Batman Begins

[poliphilo]

1. It's another one of Hollywood's daddy films. Bruce Wayne's daddy is killed and he grows up to be a sulky, emo kid. Then a number of older men- good daddies and bad daddies- mentor him into a shape of which his daddy would be proud. No-one seems to notice that he lost his mommy too.

2. Note to the critics: Crime and Punishment is "dark"; Batman Begins is merely portentous.

3. All those car wrecks and nobody is killed. It's just like The A Team.

4. Batman is mythic. The more you try to fit him into the real world- real politics, real psychology- the more ridiculous he becomes.

Comments

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

Liked the first two Burton films with Michael Keaton, hate the Christian Bale movies. The animated Batman of the early nineties will always be my favorite version--it's a lot more subtle and intelligent than these new movies.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm not a huge fan of Burton's work (The only one of his movies I really admire is Ed Wood) but I think he got the tone about right. Batman is a crazy guy in a world gone mad.

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

Burton's Batman films are about people acting out their neuroses. Everybody is engaging in some kind of weird psychodrama. Everything looks art deco. It's all very stylized.

The animated Batman is not quite so stylized or quite so mad, but you do see over and over again that he chooses Batman over Bruce Wayne, revenge over a chance at a normal healthy life. And he winds up a lonely, grim old man living alone in a huge mansion with nobody but a guard dog for company.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've not seen the animated Batman. It sounds really interesting.