Summer of Movies - "Brave" and "The Dark Knight Rises"

I'm not seeing as many movies as I hoped to this summer, but I managed to get a couple more in this past week.  Of course, I went to see "The Dark Knight Rises" on opening day because, well, I like adding my stats to the opening day numbers.

Brave
I was very excited to see this movie about another strong female character blazing her own trail in the world.  And it's Scottish - I love the accent!  We took our munchkin - I think she's been looking forward to the movie as much as I have. She likes saying that "Merida is better than the boys."  The movie had a great story about family and doing what's right.  There were some parts of the movie with more violence than the munchkin is used to (which is not much), so she was a bit scared, but once it was over, she was okay and didn't dwell on those parts.  I really enjoyed the story of the mother and daughter learning to understand one another.  What teenage girl doesn't have stories about butting heads with her mom?  This was a great movie that will become part of our movie collection and will be watched many times, I'm sure.

The Dark Knight Rises
I won't give anything away for anyone who hasn't seen this yet!  I love Batman.  Seriously.  I didn't read the comic books, so I don't know all the stories, but I was hooked in 1989 and 1992 when the Tim Burton films came out.  I watched them both many times, loving the look of the Burton-esque Gotham.  That and I thought Michael Keaton was a great Batman.  The two later films, "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin," killed the series for me. 

Then "Batman Begins" and "The Dark Knight" came along.  Wow.  I love them.  I like the backstory of Batman's origins, and Heath Ledger's Joker was eerily creepy.  I liked "The Dark Knight Rises" though it was difficult to understand Bane with the weird almost TV-announcer lilt to his voice behind the strange mask.  My niece said the movie was predictable, and I found it to be true in some places, but I go to the movies without any preconceived ideas and I don't analyze what's happening while I watch so that I can be surprised and just let the action unfold.  There was some foreshadowing in this film, so while I wasn't surprised at some turns of events, I didn't think they were ruined by the foreshadowing. 

As always, Christian Bale and Gary Oldman turned out good performances (I love Gary Oldman!) and the additions of Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt were interesting.  Hathaway has the sex appeal down (she's come a long way from "The Princess Diaries"), but I didn't completely buy into her character.  I always see Levitt as the little kid as "Angels in the Outfield," but he showed that he's grown up in this film.  I thought he played the part of the NY cop quite well.  Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and Matthew Modine were also very good.  I do think these films were well casted and have always enjoyed the onscreen rapport between Bale and Caine and Freeman.