So, I saw the original ??Batman?? once all the way through in the theaters. Every other time I’ve tried to watch it, I’ve gotten bored or fallen asleep (no, I’m not kidding).
I remember ??Batman Returns?? as much because I saw it with Anne and Dave McGhee just before he left town for another co-op stint that was going to keep him out of town beyond when I was planning to graduate (let’s be honest about my level of certainty 🙂 as anything else. It was certainly more interesting than the first, but kept a cartoonishness that I found a little off-putting.
I have only vague memories of ??Batman Forever??. Mostly they revolved around how much Tommy Lee Jones should have sued his agent for. Joel Schumacher seemed to me to have no respect for the characters, wanting to make something more in the vein of the 1960’s TV show, which also annoyed me. I may have noticed Nicole Kidman’s heaving bosom, too.
??Batman & Robin?? I saw during some downtime at Patrick’s wedding. I was amused when George Clooney was on ??The Tonight Show?? a couple of weeks ago, and Leno made some comment about how Clooney had produced his fair share of dogs, and Clooney made some comment about having given his best shot at killing the Batman franchise.
So–and I say this as someone who’s never been a huge Batman fan, really, outside of ??The Dark Knight Returns??–I was somewhat cynical about the level of praise that ??Batman Begins?? was getting. I mean, I TIVO ??Ebert & Roeper??, and enjoy their reviews, but I decided their notion of good comic book movies was a bit different from mine when they heaped tons of praise on ??Spiderman 2??, a movie I thought it was OK, but certainly not great.
Anyway, my expectations were high, and I was prepared to be disappointed, especially knowing that the screenwriter was responsible for the ??Blade?? movies, of which I do not have a high opinion–I also note that he worked on ??The Puppet Masters??, and plays a (basically positive) part in the “long essay about PM making it to the screen”:http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/rossio.html. Christopher Nolan could direct the hell out of the movie, but if it had a bad screenplay, it was still going to suck.
It did not suck.
Not only did it not suck, it exceeded my expectations, high as they were. Sure, Katie Holmes’ character could have been a little less of a cypher, or, in fact, acted by someone other than Katie Holmes. And there were various other small things that could have been different.
But, really, I think it succeeded in capturing a huge swath of the character *without* feeling like it was being crammed full of exposition like a duck intended for fois gras. The look was surprisingly down-to-earth, and Christian Bale is just one hell of an actor.
I mean, from ??American Psycho?? to this?
Actually, the really weird thing I notice on IMDB is that at 13, he was the lead character in ??Empire of the Sun??.
