The Batman Thread

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

LMP

Blue Crack Supplier
Joined
Sep 6, 2004
Messages
37,609
Location
Austin, TX
I've been thinking a lot about Batman lately, and think that this topic is too expansive to try and fit into the Random thread. So if anyone has any thoughts or opinions regarding the Batman comics, movies, or TV shows, let's talk about them here.

Ported over from the Grammy thread derail:

Yeah, he's the villain.

Speaking of DeVito, it's baffling to me why no one puts his performance as The Penguin in Returns on a similar level to Heath Ledger's as The Joker. It's just as transformative, if not more so, and his character has a real tragic and dramatic arc that's more demanding, and he nails it. Returns is a great film, but a terrible Batman movie, whereas TDK is both, and Ledger's premature death coupled with that performance sealed it as near-legendary, which it should be, but it's a shame DeVito's Penguin and to a somewhat lesser extent, Eckhart's Two-Face, get pushed to the side.

/Batman derail

I can get behind all that.

Well, having a great film behind the character helps. Having the death story of Ledger helps too. And the Peguin seemed a little more forced than the Joker, especially considering Ledger's Joker was the more "realistic" one compared to Nicholson's "fell into a chemical vat" Joker. A lot of circumstance went into it that shouldn't influence how we judge the performances, but I wouldn't say it's baffling.

I'm judging it from a performance perspective, even though the real-life circumstances do play into it in a significant amount. The Penguin's story is the dominant one of Returns, akin to Harvey Dent in TDK, and his origin/characterization is just as morphed as The Joker's in TDK as well, if not moreso. The realism in the Nolan series works for those particular set of films, but what makes it work is the attention to the central ideas of the characters, regardless of any need to follow the previous origins exactly.

My idea of Batman falls more in line with the Animated Series and any comic that may enforce that, since there is a focus on realistic dramatic arcs (Hell, it reinvented a lot of the more extravagant characters, like Mr. Freeze for instance) in a hyper-realistic setting. But that's just me and my friends from Burma.
 
Is this thread for all things Batman? Because NSW wanted to tell us all about his new delivery guy/security job up in SF:


funny-pictures-humor-fat-batman-costume.png
 
det126.jpg


I saw someone post this dream cast-list once and have to share:

Batman - Gary Cooper
The Joker - Marlon Brando
Catwoman - Ava Gardner
Two-Face - Robert Mitchum
The Riddler - Charlie Chaplin
The Penguin - Charles Laughton
Poison Ivy - Veronica Lake
The Scarecrow - Charles Boyer
Mr. Freeze - Yul Brynner
Commissioner Gordon - Jimmy Cagney
Lucius Fox - Sidney Poitier
Vicki Vale - Rita Hayworth

I'd put Orson Welles as The Penguin and don't see Brando's Joker, but either way, that's fucking awesome.
 
I love that they laugh while the Penguin is electrocuted. So much for that "don't kill others" moral code.

Which do you all think is better, Year One, Dark Knight Returns, or The Long Halloween?
 
I'd agree that DKR is the best overall. From a fun and entertainment side of things, sometimes I think I prefer Long Halloween though.
 
I'm not sure why people say Batman Returns is a bad Batman film. Just as Miller's Batman has some differences with Loeb's, and Morrison's differs from Kane's, so does Tim Burton's. The only reason people seem to have a problem with the changes Burton made is because he did it on the screen. Batman Returns IS a Batman movie, and probably one of the best we'll ever see.
 
I think it's fairly clear that Michelle Pfieffer's Catwoman is the most dynamic and interesting female character to appear in any Batman film thus far. Kim Basinger (Bay-singer, Bass-inger?) looked hot and screamed, Uma Thurman camped it up Julie Newmar-style, and both Rachels were mildly interesting. None hold a candle to Pfieffer's Catwoman.

Nicole Kidman's fantastic eye candy, but what's her thing, she's obsessed with Batman? Her character's useless beyond that. One more reason why Forever sucks.
 
Indeed. Schumacher must pay for his sins.

I feel bad for the guy, too, since it seems like he wanted to do a darker Batman, but after Burton weirded the shit out of Returns, Warners sure as shit wasn't going to let the cash go run dry. Everything about Forever down to the casting was calculated to draw a certain audience and make a shit-ton of money, which it did. When they went to remake it as Batman & Robin, which is beat for beat the same story, but with the gay and retardation cranked up to 11, people finally succumbed, and thank God they did.

Schumacher spends most of the B&R commentary apologizing for the film; he should chalk Forever in there, too. All of the interesting psychological story was cut in favor of Jim Carrey/Tommy Lee Jones mugging for the camera and setting out to bug me to no end. Carrey's Riddler is too much like The Joker, while Heath Ledger's Joker feels like what I'd want the Riddler to be, at least in terms of how he stages these elaborate moral dilemmas with clues/traps/etc... What gives?
 
Back
Top Bottom