The severity of the negative response to this movie is genuinely fascinating to read.  It's a sloppier movie than its predecessors, but it's not nearly bad enough to warrant the sheer hatred.  In fact, had this been the first movie to have come out within a decade of BATMAN & ROBIN and BATMAN FOREVER, it would have seemed like a cool drink of water.  

Individual scenes are very well done and work well on their own.  Any qualms with the overall acting in the picture are completely unwarranted.  Everyone is solid and professional and when a performance doesn't work (like Bane for instance), it fails because Tom Hardy and Chris Nolan are taking big risks with their choices.  Their reach exceeded their grasp on that one, but you do have to admit that design of his mask is rather cool.

If the winds of public opinion had blown differently, this thread of hate would have been about INCEPTION.  Or THE DARK KNIGHT.  That movie got real lucky in the court of public opinion (even if there is a ghoulish factor in its luck).  Had any major aspect of it like, say, Heath Ledger's performance and his appearance rubbed people wrong, then the shortcomings of the rest of the movie would have been more readily obvious.  And had those flaws made viewers angry, there would be those who would maintain that the very fact that the movie had sloppy flaws made the entire endeavor a complete and total shameful piece of shit that everyone should have been ashamed of themselves for making.  No?

I think that Christopher Nolan is a filmmaker with a fierce obsessive control on the narratives of movies he's making from his own original stories.  But his experiment with these franchise superhero movies is to let go of that control a little bit and allow others to steer the narrative when he isn't flying by the seat of his pants.  The reality is that he's out of his element, but he sometimes fakes it rather well and other times he goes splat.

I totally agree that Columbus isn't given enough credit.  He's essentially the Bryan Singer of the Harry Potter movies.  Everything that ultimately works in the movie series is largely due to his stubborn attitude towards doing it right the first time.

Remember all of the horrible rumors floating around in '99 and 2000 when they were trying to get the movie series off the ground?  There was allegedly pressure to Americanize the story or if not that, to Americanize Harry himself.  I seem to also remember there was talk of having a patronizing Robin Williams narration to explain the story.  Pfft!  Some or maybe all of those rumors were false, but none of them would surprise me.  I do believe that Chris Columbus used his considerable clout (probably with substantial backing from J. K. Rowling herself) to do right by the first Potter film.

As far as the backstory of "Azkaban," I agree that Rowling gets a little bit clunky with her Scooby Doo exposition and reveals, but the relationship between James Potter, Lupin, Sirius and Snape is at the heart of why certain characters behave the way they do.

The third book for me was the first of the series to be a bona fide page turner.  The pacing and expansion of every aspect of the Harry Potter universe is outstanding.  The movie version is a mind blowing botch. 

It feels like it was overrated given that Alfonso Cuaron made defiant departures from the novel as opposed to being slavishly faithful to it (and also for the fact that he was Alfonso Cuaron and not Chris Columbus).  But the story and momentum of the book are essentially murdered in the movie version for no good reason.  We have the whomping willow, the shrieking shack, Sirius Black turning into a dog, Lupin turning into a werewolf, Wormtail turning into a rat and Harry mistaking a stag patronus for his father, but absolutely no explanation of any kind as to why any of these things have anything to do with one another.

Instead, we have a really boring movie with no sense of forward momentum in which every plot point seems arbitrary and unconnected.

Were Charlie Kaufman to develop a television series, this is something like what I would expect.  With all the good and bad that entails.

Having just seen stills of it, I kinda thought the same things as Brandon Wolfe.  And then I accidentally stumbled upon it one night and was, ya know, more than a little bit surprised by it.  It's dark and funny and uncomfortable.

Wow.  I'd never heard that.  It makes me really, really want to watch MY BLUE HEAVEN again.

No kidding.  The mantra of "this will only last for another 8 hours" has gotten me out of a tight spot or two.  I feel so vanilla next to Josh.

Is there really a new recreational drug called bath salts that causes people to do this?  Really?

http://abcnews.go.com/US/face-eating-attack-possibly-linked-bath-salts-miami/story?id=16451452

Okay, see?  That's kind of chilling right there.  

Someone in that article compares it to LSD which is sort of naively misleading.  If I understand correctly, it's like some kind of ultra meth.  This is meth for people who think that good, old fashioned crystal meth just isn't hard enough.  And it adds just a hint of The Ladder from JACOB'S LADDER.

Super meth which boils people's insides and can cause them to turn feral and even cannibalistic?  Sounds like a real party.

And, hey.  Why not make zombie comments?  That's essentially what the afflicted is on this shit.  

I was actually with him through the first half of that.  And then his train of thought seem to unravel just a tad.

After Frank Miller posted his anti-Occupy rant, Larry Hama commented on his own Facebook, "Anger, alcohol and the internet do not mix."

In the case of Gabriel, he seems tweeked on pure geek rage.

It's just a hunch based one what we've seen in the trailers.  He seems to be contained to one extended sequence which begins at his house, involves perhaps a quick surprise COBRA attack and a scene in which he gives The Rock a vehicle. 

I'll bet his total screen time is about the same as that of Tom Waits in MYSTERY MEN.

Phew!  For a minute there, I was afraid that they were going to take this opportunity to add lots more Bruno to the movie to expand his role from being that of an over advertised cameo.

I think you may be on to something. 

There is no movie.  There was just an ad campaign.  Now they need nine months to go out and shoot the damn thing.

It was someone else who pointed out the "Lisa Marie guilt" thing back when CORPSE BRIDE was in theaters.  I think it was Sean?

You could take it a step further with this movie and read Angelique and Josette/Victoria as two different aspects of Lisa Marie.  The latter is the idealized one (kind of like Lisa Marie playing Ichabod Crane's angelic witch mother in SLEEPY HOLLOW and Anne Hathaway as a graceful, angelic Lisa Marie lookalike in ALICE IN WONDERLAND) with the former being the jilted, emotionally damaged possessive side (the side which would later sue Tim Burton for leaving her).  If you want to psychoanalyze Burton, he sure gives you a lot to work with.

It only seems creepy when he contrasts this by casting Helena Bonham-Carter in certain rather unflattering roles.  But art can be therapeutic like that.  If having Johnny Depp make believe murder the mother of his children in an act of passion every few films or so helps keep the peace at home, who are we to judge?

I suspect that when a script falls into Tim Burton's hands (even if he has a role in commissioning it), is that he intuits his way through production and zeroes in stuff that interests him and lets the other stuff kind of go by the wayside.

What I took away from this movie is that he really, seriously still has a whole lot of issues stemming from his relationship with Lisa Marie (which, given the clues throughout his work, seems to have had a hint of bondage to it).  I also suspect that his relationship with Helena Bonham-Carter is tinged with ambiguity and suspicion and perhaps some rage.  If you stack this one up next to "SWEENEY TODD," a few rather personal themes start to emerge.

In fact, I was so taken with the whole evil Lisa Marie as cracked, artificial porcelain doll thing going on during the climax, that I guess I can look the other way with regards to a certain other character's cosmetic effects (which were not quite so good).

As far as the whole family angle, and Burton's disinterest in the particulars of the Collins family saga, they're just pawns in Angelique's emotional torment of Barnabas.  But I'm still thankful that Burton had emotional investment in at least some part of this story.  It's what makes this feel more like one of his older movies than, say, "PLANET OF THE APES."

You can't stop the signal, true believer.

On the other hand, a good night's sleep really does go a long way towards being of sound mind and a general sense of well being on the morrow. 

Kind of like UNDERWORLD?