The Dark Knight Rises

       This summer one of my favorite movies of all time came out.  This movie was The Dark Knight Rises.  There was a lot of hype about this movie considering it was the conclusion to Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.  In the first movie, Batman Begins, Nolan experiments with how the batman legend came to be.  Early in the movie, young Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered by a street thug asking for money with his parents at gunpoint.  Bruce is left alone with his butler Alfred, and swears to himself he will fight and defeat crime in Gotham City.  Bruce is later sent to jail for stealing, little did the police know it was from Wayne Enterprises, and is there for several years.  A man named Ras Al Ghul greets him on his last day in jail and tells him to go to the mountains and join his band of fighters called The League of Shadows.  Bruce gets all of his batman skills from training with the league, and he later leaves and destroys the league's headquarters.  Ras Al Ghul later becomes one of the antagonists, but is defeated and killed.  The sequel to Batman Begins is The Dark Knight.  The villan in this movie is the crazy warlord Joker who does not have a plan, but just wants to see Gotham perish.  All of Joker's ideas work perfectly excepct for his last one, in which he is caught and nearly killed by batman.  The Joker did drive Gotham's district attorney Harvey Dent insane, by killing his lover and Batman's ex-lover Rachel, and blowing off half of his face.  Harvey Dent becomes the classic Batman villan Two-Face.  Two-Face holds Comissioner Gordon's family hostage, and nearly kills his son, but Batman knocks him off of a building which breaks his neck.  Harvey Dent had put hundreds of convicts in prison, and if someone found out he had gone insane, the convicts would have been let out.  So Batman and Commissioner Gordon make a deal to tell the people of Gotham all of the Two-Face murders were Batman's, and that Batman killed Harvey Dent.

       The Dark Knight Rises takes place 8 years after the Two-Face incident.  The people of Gotham still believe Batman killed a Harvey Dent.  They do not know Harvey became crazy and killed several people.  Batman also has not shown his face since the incident either.  He lives in seclude and only sees Alfred because the girl he loved, Rachel, was killed by the Joker.  The streets of Gotham are the opposite of how they were in Batman Begins, which is clean with no crime.  After Batman killed Two-Face, the Dent Act was passed, which made it easier for Gotham police to take down organized crime.  The streets of Gotham are cleaner than ever.  Until Band shows up.  Bane's actions start out relatively small: hijacking a plane, killing everyone except a nuclear physicist inside, and causing horror at a stock exchange.  Batman appears for the first time in 8 years to chase Bane after the stock exchange incident.  The problem is that the cops who were going after Bane decide to go after Batman instead.  Batman helps take down a couple of Bane's men, and he and Bane get away.  Batman, with the help of the Cat-woman Selina Kyle, finds Bane again, but Cat-woman closes a gate on Batman so he has to battle Bane alone.  Bane was very strong unlike Batman, and he wins easily, breaking Batman's back.  Bane then sends Bruce to a jail in the middle east where he is from.  Bane terrorizes Gotham.  He blows up a football field, trapping every cop in the city are under it.  Bane uses a fusion reactor built by Wayne Enterprises and creates a nuclear bomb, using the nuclear physicist from the plane.  He traps people in Gotham by blowing up the bridges.  Officer John Blake and Commissioner Gordon are the only hope for Gotham.  Or can Bruce Wayne escape the jail and save Gotham?  

Upcoming NCAA Football Season

       This upcoming NCAA season is going to be very interesting.  USC Trojans took the pre-season No. 1 ranking while former national champions Alabama took No. 2 and former runner up LSU took No. 3.  The SEC is still the dominate conference considering they have LSU, Alabama, pre-season No. 6 Georgia, pre-season No. 9 South Carolina, and preseason No. 10 Arkansas.  The USC Trojan's probation has just ended so this year they are able to go to a bowl game.  Two teams that are usually powerhouse, Florida and Ohio State, did not have great seasons last year (Florida 7-6, Ohio State 6-7) are both pre-season top 25 this year (Florida-No. 23, Ohio State-No. 18).  The Big 12, like the SEC, has 6 pre-season ranked teams: Oklahoma (4), West Virginia (11), Texas (15), Oklahoma State (19), TCU (20), and Kansas State (21).

       Week 1 and Week 2 have already occurred.  In Week 1 every team in the top 10 stayed in the the top 10 except Michigan, who lost to Alabama 41-14.  There were not very close important games in Week 1 except the No. 12 Clemson-Auburn game in which Clemson won 26-19.  After Week 1 Alabama jumped USC and claimed the No. 1 spot while USC took No. 2.  During Week 2, No. 24 Florida won a tight game against Texas A&M 20-17.  Georgia and Missouri played a close game for the first 3 quarters but in the 4th quarter Georgia was dominant and finished the game winning 41-20.
The two biggest upsets of the weekend were No. 13 Wisconsin losing in a shocker against Oregon State 10-7, and Arkansas losing to UL Monroe 34-31 in overtime.  Lastly, with the Arkansas loss, they have left the top 25, but replacing them in the SEC is Tennessee who moved up to No. 23.  Adding to the new top 25 members are No. 22 UCLA, No. 24 Arizona, and No. 25 BYU.