Batman Begins: The Thread

I mean he's addressing two events from two aesthtically consistent POVs, staying true to his design schemata.

We need clean, fairly basic filmmaking to know what the hell is going on with the monorail--long shots of the rail, the place where it will fall, etc--Gordoon--moving the car into position *under* the rail--etc.

While we need the emotional cacophony, the drama of the man to man violence--which, as I said, is an action continuation of their relationship as characters.

It's more 'real' and less pornographic--that is, an invitation to fetishistically enjoy the violent act via visual manipulation.

The Matrix films play with spatiality and time to allow us to deeply wallow in the trajectory of the bullet and multiple ways we can view the spectacle, building anticipation of the inevitable cumshot of it hitting someone, and subsequant, literally 'cool' ways to show that impact. Cool, because the violence has become completely abstracted and decoid of human drama.

Bruckheimer just piles on endless visually saturated shots of whatever moving somehwere really fast until the inevitable fussilade of camera angles showing whatever getting blown up by something colorfully and then onward to the next reiteration. It's Videodrome on amphetimines and with the aesthetic sense of a low attention span serial killer.

Nolan's approach is the only one I'd label admirable.

And one that will invite a fair amount of reverence. Which probably best explains why I felt left out in the cold by this one.

Maybe because that would make the widely-acknowledged subtext a little too creepy.

http://www.fusedmagazine.com/Assets/Images/Articles/article_full/batman.jpg

I guess that's why it bored me. I'm not really looking for realistic portrayals of violence when I go see a comic book movie. I would have gladly sacrificed some of that realism for a little more style.

But 'realism' is a style. I mean, this is *way* stylized--and in several modes.

When first I heard that Nolan was intent on NOT making a comic hero film, I was like, Oye, great.

But he's done just that--it's almost sui generis it's so, um, sui generis.

basically I liked most of the scenes that didn't actually have batman in them, and there were a lot of notable performances. and while I never really liked Burton's batman's movies, it's apparent to me now that he did bring something special to the table. I'm thinking back to the indescribably sad army of penguins in Batman Returns.

C Bale = great bruce wayne, hilarious batman. his batman voice was too overdone, and the actual batman mask had the unfortunate effect of making his head look like a giant, engorged ham.

This much is OTM.

Still, this one was pretty darned good as these things go. I'm anti-Burton, though, and always wanted a Batman movie that played more like a crime thriller than a superhero thriller, so I was an easy sell on this one.

Oh, come on. There's effective and ineffective pornography, and there are effective and ineffective fight scenes. The fight scenes here were more inscrutable than in Gladiator, and that's hard to do. D- on the fight scenes.

Loved the movie, though, I should say again.

I actually liked that way that was handled a lot -- other movies were much worse at making the Batman rasp sound forced/camp. In this one, I understood explicitly that the reason he was talking that way was to disguise his voice. An improvement.

I forgot to mention how awkwardly the origin story was handled. It somehow managed to feel overly long and yet rushed at the same time. I felt like the whole audience was sitting there impatiently wondering "OK, when is the action going to start" but at the same time, the filmmakers seemed to be aware of this problem so the dialog and editing were pushed along to compensate. The pacing wasn't slow enough to create a real sense of mystery and tension but it took long enough to get to the real action that the beginning felt like it dragged.

Which reminds me - what are they going to call the sequel? "Batman Continues" is unbearably lame.

I don't mind the long exposition, either, but I agree that the pacing in the first half-hour or so was strange and disconnecting. A bit of deliberately disorienting Memto pacing in a movie that had no use for such fanciness.

Loved it. Did I say that already?

I feel the opposite way. The back-story gave us plenty of plotting and not enough atmosphere. I would have loved to see more scenes of Bruce Wayne brooding in his prison cell or crouching Wind-up-bird-chronicle-style at the bottom of his well. Instead we were told what happened to him rather than seeing it for ourselves. All of that awful you have to become your fear / embrace your fear / I'm afraid of bats / bats are scary crap was completely unnecessary. Same with the awful closing line about the man beneath the mask and I-yam-what-I-yam no, you are what you do, etc.

Sure they can -- the same way I can still admire "Batman Forever" as a gay-Kilmer-camp-fest and love it dearly (and somewhat oddly), and still think this was the Batman movie that that should have been made the first time.

(More seriously, there are things about the Burton Batman films I loved and others that sucked or felt forced both at the time and now as well.)

From me, it's not revisionism. I thought they were crap then, too. If you have some idea that the love for them was unanimous, that's your problem.

I didn't find it especially compelliing, but I did find it exactlty what you do not -- necessary. Backstory is something that, even in the Burton movies, Batman lacked.

Burton, for all his talents, made not only cartoons, but fairly boring ones, when the day was all over with.

It's driving me crazy! In 2005, after some good and bad Batman films, after X-men and Spiderman, post-Matrix and a billion other by-the-numbers "dark & gritty" sci-fi movies, is this Batman movie really that much of an achievement? Is this really the best they can come up with? The jump between Superman and other previous superhero films and the first Burton Batman was immense! Plus Burton managed to find a middle ground between the darkness and the camp (which, you know, some people actually like). And to return to this discussion about the back story, the Burton movie managed to convey who Batman was and what motivates him just fine while still managing to be fun.

All of the dialog about conquering your fears was necessary? Because, you know, I got the point perfectly well when all of the bats flew at him as a kid. But I felt like I was being reminded about it every 10 minutes for the next hour.

1. Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams
2. Frank Miller (and sometimes David Mazzuchelli)
3. Alan Moore/Brian Bolland
4. Matt Wagner

All told, pretty slim pickins from the history of the character, true, but it's what I've liked and it ain't hardly fun.

Let's assume, as I do, that a superhero needs a cultural context in order to be super. And when they get updated, they need an updated context in order to work properly.

X-Men -- Loved the gay subtext. Best and cleanest update ever. Spiderman -- the message about "responsibility" is a little muddled, and the second movie was wise to keep everything firmly in the ridiculous, even though the reason people read comic books is not to feel ridiculous. Matrix -- ok, whatever. A great potential myth that pissed on its own fire. Quickly, no less. Matrix doesn't belong in this conversation. Not that you really put it there.

But Batman can still work. There is real potential in Batman, like I said before, in the fear of urbanization. The crime and density and alienation and the feeling of being alone and weird and friendless -- these are HUGE themes, and Batman can conceivably cover all of them very well, if written properly.

Superheroes are us, or they are nothing.

ok back up here... despite my love for burtonbatman and stuff, superman i & ii are still WAAYYY better movies. supes 1 is still my favourite superhero movie of all time, i think.