The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

That evil comes in the form of Bane (Tom Hardy), a thick-muscled, gas-masked terrorist who stands in stark contrast to the wiry Scarecrow and Joker of previous films. Bane is as capable of plotting absurdly complex, large-scale destruction as his evil predecessors, but he also has the bulk to go one on one with Batman's own bruising style of combat. His careful calculation does not innately terrify as does the Joker's erratic unpredictability, but Hardy ably works double time as a mastermind and, essentially, his own henchman. Furthermore, Bane's rationality, however severe and intolerant of failure, does prove alluring to the hordes of impoverished average citizens swept under ledgers in this supposed golden age for Gotham, and where Batman once had to contend with nothing more than a handful of devotees, now he must face down an entire army of riled lumpenproletariat.

Nolan's blockbusters are all defined by an inability to trim, and The Dark Knight Rises suffers from more bloat than any of his other, overstuffed features. Before the Bane/Batman conflict even surfaces, Wayne must crawl his way back to fighting form, as well as deal with his ailing company, suffering losses from a mothballed clean energy project. The latter involves the investment of one Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who also doubles as a possible love interest for Wayne. And then there is Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a cat burglar who specializes in ripping off the rich. Nolan dangles Kyle out not only as a potential love interest but a potential villain to boot. Oh, and then, there is a Gotham police officer, Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an orphan who knows that Bruce Wayne is really Batman because of some kind of orphan Shining and wants Batman to come back after Gordon gets shot. Oh I forgot, Gordon gets shot early in the movie. These plot points stretch the narrative as it is, and Nolan eventually expands each of these strands until the film bursts at the seams. Nolan delights in playing chessmaster and trickster with his narratives, but he has so many pieces to move here that, despite the film's hefty runtime, large details fall through the cracks and time in general passes in the blink of an eye, a key flaw for a film that works best when emphasizing both the arduously slow journey of redemption and the breathlessly tight timeframe in which that journey must be undertaken.

Explanations and clarifications of all these plotlines come through atrocious sound mixing, which buries dialogue and only occasionally gives any force to the more grandiose sound effects and score. The muffled dialogue would matter less were Nolan willing to let the images speak for themselves, but expository dialogue rears its head at every turn. When Cotillard's Tate reminds Wayne of their stalled project, she starts offering so many details she threatens to launch into a history lesson of fusion itself at any second. Characters offer up life stories with the slightest provocation, halting an already unwieldy behemoth. In the film's most unintentionally hilarious scene, one character launches into an overexpository description of a nefarious plan (one filled with already known details and sufficiently visualized with intercut shots of the action being related through speech) as the clock literally runs out of a major threat. But with fewer than three minutes to deal with a huge danger, Batman, Kyle and Gordon all stop and listen to this other character monologue.

Yet if The Dark Knight Rises indulges the very worst of Nolan's tendencies as a filmmaker, it also expands upon his most appealing traits until even the flaws are subsumed into some kind of declarative auteur statement, even if Nolan's style is altogether too banal for such a thing to even be possible. Nolan's blockbusters all mistake scale for composition, but here he gets so grandiose he almost bridges the two. The opening sequence, of a mid-air kidnapping continues to stress the director's fetish for realism in ridiculously outsized stunts, yet for once Nolan embraces the sheer lunacy of what he shoots, setting the mood for his most successful fusion of huge spectacle and vague plausibility yet. Greatly aiding matters is a level of action coherence heretofore unseen in Nolan's work. At last, his close-combat filming achieves a genuine visceral effect because the director holds back just enough to let the audience follow along. Nowhere is this better seen than in the first brawl between Batman and Bane, which highlights Bane's strength and speed against the lumbering Bat and adds a level of savagery to each sick thud the villain lands on a formidable icon who suddenly looks so very weak.

Elsewhere, Nolan brings back some of the loopier visual stylings of Batman Begins, especially in a tossed-off mini-sequence of Batman and Catwoman prowling the sewers looking for Bane, Catwoman distracting patrolling thugs as Batman pulls some Bat-tastic moves like upside-down grabs and a zig-zagging run in the dark illuminated only by the flash of gunfire. Late in the film, Wayne spends some time in a literal pit of a prison, its Escherian properties clearly dear to the director's heart. Nolan also has a ball when Bane's plan comes to fruition, plunging Gotham into a social uprising that bypasses Occupy for the French Revolution and makes for some of the best images of the entire trilogy. Indeed, nothing else in the film is so evocative, striking, and wonderfully insane as Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy) sitting atop a massive dais passing kangaroo court judgments on Gotham's wealthy. For a series that has only gotten more literal-minded as it has worn on, such brief breaths of ingenuity hint that somewhere in that fussy brain of his, Nolan actually has an imagination.

These rare moments of respite become all the more treasured as the plot wears on and spirals out of control. Yet the ramshackle sequencing of the lugubrious plot is, to this writer anyway, inexplicably charming. Writing in total CYA mode, the Nolan brothers attempt to satisfactorily map out not only the various character and narrative arcs of the film but the muddled politics of this saga. The Dark Knight Rises offers evidence to support any reading. Batman, the billionaire hero, intervenes in a populist revolt and sides openly with the police in a street war. However, Bane's manipulation of Gotham's underclass stands in sharp, vile contrast to whatever disillusionment the people might feel. The most admirable, if wildly inconsistent, quality of Nolan's Batman films has been that of consequence, a rare trait of most comic book movies, with their weightless CGI and flippant bombast. Nolan does not come down on any one side of his many contradictory messages but demonstrates how actions ripple out and mingle until blame and righteousness matter less than simply solving a problem that has gotten out of hand. True, Nolan makes this point less through thoughtful examination than simply throwing everything he can at the screen, but he nevertheless ends up breaking down the simplistic good vs. evil conflict of so many superhero movies, including Nolan's last two.

Nolan's best diversions, however, involve the space he gives to his actors. Bale's entropic performance as Wayne/Batman has always been the least dynamic element of these films, but his withered, defeated entrance in this film (and in the aftermath of a fight with Bane) clarifies that iciness as the mark of a man who has been broken since childhood. His literal shattering in this film is not a horrifying twist; it is the inevitable, physical bookend to the emotional devastation from which a little boy never recovered. Oldman, Freeman and Caine make it look almost too easy, especially Caine, who milks a part specifically written to wring tears from the audience for all it's worth. But once again, it's the antagonists who command attention. Hardy adopts a high, almost cheery voice that conflicts with his thick frame and obscured face. Before he sets in motion his attack on Gotham, he jovially praises a boy's on-the-nose singing of the National Anthem to himself ("What a lovely, lovely voice!") And though his eyes generally look well beyond everyone into a thousand-yard stare of simmering fury and cold thought, Bane reacts to the first sighting of the Batwing with a look of curiosity, nonverbally asking, "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"

If the movie belongs to anyone, though, it's Hathaway, who steals the screen along with Martha Wayne's old pearls with a half-turn and backflip out of Wayne Manor and never gives it back. Hathaway plays up Selina's weaponized sensuality and captures the character's irritation with her own morality, so used to self-preservation that she cannot ever do the right thing without a hint of exasperation. Plus, in the morass of the film's politicking pile-on, only Hathaway manages to fully exhibit a clear social perspective as well as a change of heart communicated in a few glances of disgust and contemplation. Hathaway already proved her talent for portraying ambiguous, unpredictable characters in 2008's Rachel Getting Married, but it is no less thrilling to see her show it in a genre (and for a director) that typically has no clue what to do with women.

Unfortunately, The Dark Knight Rises does not address some of the fundamental flaws of this trilogy. For a director who loves intricate mastermind schemes, Nolan does not particularly stress Batman's intelligence and ability to outsmart his foes, choosing rather to highlight Batman's ability to have 280 pounds of muscle and punch people in the solar plexus. And how sad it is that the one example of long-term planning on Wayne's part—the sonar grid of The Dark Knight—is far and away the low point of the entire saga, a sloppily executed and morally dubious setpiece.  Nolan also lets his plots get away from him, and it is not to his credit that The Dark Knight feels like two films crammed into one and The Dark Knight Rises could be its own trilogy. Finally, this closing chapter builds off Inception to suggest that for all Nolan's supposed ambition as a mainstream filmmaker of ideas, his greatest desire is to helm a Bond picture. The Prestige, with its modest scale, perfectly interlocking mechanics and almost accidental profundity, remains his greatest film, indeed one of the greatest of the last decade. Yet The Dark Knight Rises is certainly the "most" Nolan film, a work that blends his talents and faults until distinguishing between the two becomes a pointless exercise. This near-three-hour film splits attention among a handful of major characters, all but two of whom, Wayne and Gordon, are brand new. It ties up every loose end it can even as it leaves major logic gaps unaddressed. It devotes a huge chunk of time to a political subtext that suggests any insight at all only through a barrage of surface-depth ideas. And frankly, this damn thing makes no sense on thematic or narrative grounds. And yet, on this thin foundation Nolan builds a behemoth, and what charm the film has lies in its ability to teeter incessantly without collapsing.

Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

This villain, Lord Shen (Gary Oldman, proving he can be just as great a bad guy with just his voice as he can in the flesh), immediately sets the film apart from the first by presenting not simply a stronger beast than the tiger who fought against our heroes the last time but a less strong but more graceful creature. An albino Indian peafowl, Shen swoops and twirls, feathers hiding knives that fly out with every flourish, and his mad fury makes these metal showers all the more overwhelming. Yet Shen is also resentful of his lack of force, and he devises cannons from gunpowder as a means of overcoming any fighter superior to him.

Thanks to a prophecy foretelling his fall at the hands of a warrior of black and white, Shen ordered the genocide of pandas years ago, the act that led to his banishment. This, of course, links him to Po, now living the high life as the Dragon Warrior in the Valley of Peace. When Shen's wolves ransack the valley for spare money for the lord's war machines, Po gets his first hint of something deeper with a vague emotional trigger that prompts a memory he does not understand. Later, when Shen kills a great kung fu master with his weaponry and takes back Gongmen, Po and the Furious Five head out to stop him, Po nursing ulterior motives of learning more about the buried identity being unlocked in fragments.

At times, Po's story is a bit too broad and convenient: rewriting the unremarkable Po of the first film to be seemingly the last panda left alive on Earth opens up too many questions. Why did no one ever say anything about his rarity? Did word of a great panda warrior not reach beyond the valley and find its way back to the paranoid Shen? As for Po's relationship with his adoptive father, Mr. Ping (James Hong), the panda slips in and out of total idiocy as he seems both to know that a goose obvious isn't his biological dad and be shocked when Ping finally says it out loud. Po's attempts to find himself through his scattered, subconscious memories would have worked better had the audience not already been told upfront about Shen's extermination of pandas.

Nevertheless, Kung Fu Panda 2 has such sure grasp of emotion that even the holes and redundancies opened up by its script do not truly detract from the film. Po's struggles with identity lead to introspective moments from himself and Mr. Ping, who steals the film with Hong's quivering, almost pleading voice seeking to keep his son's love (he brought nearly everyone in theater, regardless of age, to tears). Furthermore, the repeated flashbacks can be distinguished from each other by looking at the first segment as a matter-of-fact, if folkloric, description of events while the later attempts by Po to piece together his broken recollections show his emotional response to that atrocity and his quest to come to terms with it.

However childish this makes me, I will always be in awe of great animation. Given that I cannot even draw basic outlines with any definition or even linearity (ask anyone I've given one of my strange, pointless comics as a jokey present), I can hardly wrap my head around the sheer number of man-hours and creative collaboration it takes to put together an animated film, either by hand or on computers. That's why I got so frustrated with so many of Dreamworks' projects: why waste all that time and considerable effort on the Shrek films, the movie equivalent of the "Now That's What I Call Music" series? Long passages of Kung Fu Panda are so well-rendered, so enthralling in background and movement and action that I walked out of the theater with barely four pages of notes on a small notepad I cannot see and thus leave massive amounts of white space on each page.

From the bombast of Gongmen City to the mercurial flow of Shen (all swift, slinking movements with bursts of peacockish pride and infinite madness), the animation reflects the style and tone not only of contemporary action cinema but classical Asian art. The animators also use a number of traditional, 2D scenes for flashbacks, and these feel like old Chinese paintings come to life. They could have made the whole film like this, so striking were the 2D interludes. My one complaint is that it was animated like a modern action movie, meaning that active editing occasionally dips into excessive editing, not capturing the full grace and dance of martial arts to instead go for quick flashes of swords and fists. Yet I had a clearer grasp on the space-time relations of characters in even the most complicated scene than I do with most live-action films these days, and director Jennifer Yuh Nelson knows when to pull back and give us a clearer view of the action.

A bit too open at times about trying to magnify the heart and the visual inventiveness of the first (not to mention so predictable that the prophesied victory could have been foretold by the audience as much as any soothsayer), Kung Fu Panda nevertheless manages to do so without becoming to unwieldy and disjunctive. It may not quite reach the simple, pure pleasures of its predecessor, but this film will likely emerge near or at the top of the heap of this year's Summer of Sequels. My love of animation necessarily means I must confront my hatred of children, and one of my unspoken criteria of a great animated film is that it does something to stop kids from making noise.

I might have to amend my cynicism: Kung Fu Panda 2 not only didn't silence children, it made them make different kinds of sounds. They just so happened to be split between riotous laughs, exclamations of wonder and joy, and sniffled, occasionally bawled, tears. That's a greater range of emotional response than this year's slate of hollow, derivative blockbusters is likely to offer. If Dreamworks keeps this sort of thing up, I'm going to have to find a new punching bag. They've finally started acting like a group of professionals with creative drive and vision, and the results over the last few years have been beautiful—let's just look the other way with the upcoming Puss in Boots, shall we?

Red Riding Hood

Walking out of Red Riding Hood, I felt a total emptiness in my soul. I could not rage at the absurdity of the story, the effrontery of its capitalization on the Twilight craze or the stupefying lack of direction, nor could I even mock anything. Cobbled together out of cribbed notes from someone's time-traveling Twilight slashfic, Red Riding Hood splashes its milky shots about in shuddering, arrhythmic spurts. In other words, it's an ejaculation, though to call it one would erroneously give the impression that at least one person involved had fun.

Opening with the same computer-animated "helicopter" shots of chilled, remote landscapes pockmarked with medieval villages and fortifications, Red Riding Hood clearly bears the runny, hastily applied stamp of its incompetent auteur, Catherine Hardwicke, who also helmed the first Twilight. Hardwicke brings the same sleepy tedium to this film, maintaining her sped-up yet monotonously droning montage of trees, snow-covered mountains and streams for the whole of the opening credits, devoting minutes to these repetitive, unengaging shots before finally starting in flashback on a young village girl running around the woods with her friend Peter. The two trap a rabbit in a cage, and the girl eagerly pulls out a knife to cut the bunny's throat, eliciting from myself and my two accompanying friends a simultaneous, involuntary cry of "What?!" before the scene jerks away to a calmer shot and a "Ten Years Later" title appears on-screen over yet more damn shots of more damn trees. It was the Surprise Symphony of crap.

The girl, Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, inspiring hordes of lazy "My, what big eyes you have" jokes), is now grown-up but still playful, ignoring propriety to slink around the woods all day and tease Peter (Shiloh Fernandez), now a woodcutter (guess. Just guess). Apparently, slitting an animal's throat with relish did not send Peter running for the hills, and he does everything short of getting into Valerie's smock in full view of the town despite her being betrothed to another. (But not to fear, later they cross that thin line in an obvious location begging to be caught.) I did not know that medieval apothecaries made some kind of hair gel, but Peter has clearly found something to perk up his oh-so-gentled messed hair, and for someone who should be working all day with the other villagers, Peter certainly does manage to get away with quite a bit of downtime in which to stare broodingly. Even the men cannot help but be mesmerized by those eyes, it seems.

I've used the term "medieval" twice now, but I may be setting myself up for embarrassment. Red Riding Hood does not fit neatly into an identifiable time period, incorporating modern idioms into generic folk-tale settings as if a live-action Shrek. These crossbow-wielding, log-chopping peasants have "crushes" on people and worry about who in town is richest despite the clear irrelevance of coins in this barter society. The remote hamlet of Daggerhorn operates in feudal fashion but does not seem to have any overseeing lord. In fact, they lack any clear leader at all, operating in such collective "harrumphing" that one's mind drifts to the erudite socialist serf in Monty Python and the Holy Grail explaining the place to any travelers who might happen upon the village.

Bonding the townspeople together is the fear of a werewolf that terrorizes them, though no one has seen it in years. Only when the old rituals of animal sacrifices and boarded-up houses slack with comfort does the beast suddenly return, harshing Valerie's plans to run off with Peter -- seriously, where? You are tucked away in an empty forest that even the Holy Roman Emperor does not want to control -- by killing her sister. So it goes. The townspeople, whipped into a frenzy by Col. Saul Tigh Michael Hogan, head to a nearby cave to hunt the werewolf and come back with what is so obviously an average, everyday wolf that one must choke back laughter. How have these people dealt with a werewolf for generations and learned all the superstitious methods of killing it without having any idea what a werewolf actually is?

To set them straight on their magnificent ignorance, along comes the witch-hunting priest Father Solomon (Gary Oldman) to gently explain to them that a werewolf turns back into a person and lives among people. Hence, y'know, werewolf. Honestly, this is the one time you can't blame Oldman for yelling at people. Flanked by what appears to be a crossover ad with Benetton and Medieval Times, Solomon and his warriors soon take over the town with their accents. Everyone else in the film speaks unabashedly in an American accent, including England-born Max Irons, who plays Valerie's intended husband Henry and always looks as if on the verge of tears. But Oldman sports a vaguely Transylvanian accent left over from his time as Dracula; taken with his dress -- not robe, dress -- made out of purple velvet, Oldman's mad voice pulled me from the dreariness of the film for a moment before the undertow of the movie's relentless slog yanked him out to sea.

Oldman's arrival leads to the proper introduction of the film's broad, blatant themes on female repression and sexual assault. The religious Solomon searches for any sign of witchcraft, his accurate opinion that the werewolf lives among the townsfolk leads to zealous invasion of privacy for the sake of bringing out the devil in the town. Through a series of events, Valerie finds herself targeted, partially because of the flowing red cloak she wears ("the Devil's color," adds Solomon, having inherited none of his namesake's wisdom). Tacitly, her open sexuality with Peter comes back to bite her as the village turns on her instantly, branding her a witch and leaving her out for sacrifice. They've practically watched her eat up her man in public; what's the difference in seeing her eaten*?

The sad truth of suspense movies where truly anyone can be the monster among the rest is that eventually no one cares who the monster actually is. Everyone gets to act either menacingly -- Peter, Valerie's grandmother (Julie Christie) -- or unilaterally weak -- Valerie's alcoholic father (Billy Burke, who, judging from his career, might have brought his own booze), the town priest (Lukas Haas). They're all trying so hard to be both the red herring and the Person You Least Expect that the climactic reveal lacks any weight. Perhaps if anyone looked natural in this environment, I might have bothered to study them more closely, but everyone acts so transparently as if on a set: you can practically smell how artificially clean this muddy, livestock-filled village is, and not even snowstorms can get some of these people out of short-sleeved shirts and flimsy cloth pants.

Meanwhile, Hardwicke continues to fumble tying her sexual symbolism into her murky, monotonous mise-en-scène. If she has captured anything relating to sex in her two fantastical virgin allegories, it's the somnambulant thrusting of Ambien intercourse. So many shots in the film are so out-of-focus I questioned whether the studio hired the cinematographer from The Room. The obvious metaphor of the flowing red cloak flowing behind Valerie at all times, to say nothing of the sexual connotations of a blood-flushed "hood," pops up so often I would expect even prepubescents to say "We get it!" by the end of the film. At least Hardwicke shows young people willing to have sex in this film, proving that even tucked-away Catholics in the Dark Ages were more psychologically and sexually stable than Stephenie Meyer. Yet once again, we get the mysterious, potentially hazardous bad boy wooing the doe-eyed (or bug-eyed, as the case may be) virgin into supernatural passion, and when my friend joked at the end that they set up "Red Riding Hood 2," she may not have been far off the filmmakers' intentions. Too bad the film makes the bloodless anti-chemistry of Bella and Edward look like the timeless romance for which some have taken it.

Red Riding Hood does not even work as good trash. It certainly has the seriousness required of any so-bad-it's-good romp worth its salt; everyone speaks with such gravity and verve that one almost forgives them all for speaking with American accents in their tucked-away European hamlet. Comedy works the same way as tragedy: just as the audience cries more when the characters don't allow themselves to shed tears, so too does comedy come more naturally when everyone acts sternly and does not turn to wink at the camera. And with such lines as "Lock him up in the elephant!" (don't ask) and eye-rolling suggestive phrases like "I could eat you up," the cast deserves credit for managing at least one take where they all didn't burst into gales of laughter, if for no other reason than to ward off tears. But the plot is so dull, so endlessly plodding, so flagrantly stitched together, that this unwarranted gravitas never elevates the film to the best of the worst.

My friends and I emerged from the screening in a daze. Normally, we discuss the film, gushing over the details of movies we loved or cracking jokes about the bad ones. Yet all we could do was look around, awkward and bewildered, unable to say anything without devolving into stutters or silence. There's nothing to Red Riding Hood, no sensuality in its animal lust, no joy in its deadpan tedium, no pleasure in seeing its talented lead actress continue to waste her potential on projects that do not utilize her strengths. Then again, considering that practically every movie Seyfried makes does not tap into her potential, perhaps I and others of my mindset are simply projecting the thought of talent onto her, willing her to be worthy of whatever aura we see around her. Perhaps my glasses prescription still has not fully fixed my eyes.

This movie is an insult to folk tales that have entertained and scared children for centuries, to the very idea of a fable, even to the experimental film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, from which I guess this film's protagonist got her name. That 1970 Czech movie is a riot, a surrealist depiction of the stress of pubescent womanhood on a confused, repressed girl. Red Riding Hood is itself confused and repressed, too stupid to rise above and navigate the moral waters in which it wades. The entire project feels like nothing more than an excuse for Hardwicke to get back to her roots as a production designer. Her chief artistic contribution to the set design? Putting spikes on trees. Would that I could have run my throat into one of them.


*Probably should have phrased that differently.