That said, the movie effectively painted the future of the series into a corner. Really, what in the fuck could they do next to top it? The movie essentially has enough stuff crammed into it for six movies.

The biggest problem Nolan and company will have for any future Batman films is that they really can’t use mostly any of the traditional Batman Villains.
“The Dark Knight” dragged Batman too far into the real world, and they can’t go back to the pseudo-comic book world of the previous Batman movie.

Are they going to dust off Clay Face, or Poison Ivy or even newer villains like Mr. Freeze? No, they can’t. So that pretty much leaves the Riddler. To be honest, I don’t know if I would be interested in a movie where Batman is chasing down clues all over Gotham. Besides, Die Hard 3 pretty much did a faux-riddler in Jeffrey Irons villain.

All in all, TDK is a great movie. It’s a mix of “Heat” and “Batman.” Heath Ledger’s performance was fucking brilliant. Ledger brought The Joker into the real world and made him just the perfect amount of batshit insane.

The disappearing pencil trick was worth the price of admission.

(my photo)

Independent filmmaker Mike Culpepper has come to Bay St. Louis to film a fictional movie he wrote based on real-life stories and situations that came out of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The mood of the Coast last September still felt close to Katrina when independent filmmaker Michael Culpepper visited from Seattle.

“I was there again in March, and all of a sudden it felt very different,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “There was a lot of building going on. There was a positive feel, something that was very exciting to me. You probably don’t see it because people on the Coast are so close to it, but for me to come back every six months, it’s very profound. I felt the momentum that was beginning to happen.”

Culpepper is back again this week to film the story he wrote about fictional people dealing with Katrina stuff.

He said it’s loosely based “on the kinds of things I’ve heard, people’s struggles, their tenacity not to let this be the end of things, an attitude that ‘these are hard times but we will survive.’

Filming begins Wednesday in the parking lot of Hollywood Casino and will continue in and around Bay St. Louis through Sunday, Culpepper said. He chose Bay St. Louis because it is picturesque and has “a lot of devastation.”

Its actors are from the South because “accents are important to me,” Culpepper says. “I don’t want anybody pretending.” Extras come from the local area and were scouted out ahead of time.

Titled “After All That,” the film is a 15-to-20-minute vignette about a 60-something-year-old man, who lost his home and is helped by his nephew as he tries to figure out what he has to do next.

“I’m 45,” Culpepper said, “and can imagine having a hard time trying to figure, ‘How do I start over?’ The nephew is self-reliant - says, ‘We are going to figure this out together.’

“It’s kind of a snapshot, artful, that I’m trying to make. I am not trying to make it a documentary. All of us have to explore loss at some level. I am intrigued about how you respond to loss.”

Culpepper’s interest in the Coast started with stories told by his mother in Vicksburg, who repeatedly came here after Katrina as a volunteer with her church. He also has relatives in Gulfport.

“The national media were not showing much about Mississippi,” Culpepper said, “just New Orleans. I kept going down there. I had been wanting to do a short film… ”

The initial venue for his work, he speculates, will be film festivals, followed by cable TV.

Culpepper’s previous film work includes “Bachelor Farmer,” a documentary based in Idaho that premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was screened in Washington D.C., and Atlanta and the rights to it were purchased by MTV Network.

‘After All That’,” he said, “can expect similar venues as quirky as that.”

Culpepper file
Profession: Mississippi native Michael Culpepper teaches interior design at Bellevue Community College in Seattle. Until 10 years ago, when he decided to make films, he was a full-time architect and once worked in Jackson with the Canizaro architectural firm.

Plans: Culpepper has been making films on the West Coast for a while but lately finds himself being pulled back to Mississippi, where he’s plannng several more films. Two take place in Pascagoula. One that he has purchased the film rights to is by award-winning Mississippi writer Larry Brown and is a short story titled “Gold Nugget,” which is set in Pascagoula.

The Culpepper file

However, HB2 was missing a vital element most films these days are also lacking: TENSION. I just did not feel that the characters were in danger for most of the movie despite that they fought some pretty impressive creatures.

On that note, the movie does have some extremely impressive fight scenes that scale up to an almost epic level that really has not been seen in most movies since the LOTR trilogy.

HB2 makes the Xmen and Fantastic Four movies look like the utter pieces of shit that they are. There is so much detail in this movie it’s almost sad that it will be lost on most of the general public.

Pretty much let me sum it up for you slightly better:

Kid get’s dropped off at his uncle’s house to be baby sat while the mom goes to Canada to look for houses.
Uncle is a loony following his dead brother’s research regarding finding a porthole to the center of the earth.
Characters goto Iceland to find said porthole.
Fall through volcano vent to the center of the earth.
Fall a relatively short time with no real transition to indicated the passage of time.
BTW it would take around 20 min. of falling to reach the center according to these calculations here:
Saved from dying from the fall by water vapor?!
Find a cave with glowing TRON birds.
Find main character’s brother/father buried at a site on a beach. Did the guy bury himself?
Find large/giant mushrooms.
Fight large Venus Flytraps.
Cross an ocean and fight “flying piranhas” (actually they look more like hatchetfishes; super deep sea creatures.
Cross a chasm on floating magnetic rocks (one of the only really cool parts in the movie)
Escape from a T-Rex (singular) onto a:
raft made out of a T-Rex skull which gets blown up out of the center of the earth out of Mt. Vesuvius
in Italy. It’s another “Nuked the Fridge” scene where the characters get blown up out of the fucking volcano WAY up into the sky, but land safely in a vineyard.