* Curt Purcell liked The Dark Knight less than I did, it turns out, but I still think his is the most cogent explanation of why the ending felt out-of-balance, and what could have been done to fix it, that I’ve seen so far.
* Matthew Yglesias points out that there’s almost no conceivable reason this movie was rated PG-13 rather than R aside from the MPAA simply rolling over for a great big studio’s great big blockbuster. Seriously, children, even older children, have no business being at this movie. Not only would it scare them, I think it’ll be tough for them to appreciate the themes. And the length–there have been 2 1/2 hour movies that kids have loved in the past, sure, but those have tended to have Ewoks or Orcs in nearly every frame, not serious men in neckties debating ethics.
* While I enjoyed the film a good deal, if you take this quote from Heidi MacDonald and swap out Batman Begins for The Dark Knight…
we didn’t think BATMAN BEGINS was the Dostoyevsky-level masterpiece most fellows think it was.
…you’ll get how I feel about it. It was a good movie and it’s growing on me as we speak, but No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood it wasn’t, and as you see an increasing number of statements like “Take away the Batsuit and the clown make-up and you’ve got an all-time-great crime movie” you’d be well advised to compare it to actual all-time-great crime movies and keep this in mind. Heidi groks this, which I appreciate.
* The part of David Edelstein’s now-infamous-in-fandom pan of TDK that struck me the most was when he specifically lambasted its action choreography, which I thought was quite strong, by unfavorably comparing it to BB‘s, which i thought was horrendous no matter if that was what they were deliberately going for.
* Similarly, I still remember when Jim Henley called my review of Batman Begins picayune and wrongheaded–I used it as a tagline for the whole blog for a while–so it’s funny to watch the tables turn and see him be harder on The Dark Knight than I was on specific points where I really gave BB the business–the dialogue, the costume, and the Bat-voice, for example. Still, he mostly liked it and gives his usual smartly reasoned reasons for doing so.
* Which reminds me, SFF publisher Tor has launched a new web presence centered on pretty terrific thinkblog anchored by Jim (their superhero correspondent) and his fellow ADDTF fave Bruce Baugh (who’s working the RPG beat). Notable posts thus far include Jim’s common-sense note that mainstream audiences do, in fact, like superheroes, duh, and that the comparative obscurity of superhero comic books has more to do with the format than the genre. If you said this kind of thing back in 2003, which I did (warning: like all my posts from that era, this one goes to 11), Dirk Deppey, Chris Butcher, and Tim O’Neil would kick you out of the art club. (J/K, guys! LYLAB!)
* Back on Bruce B.’s home blog, he’s put up a twofold post I really appreciated regarding Zach Snyder. First, in light of recent, somewhat vapid interviews he’s given regarding Watchmen, Bruce suggests that the director is better at making movies than talking about them, and that that’s fine. Second, he has a brief but detailed and full-throated defense of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake as far more thoughtful filmmaking than even many of its defenders give it credit for.
* Meanwhile, Matthew Perpetua says that Watchmen trailer’s use of a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and overall ’90s/early-’00s-ness in terms of its superhero imagery is a deliberate bait and switch on Snyder’s part, in the same way that the original comic used contemporary superheroisms in order to subvert them. How about that?
* Also on the Watchmen beat: At AICN, Matthew “Ozymandias” Goode speaks to Capone about his character and the film, revealing that he concocted a backstory for the character that involves Nazi Germany, which isn’t so hot, and that he looks a lot like David Bowie, which is.
* Grant Morrison discusses Final Crisis and Superman Beyond at length in an interview with Newsarama’s Matt Brady that will also hopefully continue to increase Geoff Johns’s hipness quotient, since as usual Morrison goes on and on about how good his stuff has been lately.
* I’m not sure if I ever blogged it, but Morrison also relaunched his website recently, putting a “blog” section behind a registration wall that’s really worth climbing. The most recent entry practically bursts with enthusiasm for The Dark Knight, which it compares to the book version of Watchmen in terms of the impact he thinks it will have on superheroes in its medium. He then gushes about the movie version of Watchmen, and indulges in yet another of his periodic, richly entertaining insults of Alan Moore, whom he derides as a grumpy old fundamentalist operating on counterculture-approved lines for wanting nothing to do with Hollywood in general and this movie in particular.
* Some SciFi Channel exec says Battlestar Galactica will return for its final episodes beginning January 2009, and that its prequel Caprica may go straight to series instead of being aired first as a backdoor-pilot TV movie. (Via Whitney Matheson.)
* Speaking during ABC’s fall season press tour, Lost mastermind Damon Lindelof compares the upcoming season of Lost to The Two Towers in that it serves as a bridge to the final act yet has to be satisfying in its own right. (Via The Tail Section.) Sadly, this is as close to Lindelof as I’m going to get for the time being, since I have other commitments during the San Diego Lost panel.
* Hubba hubba: Very talented comics artist Cliff Chiang is posting pinup-style portraits of great women from nerd entertainments. (Via J.K. Parkin.) My personal favorite is his Teela from He-Man (I know it’s technically called Masters of the Universe, but I never asked my brother if he wanted to play Masters of the Universe with me):
* Finally, Jesus!
Now if I really wanted to stir up trouble, I’d post about how the original Dawn of the Dead is overrated, in some ways less polished than Night of the Living Dead, and nearly as hamhanded as Diary of the Dead when it comes to message. But that would be provocative.
I used to razz the now-infamous Edelstein over his Romero worship, actually (back when he still returned my e-mails). A Dawn of the Dead review was glaringly absent at Slate when he worked there. He refused to even see it because there was no way it could measure up.
picayune
I didn’t find the Grant Morrison dig of Alan Moore as entertaining as you did, Sean. Though I tend to like Moore more than you in general, I think. Anyway, this post by Glenn Kenny about a similar dig at Moore in EW is at least a little relevant, I think:
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2008/07/you-stand-accus.html
Morrison’s being snotty, but I think he’s got a point about Moore. The old man has grown so bitter* at the world that he’s incapable of appreciating something that could be wonderful. From everything I’ve seen and read, Snyder is doing his level best to be faithful to the book, despite the studio’s meddling. And he’s one of the few guys in Hollywood with the clout and inclination to do that. Whether he’ll be successful is another matter, but he seems motivated by a true love of the source material and a desire to honor Moore and Gibbons. And Moore pretty much spit in his face.
On the one hand, I admire that Moore puts his money where his mouth is. Or lack of money, since he signs it over to the artists. On the other, I think Morrison has a point about the Bearded One hiding from the world behind a facade of principled disestablishmentarianism. (I think I spelled that right… yeah, here it is, “principled” and not “principaled.”)
*And, yes, churlish — I don’t know what else to call distancing yourself from the Watchmen movie because you hated the last one the director did, despite the fact that you haven’t seen it.
I think that Morrison does hit on something crucial with Moore, about his being locked into a particular perspective, set by a subculture as much to repel boarders as to actually understand the world. Moore doesn’t seem to really get mass-market cinema and television – he doesn’t enjoy the experience himself and doesn’t manage to bridge the empathetic gap to understand or feel why someone else might find it all very satisfying, entertaining, and even occasionally illuminating. It’s odd, in its way, to have a warm rich understanding of many of the ways people have used stories right back to the emergence of self-awareness, and yet to have only an ignorant scorn for how most of the people within fifty miles of you get and use them now.
There’s something to be said for some reinvention, when too much of present humanity appears alien.
To be clear, I find Morrison’s attacks against Moore entertaining because I find big-name writers attacking big-name writers entertaining in general, especially in this gladhandling industry, not because I think he’s totally dead-on. I think Moore is totally justified in being fed up with his great comics being turned into B-movies, but I also think that this leads him to write off the products of an entire industry sight-unseen in a way that’s unbecoming to someone of his obvious intelligence and open-mindedness.
I should note that I first started thinking “he doesn’t understand this whole medium” in response to comments Moore was making in interviews around 1986. 🙂
I hear you, Sean, and hope my comment didn’t come off as hostile. But that particular criticism of Alan Moore–that he should be happy about his comics being butchered for movies–just really bugs me.
As for him being ignorant and scornful of movies and television: did you guys read the interview? He goes on about how much he loves South Park and The Wire! I’d put those up against Snyder any day. It seems to me like he’s scornful about filmed adaptations of comics, and honestly, that seems like a pretty defensible attitude to me, especially coming from him.
I’m (obviously) a lot more forgiving of movie adaptations of comic books than Moore is, but, since we live in a world where one of the greatest works of comic art ever gets turned into a mildly diverting kid-friendly action movie, we need more scorn!
It occurred to me after looking at the moving comic over at iTunes that Watchmen, while set in America, is a very British work while the trailer for the film, while very striking, really feels like an American approach to the text. Someone said the trailer looks too clean, but I don’t think that’s necessarily it (the art in Watchmen is very crisp and stylized, particularly the colors). I really don’t know how to qualify that by pointing to specific “Britishisms” in the work, but it strikes me as feeling more like a product of the 2000 AD school of comics than any of its American counterparts at the time (except maybe for the Dark Knight Returns or American Flagg). I think the same could be said for Swamp Thing, but even that really felt more like an American comic product than Watchmen. Snyder did a fine job of translating the images, but it somehow embodies something that is inescapably and unavoidably Hollywood. By comparison, I didn’t have the same feeling of disconnect in seeing 300 or Sin City done with such a slavishly shot-by-shot approach. I’m not saying Moore just doesn’t like American film (obviously he likes the Wire just fine), but maybe there is some cultural (or pop-cultural) bias at work as well …
Or maybe I just need some coffee.
Sean B:
What the trailer leaves out (maybe it will be in the movie) is Dave Gibbons’ major contribution: the anti-Neal Adams appraoch of showing super-heroes not as idealized human specimens, but as “regular” people – out-of-shape, scarred, old, schlubby, homely, overweight, wrinkled, decaying. That is, he shows super-heroes subject to the same laws of gravity (and entropy!) as the rest of us. As much as anything, this is what Watchmen is about and I’m interested to know whether or not Snyder will even try to find a cinematic correlative for it.
IMO, this is “British” in the sense that American (pop) culture tends to focus on idealized (and “fantastical”) human bodies/figures and British (pop) culture doesn’t. The attractive people on British TV are more like the attractive people we meet in real life. See Eve Myles from Torchwood: drop dead sexy, but she’s probably not skinny enough to star in an American show (another sign of American pop culture’s fundamental b0rkenness).
I think Snyder’s use of the Smashing Pumpkins simply song goes back to his love of pop music. See this blog post on from MTV.com from Snyder where he goes into how he uses music in his movies:
http://www.mtv.ca/news/article.jhtml?id=6653
As for the fist-fight scenes in TDK, I def thought it was too slow, dimly lit, and vague. Too much of batman turning his back on the camera and then punching a henchman…somewhere. Not that BB’s were any better.
And TJ just pointed out to me that a podcast interview with Jona Nolan reveals that the sonar computer in TDK was inspired by the OMAC Project storyline. Looks more and more like the JLA film was, indeed, trying to play off Nolan’s Bat-franchise since OMACs and Maxwell Lord were announced as the villains. I’m glad it didn’t get off the ground.
I think you have a point there Jon. Nite Owl and Laurie certainly look more Hollywood-superhero-ish in the footage we’ve seen. I also think it’s apparent that the stylization in Gibbon’s work is very different from the hyper-visual stylization evidenced in the trailer – speeding and slowing down the action as needed for impact, for example. I don’t have an issue with that at all, really – it’s just another way you can cinematically approach the problem of how sequential art can manipulate time – but it is, nonetheless, a very different approach. Which brings back the whole “is Snyder riffing on Superhero movies” question, whereas the comic addressed very comic-centered themes and techniques. I’m not sure how well I buy that, given Snyder’s devotion to the panel layouts themselves as core-text; if he were really tackling superhero movie conventions, he’d take the Watchmen and apply the same thinking Moore and Gibbons did in service of breaking down superhero comic conventions.
I was gonna walk in and pick a fight by saying that the remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD was better-written and a better film overall than the original, but I can’t in all honesty do that.
They’re very different things, and it’s unfair to grade them on absolute criteria. That said, the first twenty minutes of the remake is a million times scarier than the original. And yes, Romero always wore his heart on his sleeve. There’s moments where scenes and interactions are brilliantly underplayed in the DEAD trilogy (quintology?), but that’s not business as usual.
Still need to see DARK KNIGHT.
Romero is a visionary: his first Dead movie tapped directly into the cultural unconscious and his subsequent movies have all tried to elaborate on and interpret that original vision.
Snyder is a terrfic action stylist and he gets the most out of James Gunn’s screenplay: a pared-down survival story, focused on just one element of the Romero’s first two Dead movies (interpersonal power dynamics in a pressure-cooker situation). The remake is well-made, effective, scary, and (IMO) genuinely moving. But it’s the 28 ____ Later movies that are carrying on Romero’s project (well, Romero’s keeping at it, too): by reworking Romero’s vision into a contemporary version of J.G. Ballard’s Conradian apocalyptic sci-fi.
That said, one of the things I appreciate about the Dawn remake is that the inter-personal stuff it focuses on tends to get short shrift in discussions about Romero’s work: partly because it has become less and less important in the Dead movies coming after Dawn and partly because it’s become sexier to talk about horror movies in terms of their cultural/political commentary than to talk about them for their psychological insights.
Or, y’know, how scary they are.
Hi, I just recently discovered your blog.
I think older children (and some younger) can and will enjoy THE DARK KNIGHT. Children can appreciate a good story even when they don’t fully comprehend it. As they watch it and grow older, they’ll notice those things the missed and it just makes the movie that much more special to them. (Yes, it was far campier, but I’ve been watching Tim Burton’s BATMAN since I was six. I still wonder what my parents were doing letting me watch it but I love them for it because it’s such an incredible movie and it greatly influenced my taste in film.)
Worth noting: I still disagree with the assertion that superheroes are primed for mainstream acceptance. The conversation I had with two people who were jostled out of the narrative of Dark Knight every time anyone said the word “Batman” is a check in that column…
But I’m primarily more concerned with people reading comics in general at this point. Looks like we’re both different people a few years later eh Sean?
Sean,
Your link to your old, angry post is going to Tor instead, and I really wanted to read it.
Also, look at Rickey dropping some behind the scenes podcast knowledge!
Chris: I don’t doubt you, but at this point the two highest-opening-gross films of all time are both superhero SEQUELS, and that can’t just be from die-hard nerds plus normal people who spend the whole movie irritated that the dude’s wearing a costume and has a code name, any more than, say, The Lord of the Rings making a billion dollars worldwide based solely on people who have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on their person. *looks around nervously*
Kiel: Probably for the best, but I fixed the link anyway.
Yeah, every other movie right now is somehow superhero-related. How is that not mainstream acceptance?
Not to mention that a supervillain show is the #1 TV download on iTunes.
Guys, “two guys I talked to once” is pretty overwhelming evidence.