There was a lot of anticipation for today’s Warner Bros. presentation, because every year, they really seem to bring their A-game, and coming off the enormous hit of last year’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, they got to do their presentation earlier in the week as part of the Opening Day Ceremony. Much of the excitement came from the knowledge that director Christopher Nolan would be bringing something for The Dark Knight Rises to the presentation, since he’s always had a lot of respect for exhibitors and theater owners.

But first, everyone had to wait over an hour to listen to speeches from MPAA Chairman and CEO, Senator Chris Dodd, and John Fithian, President and CEO of NATO, who had a lot of interesting things to say about the state of the film industry. Probably the most significant revelation was that 20th Century Fox would stop all non-digital film stock distribution in roughly two years and only be releasing their films digitally.

Once the Warner Bros. presentation began in earnest, Tim Burton started off by showing an extended trailer for his Dark Shadows after bringing Johnny Depp out, who barely said much of anything.

We’ll jump right ahead to the movie everyone was looking forward to, The Dark Knight Rises, although Nolan chose instead of showing the trailer or any sort of long clips with dialogue, to just show a series of hand-picked images that he had cut together with music, with some footage we’d seen before either in previous trailers or stills but also some new bits. It was still quite powerful, even if there wasn’t enough dialogue to really have any sort of context.

It opened with pretty much the same airplane hijacking scene that was showcased in the six-minute IMAX preview last December, although you could clearly understand everything Bane was saying in this case. We see Bruce Wayne back in Wayne Manor in a bathrobe and cane, clearly a broken man eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. We see Selina Kyle sneaking out of Wayne Manor, having been in disguise as a maid. In fact, the footage included quite a bit of the fetching Anne Hathaway both in street clothes as Selina and prowling the night as Catwoman, as well as a bit more footage of Bane walking onto the football field and setting off explosives in the middle of the play as the quarterback dodges them. We saw quite a bit of Joseph Gordon-Levitt as young rookie cop John Blake caught up in the war being waged by Bane, including a scene where he shows his shield to Selina, possibly trying to arrest her? We see lots of shots of the destruction of Gotham by Bane, as well as brief glimpses of the Batmobile, the Batpod and the new flying vehicle known as “The Bat,” throughout the carnage. There were quite a few shots of Selina and Bruce together, but we also see Bruce kissing Marion Cotillard’s character in another shot, leaving us to try to figure out what’s going on there.

Throughout the whole thing, there was only the tiniest bit of dialogue amidst all the images and that was Catwoman saying to Batman, “You’ve given them everything” and him responding, “Not everything, not yet.” Then, it closes with Michael Cain’s Alfred saying, “Don’t worry Master Wayne. It takes a little time to get back into the swing of things.”

Not sure if we got too much more out of the footage than we have with what’s come before, although it’s clearly not a trailer that would work for audiences looking for some idea what the story might be. But it really was quite a brilliant way to set the tone of the movie, having it driven by the music, presumably from regular composer Hans Zimmer, doing something more like what he did with Inception, really driving and sounding more electronic.

Rock of Ages director Adam Shankman didn’t seem too pleased to have to follow that spectacular “Dark Knight” footage, using a bit of profanity as well as joking that he wants to be Christopher Nolan when he grows up. After describing his movie as “Hairspray with booze and strippers,” he showed an extended trailer that builds up on what we’ve already seen before and it was obvious that Alec Baldwin will probably have some of the funniest lines in the movie. We got to see some longer portions of the musical numbers with Catherine Zeta-Jones as the conservative Patricia Whitmore who wants to shut down the Bourbon Room, performing “Hit Me With Your Best Shot” with her congregation and Cruise’s Stacee Jaxx performing Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive.” It looked like a lot of fun, although it also appears like it might diverge from the Broadway musical quite a bit.

Next up was Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, adapted from the classic novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the big question of why he’d make a drama in 3D was finally revealed as we watched some unfinished footage in 3D that still looked fantastic.
It was immediately apparent what 3D brought to the mix as we watched a car speed up to Gatsby’s Hamptons estate and Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway gets out of the car and experiences a wild swinging ’20s party scene that could only have been orchestrated by the director of Moulin Rouge!. We get to see a bit of Isla Fischer’s Myrtle Wilson in this scene, as everyone talks about the mysterious Gatsby who never seems to be around at these parties. We then see Leo as Gatsby for the first time as fireworks are going off behind him, but there’s a sadness in this man, something we can tell as we watch a fantastic wordless scene where Leo’s Gatsby walks inside the mansion from the rain, wipes off his hair and then walks to a room where Mulligan’s Daisy Buchanan is standing surrounded by what looked like white lilies. A lot of the footage included shots of Leo cuddling with Carey Mulligan, who will forever be known to women all over the world as the “Luckiest actress in the world.” It’s hard to talk about the visually-driven footage too much, but the 3D was used to great effect to create the mansion’s vastness. Much of the music accompanying the footage seemed contemporary, which was an interesting choice. From what we saw, we expect the movie to be huge, maybe not as big as Titanic, but definitely up there with The Aviator or some of Leo’s other movies because women are going to be flocking to see this one again and again.

source: ComingSoon.net. (edited)