her one exhale. So I started working on my breathing a lot.”
It’s just a guess, but I think Hathaway will do okay.
And, there’s something else worth mentioning.
Basically, this series is about to join “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” as one of the greatest ever made. Outside of the movies in those series, every single aspect of this Batman series’ first two installments – plot, acting, camera work, whatever cinematography is – has been far better in every single aspect than every other movie made in the history of mankind. In no way is that an overstatement made by a person who loves superhero action movies.
The movies really have been fantastic, and more people than me have been thinking about the last one so much that they have become unable to function. In December, for instance, select IMAX theaters showing “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” showed a special seven minute preview of “Rises.” The preview included something like the first four minutes of the film – which primarily involves an airplane being dramatically hi-jacked by the film’s new villain Bane. Boucher said this about that preview: “It’s revealing that in the eyes of many fans the biggest movie event of this holiday season is the seven-minute preamble to a film that won’t reach theaters for another six months.”
It is now March. Less than five months.
