I watched the first 2/3rds of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? for the first time since college, and its even better than I remember. Saving the rest for tomorrow, but, man, everyone in that movie is so good.
Anyway, we'll talk about that movie later.
And, we really need to find me a copy of Straight Jacket.
Also watched a PBS show, Pioneers of Television, that I think Randy originally sent me the link for. Anyway, the topics was superheroes, and featured Batman, The Hulk, The Adventures of Superman, The Greatest American Hero and (sigh) Wonder Woman.
You can watch the whole thing on the PBS site, so go nuts.
There isn't much to say about the plotting of this second installment of the direct-to-video adaptation of Dark Knight Returns that a generation of comics fans grew up with via the comics page. The dialog, often the framing, the depiction of characters... It's likely the closest adaptation I think you'll ever run into that doesn't fall into whatever trap Peter Jackson fell into with his The Hobbit Part 1 that felt like a checklist of scenes with no real narrative push or (dare I say it) heart in its desire to lovingly recreate each beat and scene. Nor is it the Zack Snyder slavish recreation that misses everything about why Watchmen worked, and figures that showing the same stuff we saw on the panel is good enough, even if all the directorial decisions - like casting, emotional beats, musical selection and cinematography - were completely misunderstood.
In this second installment, as an audience we've had the opportunity to get used to Peter Weller as Batman (and he's actually pretty great), and we get Michael Emerson as a giddy, cerebral Joker (God bless you, Andrea Romano). And, somewhat like the 3rd chapter in the Dark Knight trilogy from Nolan, Batman actually takes a back seat to some of what else is happening in the story. World War III is seething to break out, Superman's relationship with the government is filled in, and against that backdrop, Batman is still running around concerned with cleaning up the streets of Gotham. You can almost understand how it got ignored for all those years until he retired.
I recently saw a quote from comics creator Faith Erin Hicks noting how dated Dark Knight Returns felt on a re-read. She's not entirely wrong, but I sort of also sort of rolled my eyes. It's a work of its time with undercurrents that remain relevant and resonant.
Comics weren't really intended to have a shelf-life when the book hit the direct market, they were commenting on the moment, and Watchmen is no less a piece of the Cold War than DKR. And we were so ready to forget about the cloud of nuclear annihilation when Gorbachev instituted Glasnost, I'm not surprised that a generation had grown up without the context, and doesn't quite get what it felt like to do duck and cover drills until everyone admits that it's kind of pointless when you're in about 3rd grade. Nor has the era of street crime that pervaded the big cities been seen in Gen Y's lifetime (although Chicago spent 2012 doing it's damndest to recreate the era that made "Bloods" and "Crips" household names).
As mentioned before, I watched and blogged movies 147 times, sort of. Anyway, the point is, I watched John Carter 3 times, and never regretted it. Process everything in the rest of this post* with that in mind.
So, the actual experience of deciding to blog every movie for a year was sort of in line with other "for a year I shall..." plans I've had. Like the year I went vegetarian, just to be difficult. Yes, I did this.
Honestly, I think I was probably way down on number of movies viewed this past year. I don't know how many movies people normally watch, but I know that for the first time in 5 years, my attendance at the Alamo and Paramount this summer was significantly lower than usual.
All that also took a financial toll in past years, and I've been cutting back on Alamo visits to try to better maintain our finances. I'm guessing I still hit the movies more than the average bear, but it did feel like a down year for being at the theater, but maybe I made up for that in Cable viewership and watching home video.
When I was in 6th grade, I walked into Austin Books and Comics and had some birthday or Christmas money to spend. I don't remember much about my early days of comics collecting, or chronological order of events, but I most certainly remember standing in ABC, flipping through the pages of a collection of Dark Knight Returns and not buying it. I've always regretted the decision.
Because it was a whole 3-6 months later that I bought a trade paperback of the comic that changed everything for me. And I could have read that comic much, much earlier.
Today that copy of Dark Knight Returns is in a sealed bag with a board. It's worn from wear from the literally dozens of times its been read cover to cover, not counting the hundreds of times it was simply picked up and leafed through, nor the times it was handed off to friends (even as they were told: do not lose this, do not tear the pages, do not read it while eating, do not in any way harm this book) and, when I was making some early decisions about Jamie, she took it with her as assigned reading.
Flat out, I have most of the book memorized. Like some people spent their middle-school years memorizing baseball stats or all the words to their favorite sci-fi movie, I (and a lot of you, I'd guess) were memorizing every caption and thought bubble in Miller's comic attributed to Batman. I was a Batman nut.
editor's note: I had called this post something about "Batman: Court of Owls", but it's not really about that, so I went back to my original title.
Many months ago when I was thinking I'd probably continue to follow DC Comics in the wake of the Nu52, I made a decision to just read the collections of Batman comics rather than single issues. Actually, I'd been doing that for a while as I found I really could stand to wait for the trades when it came to the often ill-paced thrills of a Batman mystery unfolding.
To that end, I am now reading the first Batman New52! trade, The Court of Owls.
Thanks to Adam West, I've been a Batman fan literally since before I could talk. Like most kids, I was somewhat unaware of the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne as a motivating factor for Bruce until I started picking up Batman comics in middle school.
Happy Birthday to Mr. Adam West, most famous for his role in the 1966 movie and TV series, Batman. he was born this day in 1928.
Mr. West as Batman inspired me to my first word: "Batman", and fueled me with a deep desire to both do what's right and say ridiculous things in a completely earnest tone. I continue to enjoy the TV show, lo' these many years later.
Let me get this out of the way: I've always enjoyed the artwork of Gary Frank that's come through my buy pile, and here I felt like he somehow trumped his previous efforts and delivered the Gary Frankiest artwork that ever Gary Franked. That's a compliment, y'all. Beautiful illustrative linework, an ability to capture expressions that's somewhere approaching Maguire, a great sense of panel layout and page management... In my book, this is just gorgeous work, including the inking and colorist work. This level of quality is the sort of thing that can give a casual buyer at the book store a chance to seriously consider buying a comic even if that's not their usual thing.
I appreciate that DC seems to have tried very hard to up their game in the art department. When you're putting a package together like this for a book store audience, and you need yet another take on the Batman origin story to sell inside comic shops, you might as well go crazy putting out terrific looking superhero art.
Unfortunately, the book isn't just about the art, and at some point you have to also tell a story.
Author's Note: Spoiler's ahoy. Proceed at your own risk.
So, today I teamed up with Jason, AmyD, The Admiral and Jamie and re-watched what appears to be the final installment in the Nolan-helmed Batman trilogy.
As has been the pattern with Nolan's movies since Memento (and what I tend to think is true of movies I don't just enjoy, but enjoy re-watching), once you know how it ends, it's a pleasure to re-watch the film and see how the moving pieces work together, and not just from a plotting perspective, as in a particular good espionage movie or thriller. I've harped a lot on how Nolan has more or less used the Bat-movies as a chance to explore ideas of fear, justice, security & liberty - and it was worthwhile to take in a second viewing and watch the movie in a frame of mind more conducive to regarding what Nolan was doing and trying to say, and not just hanging on as a summer thriller unspooled and I did my best to keep up.
Of course, I don't have a score sheet that enables me to check Nolan's ideas off, and what you read here is based on nothing, really, but my own reading of the movies as a whole, so you'll have to bear with me.
I'm considering this post a "first take" review. I'm stating that now partially because I do plan to see the movie again in the theater (and likely many times in the future) and partially because I've already seen how this plays out for me trying to talk about a Nolan movie on the first go-round and pretending like I got everything.
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) has a tremendous amount of territory to cover, and contains a terribly ambitious film that I think, did modern movies not get capped at 2.5 hours as a run-time, could easily have fleshed itself out a bit more and run an even 3 hours or longer. The movie has the task of laying out it's own story, giving a conclusion that satisfactorily resolves character arcs and plot threads from prior films, and digging far deeper into the thematic elements of the prior movies.
From a content standpoint, of course it's a mishmash of the entire scope of this thing we call "Batman", with the movie seeming to borrow plot from a few different bat-sources, including Knightfall, Batman: The Cult, The Dark Knight Returns and from No Man's Land- stories from different Bat-eras and varying Bat-creators, and but all sharing central motifs of a lost city. But, that said, Nolan has managed to very much craft a new story, making this final installment feel very much like a section or book within the book and less like an episode.
Friday evening pal JuanD brought over his dog, Levi, to join Jamie and I for our pre-Dark Knight Rises screening of The Dark Knight (2008). I mention Juan not just because Juan is a terrific fellow, but because our post-screening discussion should really warrant him a co-writer credit on this post.
I'm not very fond of my original review of the movie from 2008, and was sharing with Juan how I was so rattled by the movie's very existence that it took a viewing or two more to begin to appreciate everything Nolan was trying to accomplish, and that, in many ways, the best way to watch these movies is to turn off everything I know about Batman (which is a lot, and runs near constantly as a background subroutine) and instead come at the film as if I weren't playing comics-fan-connect-the-dots. At some point it may be more useful to start looking at the movie as employing archetypes to relate a fable of duality on an operatic scale. Chaos vs. Order. Liberty vs. Security. Lies vs. Truth. Personal Duty vs. Public Duty.
all that and a motorcycle that goes VROOOM! VROOOOOOM! VROOOOOOOOOOM!!!!
You can feel a great leap in the quality of the film from Batman Begins during the first scene of Dark Knight, and the decision to dump the studio backlot feel of the previous Gotham for the very real streets of Chicago shot in punchy, deep focus, free of the filters and mood enhancers that dominated the look of the first movie. And it's that realism and stepping away from the comic page that seems to give the movie some it's immediacy and edge. Gotham is Chicago in this film - lived in and real, not a set made to look dank.
You see the phrase "we are saddened" expressed by PR wings when a tragedy strikes. We can read between the lines and know that in many cases, the employees of the company may well be saddened, but the need to create a quick press release that admits participation while denying culpability is at the core of the statement.
But today, I am actually and truly saddened by the events at the screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Auroroa, Colorado. As of this writing, what information I have found states that 12 to 13 people are dead, and many more wounded. A gunman took the opportunity presented by a darkened theater and a room full of people with their attention elsewhere, and he took it upon himself to unleash horror. Words fail me.
I arrived at work in a Batman t-shirt today and had not checked the news aside from the weather report. Jim, the manager at the coffee shop, is a former comic geek (and now a barista by day and a reservist soldier on the weekend. Great guy.) asked me if I was wearing the shirt "because of Colorado". And then he saw my blank stare. "You haven't heard..." And he explained what he knew to me.
I'm not buttoning up the sport shirt I'm wearing over the bat symbol. Batman didn't kill these people. And despite my misgivings about some of the messaging about Batman and taking the law into one's owns hands that I expressed yesterday, part of why I think I can continue to embrace Batman as symbol is that Batman is , at the end of the day, a statement of defiance against cruelty and terror. I haven't seen the final installment of the trilogy, but I can say that in mining the Batman mythos of the past 70 years, what Christopher Nolan dug up was the ability of a man to confront fear and let it pass over him and through him and let it become nothing. In Dark Knight, we saw what seeming chaos looks like as a man wants to watch the world burn, and the choices we can make, even supposedly the worst of us, in those moments where we're put to the test - whether we give in to fear - those moments matter for all of us.
So, I put on the shirt with a smile on my face when I got dressed today, but now I'm wearing the shirt in mourning. And, if I'm allowed to use the word, in defiance.
Be prepared for American politics to go crazy today talking about how the other side made this possible. But those are cowards seeking an opportunity. Nobody made this crazy person pick up guns or smoke bombs. This was a person looking for an excuse and an opportunity. This is when we decide how we'll react, and how we choose to respond shows who we really are.
Today we should be looking to Colorado not for answers, nor for blame, but out of respect for the dead and wounded. I am very truly saddened, and I am very truly sorry.
I love Batman. I do. Most importantly, Batman has always been with me, and Batman will be around in some form long after I'm worm food. Whether the idea will endure like Arthurian legend or disappear like so many other pulp characters, I can't say. I do occasionally imagine a future in which it's a bit of trivia where people find out that the stories of Batman and Superman originated in comic books, their roots in the pages of comics long since lost the way, say, Paul Bunyan's legend spread as part of an ad campaign.
But as I grow older, I move further and further from a place where the repetition of the stories in the comics has appeal and find myself in a place where the character works better for me in movies or in the occasional graphic novel or some such. While the comics kind of make a joke about it and ask the reader to engage in willing suspension of disbelief, after reading Batman comics since the mid-80's, it's hard not to notice that whatever state Gotham is located in has done a simply terrible job of managing its prisons and mental health care, and that the people of the state seem to have an incredibly low bar for what they expect their politicians to do about the fact that a clown-faced killer routinely exits a supposedly high-security mental institution under his own recognizance.
somehow this movie did not feed my need for believability in my superhero franchise movie
There's the small matter of child endangerment that's hard enough to ignore on the first go-round, but by Robin #5 (2 of whom have been "killed"), one would expect Superman would take Batman aside and suggest he give the kid sidekick idea a rest for a while.
There's the whole "how has nobody figured out that Bruce Wayne is Batman" thing, especially once you add in the "youthful wards" that keep rotating through Wayne Manor, placing Man-Bat on the things that feel more likely to happen than Bruce to not be considered the Michael Jackson of the DC Universe.
I do recall that when Batman Begins was released, it wasn't really an event. I certainly didn't rush out to the theater to see it, and when I finally did catch it, the theater wasn't packed. I believe the common mythology is that Batman Begins did fine at the box office, but nobody would mistake it for a spectacular game changer. Then the movie hit home video and cable, and people sort of freaked out about the movie at that point.
Honestly, I remember a lot of people I worked with in Arizona asking me about the movie around Christmas when the DVD hit the market.
We're the franchise you need, not the franchise you deserve. Or something.
In anticipation of Saturday's viewing of Dark Knight Rises, Jamie and I are re-watching the first two Chris Nolan helmed Bat-flicks. If you'd like to join us Friday for Dark Knight, we'll be here with bells on.
The bottom line is that I think this movie is really a pretty darn good Batman movie, especially in 2005 when the last Bat-flick I had seen at the time was Batman and Robin. However, I'd argue that once Nolan was able to cast off the shackles of WB studios and make a Batman movie without producer notes, their "help" casting the film, etc... He made a movie that a whole lot of people liked better, and that stands up a bit more strongly upon review.
So, something I've been doing of late is just basically not bothering to learn much about a movie before I go see it.
There's a lot of press out there about Dark Knight Rises. Entertainment Weekly arrived in the mail with, seriously, a horrendously designed cover.
Gah.
I'm not going to read the articles on the movie because, well, at some point I'd like to just sit back, watch a movie and tear it apart on it's own merits. I don't need to read what Christopher Nolan was thinking until after the movie. If I care at that point.
For reasons unknown to science, in the late 1980's someone let Ralph Bakshi and John Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stimpy fame) make a Mighty Mouse cartoon. It's run was brief, and it went down in a hail of PMRC bullets when some killjoy thought Mighty Mouse smelling a handful of flower petals was him snorting Scarface piles of cocaine. Which it was not, but this was Nancy Reagan and Tipper Gore's America, airing in the same time when people really believed in hidden messages in metal albums, and so the show disappeared.
World's Finest?
If Mighty Mouse is a Superman analog (and he is), then he needs a crime-fighting pal. Bakshi and his crew obviously had their eye on Batman comics at the time, giving us a pretty well post-Miller Bat Bat, but with more than a hint of Burt Ward in The Bug Wonder (the red, tick-like fellow atop Bat Bat's shoulder).
This was all during an era where Bart Simpson was still considered terribly edgy and bad for children, when cartoons were mostly considered strictly juvenile entertainment. The goofy satire and riffing on old serials and whatnot was surely lost on the kids who were supposed to be watching the show. But with a soft spot in my heart for Mighty Mouse, I'd tuned in - and I thought the show (when I could catch it) was pretty great.
You at least need to skip to 0:49 to see Mighty Mouse calling upon Bat Bat for assistance.
You also have to like how he drives the "Manmobile".
In my possession I still have the Wendy's Kid's Meal collectible Bat Bat.
As we head toward Wednesday and the release of the much-anticipated Dark Knight Rises, I cannot help but reminded of a simpler time when the average person on the street did not associate inverted semi-trailers and Christopher Nolan with The Dark Knight Detective.
The comics are, of course, silent. We imagine the lonely street sounds of Gotham, and we can believe the sound effects splattered across the page in beautifully rendered and colored lettering. But never do comics cross over with music, not unless they're brought to the screen.
I was at basketball camp in the week before the release of Tim Burton's highly anticipated Batman. In fact, I had read the novelization of the movie during my downtime at camp that year. The session ended mid-day on Friday, the day Batman hit theaters and it was a whole thing making sure I got to the movie that night (which I did. Thanks, Peabo's Mom!).
It's hard to explain exactly how Bat-Crazy I was (very publicly) in 1988, and what a big deal the film felt like at the time. I'd been following Batman's production via magazines, newspaper articles, notes in the comics and other places, had taped the trailer and watched it over and over...
The camp took place at the University of Texas and we stayed in the dorms at The Dobie, and I still very much remember everyone stopping in the cafeteria line to watch the video for "Bat Dance" (there was a TV on MTV for some reason near the door). The video was appreciated, but not as much as in 1987, when the video had been for George Michael's "I Want Your Sex".
Like anyone else born in the 1970's, I had a warm spot in my heart for Prince, but found him an odd fit for Batman. It's only in cold hindsight that I have to assume this was neither Tim Burton nor Prince's doing so much as that of WB executives. But who knows? (Probably Prince, I guess.).
It's no secret that I'm totally in the bag for Chris Nolan's take on Batman. I believe he's a strong storyteller in his way, smart behind the lens, able to create great tension from both an action perspective and a character perspective. And I like that he's pushed audiences using something like Batman that we've seen handled an infinite number of ways with various degrees of success.
Over the past few days I've received a few links from you guys, and I guess its appropriate to comment.
Cap Homecoming
If you haven't seen the video of the little boy receiving a visit from Captain America for his birthday, and then learning that the unmasked Cap is the dad he thought was in Afghanistan where he's serving, then you really need to watch it.
An amazing and poignant moment, and a reminder that the US military is a volunteer military of men and women who are also fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Here's to all of our Captain Americas coming home.
Yes, I saw the Gawker article and cartoon. Yes, that's The Daily Texan.
I have literally no idea what the cartoonist was thinking, but contextually, just the use of the word "colored", which is only used in Texas in a weird, gallows humor sort of way to suggest backwards thinking, tells me that this cartoonist was trying to make a point which never quite made it into the strip, and instead just made UT's daily student paper look backward and racist.
If the cartoonist was trying to make a point about how the matronly and condescending media is telling the story by framing the story to a child-like audience to scare them, then... okay. I guess I get it even if I don't buy necessarily buy that interpretation. You'd pretty much need to be handed a few sign posts to get you there.
From looking at the rest of the cartoonist's work on the Texan website, all of her strips (if you want to call them that) are terribly inept and seem to fail to actually convey anything other than a general sense of "I watched CNN last night" and a bit of anger at someone running for student government*. Frankly, political cartooning is hard. The skill to create icons and symbolism to convey your opinion or some greater truth with a 2 second glance is hard to come by. Even among comic nerds, political cartooning gets a certain level of respect for the difficult task it represents. This student gets an F in cartooning.
But, pulling Eisner's work would mean The Daily Texan would then need to either fill that space with another cartoon (and lord knows how hard that would be to find), or run an ad for Forbidden Fruit or Tom's Tabooley or something. I just wish the editor or faculty advisor had been able to make a better decision before letting this see print.
Several comics sites talked about the guy, and who can blame them? A dude who owns a completely amazing black Lamborghini dressed himself up as Batman and drove around in the car (with the top down), pretty much doing what every single person in the world has always wanted to do.
Some were saying this guy does this for kids or a charity or something. Really, I don't know why he does it, but he's okay in my book.
And how can you go wrong hiring Andy Devine to play Santa? I will tell you: You cannot.
My Personal Bug-a-Boo of the Day
Mixing historical figures with genre tropes is getting played out. Especially when you can tell that neither the artist nor the person writing the article (a) realizes this, or (b) realizes that this one in particular was done a long time ago and better as "Tales from the Bully Pulpit".
No, I don't care about the Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter movie.
Thanks to everyone for thinking of me and sending me links! Keep them coming.
*dear students: these elections will never matter anywhere, to anyone but to sad people reading grad school applications in basements
I am now only really collecting Superman toys and collectibles (unless someone wants to buy me a bigger house and increase my salary), but this item... this item I will buy two of.
