GOTHAM GALA
At The Dark Knight Rises premiere here, talk turned to the mayor — of Gotham
The talk of the town earlier this week? The Dark Knight.
Ionly Christopher Hitchens were still here to give us his take on The Dark Knight Rises. This, I couldn’t help but wonder the other night when leaving the official Canadian unspooling — in which Christopher
Nolan not only plops down Batman in a tyrannical regime resembling the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, but concurrently evokes images of the Arab Spring, riffs on last year’s Occupy protests and, holy moly, paints a world with hues from Orwell’s Crayola box.
“Welcome to Wayne Manor,” a masked boy-man had to say, interrupting my thoughts as I whisked myself to the Warner Bros. post-preem party held at One King West. Recreated in the image of Bruce’s famous Mcmansion, the ballroom upstairs was in the throes of a party, stuffed with some guests still trembling from the pulsepounding mega-spectacle that is the last of Nolan’s caped-crusder trilogy. “I’m not sure what
Hans Zimmer has done to my blood-sugar level,” pronounced my friend, seasoned shindigdweller Si Si Penaloza, referring to the incorrigible score that heightens the drama in the film at every turn.
Thankfully, there was a spread worthy of a billionaire at Wayne Manor — including tandoori chicken. (Who knew?) In a corner of the room, meanwhile, in a darkened cage not far from where beautiful starlet Sarah Gadon stood, were eight flying rodents — suffi
❚ ciently spooky to steal away one’s appetite. Actual bats! Small, yet creepy. “Muskoka,” the bat-keeper told me when I quizzed him about their provenance. Apparently, he had personally captured them to bring them here.
“Lake Joe?” I asked, sarcastically? “Lake Rosseau,” the batkeeper told me, with a sauce of self-congratulation. Well, then.
In most quarters of the party, the talk, inevitably, was centred on the bat of the hour.
Christian Bale’s Giorgio Armani suits, as worn by Bruce Wayne, were wonderful, someone pointed out. Michael
Caine is so wonderfully Michael Caine, another was saying. Editrix Suzanne Boyd gave ample thumbs up to Anne Hathaway’s f Catwoman suit, joining a chorus who think she really pulls it off in the movie, and does it without trying to “do”
Michelle Pfeiffer. Top Canadian papparazo George
Pimentel, meanwhile, was focused on a staggering sequence in which Bane, played by Tom
Hardy, blows up a football stadium — a scene bound to whisk up every fear of terrorist grotesquerie in the real world.
Reasonable attention, at the party, was focused on the mayor. Of Gotham. Does he or doesn’t he? That seemed to be the subject of some conjecture where Nestor Carbonell was concerned. Best known for this roles on Lost, Carbonell plays the role of the city’s top elected official, and had turned up this eve at the party (with fellow star Matthew Modine). But is he really the Commissioner of the Gotham City Eyeliner Task Force, as some allege? No, as he has to probably spell out every day of his mascaraaccused life — he just has really dark eyelashes. Especially the bottom ones.
Case settled? Well, that one, perhaps. Now, all that’s left to find out is how much ka-ching The Dark Knight Rises racks up during its high-stakes opener weekend.
National Post sgovani@natioanlpost.com