In Which Kurt Loder Gets A Taste Of His Own Medicine...

While most of the reviews of "The Dark Knight Rises" have been positive, the opinions haven't been unanimous.  Seems as if there's a certain...type of person who hasn't found the film to their liking.  And it's not because they don't enjoy movies with violence, looting, and mayhem. Lord, no!

They just hate when those action are ascribed to their side.

Kurt Loder - former Rolling Stone editor and deliverer of dramatic headlines from the world of music as anchor of MTV news - lashes out at the final flick of the Batman trilogy.  Won't take you long to figure out why, either.  Via R.S. McCain:

The film is thick with politics of an obliviously nonsensical sort. In an attempt to lend the tale contemporary resonance, the script (by director Nolan and his brother, Jonathan) positions Bane as a self-declared revolutionary, come to liberate Gotham from its oppression by the city’s wealthy upper crust (the One Percent, if it need be said). But Bane is so clearly a vicious nihilist—he empties the municipal prison, arms the freed inmates, sets up kangaroo courts—that it’s not at all clear why the inexplicably angry populace (they’re living in a city scrubbed crime-free after the death of Harvey Dent—what is their problem?) would so ecstatically rally to him. Members of the real-world Occupy movement may bristle at being thus depicted, even at second hand, as witless sheep.



I think that Loder has come up with the best description of the denizens of Zuccotti park and elsewhere - "witless sheep".

"My hate is about to be expressed as projectile vomiting...!!"

Loder's tone seems almost petulant, that his pet cause isn't in fact given the solemn respeect it deserves, but instead is fictionalized to meet the needs of a dramatic production.

Just like Republicans and their ideas were/are in HBO movies/series such as Game Change, The Newsroom, and Recount.  Just as George Bush and the Iraq war were in the slew of poorly -attended movies Hollywood churned out during his administration [In the Valley of Elah (2007) Redacted (2007)The Kingdom (2007) Rendition (2007) Lions for Lambs(2007) Home of the Brave (2006) and Stop Loss (2008)].  Just like ordinary conservative citizens are in TV shows like "Law and Order", or on ABC News.

Will Loder realize what he's feeling now is what conservatives feel every day, when we watch the news, listen to the radio, or read the paper?  Will he feel empathy with our despair at seeing our views being intentionally distorted in order to meet a prefabricated, fictional storyline?  Will he wake up to the greater injustice?

Nah.  He's a witless sheep, after all.  He'll pause to get his breath, then begin bleating once again, clueless to the irony of his complaint...