Words. Cannot. Describe...

...the emotions swirling through my head right now, just over six hours since the credits rolled on The Dark Knight Rises, the thrilling conclusion of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. I managed to remain spoiler free through the entire lead-up to the film's release - I limited my exposure to hard-to-avoid billboards and posters (see right, also my phone background), and the only line from the trailer I happened to hear through shut eyes and covered-up ears was, "There's a storm coming, Mr. Wayne," which is the title of the first track in Hans Zimmer's striking soundtrack album.  Although, for my money, Michael Shannon does a much more convincing reading of that same line in Take Shelter...

I'm convinced that shielding myself from the trailers enhanced my enjoyment of the movie, particularly after saturating my brain with trailers for The Dark Knight in the months before that came out in 2008.  I mean, I watched the regular trailer, the trailer juxtaposed with scenes from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, even the trailer reenacted with LEGO.  I knew every beat from the trailer so well that when I eventually saw the movie, I was basically just waiting for those scenes to happen.  Like, instead of being absorbed by the brilliantly-planned and executed car chase, I was just thinking, Oh, here's where they're gonna flip that truck.  It kind of pulled me out of the experience, which I didn't want to happen with the finale.

Whether or not my little spoiler-free experiment contributed to my perceptions of the movie, I have to believe that it made a positive impact.  I left the theater last night thoroughly satisfied - with the portrayal of the characters, with the treatment of the Bat-mythology, and with the narrative structure in general, even though it did fall into the greedy trap of trying to squeeze too many plot points and/or amusing bits into the already-bloated running time.  In my mind it didn't measure up to The Dark Knight (how can you top a Batman movie that features The Joker?), but I could tell instantly that #TDKR is a movie I will be happy to see again many times in the future.

Needless to say, I've been kept busy with all the craziness leading up to this much-anticipated event in Batman's media history (you can check out my live-tweeting of both previous movies) - not to mention LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, another Bat-related pastime that's been keeping me pretty occupied.  Through all this, I've still been keeping up with baseball, although my interest has turned rather internal since the All-Star Game.  While a half-season's worth of stats does not provide a terribly large sample size, the halfway point of a season is a good milestone to pause and take a snapshot and see how each team is faring.  I've praised ESPN's fantasy point system so much that I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but the fact that points are already calculated has helped make the half-season evaluation process infinitely more manageable.

Unfortunately, the baseball world did not pause for me while I was holed up in my cave putting together my reports.  But I'm pretty much done now and just about ready to launch back into the In-Depth Analyses I love so well.  But for now, go to your local theater (IMAX preferably) and check out The Dark Knight Rises as soon as possible... because I can only resist talking about all the spoilers for so long!