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Have you ever felt that something(like taking backup of files, deleting old files etc.) should automatically happen when you connect your pen-drive to your system?Let us take an example, Suppose your teacher wants you to copy your assignments into his pendrive in front of him. The pen drive contains your final examination paper. You want your ubuntu system to automatically copy all the data from that pen drive to your hard disk automatically in the background (without even opening a copy dialogue). Here is how to do it on ubuntu:1] First let us write a simple shell script which we want to execute whenever a pen drive is connected to our system. Let us write a simple script which copies all data from the connected device to your home directory.First open a new fileemacs $HOME/script.shand add following lines to that file.#!/bin/bash sudo mkdir -p /tmp/test sudo mkdir -p $HOME/device_data sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/test sudo cp -r /tmp/test/* $HOME/device_data/ sudo umount /tmp/test Save and close the file.This script essentially creates a new directory named "device_data" inside your home folder and copies all the data from the pen drive into device_data directory.(Note: You can write ANYHTING into this script, so use it wisely :P)Now let us make this script executable.sudo chmod +x $HOME/script.sh As this script needs sudo permissions, we need to make it sudo runnable. To do this add the name of the script into sudoers file.Open sudoers file.sudo visudo -f /etc/sudoers Now after the 25th line (%sudo…) add this line ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /home//script.sh So now this script will run with sudo rights but will not ask for password! :)2]Now we need to tell our system to follow OUR rules (i.e execute our script) whenever a pendrive is connected. For this we need to create our own "udev rules" file. This file should be created in '/etc/udev/rules.d' directory.cd /etc/udev/rules.d Open a new file (with sudo rights):sudo emacs 91-myrules.rules Make sure the file name starts with "91". This gives your rules priority over other rules.Now add these lines into that fileACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="****", ATTRS{idProduct}=="****", RUN+="/paht/to/your/script.sh" Make sure you enter proper path into RUN variable.Done!!Now plug any pendrive into your system and test this!Note: 1] When you connect your external drive this script will be run and your system won’t be able to use it unless this script execution is complete! So have some patience! :p 2] This answer is written for educational purposes only! Do not misuse it.Thanks Mehak Sharma for promoting the answer!

John Constantine is an upper middle-aged, alcoholic, chain smoker. He almost certainly cannot run a whole mile without stopping for a hard wheeze and a smoke break every quarter mile. In his younger days, he was as capable in a fist fight as any average football hooligan, but no more.Oh! You mean his magic!What magic? Though DC seems to have foolishly allowed him to join the occasionally shoots laser beams from his hands set, he is still basically just a human being. He has no real inherent power of his own and mostly operates on the basis of whatever infernal power he can borrow on balance against the current market value of his miserable, besotted soul.He certainly is clever. Or at least ammoral enough to trick others into believing he's clever. And anyone quick enough to fool the Lord of Lies probably does have a few bright neurons in his skull.But, otherwise, he is not powerful at all. Merely sharper than the average denizen of the pit.

In 1957, on television's Night Beat, Mike Wallace asked William Carlos Williams if he thought that E.E. Cummings' poem "(im)c-a-t(mo) / b,i;l: e" was really a poem. (Television was different back then.) Williams said no. Maybe the question was too blunt; maybe the poet considered this print ideogram of a motionless cat too juvenile. But if William Carlos Williams, himself a leading experimental poet of the time, was not able to recognize that outburst of phonemes and punctuation marks as poetry, what hope was there for the average readers of the time—"mostpeople," as Cummings liked to call them—not to mention all the folks residing in Televisionland? *Over the course of a 45-year career, Cummings wrote many traditional poems, at least poems that would look like poems if viewed at arm's length. He was capable of riffing on the ballad:All in green went my love ridingon a great horse of goldinto the silver dawnfour lean hounds crouching low and smilingthe merry deer ran before.He could be childlike ("maggie and molly and milly and may/ went down to the beach(to play one day)"), bitterly satiric ("the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls/ are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds"), as well as political ("I sing of Olaf glad and big/ whose warmest heart recoiled at war"). Many of his poems, especially the sillier ones, feature comical end rhyme ("the way to hump a cow is not/ to get yourself a stool/ but draw a line around the spot/ and call it beautifool"). The sonnet was such a favorite form of his that examples were included in every one of his collections. But it was his typographical high jinks that appealed to his fans and appalled his detractors and secured his broader reputation.In the long revolt against inherited forms that has by now become the narrative of 20th-century poetry in English, no poet was more flamboyant or more recognizable in his iconoclasm than Cummings. By erasing the sacred left margin, breaking down words into syllables and letters, employing eccentric punctuation, and indulging in all kinds of print-based shenanigans, Cummings brought into question some of our basic assumptions about poetry, grammar, sign, and language itself, and he also succeeded in giving many a typesetter a headache. Like Pound, who never wrote an obedient line, Cummings reveled in breaking the rules of grammar, punctuation, orthography, and lineation. Measured by sheer boldness of experiment, no American poet compares to him, for he slipped Houdini-like out of the locked box of the stanza, then leaped from the platform of the poetic line into an unheard-of way of writing poetry.That said, determining Cummings' influence and his present stature in the poetry world calls for a more measured view. Some honor Cummings as the granddaddy of all American innovators in poetry and ascribe to him a diverse progeny that includes virtually any poet who considers the page a field and allows silence to be part of poetry's expressiveness. Ferlinghetti and Creeley, Olson, Jack Spicer, Louis Zukofsky, and Marianne Moore—all would be among his many stepchildren. Others, ignoring the romantic sweetness and childlike wonder in his poems of love and nature, would have Cummings shoulder some of the blame for desiccated extremes of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry—at least Cummings would have enjoyed the equal signs. Whatever the claims for his influence, he is not widely enjoyed these days.The life of Edward Estlin Cummings began with a childhood in Cambridge, Mass., that he described as happy, but he struggled in both his artistic and romantic exploits against the piousness of his father, an esteemed Harvard professor. He began his own student years at Harvard writing conventional imitations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti but ended up delivering a commencement speech on "The New Art," a declaration of the modernism he would spend the rest of his life exploring and helping to define. After a stint in the ambulance corps and a false, wartime imprisonment in France (the subject of The Enormous Room), he returned to New York and began a long, melodramatic affair with Elaine Thayer, wife of a friend and patron.Cummings' career as a writer—and a painter—was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten. Finding book publishers was an ongoing challenge, and his critical reception was uneven at best. By age 25, his poems had appeared in avant-garde magazines such asBroom and the Transatlantic Review, and he had published two books, ­The Enormous Room and Tulips and Chimneys. But as late as 1935 he was driven to self-publish a poetry collection—the title of which, No Thanks, echoed the responses of the 14 publishers who had turned down the manuscript and to whom, listed by name, the book is bitterly dedicated. Not surprisingly, the "small eye poet" was often embroiled in arguments over typesetting. He was annoyed that Tulips and Chimneys was published without the ampersand he had in the title. For most of his life, his book earnings never amounted to more than a trickle, and money worries haunted him; well into his 50s, he was still accepting checks from his mother.Several major collections, however, advanced his reputation, and by the last decade of his life, Cummings had become a poetry star. His contracts for public readings—usually sellouts—even included "rules of engagement" meant to protect him from the throng of his fans. He would plan his escape through a "secretbackentrance." His books, particularly the hefty Poems 1923-1954 sold hotly for poetry. He delivered the prestigious Eliot Norton lectures (or "nonlectures," as he called them) at Harvard; he also received the Bollingen Prize and once read to a crowd of 7,000 at the Boston Arts Festival. In 1959, his new 100 Selected Poems sold 5,000 copies ($1.45 apiece) and, thanks to Grove Press, is still in print.Since then, his reputation has suffered enough of a falling off to raise the question of what happened to his hard-won fame. For one thing, his most characteristic poems do not lend themselves to being read out loud; they are so embedded in print that to voice them is to sacrifice their visual integrity. Cummings himself called his poems "inaudible." A few of his poems such as "Buffalo Bill's" and "in Just-/spring" (the balloon man poem) are kept breathing due to the life-support systems of anthologies and textbooks, but except for these and a few other signature numbers, the body of his work has fallen into relative neglect. He is no longer mentioned in the same breath with Eliot, Pound, or Stevens; and because he is synonymous with sensational typography, no one can imitate him and, therefore, extend his legacy without appearing to be merely copying or, worse, parodying. Sadly but inevitably, his direct influence is most easily found in the pages of middle- and high-school literary magazines where rain, leaves, and snow are perpetuallyfallingfrom the sky. "No one else wrote like Cummings, and Cummings wrote like no one else" is how the poet's latest biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, delivers the bad and good news in E.E. Cummings: A Biography. And a prescient Harriet Monroe tempered her praise by warning, "But beware his imitators!"These days Cummings is rarely mentioned. He has become the inhabitant of the ghost houses of anthologies and claustrophobic seminar room discussions. His typographical experimentation might be seen to have come alive again in the kind of postmodern experiments practiced by Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, not to mention the coded text-messaging of American teenagers. But the eccentric use of the spatial page that accounted for Cummings' notoriety must be seen in the end as the same reason for the apparent transience of his reputation. No list of major 20th-century poets can do without him, yet his poems spend nearly all of their time in the darkness of closed books, not in the light of the window or the reading lamp.

This question contains two inaccuracies.The suit concerned lies people started telling in an attempt to discredit Michael Mann’s climate research that resulted in the famous hockey stick graph. Ball was one of the people telling the lies, so Mann sued him. Mann had already won a suit against the Frontier Foundation for publishing Ball’s false accusation. As a result, the Frontier Foundation apologized for publishing Ball’s “untrue and disparaging” comments.Mann proceeded to sue Ball himself in Canada. The suit was dismissed because Ball’s attorneys said that Ball was old and ill, plus no one actually believed what Ball said anyway.Mann did not “turn over his underlying climate research data” because the suit did not go forward. His data is readily available to anyone who wants to duplicate his research.EDIT:At least two commenters have posted links in their comments, for which I thank them. One is a link to the court’s ruling to dismiss Mann’s libel suit. The other is a link to the initial lawsuit brought by Mann. There are a couple of things to note from this.First, the judge dismissed the suit because Mann and his attorneys simply failed to pursue it. As a result of dismissing the suit because of the failure to pursue it, the judge awarded costs to Ball, the defendant.Some in the anti-science community have started crowing about the dismissal, claiming that it proves that global warming and climate change are a fraud. On the scale of right-to-wrong, that is so wrong that it is actually off the scale. The judgement absolutely did not find that to be the case. In fact, the judge specifically said, “I do not intend to address those differences (the dispute between Ball’s denialism and Mann’s science)”.Another thing to note is that Mann’s initial hockey-stick publication appeared more than 20 years ago. Many scientists (actual scientists, that is) have looked at Mann’s data and methods and many have done their own research, and all have found that Mann’s work is essentially correct. The hockey stick game is over. The winners have retired from the field, packed their bags and returned home. They have done many other things in the meantime. The losers are still on the field, whining and crying that the game is not over. But it is.Will Mann appeal? I doubt it. Part of the suit has already been resolved. The suit involved an interview with Ball that appeared on the website of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The FCPP was a party to the suit. They have already apologized for publishing Ball’s personal and clearly libelous attack on Mann. By the way, there is no doubt that Ball’s statements were libel. Ball said that Mann had committed acts that warranted imprisonment, which is libel. Truth is a defense in such a case, but I have no doubt that Mann would have prevailed.Some are speculating on whether and why Mann might not appeal. I do not know the answer to either of those questions, and I suspect no one here on Quora does. So there is really no point in speculating. But in any event, this case proves absolutely nothing about the fact of global warming and climate change.Global warming/climate change denialists ought to start asking themselves why they are denialists. I suspect that at least 95 percent of the people who post or comment with denialism on Quora really don’t know why they deny the science. I have addressed this in other posts and I don’t feel like going into it again. Suffice it to say, the science is clear.

As a conservative woman I dislike [modern] feminism because it dislikes me.It constantly disparages conservative women as being stupid, submissive, uneducated, backwards, outdated and even dangerous to other women. It constantly acts as though conservative and traditional women are bad role models, bad examples of womanhood and if we’d only “get with the program” or “get smart” and get with feminism then we’d be so much better in every single way.It’s patronizing as hell.Beyond that I dislike it for the same reasons that many liberals dislike it:I dislike their insistence on using arguments that have been disproven time and time again such as the supposed gender wage gap and the 1-in-3 rape statistic. Even a few feminists have pointed out that both of these are false but they’re still pushed everywhere in feminism because the narrative and controlling women is more important than facts and honesty.I dislike their insistence that they somehow own the total and exclusive rights to ideas like equality, fairness, justice. The “If you’re not feminist, you’re misogynist/pro-rape/against gender equality” schtick they push constantly.I dislike their penchant for propping up the worst people and then disavowing they did it. It’s to gaslighting proportions. Lynda Sarsour (pro jihadi, pro child soldier, pro FGM, anti-semitic scammer), Donna Hylton (convicted rapist), Assata Shakur (convicted terrorist and fugitive), Cherno Biko (self admitted rapist) were all beloved guests, organizers and honored speakers at the Women’s Marches. Women like Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem are so prolific in feminism and Women’s Studies that they’re practically landmarks you can navigate by. Then when you point any of this out they insist it didn’t happen (really? There’s pictures and videos everywhere) or pull a no true scotsman (“They’re not real feminists!”) If being an honored guest/speaker and organizing a women’s rally and being one of the most prolific speakers/lecturers and authors referenced in women’s studies doesn’t make you a feminist then I don’t know what does.I dislike their over-focus on men and their total hypocrisy of it. Men aren’t allowed to have any opinions on anything a woman does. Nothing. Not on how they look, how they dress, how they act, what jobs they take. Nothing. But feminism can post a dozen articles a day on how men are failing, what men need to do better and wax all day long about masculinity and how it’s wrong and how it should be taught and right down to what toys little boys should be allowed to play with.Ironically feminism has become the very thing it complains about and hates — something that controls and seeks to control women — through fear and propaganda.

Recently I read an article in “ The sanity clause” , an online magazine about - “Christopher Nolan: Someone more than a man; a symbol”. Here it is-This is the first in my new series, 21st Century Masters, a collection of director profiles specifically on directors and their films from the year 2000 onward. With some exceptions, films made before 2000 are not the subject of these profiles. These are attempts to understand the legacy of filmmakers here and now, not of the past.There are three steps to Christopher Nolan’s directing process.He shows you something ordinary, which it probably isn’t.He takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary.But you wouldn’t clap yet, because he has to bring everything back.Conveniently, this is the same model Michael Caine explains in “The Prestige.” A good “magician,” he says, tries to do something new, but not everyone can. A good “magician” gives total devotion to his art.This is Chris Nolan in a nutshell. He begins with a film that demands your patience and attention, one that feels gritty, realistic and serious but has a little something more. Then, he astounds with monumental twists, stunning special effects, sweeping vistas and a screenplay that ever so slightly bends what’s possible. But Nolan’s real game is in showing you how its all done. He arranges elaborate procedures for his characters with strict rules and principles for them to follow. Then they’re confined to boxy, talky and methodic scenes of dialogue to lay the exposition open for scrutiny.By doing this in each of his eight films, Nolan has been able to take over the world. No director in the 21st Century has emerged as a more distinctive, important voice for film as a popular art form than him. Other directors have been more critically acclaimed and others have slightly larger box office receipts, but no other director to make his or her mark in the last 12 years has come close to uniting adoring fanboys and appreciative film buffs than Nolan.Nolan’s films are about singular ideas. His legacy comes from getting modern audiences in the multiplex to obsess over their films, study them with scrupulous attention and adhere to them as important texts made to be discussed.Like Batman himself, Nolan is a symbol more than a director. He currently has the clout to take on any project he pleases and the fervent belief by many that he can do no wrong. And if through his audience he can transcend the idea that his film is just a movie made for entertainment value, he can become a beacon for something better than what we have in the movies today.“You take it away… to show them what they had.”“Following”Christopher Nolan began his fascination with filmmaking when he was just 8 years old in London. He shot films with action figures on Super 8 cameras and eventually started using his friends. But he never attended film school, and his early short films were low rent and surreal, most notably his 3-minute short “Doodlebug,” about a man obsessively chasing an insect around his house.He directed his first feature in 1998 about an unemployed writer who takes to following people simply for the sake of learning how they spend their day. The aptly titled “Following” was filmed for only £3000, used all non-actors and was directed, written, produced, shot and edited by Nolan himself.I always said that it’s hard to see how this indie, black and white neo-noir could ever come from the same guy who gave us one of the largest franchises in all of film history, but the core elements and traits that carry through all of Nolan’s films are all right here.“Following’s” protagonist Bill first lays down a set of rules for the audience to understand. He’s just fascinated, not sexually aroused or deeply disturbed. Don’t follow women into dark alleys at night, never follow the same person twice, and most importantly, don’t follow anyone that isn’t random.Every Nolan film is dictated by a complex scenario or a strange way for a character to behave, but it’s always boiled down into a strict method to the madness, usually explained directly to the audience in voice overs or monologues. Think Lenny’s fact-based tattoo system in “Memento,” the pseudo-science of “Inception’s” dream worlds or the aforementioned three-step procedure in “The Prestige.”Nolan loves doing this as a way of building suspense and surprise for the twist he surely has coming. In “Inception,” the film is so dense that we hang onto certain details, like the rules of The Kick or the sedative, that get in the way of more important ones like Cobb’s dark past. Like Cobb, we’re not supposed to be able to keep all our memories straight at once, and they come back to haunt us later.Here in “Following,” Bill’s rules are established such that they can be broken. He begins tailing a thief (not coincidentally also named Cobb) who also has his own unique game and set of rules. He breaks into people’s houses but doesn’t steal valuable items, only peace of mind. “Everybody has a box,” he says, the keepsakes that tell who a person are and what’s special to them. Cobb rifles through them and makes snap judgments about his marks. When one couple walks in on them invading their home, he calls the woman out for having an affair because of the way they reacted to their presence.This is all engaging discussion of human nature, but Bill and Cobb’s behavior is really just a plot device. It’s driven only for fascination and personal principles, not physical or moral motivation.“Doodlebug”Which brings us to our second point about Nolan’s filmmaking. Armond White pointed out in his review of “Inception” that Nolan’s characters have no morality. This is not necessarily a problem, as it’s hard to pin down the morality of many characters in the movies, such as in films by Bunuel and even some Kubrick and Hitchcock (who Nolan deeply admires). But it’s an important observation that guides nearly all of his work.In addition to having a set of rules, all Nolan characters have a fervent belief or philosophy. They act not out of being right or wrong but because they are motivated by this one idea that they hold deeply. We’ll delve into the specifics of each film later, but understanding this helps us to realize that Nolan’s films are not about emotions, or even characters really, but about behavior, ideologies and how those factors drive people to act.In “Following,” this voyeuristic fascination naturally gets Bill into trouble. But before that, Nolan has fun leaving us obvious visual clues that will return later, in this case an earring. He also leaves room for some sharp wit as Cobb jumps to hasty conclusions and coolly infects these livelihoods. It’s also engaging in black and white, something Nolan should definitely return to if given the opportunity.But Nolan cheats ever so slightly. SPOILER AHEAD! We have no reason to suspect that Cobb is actually scamming Bill along with the woman known only as The Blonde. And when the twist is revealed to us, it comes from an otherwise little seen policeman who tells us everything we know is wrong directly to our face and Bill’s. SPOILER DONE. It’s a twist not achieved through visual storytelling but more methodic dialogue.This is yet another troublesome trait of Nolan’s style. Initially, it seemed to be a mark of an amateur, someone who couldn’t tell his story through his camera and defaulted to his words. Now it seems to be a trend, and it’s something some critics still frown upon. But we begin to get a better sense of why he cheats the way he does in his follow up film, “Memento.”“There are things you know for sure.”The first shots in “Memento” take place in reverse. A hand holds a Polaroid snapshot that is developing backwards, with the image becoming less clear the longer we see it and the more he shakes it.This is Nolan telling us everything we need to know about “Memento” right in the first frame. We know the timeline is jumbled, we know we’ll be going back in time, and we even know things are going to get hazier the more we puzzle over it and the more he shakes things up.We know how this ends, and what we want to know is how we got here. Often in film, this is not the case. Even his characters seem unsure when Lenny wonders why his wife would read the same book over again.“I’m interested in making films to watch them a second time, and hopefully you’ll be interested to watch a second time,” Nolan said in a 2001 interview with Indiewire. “You don’t see how it’s stuck together; it actually can sustain that scrutiny and become something a little bit different when you see it again. Because I feel like I’ve got three years to work on this thing and as a viewer you’ve got like two hours to watch it, so it ought to be functioning at some level of greater sophistication than you can absorb in one viewing.”People often place “Memento” in the “mind-fuck” category. When it was first released, it was simultaneously a critical darling and a cult staple. It seemed to toy with our sense of space and time as well as our expectations, and yet Nolan admits himself that “Memento” is no more complicated than “Following.”The methodical system in “Memento” is two-fold. One is Lenny’s creepy tattoo system on his chest, arms and legs. The second is the film’s structure. It alternates between color and black and white and different moments in time. We’re confused because we usually associate black and white with a flashback, but here it’s obvious that’s not the case because the first shot of the current color sequence always matches up with the last shot of the next one.As Nolan says in the same Indiewire interview, this is actually an extremely linear film. But he gets that truth past us by immersing the audience in Lenny’s perspective. We hear internal voiceover constantly, we see his memory in color as though it were true, not in black and white like the story of Sammy Jankis, and our field of vision is restricted to his face and what he sees immediately in front of him.This is the start of Nolan’s most irritating trademark as a filmmaker. Nolan cannot, or more likely chooses not, to do more than close-ups when it comes to viewing his characters in conversation.“Memento” was the first film in which Nolan paired with his since permanent cinematographer Wally Pfister. Pfister’s style finds him rarely including more than one person in a shot at a given moment. Almost always in a Nolan film, if someone is talking, we see a close-up of the speaker alone. If he or she mentions an object or interacts with an object in some way, we’ll get a close-up of it. Think the beer coaster that Carrie Ann Moss slaps down in front of Lenny, or the dozens of individual photographs he carries with him. When he reads the line, “Don’t Believe His Lies,” he always reads it aloud too.He doesn’t do medium shots to allow his characters to breathe, he doesn’t have multiple people interacting together in the same frame, and he always keeps his camera steady, if not motionless during the shot. He’s capable of wide vistas that look impressive in IMAX, but these are set dressing, not back and forth exposition.Some critics have cited this very reason as why they’re disappointed with Nolan’s work. Not only are his films not visually engaging, trudging through lengthy dialogue sequences rather than tell the story visually, this approach can get confusing and clunky when it comes to Nolan photographing action.It appeared to be the mark of a rookie, someone who over time and a few more films would grow. But now eight films in, he’s only continued this approach if not mastered it. Nolan keeps our minds strictly focused on the character’s perspective so we can analyze their thought process and the story’s rules. Only later does he move away from the small screen to surprise us that we’re looking at a big one.What I admire then about “Memento” is how smart and self-aware it is. Everything Lenny says either tells us more about the themes (memory, how we lie to ourselves to survive) or it digs a deeper hole for him in this hapless predicament. Occasionally it’s actually hilarious, like Lenny drinking the beer with spit in it or earlier catching a gun that’s travelling backwards in time. At other times, we develop a sense of pathos for him, even if his actions don’t warrant it. “The world doesn’t just disappear,” Lenny says, but for him it does every few minutes. We’re sad that he lacks the context to love, make friends and grow. The end goal is really not the only thing that’s pulling us along in this story, and it is part of the reason Nolan devotes more time to the set-up than the payoff.The mental tropes Nolan was establishing here would follow him into every one of his films since. Unlike the socially awkward Bill in “Following,” Lenny was particularly disabled, even if his disability is also a plot device. All his characters carry a similar mental burden and similar rules, methods and principals. Bill was destroyed when he broke his rule. Lenny, and for that matter most of his characters again, were destroyed when they followed theirs.“Small things, remember?”“Insomnia”The cult success of “Memento” allowed Nolan free range to tackle a bigger, Hollywood studio production. That film was “Insomnia,” a remake of a Norwegian film and one he didn’t write the screenplay for. His previous film had the big name stars of Guy Pearce, Carrie Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano, but never had Nolan worked with actors as high caliber as Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams.And yet “Insomnia” isn’t suddenly exacerbated in scope. It’s the story of a veteran L.A. detective who travels to a small town in Alaska to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. In this town, the sun never sets, and his inability to sleep represents his inability to deal with the many bad choices that have made him guilty over time. Pacino’s character ends up cutting a deal with the killer to prevent his own scandal from getting out, all the while believing he’s acting nobly.The problem with “Insomnia” is that his guilt and his deals with the killer are all part of some elaborate psychological game, but really it just seems like he’s a washed up old cop making horrible mistakes. And for a film about the dreary feeling of insomnia, it’s pitched at this intense level of ferocity, with delusional flashes of lights and colors to amp up the psychodrama.What I admire about the film more than the story are the performances. Pacino does about his best work of the 2000s in “Insomnia,” presenting himself as an actor and a character who has really done the rounds and seen the worst. When he uses Nolan’s crime procedural rules and tactics, its because he’s a guy that can now see through the bullshit of punk teenage witnesses, subduing them by using his language calmly instead of losing his temper.But what’s more, Nolan uses fog, shadows and Foley effects to play up the creepy noir aspect of the story rather than the action. “Insomnia’s” signature scene shows Pacino wandering in a foggy purgatory searching for the killer. I won’t reveal what happens here, but Nolan erases our sense of space and coherence and tickles our other senses with the accentuated plodding of footsteps and resounding gunfire.“Insomnia” may not be an essential film in Nolan’s repertoire, but it shows growth. We can see how he can handle a studio production and add his own flavor to it. He was going to need it to prepare him for his next project.“As a symbol, I can be indestructible.”The League of Shadows plays an important role in “Batman Begins.” “We step in every time a city signNowes its decadence.”Following 1997’s abominable “Batman & Robin,” Warner Brothers had exhausted one of its most lucrative franchises, and at just the worst time. “Spiderman” would explode into the popular culture just five years later, and they were yet without a superhero franchise to answer the call.The decision then to bring in Christopher Nolan was a gamble. It was his job to essentially usher in a new kind of superhero film.“Batman Begins” did just that. The movie brought in nearly $400 million, it put Christian Bale on the road to being an A-list star and it quickly made Nolan the luckiest man in Hollywood.Passionate or lukewarm, critics everywhere talked about how “Begins” was “unexpectedly good” and helped “breathe new life” into a dead and gone franchise. Roger Ebert said, “This is at last the Batman movie I’ve been waiting for.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis wrote, “”Batman Begins” is the seventh live-action film to take on the comic-book legend and the first to usher it into the kingdom of movie myth.” Nolan’s film was, “Conceived in the shadow of American pop rather than in its bright light,” she added.Dark and dour superhero movies are hardly seen as a breath of fresh air not even 10 years later. Nolan’s film operated on a level of myth and symbolic stature that comic book movies should not only be taken seriously but should be the driving factor in our cinematic popular culture.How did Nolan become the poster boy for this movement? He had made a film specifically about symbols and legends. “Begins” is filled with mantras designed to inflate your stature in the eyes of the public.“You become something more: a legend.”“You must be more than a man in the eyes of your opponent.”“As a symbol, I can be indestructible.”This isn’t subliminal messaging designed to stimulate demand for superhero movies. Batman is a character grappling with his own identity, one who can do good when he battles his own fears and becomes a monster to project his fear onto his enemies.People have admired Batman for being a superhero without any powers, but Bruce Wayne’s strength is that his alter ego is superhuman. Batman is a legend, a myth and a god capable of anything in the eyes of the public who fears and admires him.Maybe Nolan is joking in “The Dark Knight” when copycat Batmen try to help and question what the difference is between them. “I’m not wearing hockey pants,” Batman bellows, and neither are all the other DC and Marvel comic book movies that have taken themselves way too seriously.Most superhero films now share the epic scope and manufactured darkness that “Batman Begins” created, but Nolan has a special touch that other directors lack. Walk in a minute late to “Begins” and you might not even know this is a Batman movie. Nolan makes a mockery of the origin story by pulling resources and iconic gadgets completely out of its ass, something that in another movie would warrant an Easter egg.He even turns the action into an incoherent blur, granting us the idea of an indestructible force without actually allowing us to see anything. When Batman disappears mid conversation with Jim Gordon, this is Nolan using his methodic cinematography and editing style as a visual gag. What if through the magic of editing the subject of the next shot was replaced with nothing? Now Nolan has a character that can help him do that.Even the mantras work because Nolan is treating them like singular ideas that need to be methodically explained through rules and order. It’s not enough for Nolan to just provide a training sequence montage. He needs Liam Neeson to coach you through these subtle extensions of the same philosophy. Another director would bluntly repeat them.Like Batman, Nolan had performed a deft-defying rescue and was a figurative legend. He now had the clout to take up a more personal project on a bigger scale, and it was only a matter of time to see what trick he would pull out of his hat next.“Are you watching closely?”A magic trick is often so simple to detect if you know what you’re looking at. But the magician’s job is diversion. He demands our attention on something other than the obvious tell.“The Prestige” is Christopher Nolan’s elaborate illusion of a film. He asks us to watch closely, to follow the three steps (The Pledge, The Turn, The Prestige) of the magician’s performance and to piece together the screenplay’s endless web of betrayal, love, hatred and devotion.But Nolan puts all the clues in plain sight. We’re watching so closely that we ignore the film’s other stylistic choices. Like “The Prestige’s” characters, we become obsessed with the wrong thing.“The Prestige” is the twistiest film Nolan ever made. It’s a complicated whodunit between two rival magicians, one who wants revenge for the accidental death of his wife and the other who wants the same success and support for his family as his rival.Nolan was smart to make a film between the two Batman movies, but it underperformed at the box office and wasn’t entirely well received by critics. It first had the unfortunate luck of being released in close proximity to another paranormal magician film, “The Illusionist.” But what’s more, critics saw “The Prestige” as empty entertainment value designed to mess with your head and nothing more. The experience is so complex and the characters so morally corrupt that it’s emotionally draining. A review of “The Prestige” by Film Threat’s Mark Bell echoed the most common criticism of all of Nolan’s work, saying, “When all is said and done and you get the full explanation of what meant what and who did what to whom, it’s not fulfilling at all. It’s a magic trick that’s all showmanship and craft, but lacking true whimsy, ultimately failing the audience.”But think about it. Doesn’t a magic trick always lose its appeal once you know how it’s done? If “The Prestige” was all about its ending, that would defeat the purpose. You want to be fooled.“That feeling of bafflement and wanting to know the secret behind it, that’s a great feeling. I wanted to make a film that embraced that feeling,” Nolan said in an interview with Spike TV.Why otherwise would Nolan leave so many dead giveaways? SPOILERS AHEAD! We know Tesla’s machine is capable of making duplicates, and we know it makes them away from the machine itself, so why should we be surprised that Angier was making copies of himself all along? We see him with a gun when he first tests it. And what else could he have been doing with those water tanks? We even know Angier drowned in one at the beginning. As for Borden, the movie keeps telling us that the only way he could possibly do the trick is with a double. And we know that Tesla made a machine for Borden already. We even get an idea of Borden’s split personality when he says he doesn’t love his wife today. SPOILERS DONE.Nolan wants to wrap us up in the mystery of the film, and he does that by constantly repeating the film’s main idea that you must give yourself fully to your art. He shows it and tells that one idea as many ways as he can until it’s the only thing you’re focused on, not the many plot holes.And it’s even the reason Nolan cheats in his twist. It’s safe to say that the twist in “The Prestige” is not altogether possible. In a movie that otherwise considers itself a gritty, ruthless depiction of an older time in London, Nolan incorporates a twist that adheres to the paranormal.Here again we see similarities in Batman’s use of a sonar device that allows Lucius to map all of Gotham City, the fact that Lenny in “Memento” had always been lying to himself, that Cobb could just disappear off the radar in “Following” in just a stretch of dialogue, or that the villain in “The Dark Knight Rises” comes completely out of left field.Nolan cheats because he wants you to know that these acts of magic, as it were, are totally conceived by someone.This is Nolan’s primary innovation. He can make absurd science fiction or action films and pass them off as reality, and yet he can take that formulaic blueprint of reality and let you know just who drew it up.Granted, in “The Prestige” he does all this in the guise of another stylistically uninteresting film. For a movie that devotes so much time to period detail, Nolan spends a lot of it studying Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman’s faces. It’s other cheat is in finding a way for Borden and Angier to always show up onstage as the assistant from the audience just so that they can sabotage one another. This seems to me a less intentional flaw in the screenplay, but I digress.To really make something great, Nolan needed to achieve something more. He had always attracted fierce acting talent to his projects, but the films were always bigger than the actors. If he had someone who could carry the film away on a wave of energy, then he could make something people would remember.He needed something of a wild card.“And… here… we… go.”Heath Ledger died in his bed on January 22, 2008. The cause was an accidental prescription drug overdose.The effect was much greater.Christopher Nolan had not yet begun editing on “The Dark Knight” when news of Ledger’s death came in. Suddenly his job was not just to make a film but a tribute.“When you get into the edit suite after shooting a movie, you feel a responsibility to an actor who has trusted you, and Heath gave us everything. As we started my cut, I would wonder about each take we chose, each trim we made,” Nolan wrote in a eulogy article for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. “I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly.”If “Batman Begins” had become a symbol for what a superhero movie could be, “The Dark Knight” became a symbol for what a superhero movie should be, and it had happened before the movie was even completed.The anticipation for the film had achieved mythic proportions in a way I had never known in my lifetime. I saw Ledger’s face hidden under the Joker’s makeup every day when I worked at a movie theater, the trailer repeating every hour as though the film’s power beckoned. For an 18-year-old still learning to appreciate great film, the best movie I had seen that year prior to “The Dark Knight” was “WALL-E,” so there was absolutely nothing I was anticipating more.When the movie finally arrived, I was working concessions for our theater’s midnight showing. It was the busiest two hours I’d ever worked, and our theater was just one of the 3,040 theaters nationwide that helped “The Dark Knight” earn $18.5 million overnight, a midnight screening record for the time.Ledger’s death impacted the way “The Dark Knight” was received in a way Nolan could’ve never controlled. The film made $533 million domestically and over a billion worldwide. Audiences trumpeted its greatness so loudly that it rocketed its way to the number one spot on the IMDB Top 250, ousting “The Godfather.” It also won a posthumous Oscar for Ledger’s supporting actor work. Something about The Joker dangling on the end of Batman’s harness was ambiguous enough to cement Ledger’s permanent legacy on film.But Nolan was never the same either. For an emerging 21st Century talent to achieve such critical and financial success (and for of all things a comic book movie) figuratively placed him into a directors’ pantheon. At the moment, he was untouchable. Soon, an unexpected wave of analysis and criticism were thrown at the director and his entire line of work. Nolan was now not only one of the most respected new directors but also the most polarizing.I myself have read much of this criticism, and I wondered if four years later “The Dark Knight” could still hold up to its legacy and its place beside what I felt to be a disappointing finale to the Batman trilogy.“The Dark Knight” is and was always the film I wanted from Nolan. It’s his best work by a mile and still encapsulates everything I’ve discussed about him so far. It’s a monumental achievement.This time around, we see Batman before Bruce Wayne, the symbol before the man. His legacy has created tainted vigilantes fighting with guns and getting people killed, and the Gotham once riddled with organized crime is now a cesspool of chaotic violence.“It had changed in three years. Bigger. More real. More modern. And a new force of chaos was coming to the fore,” Nolan recalled in a foreword to the book “The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy.” “We’d held nothing back, but there were things we hadn’t been able to do the first time out—a Batsuit with a flexible neck, shooting on Imax. And things we’d chickened out on—destroying the Batmobile, burning up the villain’s blood money to show a complete disregard for conventional motivation. We took the supposed security of a sequel as license to throw caution to the wind and headed for the darkest corners of Gotham.”The success of “Batman Begins” and the symbol it created in popular culture allowed Nolan to run with whatever story he had in mind, and he used a new symbol, The Joker, to convey a theme that seemed to combine both “Begins” and “The Prestige.”What if a symbol could inspire madness and bafflement? How could our minds be twisted if we believed things were in a state of anarchy?The Joker is such a mystifying, impossible figure as seen in “The Dark Knight.” He has a sadistic presence and somehow appears to have unlimited resources to create any social experiment he wants. Through using only mental patients, he can rig thousands of barrels of explosives in warehouses and on boats without anyone noticing. He appears to have no altar ego and his backstory, as told by him, is a lie. He’s not altogether supernatural, but he’s a symbol too.He says to Harvey Dent that he just wants to introduce a little anarchy into the world, and we believe it in the same way we believe Cobb’s intentions in “Following.” But that’s not entirely true. It’s a lie firstly because we know The Joker is a compulsive liar, and secondly, his plans are always several steps ahead from what anyone can anticipate.Like Nolan, The Joker is all about rules and order, but he wants them for different reasons than Bruce Wayne does. His goal is not to create anarchy in Gotham but to replace the symbol of Batman with a new one. He asks Batman to remove his mask to reveal he’s just a man, not a symbol. That doesn’t happen, so when Batman has just upended The Joker’s truck, he stumbles out and stands in the middle of the street bellowing, “Hit me!” Had he done just that, Batman’s reputation as a hero who doesn’t kill people would be destroyed. Failing that, he transforms Dent himself into a demon, the opposite of the likeable DA the public envisioned.All of these set pieces, including The Joker’s ferry experiment, are all elaborate plot devices for Nolan to emphasize his philosophies. They work as thrilling stunts firstly because they’re tangible and done without CGI. But what’s more, Nolan layers multiple timelines of chaos (Batman and The Joker’s interrogation, the man with the cell phone in his chest, Dent’s kidnapping) in classic action movie fashion. Layered timelines are a staple of Nolan films going back to “Following” and continuing through “Inception,” but here with a thousand things going on at once, The Joker seems to be an omnipresent force pulling all the strings.None of this would be possible without Heath Ledger in the role of The Joker. Watch him slick back his hair as he approaches Maggie Gyllenhaal or smack his lips as he explains how “the box’s” plan to the mobsters is just a bad joke. If the movie itself doesn’t have a sense of anarchy, Ledger himself brings such an element of surprise to every moment. Ledger had the acting sensibility of a young Marlon Brando, a sort of awkward masculinity that made his emotions and his façade ambiguous and impenetrable. The Joker then is one of his most perfect roles. He can make a line like “Why so serious” instantly iconic because he shares the dialogue’s mystique.If you ask me, Batman did not need to be a trilogy. The myth continues endlessly when Batman rides off into the fog, and I didn’t need anything resolved. If Nolan had followed the same unfortunate route of both Ledger and his title character and disappeared, he would be heralded as a master. He would’ve been a young talent who could’ve been so much more and left it at that.But I believe in Harvey Dent. “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”“I’d hate to see out of control.”Image courtesy of The InquisitrWhat do we know so far about Christopher Nolan?1. We know he likes his films to adhere to rules. His characters incorporate systems into their livelihoods (Bill’s following, Lenny’s tattoos, Dormer’s crime scene investigations, Bruce Wayne’s pledge to not kill anyone, the three steps to a magic trick, The Joker’s games). Some characters break their rules, and others follow them blindly, but both paths either literally or figuratively lead to their destruction.2. His characters have no morality. They operate on one philosophy, one principle or one goal (Cobb’s mental robberies, Lenny’s dead wife, Bruce’s pledge to not kill anyone, Angier’s dead wife, The Joker’s dream to watch the world burn).3. In addition to having no morality, they are so obsessed with their goal that they are often mentally or emotionally disturbed protagonists (Lenny’s short-term memory loss, Dormer’s insomnia, Bruce’s fear of bats and his guilt over his parents’ death).4. He’s a poor visual storyteller, or at least he doesn’t try to be a conventionally stylish storyteller. All of his dialogue compositions are one-shot close-ups, and he often focuses in on exactly what the characters are talking about as they’re saying it. Critics have complained that Nolan’s action sequences are clunky, if not without flow entirely. Stephanie Zacharek went as far to say that Nolan’s images are “disconnected from one another.”5. The stories Nolan tells are often more about the buildup than the end. We want to know the little bits and pieces to Lenny’s psychosis, Borden’s Transporting Man trick and The Joker’s elaborate schemes.6. And yet Nolan still chooses to incorporate complicated twists into the screenplays. He cheats with talky twists and paranormal devices to let you know that he’s constructed this particular twist.7. He layers timelines one on top of the other to create an illusion of complexity. “Memento” operates in two timelines, “The Prestige” in three, and “Following” in four, but only intercutting between three at one time.8. Nolan makes films that are preposterous in terms of action and even story, but he portrays them in such a way that they appear realistic (see: all of the above).Oh, I’m sorry, did you not enjoy my laundry list of points I’ve already made clear, my dozens of examples and my ordered group of traits that feel like homework?That’s the way I feel watching “Inception.”“Inception” is Nolan’s “masterpiece” in the sense that everything we need to know about Nolan as a director and how he operates is here in excruciating, literal detail.Nolan apparently worked on the screenplay for nearly a decade, and “Inception” began as a heist film. This is one of the few genres where exposition and explaining every step of the process is part of the fun of watching the movie. But Nolan realized he needed a way to introduce an emotional element into the story, and this is what complicated the screenwriting process for so many years.So it really struck audiences as a brilliant, complex, multi-layered labor of love. This film too rocketed to number one on the IMDB Top 250, and because it came from the director of the previous “best movie ever,” suddenly teenagers and cult film enthusiasts had a masterpiece and an auteur director to call their own.Rarely had a blockbuster epic been this structurally complex and surreal, and audiences were drawn to that complexity whether or not being complex was actually admirable. (See: College Humor poking fun at “Inception’s” plot)And yet, Nolan does start with one simple idea that he continues to expand upon throughout the movie: “Once an idea is fully formed, it sticks.” (you know, like, don’t think about elephants) In this case, the idea is that reality may not be all that it seems. The world you are living in may be a dream, and you may no longer be able to grapple with reality.This is nothing new to film. Lots of films have posed questions about reality, even dreams. Do movies like “The Matrix,” “Blade Runner” and “Mulholland Dr.” ring a bell?The difference is Nolan pulls out his whole arsenal of tricks to get you to embrace this possibility. As we know, his vision of a film that gets its point across is not tidy, nor is it simple. Roger Ebert put it best when he wrote, “Nolan successfully made the film he had in mind, and shouldn’t be faulted for failing to make someone else’s film.”He started with the rules. “Inception” has plenty. Dream worlds adhere to rational stretches of time, such that five minutes in reality gives an hour in one dream, a week in the next level, and so on. When constructing these dreams, it’s important to never construct from specific memories. There are more. But break any of these rules, and the “projections” of the dreamer’s subconscious will come to attack you, alerting the dreamer to the intruder’s presence.Next is Cobb, a man with a goal to get back to see his children again. He’ll do anything to get there, including sabotaging a multi-million dollar corporation so that another wealthy CEO can claim a monopoly on the market. Cobb acts on his principles, not his morality.Cobb of course is mentally distraught, and after being in Scorsese movies for a solid decade, no one is better at playing emotionally tormented individuals than Leonardo DiCaprio. After visiting the dream world known as limbo, Cobb no longer has a perfect hold on reality. His wife killed herself and is haunting his dreams and the dreams of those he invades. And what naturally make Cobb suffer are all the rules he breaks. Don’t construct from memories. He returns to his dark past regularly. Don’t use someone else’s totem. He uses Mal’s. Again, the list goes on.All of this is presented as linearly as possible. “Inception” is loaded with talky exposition to drill these rules and ideas into your head, and it’s by far the strictest in terms to tailoring its shots to exactly what is being said in the screenplay. If a character discusses the rules of the totem, we get a shot of the top spinning. If a character is talking, we see him or her talking first. When Cobb reads aloud “I will break up my father’s empire,” we see it scribbled on a white board. Only rarely does the film actually speak for itself to explain the rules of the dream world or to advance the plot. A good example is the pinwheel hidden in the bedside safe, one of the film’s most emotionally poignant moments, or Eames raising a new, bigger gun from below the frame line as a brief visual gag.“Inception” is a complicated film, and Nolan provides a complicated twist. The world seems to be ending outside of Mal’s limbo apartment, and Cobb still takes several minutes to describe just what happened to Mal when the two of them were in limbo before. Nolan does this to set the character up for his own questioning of reality, challenging the baseline moments that have given Cobb security earlier.So when we signNow the film’s final shot, the movie achieves a level of ambiguity. Cobb’s story is resolved happily, but we’re still left with the film’s theme in mind, nagging us that both the character and we may still be wrong.Part of the reason I can’t enjoy “Inception” is because the film seems to be speaking about its own construction, constantly referencing what it’s doing and how it does it. Maybe “Inception” is really just a documentary for how Nolan makes all his movies.To explain, let me start by saying this film is actually innovative for layering five timelines on top of each other and intercutting between four of them. We can piece together where each layer is in time based on the color palette and weather patterns within each scene. Any more timelines and we may be lost. Nolan has always used multiple timelines and layers to his films, but he overthinks his metaphor when he organizes Cobb’s dreams into literal layers, signNowable through an elevator in Cobb’s mind.Nolan loves rules in his films, and here he calls them that. Nolan loves exploring one simple idea in a film until it sticks, and his characters are on a mission to implant one simple idea into the mind of an audience member. The Mr. Charles plot device is designed to let the audience member know that it specifically is a plot device.He even is a filmmaker who makes dreamlike movies into realities. And what does he say here? “It feels real while we’re in them. We only realize something is strange when we wake up.”This is as close as we’ll ever come to understanding Nolan, and he delivers it to us verbatim. In fact, we begin to realize that “Inception” doesn’t feel like a dream at all. What dreams adhere to rules? In what dreams can we sense that actual time has passed, let alone a week or a month? Why is there no spontaneity in the dreams? Why are there no unicorns, naked women, people fighting with lasers or something stranger instead of just guns? Why can’t Cobb fly in his dreams?But the bigger reason I dislike “Inception” is that I feel he’s tackling a theme he handled so much more elegantly, and more fun, in “Memento.” “Memento” is specifically about memories, but what are memories, really, other than constructed figments of reality that exist exclusively in our minds? Cobb is attached to his dark memories of his dead wife, and he is so certain that the life he’s living is reality, but he may be fooling himself. Lenny has a dead wife, and he is fooling himself. Both characters live with regret of not being able to do more for their wives, and both will grow old and be filled with it. We leave Lenny at the tattoo parlor knowing he’s stuck, but we have to follow Cobb down into the rabbit hole of limbo to learn and witness the same thing.It’s a film that panders to you so much to let you know its brilliant, and it treats everything with such grave intensity that it forgets to be enjoyable. Its set pieces are remarkable, but are for their own sake. The only stunt we actually get to see repeated in the climax is the paradox stairs, not the folding city or the mirrors under the bridge continuing to infinity. The movie rarely has a moment of levity, save for Joseph Gordon-Levitt falling off a chair or stealing a smooch from Ellen Page. And all the action movie set pieces feel like clichés from Bond movies.And yet “Inception” quickly became the most fiercely debated film of 2010. Some critics argued it was more fun to speculate over than to actually watch. That’s because countless theories sprung up online about what really happened.“The end when Cobb returns home to his kids is really a dream! Have the kids aged? Are they wearing the same things? But didn’t the top look like it was wobbling? How will we know?”“Maybe the entire movie is a dream! What about what Mal says to Cobb about how everything in his life seems too good to be true? And they keep saying to take “a leap of faith.” And we never really know how he ended up in Mombasa in the first place. It fits with the rules of a dream.”“But wait! That’s how all movies are! “Inception” is really about making movies. It makes perfect sense, because Cobb is the director, Saito’s the producer, Ariadne is the writer, Fischer’s the audience and Eames is the art director! Does that make Michael Caine the stodgy film critic?”“There should be more to it than that though, right? Maybe the whole thing is an ode to architecture. Nolan is always constructing things in his movies, and everyone seems to be building something here. Look at the top: it’s a pseudosphere, a structurally perfect object where every point curves away from the center.”I personally don’t believe any of these, mainly for the reason that while all these theories are interesting, none of them really suggest what Nolan is actually trying to say or do with the movie.(Side note: Also, all of these theories are wrong on a practical standpoint. Nolan used two different sets of kids, and they are wearing different clothes. Nolan did not intend to make a movie about movies. The top is really just something the prop department threw together so that it would stay spinning for a long time.)He got his audience to do exactly what he wanted, which is to study and obsess over the details of the film and come away with a central idea.But he went too far. The audience that is in love with “Inception” has missed the bigger point. They scrutinized the ending to the point that they overlooked the film’s elegant ambiguity. Whether the ending is real or a dream does not really matter in the broader scheme of things, and knowing gets the viewer nowhere. (Again, see: College Humor’s take)“I’ve been asked the question more times than I’ve ever been asked any other question about any other film I’ve made,” Nolan said in an interview. “What’s funny to me is that people really do expect me to answer it. There can’t be anything in the film that tells you one way or another because then the ambiguity at the end of the film would just be a mistake. It would represent a failure of the film to communicate something. But it’s not a mistake. I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me.”The important thing to Nolan is that what is real and what is fake no longer matters to Cobb because he has his kids, the thing that matters most.Now the things that matter most are less clear. Movies are epic, dark, wordy and complex because an ambitious filmmaker unintentionally fostered over-ambitious fans. Stephanie Zacharek feared that all movies will now only be “awesome” rather than “great,” and in the two years since, she may be right.“Ah yes… I was wondering what would break first.”A man can only continue to be seen as a symbol for so long.Maybe that’s what Nolan is doing by throwing in the towel on “The Dark Knight Rises” and ending the Batman franchise. Bruce Wayne cannot sustain this kind of pressure any longer, and neither can Nolan. They have to move on, but first leave in a gigantic bang.Following the surprise hype of “The Dark Knight” and the over-hype of “Inception,” “The Dark Knight Rises” could only go down in anticipation. It was already unlikely that lightning would strike three times. But then there was controversy over Bane’s inaudible dialogue behind his Hannibal Lecter mask, death threats started pouring in to dissenting critics on Rotten Tomatoes before the film had even been released, and worst of all, the tragic midnight movie shooting in Aurora, Colorado cast a gloom over the whole occasion that was even too dark for Batman.What’s interesting about “The Dark Knight Rises” is that we see Nolan stepping away from the spotlight of yet another iconic, superhero epic. He chose to make a film about socio-politics and bleak ideologies of hope in the modern day. I myself wrote in my review of “Rises,” “’The Dark Knight Rises’ is more of an enduring challenge than some will expect. For others, it will even feel little like a superhero movie. But its heavy themes of untapped emotion and social anarchy dwarf the flimsy blandness of ‘The Avengers’ and ‘The Amazing Spiderman.’ It does the Batman franchise proud.”With this film, critics almost pre-emptively combatted the hype with lengthy analyses designed to put discussion of the movie into an appropriate context. And in the process, the Internet has produced such an engaging web of articles going all the way back to the beginning of Nolan’s career. To read about one film is to just start to absorb them all. You become obsessed with talking about his films even if you don’t particularly enjoy them.So it pains me to not be able to discuss and debate the many unbelievably convincing contrarian viewpoints that successfully rationalize Christopher Nolan’s work, not just diminish it. Jim Emerson, Bilge Ebiri, Stephanie Zacharek, Andrew O’Hehir; the least I can do is link to them and urge that you see how polarizing and animated discussion about Nolan really is.But the writer that concludes my thoughts on Nolan best come from a recent post by the great David Bordwell.“Nolan is now routinely considered one of the most accomplished living filmmakers. Yet many critics fiercely dislike his work. They regard it as intellectually shallow, dramatically clumsy, and technically inept. As far as I can tell, no popular filmmaker’s work of recent years has received the sort of harsh, meticulous dissection Jim Emerson and A. D. Jameson have applied to Nolan’s films. People who shrug at continuity errors and patchy plots in ordinary productions have dwelt on them in Nolan’s movies. The attack is probably a response to his elevated reputation. Having been raised so high, he has farther to fall,” Bordwell writes.Nolan is at the top of a new generation of directors in the 21st Century. They make films designed to be awesome, designed to be obsessed over and talked about not only as great works of art but as mind-shattering experiences on a widely accessible scale. It’s important to know if this is a direction worth travelling in. Bordwell continues:“Nolan’s work deserves attention even though some of it lacks elegance and cohesion at the shot-to-shot level. The stylistic faults I pointed to above and that echo other writers’ critiques are offset by his innovative approach to overarching form. And sometimes he does exercise a stylistic control that suits his broader ambitions. When he mobilizes visual technique to sharpen and nuance his architectural ambitions, we find a solid integration of texture and structure, fine grain and large pattern.”In “The Dark Knight Rises,” Batman is no longer the mysterious figure. Wayne himself is the person we don’t fully understand. And until this point in his career, Nolan has been the white knight for movie critics and fanboys alike. Only now at the end of his biggest franchise do we get a glimpse of the man and director he is and the one he can be.

Is it possible to get both a ticket for speeding (15 mph over limit of 45mph) and an illegal u-turn at the same stop?The short answer is “yes”. the Cop / Deputy / Highway Patrol / State Police can give you as many tickets as he wants and the he witnessed.TRUE STORY: this was back in year 2010Years ago, I got a ticket for Tinted Windows. This was in a suburb of LA known as City of Alhambra.Except I gave the City of San Gabriel PD motorcycle Cop some Lips service and an attitude.I had just turned a corner and came to a complete stop and made a right turn. He was standing in the street and waiving people over. I was thinking, “What?” “I was NOT speeding, I didn’t run any red lights”. So I was pissed and to me this was a phony fake traffic ticket, aka harassment.So when he wrote my ticket for Tinted Windows. He “Dickedf with me”. There was three boxes he could have checked as “Correctable”.He didn’t check them. Which when I went to the Alhambra courthouse Traffic Clerk window. The nice lady said, this cop was messing with you because he didn’t check those three boxes as “Correctable”? Your bail to post this to fight this traffic ticket was $1,125.Yep, you read that correctly, $ One Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-Five dollars for Tinted Windows.So, she said “let me fix this”. And she did, so My bail became $75 dollars, Yep Twenty-Five dollars times Three = $75 dollars instead of $1,125.That said, I fought the ticket called “Trial-by-Written-Declaration” TBWD. In California you can write-up your Oral arguments and submit what’s called a “Pleading” or “Trial Brief”.I did that and “LOST”. Found Guilty of this traffic Tinted Window ticket.========================================================Okay, Plan B. If / When you lost the your TBWD. You have 20 calendar days to go back to the traffic clerk window and ask for “Trial-de-Novo” AKA Translation: Latin for New Trial.I did that.So on the day of the trial. They usually have a commissioner for traffic court. I asked and did a Motion for a Real Judge. I said, “You (Commissioner) already adjudicated my trial. You may not re-hear my trial. I request a Motion for a different court in front of a real judge.”The commissioner came back. “Well that may take a while”.I said, “No worries, I’ll wait”.As chance would have it, mine was the first case in front of the REAL JUDGE.The real judge look at me and proceeded to ask me, “what evidence do you have that your tint is legal”.I spoke firmly and loudly, I almost yelled. “OBJECTION, Defendant has no burden of Proof to prove or provide exculpatory evidence for my own conviction or exonerate myself. ““What does the Citation say right, underneath my signature? In fine print”?Citations say, right under your signature: “This is not an admission of Guilty, but a promise to appear”.I said to the court, “Thus I have no burden to prove a “negative” Of presumption of “not Guilty”; AND I kept my promise to appear by appearing here now.”I continued, “This Gov’t Witness (Pointing to the Motorcycle Cop from San Gabriel PD, I think his last name was Robinson) has the burden of proof, the question before the court is WHAT EVIDENCE DOES HE HAVE to convict me on this traffic infraction charge”???I continued, “That traffic citation was modified and Effective Jan 1, 1999 to include subsection (e) which has 4 elements to satisfy this citation. This Gov’t witness MUST PROVE all 4 elements. NOT ONE, NOT TWO, NOT THREE but ALL 4. WHERE IS THAT PROOF?”I continued, “Where there is ‘no-proof’ the court must dismiss “said ticket in question” for lack of evidence to prosecute”… “a Motion to dismiss is hereby entered”.Wow! The judge was taken aback, and backed up in his seat. He signNowed under his Bench desk and got out the California Vehicle code book and looked up that section of law and read it for a good 5 minutes.Did I mention I had a J.D. Law Degree at this point in my life. So I did my home work and researched my case.Then the Judge turned to the Cop and said, “what evidence do you to submit to prosecute on this traffic ticket for Tinted Windows”?The Cop, was standing to my left at the Plaintiff’s desk, I was to his right at the Defendants desk. The cop used his thumb and pointed at me and said, “I thought he (defendant) had the burden of proof”.The judge (LOL I Kid you not, gave the cop the look of “no you idiot, you’re the Gov’t, you have the burden of proof).Right then and there, I yelled “MOTION TO DISMISS”.The judge, “Motion to dismiss granted”.And I stormed out of there and didn’t say another word.========================================================So the San Gabriel PD cop “dicked with me”? Well, I Dicked with him right back. I filed a complaint with him with San Gabriel PD. The Internal Affairs called me and asked if they could interview me. I said, sure.The first thing they said was how nice my complaint was because I had typed it up as a Pleading or a Brief. I said well I have a law degree.See below for an example in another answer I gave.Stanley Hutchinson's answer to I got a ticket for going 45 mph in a 35 mph when the speed limit was just about to change to 45 mph. Should I just pay the fine or take it to court?(click on the Legal Pleading templates to see what they Examples look like)Long story short, I told the them (2 officers) how Robinson “Dicked” with me to get my bail to $1,125 and the traffic clerk window and how he wrote me a traffic ticket to Tinted windows from the FRONT DRIVER AND FRONT PASSENGER side when it’s been LEGAL in California for 10 years. AND, AND, He had no proof.That complaint went into his file, his folder for dishonesty.========================================================Now I digressed.On your ticket, you should fight it. Both of them.Read that link to find out how.See traffic laws are known as “Strict Liability”. That sounds bad, but it’s actually Good, Very good.WHAT “Strict Liability” MEANS is that the citation or traffic infraction is “strictly interpreted by the courts” according to that Statute ONLY.Nothing less, Nothing more.See in Criminal courts for Felony or misdemeanors they also have to prove “Intent”, “Motive”, “Opportunity”. But not for Traffic tickets.So on the U-Turn ticket? unless and if there was a SIGN, that said “NO U-TURN”, you can make a U-Turn there. Unless if it was a “Storefront Business District”.The other exception is if the U-Turn was at an Intersection, it’s a legal u-turn. Unless there’s a sign at that intersection that says “NO U-Turn”.On the Speeding ticket, Go Online to that court system and find the Subpoena form. And Subpoena all the following. Subpoena the Heck out of him, prior to the trial and bring that to court, Do a Motion to dismiss for everything he failed to provide per the Subpoena(s).All roads that are speed traps are illegal. charge him with that, and ask him how many tickets he’s given for speeding at this section? Bingo, if it’s more than one or two, that’s a Speed Trap “ILLEGAL”.Two, ask (Subpoena) him for his paper work on when his radar / lidar was last calibrated Before and After he gave you the ticket and if he erased the previous speeder he caught.Three, ask (Subpoena) him for his paper work on when that section of road was last surveyed and demand a copy of that. Speeding tickets must have had that road surveyed within the last 7 years, because if the “Average speed” has increased that local traffic division must increase or adjust the speed to reflect how traffic is using that road.Four ask (Subpoena) him for his paper work on when and how he was trained on the use or that radar.Okay, Good Luck!**if you like this answer or find it helpful please give me an upvote below - Thanks**