There’s a lot to chew on here.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that (a) Anne Hathaway has a nicely delivered monologue and (b) If what she’s saying is any indication, there’s an Occupy Wall Street-ish kind of aspect to DKR, with Nolan not necessarily on the side of the OWSers.

The second is that Nolan seems to want DKR to be, like TDK, a movie of ideas. Which is pretty grand.

I’m going to have to watch it a few more times to really grok the rest.

PS: Since I’m basically switching to Dark Knight Rises blogging from here until July 2012, here’s Santino–he’s back!–writing with some worries about the 6 minute prologue running in from of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

I’m really grateful for everyone who orders their Amazon stuff through the site. I don’t know who, but one of you ordered 3 Kindle Fire’s through that little link on the right. That’s just awesome.

Thanks.

Truth be told, Hitchens’ charm was mostly lost on me, but you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. So I’ll just say that I found Steve Sailer’s notice to be slightly more in line with my thoughts.

That said, I was very interested in the little epiphenomenon of Christians saying that they hoped Hitch had a pleasant surprise at the Pearly Gates. (Which is to say, that rather than fearing his surprise might be unpleasant, they seem to charitably assume that everything worked out well for him.) Allahpundit summarized this oddness pretty well. The two best explanations for it that I’ve seen  are these:

The first comes from Ross Douthat, who has a really funny (and clever) line about the nature of Hitchens’ blasphemy in an essay slugged “The Believer’s Atheist”:

Recognizing this affinity, many Christian readers felt that in Hitchens’s case there had somehow been a terrible mix-up, and that a writer who loved the King James Bible and “Brideshead Revisited” surely belonged with them, rather than with the bloodless prophets of a world lit only by Science.

In this they were mistaken, but not entirely so. At the very least, Hitchens’s antireligious writings carried a whiff of something absent in many of atheism’s less talented apostles — a hint that he was not so much a disbeliever as a rebel, and that his atheism was mostly apolitical romantic’s attempt to pick a fight with the biggest Tyrant he could find.

The second comes from Galley Friend X:

You will, perhaps, note the change of the site subhead.

With that one line, I think Nolan may have chainsawed through the Gordian Knot of the problems masks and capes create for making superhero movies grounded in something like the real world. It’s a level of awesome up there with the elegant explanation for Captain America’s costume in The First Avenger.

Everything else in the 7 minutes is high-level awesome, too. Especially the CIA heavy who looks like Alan Ruck.

Jonah Goldberg has a typically astute column today about the push-back against Gingrich, here’s his kicker:

Mitt Romney is still the sensible choice if you believe these are rough, but generally sensible, times. If, however, you think these are crazy and extraordinary times, then perhaps they call for a crazy, extraordinary — very high-risk, very high-reward — figure like Gingrich.

This helps explain why Newtzilla is so formidable. In order to stop him, you need to explain to very anxious GOP voters that the times don’t require him.

As a strategic matter, I think this is probably correct, but at the tactical political level I suspect it’s still possible to stop Newt. If someone were to drop, say, $30M in negative ads on him between now and Feb. 1, it might build up his negatives enough to matter.

P.S.: Josh Kraushaar makes the best-case argument for Newt–that he’s Steve Jobs.

Offered without comment.

For the first, and assuredly last, time, my name crossed George Will’s lips this weekend:

GEORGE WILL, CONSERVATIVE COLUMNIST: It reinforced it in the sense that we now have a solid front-runner in Newt Gingrich. And he’s arguing with Mitt Romney over who is the most electable. So it comes down to this right now with the clock ticking and as you say, favoring Newt Gingrich, Newt Gingrich was a shooting star in this town, the most prominent Republican from 1994 to 1998. He was at that point he was the most disliked politician in America. He says I’m the most electable

Mitt Romney said that he’s the most electable. I refer people to Jonathan Last in the Weekly Standard today, says Mitt Romney has been in 22 contested elections, not counting caucuses — primaries and general elections. He’s won five. He has lost 17.

Well, cross that off the bucket list. Next up: Dinner with Stan Lee and Tricia Helfer . . .

Be back in a week.