When I was a kid, I didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer. I wanted to be Batman.
Kent’s Recommended Watch:
Christopher Nolan:
Batman Begins
Saw Batman Begins today. Thumb up. Much better than the previous movies (Tim Burton’s freakshows and Joel Shumacher’s camp spectacles). Obviously the screenwriters have been reading Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One.
I’m a Batman fan from way back; back when I was a kid and the cheesy Batman TV show aired every afternoon on TV20 in Hayward. You’d expect a kid named Kent to like Superman more (and let’s not overanalyze that I eventually got into journalism), but only an alien can be Superman. Anyone, with effort, plus a billion dollars, can be Batman. (And it helps to have an obnoxious teenage partner in a red suit to attract the gunfire away from you.)
The TV show got me into the comic books. Batman was a lot cooler in the comic books; it was during the time when DC Comics was trying to copy Marvel Comics and create more realism and less cheese. Thus, Batman was kicking some serious ass. My friend Greg and I got into playing Batman all the time—except I was a kid, so I was “Batboy,” and he didn’t want to be Robin, so he became “Superboy.” When “called upon,” Greg and I would duck behind my dad’s van and change into our “costumes” (masks, sweatshirts with copyright-infringed logos, and trash-bag capes) and come out to “save the day”—from nobody in particular—then change back into our “secret identities,” which to our suprise weren’t fooling anyone. (Hey, we were eight.)
I eventually grew out of playing Batman, but I was Batman for every Halloween until sixth grade. By then, I had grown to be annoyed with the TV show. It was funny in its own right; but I sometimes wished it pick some other character to lampoon. Like that bowhunting Batman rip-off the Green Arrow. Or Captain Marvel; that was half a lampoon in itself. (There used to be a Captain Marvel TV show on Saturday mornings, but I remember it was slow and boring.)
The thing that always bothered me about Batman was that it was ridiculously easy to figure out what his secret identity was. It’s the toys. Batman has all these fantastic toys—a Batmobile, a Batplane, a Batcopter, and the gadgets—so who’s bankrolling the guy? Simple—who’s the richest guy in Gotham City? That’d be Bruce Wayne. “Follow the money,” as Deep Throat once pointed out.
I was pretty jazzed when Tim Burton’s Batman came out; despite the awful dialogue, it was better than any other superhero movie had been to that point. (Seriously. Watch the Superman movies sometime. The scripts are just terrible.) The trouble had always been that the directors were never serious comic book fans. I think the first comic book fan to direct a superhero movie was actually Spider-Man’s Sam Raimi, which is why that series has turned out so great. Batman Begins was cool (and I hate to say this, being a Batman fan) but I gotta admit the Spider-Man films are still better.
Next movie to see: War of the Worlds. Spielberg rules.