Dark Knight Rises Prep: Pre-Movie-Experience Management

So, something I've been doing of late is just basically not bothering to learn much about a movie before I go see it.

There's a lot of press out there about Dark Knight Rises.  Entertainment Weekly arrived in the mail with, seriously, a horrendously designed cover.

Gah.

I'm not going to read the articles on the movie because, well, at some point I'd like to just sit back, watch a movie and tear it apart on it's own merits.  I don't need to read what Christopher Nolan was thinking until after the movie.  If I care at that point.


That's, of course, antithetical to the EW model, and that's fine.  I'll just keep the magaizen around til next week and maybe flip through it then.  I'm also not reading reviews that aren't just what somebody said to me on Twitter.  The reasons are not all that complex.  I am already going to see the movie, so I don't need convincing either way.  I'd like to not have a subroutine running as I think about what Beppy McClure, film critic for BloopBleep.com had to say about the movie as scenes come up that Beppy had written about, and, of course, it'll color what I think and eventually what I say about the film when I do my own bit of writing.

I've been doing this a lot lately.  I really didn't know anything about The Amazing Spider-Man other than that it featured Gwen Stacy, the Lizard and that one fellow from The Social Network.  And you know what, I enjoyed it just fine without reading what the director was thinking before or afterward.  Or how young Mr. Garfield trained for the role.  Any of that jazz.  I did read one review somewhere, half by accident, but I couldn't tell you what it said, but it mentioned that The Daily Bugle wasn't in the movie.  That's all I remember.

Moonrise Kingdom was a bit easier to avoid.  Aside from seeing the trailer two or three times and being familiar with the cast, tabula rasa.

But, yeah, it's kind of nice, and I'm trying to not have pieced together the entire script of the upcoming Man of Steel film together, but I think maybe I already know too much.

In short, I'm 37.  I've seen a lot of movies, read a lot of comics, watched a lot of TV.  When I was a kid I was amazed that my dad could predict plotpoints within minutes of characters getting introduced, but it's just part of watching the same stories play out in new forms.  I'd like a few surprises in my life, be able to enjoy a story for the first time without all the filters from time to time.

Afterward, we'll see.  In the meantime, I'm just going to watch the headlines and tweets go by, and be ready for whatever unspools before me on Saturday afternoon.