Oh, I loved Adam West in the 60's movie and TV show. Especially Cesar Romero as The Joker, cackling like Michael Jackson at Chuck E. Cheese's and sporting a mustache under his clown makeup.
And Tim Burton got a few things absolutely right in his original Batman from 1989: The dark, dirty, surreal Gotham; the bat suit; the batmobile; Alfred. But the tone was over-the-top, a comic-y take on a superhero without the emotional weight or even a real plot. Nicholson shamelessly mugged and stole the movie from the ill-cast Michael Keaton -- an even bigger crime than his character's attempt to poison the entire city. The name of the film was Batman, after all.
I will not speak of Joel "Bat Nipples" Schumacher.
So here comes Christopher Nolan, getting every last detail almost perfect. By focusing on Bruce Wayne's emotional trauma, crippling fears, obsession with revenge and his sense of justice, we finally get a fully fleshed character behind the cowl. Some might argue that the film wastes too much time with Bruce's Far East exploration of the criminal mind and his training at the hands of The League of Shadows. But this is time well spent in a movie that promises with its title to reveal how Batman Begins.
It was always a running joke among nerds like me, trying to figure out what happened to the contractors who designed the bat cave or the technicians responsible for all his cool equipment. And finally, we have a movie that goes a long way to reveal all of this in believable detail, introducing a new character and enlisting Alfred as a more hands-on partner. If it wouldn't have stretched an already long movie out to unprofitable lengths, I could have watched even more of the evolution of this kind of stuff and Batman's crime-fighting learning curve.
As it is, though, this movie finally shows a Batman as Batman should be: a figure striking fear into scumbags, who works from the shadows and chills criminals to their bones with a ferocious appearance and all-business growl of a voice. And finally, a Batman who originated in DC's Detective Comics actually behaving like a detective. His relationship with a young (and eventually police commissioner) Jim Gordon is the stuff of giddy dreams. None of this story had ever been satisfactorily told before, and unlike Lucas's childish, sappy and illogical prequels, this Batman origin fulfills the promise of an aging geek's imagination.
Perhaps my biggest gripe (and you know there had to be one) is the fight choreography. Everything is shot up close and with quick cuts, likely because the bat suit just doesn't allow for a lot of agility or acrobatics. And maybe you can buy the excuse that the style of fighting Batman employs is the up-close-and-dirty kind. Certainly, these scenes are preferable to a CG-rendered Batman as in the Spider-Man movies. But while the wire work and fight choreography of Hong Kong Kung Fu pictures and the balletic brawls of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Kill Bill and The House of Flying Daggers have raised the bar of what constitutes an artistic achievement in fighting, Batman goes for a lot of muddled flying fists, kicks and blocks.
Oh, well. All still amazingly satisfying, though perhaps Batman Begins appeals most to the hard-core geek audience. Like me. With any luck, this will almost erase the memory of Schumacher's neon Gotham and (shudder) Alicia Silverstone squeezed into tights.
Top 10 Comic Book Films
- Superman
- Spider-Man 2
- Spider-Man
- Batman Begins
- Superman 2
- Sin City
- X-Men 2: X-Men United
- X-Men
- Batman
- American Splendor
Honorable Mention: Flash Gordon, Hellboy, Men in Black, Ghost World
Edited 6/23, 4:35 PM because I'm an idiot.
8 comments:
I don't see how you think Spider-Man is a better movie than Batman. I really don't. And all this talk about plot and character development in the latest (which I didn't see) Batman - you're nuts. You're simply nuts. It's a fuckin' comic book on screen, man. We all already know the plot going in. It's Batman for crying out loud. Give me good acting, a good script and great direction, and you've got a winner. Me, I'll take Burton, Keaton, Nicholson, Bassinger, Billy Dee, Wuhl, Palance & Co. every time over your Tobey, Willem, Kirsten and nobody else worth mentioning. Sam Raimi? What the hell has he ever done? Tim Burton is twice the director he is. Raimi did a better job with Darkman if you ask me. Spider-Man is just so average a movie to me (I didn't see #2 as you know). Anyway, just to piss you off even further as I wrap this up, I think Dick Tracy is better than Spider-Man. How do you like that?
- Chief
You're just baiting me, Chief. But I'm bored and hungry for bait.
"Give me good acting, a good script and great direction," you say? What, exactly, about the Burton Batman script was so good? Robert Wuhl's goofy mugging (looking at a large mirror in Wayne Manor: "Maybe he should be called Bruce Vain"), Nicholson's goofy mugging ("This town needs an enema!) or Jack Palance's goofy mugging?
Don't get me wrong, I really liked Batman. But it doesn't come close to capturing the real darkness behind the character. "Just a comic book on screen" doesn't do any justice to the Frank Miller, et al. graphic novels that depict more than just sleek Bam! Pow! comic book spectacle and thin stories of bad guys bent on citywide domination.
But you have no basis for an opinion, Chief because YOU DIDN'T SEE BATMAN BEGINS OR SPIDER-MAN 2. So put a sock in it.
And upon closer inspection, I actually screwed up. Meant to have Batman on the list anyway. So there.
what's up with your use of the word 'mugging' anyway?
and so we have batman vs. spider-man. who wins? they're both the same basic story. you realize that, right? man is wronged. man happens to have strange power. man fights back against bad guys. while man fights bad guys, a love interest develops. the public tries to determine who man is. they fail to do so. man beats bad guy in end. movie over.
all i'm claiming is that batman had a good script. that's all. just good. you say it wasn't? why not? what was it missing? what was it missing that Spider-Man had? and if it wasn't good, how far from good was it? worst script ever? terrible? bad? slightly below average?
Batman had better actors, better acting, a better director and better direction. Batman also had more memorable lines. I would think most people, including you, would agree with these last 2 statements. So for you to drop Batman nearly off your list and have Spidey at #2 says you must think something else was seriously lacking with Batman, or seriously better with Spider-Man. What was it?
tim burton made batman the way he envisioned. tim burton wasn't looking to make money. tim burton wasn't interested in attracting all age groups to come see his film. he was looking to make a film, his film, his way. he did a great job. he painted his vision of what gotham might be like. i, for one, liked it. i liked the darkness, the gloom, the strange architecture. the world he created for a batman and joker to run around and play in was certainly different from the one we know. it was realistic enough, but had a fantastical edge to it.
sam raimi, on the other hand, made spidey (in my opinion) for the masses; made it for money; had in mind a spidey 2 and a spidey 3 (currently in production) when he made the first; wanted to please all age groups. he had no extraordinary ideas of a world that spider-man might exist in. he, instead, produced a somewhat boring, connect-the-dots, paint-by-number picture that anybody could have done. his superhero ran around in the same exact world that we live in. he tried to sell the idea that a comic book fantasy
could actually exist in our world. (granted, superman did the same, but superman is a classic for many other reasons)
i guess we agree to disagree.
i prefer the semi-realistic world of burton's batman to raimi's unprovoking, safe (made for the masses) spider-man.
10 years from now, if batman and spider-man were both on tv at the same time on the same night, i would flip to batman in a heartbeat.
my hunch is the majority (a vast majority) would be watching with me.
- Chief
(paid for by CMBUBLPS, the Commitee to move Batman up Bones' list past Spider-Man.)
You really are all over the place, Chief. Such a hopelessly disjointed argument is hardly worth responding to. But it's 95 degrees outside, I'm in the office and I have nothing else to do at the moment.
You write: "All I am claiming is that Batman had a better script. That's all."
And then you write: "Batman had better actors, better acting, a better director and better direction."
How am I supposed to react? Pick an argument and stick to it, why don'tcha? A better script only or better everything?
And you are way off with your plot summary. "man is wronged." (While someone close to Peter Parker is killed, he isn't out for revenge. He fights crime because he realizes he has a responsibility to do so with the power he was given. Batman is a more darkly driven, classical vigilante.)
"man happens to have strange power."(Batman has no strange power. He is an ordinary man with extraordinary financial resources and excellent fight training.)
"man fights back against bad guys. while man fights bad guys, a love interest develops. the public tries to determine who man is. they fail to do so. man beats bad guy in end. movie over." (These are comic book "superheros" after all. They are gonna fight bad guys. And a love interest helps to develop the dual-identity conflict. Nothing wrong with films following a classic formula. It's what you do with those formulas that make an interesting story. There was nothing exactly bad about the Batman story, just that I expected more from it. More like what I saw in the new movie.)
But anyway, there is no accounting for taste. What you like and what I like hardly ever have to meet. There are folks out there who think that Celine Dion has soul and Carson Daly is cool. Which you might argue is objectively wrong. And I would agree. Which brings me to your anti-Spider-Man spiel.
I would argue that Batman fails mostly at the script level and then fails a little more--though not entirely in its casting and direction. Michael Keaton might be a better actor than Toby Maguire (not sure if he is), but it's hard to argue that he isn't the most imposing presence as The Dark Knight. And he's completely ineffectual as Bruce Wayne. Remember that scene when he threatens Nicholson with a fireplace poker at Vicky Vale's apartment? "You wanna get nuts? Come, on. Let's get nuts!"
Puh-lease. I'm pretty sure you weren't supposed to laugh at this scene. And if you are, then why should there be a laugh during this crucial confrontation?
Which brings me to the failure of direction. Batman is far too campy and light. Most of this comes from the film's best aspect: Nicholson's Joker. His scenes are great. Hilarious and just typical screwy Jack. But not the dark, brooding, menacing tension you get in Nolan's Batman Begins. Which you would realize in a second if you had seen it before formulating uninformed opinions.
Raimi's Spider-Man, on the other hand, creates a world exactly like our own because he understand his source material. Spider-Man didn't live in Gotham--an exaggerated cesspool version of New York; he lived in New York. And the appeal of Spider-Man and the Marvel characters that succeeded him lay in his everyman persona. He was just an ordinary kid with ordinary problems. Girl trouble, guilt, money problems, conflict on the job and in all his relationships as he dealth with his new identity. All of this is explored more fully and with wit in the second movie. Which I needn't remind you that you haven't seen and cannot speak of without first swallowing your foot.
And if you really think that Warner Bros. didn't envision and market Batman as a cash cow film franchise from the inception, than you just don't have a good memory for life in 1989. The endless hype for an entire year before the movie was released, the ubiquitous shirts, the rumours about who would be in the sequel almost immediately after the release. Burton was given the chance to film his vision, sure. But a sequel was a foregone conclusion. And that sequel really, really sucked balls.
So we can agree to disagree. But if you continue to praise Batman as anything other than the best Batman film we had until this new one--well, then you really should inform your opinion by watching what this franchise could have been from the beginning. Only costs $10 at a theater near you.
you're right. this is pointless. i like the first batman better than the first spiderman. vice versa for you.
we can't argue those points because we'll get nowhere. however, let me point out a few of your argumentative deficiencies.
all i'm ever comparing in all of my arguments is the original batman (1989) versus the first spider-man (2002). go ahead and reread them. i thought i was clear. i am completely aware, and i fully admitted as much already, that i didn't see spidey 2 or the new batman. you needn't remind of that anymore. but since those movies are not pertinent to my argument, just exactly where do you see me "swallowing my foot" or "formulating uninformed opinions"? I saw the 2 movies I'm talking about. And since that's ALL I'm talking about, what the hell are you talking about?
and i don't care if... "All of this is explored more fully and with wit in the second movie."
You had the first Spidey high on your list. And that was the source of my contention. Not Spidey 2. You're right, I can't comment on Spidey 2 because I didn't see it. And that's why I didn't comment on it.
And notice when I quote you, I use the actual quote you made. Let me give you a tip, use 'ctrl-c' to copy and then 'ctrl-v' to paste. That way you can be sure you didn't swallow your own foot when accusing me of swallowing mine. Case in point - my quote read... "all i'm claiming is that batman had a good script. that's all. just good." Whereas you remembered this quote as "All I am claiming is that Batman had a better script. That's all." What is that - some kind of linguisitc legerdemain you're privy to now as a rising star in the field of journalism? (Which by the way, i'm very happy to see. Thrilled really. Hope it continues and hope it carries you to the highest of places you wish to go in that field. You deserve it. You're a fantastic writer, man. Seriously. Fantastic.) But enough of that. Let's get back to the point about you being a complete jerkass in this argument. My summary is this:
Spider-Man - average movie
Batman - good movie
Spidey-Man 2 - i don't know, i didn't see it
Batman Returns - i don't know, i didn't see it
-Chief
Very hard to cut and paste in Blogger sometimes. My sincere apologies.
And the only point I have to make about the new movie is that if you go and see Batman Begins you will realize how much better 1989's Batman could have been. In fact, it could have been Batman Begins.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for writing.
Thanks to both of you. Since I can't seem to meet up with any of you guys in person, the internet banter is an adequate substitute.
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