Maybe you heard about it already, but there was a movie that came out last week. Something about a Batman rising. The whole series is basically one extended metaphor for overcoming childhood fear writ large over 8 hours of Christopher Nolan direction and Hans Zimmer scoring.

It was one of the most anticipated movies of the year, if not the last decade, given that Nolan’s Batman franchise has piqued the interest of just about everyone. It’s broken all sorts of box office records and Heath Ledger’s The Joker has gone down in history as one of the most powerful movie villains ever. Really. All this from a movie about a guy dressed as a bat.

You may have also heard that a crazy guy bought an assault rifle off of the internet and shot up a movie theater in Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 50+ others. It is and was a horrific act of violence that preyed upon the art form of motion picture – one of the great American art forms, mostly because movies tap very deeply into the American psyche. Say what you will about movies, but they offer a chance to dream. You can see your dream. That, in the realm of humanity over thousands of years, is a new and brilliant concept. People can dream bigger now.

So a guy goes and shoots up a theater and the movie still makes $160m at the box office. I’m not here to talk about the shooting – to be honest, I fucked up reporting it on this very site having gotten carried away with something the NYPD police commissioner said, and for that I feel that I’ve failed a little as a reporter on the story of the shooting. Anyway. Let’s move forward.

“The Dark Knight Rises” is a good movie. It’s a good movie because it’s an end to a very good beginning and a very good middle. It may not be the strongest of the three, but for my money, it’s the perfect end to the trilogy.

People have attacked the movie for being too violent in the wake of the shooting and the only logical response to that is a) you’re wrong and b) it’s a movie, you’ve had movies for a while now, get used to them, there are crazy people out there who are crazy regardless of things.

In Edgewater, New Jersey a “Dark Knight Rises” screening was interrupted and then evacuated after someone opened the emergency exit doors. A week ago, this would not have been a story. But in this post-Aurora world, it reached the newspapers. Someone opens a door. That was pretty much the entire article.

We can’t live in a world governed by fear. If someone opens a door and it makes the newspaper, we as a culture have some serious thinking to do. The fact that gun control (particularly a ban on fucking assault rifles being made available to any Joe that can pony up a few grand to buy one) isn’t being made more of an issue after this tragedy is beyond me. People have taken to blaming the movies – a true cop-out if there was one. A sick bastard bought a gun designed to kill as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time possible. And he succeeded. And here we are blaming each other. It’s poetic – his act was designed to divide us. What’s worse is that he succeeded.

The movie is good, too. It’s operatic in its delivery which is what I think people are missing – we have become too accustomed to a wham-bam delivery and when someone takes two hours and forty minutes to tell a story it tries American’s patience.

I guess, if anything, we should be more patient with our storytellers and more patient with each other. There are compromises to be made on all political sides and we should suck it up and reach a goddam conclusion instead of the hyperbolic vitriolic wordpocalypse that we seemed to have engaged ourselves in. You cannot blame a President for trying to help out. And you cannot then sit back and tell me that it wasn’t a good movie because it didn’t live up to your expectations.