Selena Kyle? The girl who talks to her cats?

November 19, 2012 2:11 PM

The fact that many of the actors in Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy have previously portrayed high school characters has resulted in an extended trailer mashup resetting the Batman series as a teen comedy.
posted by The Whelk (41 comments total)

Heh. That was really well done. "Violent Principle on Trail."
posted by phaedon at 2:20 PM on November 19, 2012

Yeah I thought this was going to be another quick and easy joke parody but they put a lot of thought into it and it came out really well.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:28 PM on November 19, 2012

That was surprisingly amazing, not overdone, clever, and I would absolutely watch this as a real movie. Somebody get on it!
posted by Mizu at 2:29 PM on November 19, 2012

On a related note, is it too late to add 10 Things I Hate About You to my Movie Channel I'd Never Stop Watching?
posted by MCMikeNamara at 2:44 PM on November 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

Ha, ha, the TV news says "Violent Principle on Trail"!

On edit, sorry phaedon.
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:45 PM on November 19, 2012

Ha, ha, the TV news says "Violent Principle on Trial"!

It says Violent Principle on Trail
posted by sweetkid at 2:51 PM on November 19, 2012

Yes, of course it does. I thought I had edited it properly, but see now that I didn't. I'm giving up and going home...
posted by Mental Wimp at 2:57 PM on November 19, 2012

What movie(s) are the Christian Bale clips from?
posted by naoko at 2:58 PM on November 19, 2012

Yes, of course it does. I thought I had edited it properly, but see now that I didn't. I'm giving up and going home...

No, you did fine, but you edited while I posted. EDIT POWER IS MESSING WITH YOUR MIND, FRIEND.
posted by sweetkid at 3:00 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

What movie(s) are the Christian Bale clips from?

Velvet Goldmine
posted by The Whelk at 3:01 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Made of awesome, it was. Well thought out, with a decent script, and a good choice of clips. And I so loved the ending...

(10 Things is one of my guilty pleasures movies, BTW...)
posted by Samizdata at 3:01 PM on November 19, 2012

I think Batman: The Animated Series deserves more credit for keeping the batman franchise viable.
posted by kickback at 3:02 PM on November 19, 2012 [5 favorites]

kickback: "I think Batman: The Animated Series deserves more credit for keeping the batman franchise viable."

I so agree with you. That was the only thing to help keep Batman relevant between generations. Adam West did a fair bit of damage it seems. (And I blame early exposure to Batgirl/Yvonne Craig in really tight clothes as partially formative of the later Samizdata's peccadillios.)
posted by Samizdata at 3:06 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Do we really need yet another Bat Pack movie, though?
posted by kyrademon at 3:07 PM on November 19, 2012 [9 favorites]

It's funny, Samizdata, I blame Batman: TAS' Harley Quinn for basically all of my peccadillos ever, in perpetuity.
posted by kickback at 3:13 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sad they didnt' include Christian Bale in Treasure Island. Not sure how they'd fit it in but....
posted by hot_monster at 3:30 PM on November 19, 2012

kickback: "It's funny, Samizdata, I blame Batman: TAS' Harley Quinn for basically all of my peccadillos ever, in perpetuity."

Wow. We so are NOT going there in my case.

Of course, I am the man with a cat named "Mr. J" so you make the call.
posted by Samizdata at 3:33 PM on November 19, 2012

The only problem I saw in it was that they didn't have a good clip of a younger Aaron Eckhart so it looks like she's crushing on the school principle or something.
posted by The Whelk at 3:35 PM on November 19, 2012

The Whelk: "The only problem I saw in it was that they didn't have a good clip of a younger Aaron Eckhart so it looks like she's crushing on the school principle or something."

Wouldn't be a first time thing, methinks. Although with a younger Eckhart, I suspect modern audiences that view stuff like this on YouTube might have a recognition issue.
posted by Samizdata at 3:54 PM on November 19, 2012

Having never seen the Nolan movies, at first I thought that all of the footage in this mashup came from the Batman movies themselves, which was rather confusing.
posted by KokuRyu at 4:05 PM on November 19, 2012

A while ago someone exploited Nolan's habit of casting the same actors in everything to produce a fake trailer for The Batman Complex, the two-and-a-bit minutes of which are both way better than the entirety of The Dark Knight Rises and probably the best superhero movie we'll never see.
posted by permafrost at 4:15 PM on November 19, 2012 [17 favorites]

Holy crap, Cobb from Inception as the Mad Hatter basically inventing Batman by taking hold of Wayne's mental problems.

Can someone dopple me into the universe where this exists?
posted by The Whelk at 4:21 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

I so agree with you. That was the only thing to help keep Batman relevant between generations. Adam West did a fair bit of damage it seems.

Eh I disagree. I am glad that that view didn't come to predominate the public perception of Batman in the long run, but I think 60s Batman is an entirely valid and entertaining version of the character, that shows how versatile the concept really is. Batman can work either in GRIMDARK or BASH! POW! WHAM! modes. Batman: Brave And The Bold wasn't afraid to refer to it, while also not being afraid to refer to some of Batman's other elements from time to time. (And it wasn't afraid to kill people off either, a first for TV Batman!)

Anyway, Adam West just played him. You can't dump it all at his feet.
posted by JHarris at 4:23 PM on November 19, 2012 [6 favorites]

That was bonus. I loved the end in particular.
posted by dethb0y at 4:43 PM on November 19, 2012

I'd give it an 80%. Putting in Aaron Eckhart doesn't really work, and including Powder? AH HELL NAH
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:02 PM on November 19, 2012

Yes, mister freeze was cheating.

But man oh man did that Anne Hathaway cat clip make me cackle.
posted by The Whelk at 6:07 PM on November 19, 2012

Yeah, those younger Hathaway eyebrows deserve their own zip code or something.
posted by Purposeful Grimace at 6:43 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

JHarris: "I so agree with you. That was the only thing to help keep Batman relevant between generations. Adam West did a fair bit of damage it seems.

Eh I disagree. I am glad that that view didn't come to predominate the public perception of Batman in the long run, but I think 60s Batman is an entirely valid and entertaining version of the character, that shows how versatile the concept really is. Batman can work either in GRIMDARK or BASH! POW! WHAM! modes. Batman: Brave And The Bold wasn't afraid to refer to it, while also not being afraid to refer to some of Batman's other elements from time to time. (And it wasn't afraid to kill people off either, a first for TV Batman!)

Anyway, Adam West just played him. You can't dump it all at his feet."

I didn't. He was just the easiest masthead to point out, without doing a 97 link superpost of research tracking down old TV show staff.
posted by Samizdata at 6:45 PM on November 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

Halloween Jack: "I'd give it an 80%. Putting in Aaron Eckhart doesn't really work, and including Powder? AH HELL NAH"

Okay, I have to admit I grinned a little when I saw him and knew where they were going. Of course, I am a DC/WBKids Freeze fanboy, so...
posted by Samizdata at 6:50 PM on November 19, 2012

Samizdata: "a 97 link superpost of research tracking down old TV show staff"

PRE-FAVORITED FPP
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:03 PM on November 19, 2012 [4 favorites]

The Whelk: "Holy crap, Cobb from Inception as the Mad Hatter basically inventing Batman by taking hold of Wayne's mental problems.

Can someone dopple me into the universe where this exists?"

Cobb's not the Mad Hatter. Fischer Jr., is the Mad Hatter. But to talk about that, we have to talk about how he got there first.

After he breaks up his father's empire, he comes to the realization that to "be the better man" he must help people one-on-one, and goes back to university to pursue a degree in psychiatry. At first, he's not sure why he chose that path, but when he takes a course on the use of the PASIV device for therapeutic exploration of patients' subconsciousness, he takes to it like a natural, grasping the concepts instinctively. At the time, he attributes this to his previous experiences with the process during anti-extraction training.

Once he has his degree, he establishes a rather successful practice centered around PASIV-assisted shared dreaming therapy. However, there's one patient that he has trouble with, a man who's been institutionalized for severe depression ever since his parents were both killed when the man was just a boy, too afraid to let go of his grief and move on with his life to be able to function in society.

Fischer, seeing himself mirrored in this patient's pain, due to having lost his own mother at a young age and growing up feeling like his father wasn't a part of his life, finds himself highly moved and strongly motivated to try to help this patient where all the other doctors have failed. He begins to explore more unconventional treatments, when it hits him: what if he could use the PASIV device to put the idea in his patient's head that he's suffered enough, it's ok to move on with life now?

He inquires among the experts in the field of PASIV-assisted shared dreaming, and they all agree, that inception of an idea into the subject's mind is impossible. All except one, a professor at the University of Paris, who answers the query with "You need to have a talk with my son-in-law."

The first meeting that Miles arranges between Fischer and Cobb is brief, as Cobb didn't know who he was to be meeting with until Fischer walks in. Cobb angrily storms out, afraid that being face to face with Fischer again may somehow unravel the life with his children that he's regained for himself.

Fischer however, sees enough of Cobb to have a spark of recognition, and troubled by this as well as Cobb's reaction during the meeting, he hooks himself up to the PASIV machine to try to figure out where he remembers Cobb from. It is in this dream session that Fischer figures out what was done to him by Cobb and his team.

Fischer begs Miles to put him in touch with Cobb again, and when Cobb picks up the phone, he explains that he's not mad about being incepted, and that he means no harm to Cobb and his family. Fischer goes on to tell Cobb of all the lives he's been able to make better since Cobb had set him down that path, and how it wouldn't even have been possible if not for the time he'd spent in Limbo with Cobb, because Cobb's experiences with dream manipulation had imprinted upon him. He then asks Cobb to help him help his patient.

It's Fischer's acceptance that the idea that he was incepted with was good because it had moved him to bring healing to the world, combined with Fischer's ability to discuss the finer points of PASIV usage as a learned equal that finally break down Cobb's resistance. Cobb sees much of his own curiosity about the boundaries of what can be done with dreaming now imprinted into Fischer, and he agrees to help with an inception on the patient, because he's a little afraid of what might happen if he's not there to guide Fischer. Cobb has two conditions though: he isn't mentioned by name in any of the reports for any medical journals and that he doesn't go into the dream himself.

Cobb brings Arthur and Eames in for support, as well as the new extractor they'd been working with since Cobb retired, but his old friends aren't convinced that it'll work without Cobb going into the dream with them. Cobb resists this suggestion; he's afraid that despite having accepted Mal's death and having had a chance to raise their children, that if he goes back in, she'll wreak havok in his subconscious again. Eames is the one to offer up a solution: Although Cobb's usual role is the Extractor, he can protect himself by learning the skills of the Forger's trade, and take control of his subconcious' Shade of Mal by becoming her himself.

"You want me to become my late wife?" Cobb asks, coldly incredulous.

"Your mind generated a projection of her in exacting detail for years as your way of coping," Eames answers, "and that's the bulk of the Forger's job right there. The rest is just believing that you are that person strongly enough that everyone else in the dream believes it too."

"And this won't be like the years you went to every corner of the globe doing things of questionable legality," offers Miles "this will be in a controlled, clinical setting. I'd even be willing to come along, and lay most of the groundwork for you, all you'd have to do is show up near the end and give the emotional power to the idea I put into our patient's head."

So to perform an inception on the patient, they construct the first level dream to be from the boy's youth before his parents had died, specifically centered around another early trauma for him that they know of from the patient history, that he's been afraid of bats ever since falling into a cave of them. They make a few adjustments though. In the dream he's part of a fantastically rich family, with Miles assuming the role of the family's head butler, and Cobb using what he'd learned of the Forger's art from Eames to project himself as a wealthy version of the boy's dead father. It's on this level they plant the seed of the idea, "Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

The second level of dream, they try to instill in him the idea that he's strong enough to be able to pick himself up and face a world that is sometimes painful and scary, by advancing him to adulthood in the same rich-kid fantasy world as they had in level one. Cobb and Fischer take on the roles of antagonists in this world, Ra's al Ghul and Dr. Crane, first training him to not give in to fear but to instead use it as a tool, and then giving him someone to fight against. Ultimately, they succeed in convincing the patient that he can be a hero, but then his projections start fighting back.

Or really, just one projection. Due to the patient's severe depression, it's actually been the inception team's projections populating the bulk of Gotham. Aside from a compassionate police officer who had comforted the patient as a young boy when his parents died, his mind hasn't projected many people. So when his mind tries to fight back at having its dream shared, instead of a whole dreamworld's worth of people, it creates one anonymous projection with a multiple choice past. And instead of lashing out at the other dreamers, this projection of his mental scars lashes out at himself, all the while trying to prove a point that the whole world is as crazy as he is.

The team works to do damage control, with Eames forging himself as Harvey Dent trying to draw off the Joker projection's attention. They eventually get the patient to contain the problematic projection on his own, but they realize that this self-hostility is a problem that must be overcome, so Eames modifies his persona of Dent into Two-Face to engineer a situation that would let the patient unleash a whole city's worth of police and civilian projections that are inclined to be hostile to him.

They then drop him to level three, which is again an extension of the same dreamworld, only advanced a few more years. On this level, the patient's withdrawn from the world because he believes it'd be hostile to him and the idea of him heroically facing the pain and misery of the world. This is what the inception team must fight against, and the new extractor that Arthur and Eames had been working with sets the plan in motion.

She steps out of the role she'd carried forward from previous dream levels as a house servant and breaks into the protected portion of the patient's dream (the uncrackable safe) and takes memories of his Mother to get his attention. Later on, its her quest for the anonymity to be able to be free from what's expected of her (a idea they borrowed from his hostile projection on the dream level above), that lets the team give him the idea that maybe he could be free to do what he wanted to do as well.

Arthur (who had also stayed in the background as a house servant on the upper dreams) is tasked with teaching the patient that other people can see that he's in pain and feel compassion for him, and are willing to help him fight through his troubles.

Eames' job is undoing the trappings of the rich-boy fantasy world they'd constructed, so that the patient knows that it's his own willpower and internal personal strengths that can carry him forward, to make sure he doesn't take the wrong idea out of the dream.

Cobb (who in this deep of a dream level has to forge himself in the likeness of Mal to be able to control her), is there to show the patient that yes, he does love and want to be a part of the world, by threatening to take it all away from him. And by making the patient have to climb out of the same pit that Cobb-as-Mal did, they hope to have the patient have the same successful leap-of-faith that Cobb did in his own healing process.

And Miles, who'd been a proxy father figure since they'd "killed" the patient's father back on the first dream level, gets to plant the ultimate version of the idea they're looking to incept, that you don't need to keep sacrificing yourself over your grief, the people who love you most dream of you being happy and part of the world again. Obviously he's successful at it.

(Of course, for this to work, certain on-screen deaths need to not be be actual deaths, lest we start dropping team members into limbo, and there's the fact that you'd need extra team members I hadn't mentioned to be the dreamers of level 2 and level 3, probably posing as other servants in the Wayne household, it fits together so well, I have to wonder if Nolan didn't intend for it to be seen that way. Even if he didn't, this will forever be my headcanon.)
posted by radwolf76 at 9:07 PM on November 19, 2012 [22 favorites]

*slow clap*
posted by The Whelk at 9:33 PM on November 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

That elevator pitch is gonna need one hell of a tall building.
posted by davejay at 9:46 PM on November 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

davejay: "That elevator pitch is gonna need one hell of a tall building."

Who does an elevator pitch for 4 movies that have already been made?
posted by radwolf76 at 10:08 PM on November 19, 2012

I liked this. Especially the bit where Harley doesn't like girls.
And I await the Very Special Episode when she meets the new gal, Ivy.
posted by Mezentian at 12:16 AM on November 20, 2012

I couldn't follow The Batman Complex at all.
posted by yonega at 5:56 AM on November 20, 2012

This was pretty great. What movie(s) were the Joseph Gordon-Levitt bits from?
posted by sevenyearlurk at 7:38 AM on November 20, 2012

Brick and Ten Things I Hate About You.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:01 AM on November 20, 2012

davejay: "That elevator pitch is gonna need one hell of a tall building."

radwolf76: Who does an elevator pitch for 4 movies that have already been made?

George Lucas, talking to Mickey Mouse?
posted by chavenet at 9:29 AM on November 20, 2012

Brick was quite delightful. I am pleasantly surprised by Mr. Gordon-Levitt's Hollywood transformation from TV Kid to Movie Guy and I look forward to seeing what he was to offer us in the future.

/derail
posted by Samizdata at 10:47 AM on November 20, 2012 [2 favorites]

Who does an elevator pitch for 4 movies that have already been made?

Traditionally, every elevator pitch is for two movies that have already been made, so four isn't a stretch.

Picture this: the dignity of Alien vs Predator with the romance of Bowling for Columbine! It's brilliant, I tell you!
posted by davejay at 8:09 PM on November 20, 2012 [1 favorite]