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Batman Begins

carole said:
It's got Christian Bale in it, which is good enough reason for me to see it . . . ;)
But having seen him first in American Psycho he just terrifies me now. Liked Equilibrium tho.
 
A review from AICN's most esteemed reviewer, Neil Cumpston:
Neill Cumpston Showers BATMAN BEGINS With... Praise!!
Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
By now, many of you are already back from the midnight shows, and more of you are getting ready to hit the theater tomorrow. What better way could there be to celebrate than with a review by our very own Neill Cumpston?

Here Comes Batman
I need to get a “holy shit” key put on my computer that I can hit when I see a movie like HERE COMES BATMAN. Basically, this movie rounds up the last four BATMAN movies, chain-whips them, and then kicks their balls into a sissy-forest.

Plus, there’s a whole new origin for Batman, one that doesn’t include neon in the shape of the word ‘GAY’. Imagine a two-hour prison pounding done with the lights out and part of the room on fire, with Katie Holmes in the middle of it, and you’ll start to get the idea.

Everyone important from the Batman comics is played by someone British – Batman is the AMERICAN PSYCHO guy, Policeman Gordon is Sid Vicious, Something Foreign Name Bad Guy is Liam Neeson (he was in some black and white Spielberg movie which won a prize which = I will never see it) and the Scarecrow is the dude from 28 DAYS LATER. But they’ve been dubbed by American actors so they don’t sound faggy. Michael Caine is Alfred Butler, but he speaks all British ‘cuz that’s the only way you can be a butler. There’s also a mob boss played by the British dude from IN THE BEDROOM, but I heard that in that movie he was also dubbed in American. Also, Morgan Fucking Freeman is the dude who builds all of Batman’s cool stuff, but he talks like Morgan Freeman. Oh, also the dude who played the android in BLADE RUNNER is in it, and Morgan has this cool scene at the end where he hands him his ass and tells him to fuck off.

Katie Holmes is so hot she could turn Tom Cruise straight.

Fights: Liam Neeson and Batman out on the ice (before he’s got the Batman costume); a bunch of ninjas beating the ass-fat off Bruce Wayne; then Bruce Wayne refuses to kill this dude and become a Ninja or something – I forgot the particulars of that, because he totally burns down the ninja hideout and runs away; Batman beating the shit out of all these criminal dudes down at the docks (he’s scary like the monster in ALIEN in these scenes) plus a bunch of other scenes including one with a bunch of bats and a train fight that’s like if you could have a boner made out of punching.

Another cool thing: you never see Batman full-on, just standing around in his costume. Little parts of it, not all at once, which makes him look even more bad-ass. Full-on guys in costumes look like rollerskating on Planet Gay.

This looks like an awesome start to a shitload of good Batman films. I think there should be one where he tracks down George Clooney Batman and beats him up with his ice skates. Also, if they’re going to bring Robin into any future ones, he should be played by Boobs Out Carla Gugino from SIN CITY.

http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=20467
 
Another gruding review from Peter Bradshaw:

Batman Begins

*** Cert 12A

Peter Bradshaw
Friday June 17, 2005
The Guardian


To the batcave! Ever since Tim Burton's noirish 1989 Batman movie was supposed to have banished memories of the campy 1960s TV show and rebranded the Caped Crusader as quintessentially "dark", the batcave has become this franchise's spiritual home.

Gloomy, crepuscular, dripping and bristling with the wings of a million nocturnal creatures - that is how it appears in this movie, literally a cave, and also a subterranean expression of the dank hellhole that is Gotham City above, with its stalagmite-skyscrapers and urban vermin. The Batman movies notoriously went pear-shaped after Joel Schumacher was at the helm in the mid-1990s with flashy effects and cheesy performances by Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze and the once white-hot Alicia Silverstone as Batgirl. And the inevitable sniggering that greeted the reappearance of Robin meant the films were slithering back to that undisciplined, tongue-in-cheek comedy we were supposed to have got away from.

Now the ultimate hoodie is back, in body-armour, not Lycra, in a film directed by Christopher Nolan - the smartest and most exciting British director for many years - who gave us the disturbing thrillers Following, Memento and Insomnia. The sequence has been pointedly reset, to antedate Schumacher's errors of taste: Batman Begins Again. The result is a big, bold and, yes, dark film which gets a batgloved grip on things again, presenting an elaborate new backstory and casting Christian Bale as the gloweringly muscular anti-hero of the shadows. There is, however, little in it stylistically to show that Nolan was in charge, as opposed to just any competent director - apart from a cameo for Following star Lucy Russell, as a smart-set socialite drawling her approval for Batman's rough justice. (I'd much rather have seen Russell as the love interest, and not the callow childhood sweetheart Katie Holmes.)

In this retelling of the story, Bale's Bruce Wayne is the son of an idealistic American billionaire, an FDR-style patrician liberal who withdrew from the day-to-day running of the family corporation to practise medicine and donate vast sums to establishing a proper public transportation system for Gotham: a gleaming new monorail. As a child, Bruce remembers riding on this train with his parents, instead of in a limo, but Nolan neatly contrives that it is this monorail which, in the denatured and decadent city of Wayne's adulthood, is the scene of Gotham's operatic Armageddon.

Young Bruce has a horror of bats, having once fallen into a well to find himself pretty well face down in them. It is this fear he draws upon in constructing his alter ego, after his parents are gunned down by a desperate street thug and the little boy feels pathetic that he did nothing to help.

But Nolan's film gives us an interesting new twist. After 13 years in the joint, this mugger is up for a parole court hearing, proposing to offer inside information that could convict Gotham's biggest villain Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). It turns into a Jack Ruby-style bloody fiasco; Bruce flees abroad to find himself and brood on who the real bad guys are, and winds up thrown in jail in China where he encounters a mysterious sect of righteous assassins, led by Liam Neeson, who propose to instruct him in the vocation of the masked avenger.

This is the movie's big influence: a wholesale borrowing from the new wave of action movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Batman's big credibility gap has always been that he is the superhero without superpowers. Nolan's film imports the concept of Asian martial arts to bolster Batman's credentials.

Back home, the young corporate princeling works on his new persona, with the help of his butler and confidant Alfred, amiably played by Michael Caine. As Batman, Bale does look quite creepy, especially close up, his mouth and chin transformed into something bestial - with a growling voice that drops an octave when in character. His batmobile isn't the sleek black convertible of old but a chunkier Humvee-ish ride, more suitable for paranoid urban combat and originally designed for the military by the Wayne group's tech maestro (played by Morgan Freeman). Bale brings to this some of his American Psycho performance, a rich loner compulsively assuming a new identity to purge his self-loathing, and indeed ambiguous loathing of a father who failed to stand up for himself.

Certainly, the muddy colours of Nolan's visual palette make everything look appropriately dark - and dark is what so many movies nowadays claim to be, perhaps confusing darkness with depth. (I am tempted to say: you want dark? Try the daylit nightmares of Neil LaBute or Michael Haneke.) Nolan certainly intensifies his own darkness-visible factor, however, by casting Cillian Murphy as an unprincipled psychiatrist who specialises in getting obvious villains off on insanity charges, and is involved in a plot to use a fear-inducing poison gas. Murphy, with his uniquely sinister good looks and sensuous, predatory mouth, is the scariest actor I know.

So Batman has indeed begun and the movie's ending promises future encounters with the traditional super-bad guys. It's all handled confidently enough, but no big surprises. Batman begins, all right. Now where does he go?

www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/st ... 28,00.html
 
I saw it thisafternoon, very very enjoyable.

IMO very well thought out, and avoids a lot of the obvious cliches.

The Scarecrow is way disturbing too. I'll save the spoilers there, it had me freaked in a few places.

A different Gotham to Burton's versions, this one looks quite overtly like Manhatten from the air, and more shanty towns/grime/gantries at ground level.

Worth watching, I'd say :D
 
I saw it yesterday and really enjoyed it!

I liked seeing the little scene that sets up why so many of Batman's enemies are lunatics!
 
You mean the chat at the end with Gordon that sort of tips a hat to the co-dependent nature of the characters? That was a clever touch...
 
I saw it on Friday and loved it. Admittedly I'm easily pleased, but I found it funny, tense and engaging. The Scarecrow was quite disturbing and the obligatory romance wasn't too much to the forefront- a double thumbs up. ;)
 
I saw it yesterday and... WOW! At last they've made the Batman film that I've been waiting to see.

Nolan did a great job of keeping the film dark and brooding but without going too far and making it a grim affair. The cast was faultless too (even Katie Holmes, most surprisingly)... Caine did a great job of providing humour, Freeman was... Freeman ('nuff said), and Bale came across as genuinely menacing as Batman, especially with the voice.

The set up with the loonies was a classy touch, and the teaser at the end... :shock:

Best birthday present I got :D
 
Great film. I did think it took him a long time to become Batman, but then that's probably the impatient kid in me. :oops:
Bale made a very scary and menacing batman. 8)
 
Anyone seen this movie yet? It so rocks!

They've made the effect amazing without all that CGI they use these days too. :yeay:

If you see the end of it too it hints at who could be in the next film too. I liked also they brought up the origin of Batman too as none of the others did.
 
Saw the movie this weekend and was quite pleased with the job they did.

The Scarecrow's quite plausible and scary as hell.

I liked how they had Batman using stealth and many of the fight scenes have him flitting about like some big, dangerous animal a'la Alien or Predator. That fits in quite well with his tactics.
 
Batman has always been my favourite superhero, so I was delighted that this movie was so delightful!

Many highlights: (MINOR SPOILERS) Batman taking down the guys at the docks. Nolan does something so obvious that it's a wonder no director has tried it with the character before: he shoots the scene like a horror movie.

Also, I loved the bit where he has the guy hanging upside down, and is snarling questions at him. That for me hit the nail right on the head: That is the Batman I love!

And towards the end, there was a newspaper headline that I would love to aspire to one day:
SPOILER AGAIN. 'Drunk Billionare Burns Down House'.
 
Finally got to see it yesterday, and I thought it was great and I will echo the sentiments that they finally got the character right. Ok, so who's going to be playing the Joker? I've read 2 names bandied about, Crispin Glover and Sean Penn. What about Mark Hamill? He did the great voice for The Joker on the cartoon.
 
Oooh...Crispin Glover...cool!

Although Sean Penn's head is more the right shape.

I don't think Nicholson was really right. He did do the over-the-top thing, but his face didn't have the right equine qualities. Years ago, someone suggested Peter O'Toole, but even then I think he was too old, and I don't know that it was his thing, really.

If not the Joker, I'm sure there's a Batman villain that Glover could play.
 
lennynero said:
... What about Mark Hamill? ...

Has he made anything that didnt bomb? Other than those three sci fi films, the name of which escapes me.

:twisted:
 
I would love to see Johnny Depp put his always original spin on the character of The Joker.
 
Talk of the sequel:

Batman Vs.Batman

Posted by Clint Morris on October 13, 2005

Seems about as likely as the AFI Saluting Paris Hilton’s film career, but never the less, an interesting rumour has hit the always-open ISH.

According to Dark Horizons, original “Batman” (1989) star Michael Keaton might be set to trade suits. Yep, according to a scooper, he’s being eyed for the role of ‘The Joker’ in the forthcoming “Batman Begins” sequel.

Keaton, whose expressed his love for the recent “Batman Begins” (mainly because a prequel idea is something he suggested back when they asked him to do the third film – which he consequently turned down), would play the clown prince of crime to Christian Bale’s Batman.

The upcoming sequel – still untitled, so stop sending me the ‘it’s going to be called 'Batman goes Hawaiian'” emails – will also re-introduce to the series, Harvey Dent, rumoured to be played by “Scream” star Liev Schreiber.

Keep your eyes glued to the screen - Not that close! - for further updates.

www.moviehole.net/news/batman_vsbatman.html
 
Batman Begins rocks!

The end ofit showed theJoker would be the next character. But will they ever trie other villians like Clayface?

Batman goes Hawaiian,Omg he's too dark of a character for that! :rofl:
 
Rented it the other day and thought it was fooking cool. Im off to get one of those cars. 8)
 
Years ago, someone suggested Peter O'Toole, but even then I think he was too old, and I don't know that it was his thing, really.

I would have prefered him in the 80s version to Nicholson. Scuppered if I can think of a current equivalent though :(
 
Rubyait said:
Rented it the other day and thought it was fooking cool. Im off to get one of those cars. 8)

I'd rather have the utility belt. 8)
 
Scuppered if I can think of a current equivalent though

Bruce 'Guzzoline' Spence.

Eyes and teeth of a scary man. He played the Gyro Captain in Max Max 2. His teeth were put to astonishing effect playing The Mouth of Sauron in Lord of the Rings, Return of the King special edition DVD.

My brother also pointed out recently that if another film of Judge Dredd were to be made, he would be excellent as a certain Dark Judge...
 
Robin Williams, Joker?


The actor's thoughts on portraying the famous Batman villian.
by Jeff Otto

June 26, 2006 - News of what's happening with the sequel to Batman Begins has been scant of late. Director Christopher Nolan has been hard at work on his Batman Begins follow-up, The Prestige, which re-teams the director with Christian Bale.

Most believe that the director's next film after Prestige will be a sequel to Batman Begins, likely with The Joker stepping into the villain slot.

Many actors have been rumored to play the part, but fan favorites include Paul Bettany and Adrien Brody. Another actor who has been mentioned in connection with the series since way back during casting for The Riddler in Batman Forever is Robin Williams. Of course it helps that the actor has a connection with Christopher Nolan, having starred for the director in Insomnia.

IGN FilmForce spoke to Williams about the possibility this weekend. He was enthusiastic about the prospect.

"Oh God, I'd love to do that one."

Williams is famous for his Jack Nicholson impression, but he suspects Nolan would be looking for a new take. "Well, you want to do a different Joker. You know, if they do Arkham Asylum, it would be amazing. Arkham Asylum is one of the greatest, nastiest comic books ever. It's truly, it's like the Marquee de Sade on that level, and wonderfully damaged and quite tragic, in terms of when you realize [what happened to] create these characters..."

We asked Williams whether he saw The Joker as more over-the-top or dark.

"You can go both," Williams said. "As in madness, there's a lot of ways to go. I think you can really explore how bright and how nasty-funny he is, just like I guess what Kevin [Spacey] did with Lex Luthor, made him really funny, but yet still damaged... As evil is, accessible and yet still horrific. Jump back and forth all the time. I'm kidding... Kidding!"

On the second kidding, Williams gave me a soft poke in the throat with two fingers. Amusing, but a bit surprising.

"See there it is," says Williams. "I saw your eyes go f**k off!"

Williams is an admitted fan of comics and/or graphic novels. "It's interesting now that they're doing, they all kind of realize, with all the adult comic books or graphic novels for those who are trying to upscale themselves... Is that a comic book? No! It's a graphic novel! Is that porn? No! It's adult entertainment!"

"They're making these really interesting pieces and there's a lot of great, great comic books and graphic novels out there that could make wonderful movies. They're looking for them, and it's great... I read this comic book called DMZ [by Brian Wood], which is about New York after kind of a Civil War. Could it happen? Every time the helicopters fly over my house I'm going, 'Welcome to Baghdad!' But it's kind of fascinating, because they treat it like the country's divided. All these cities like Lebanon and Beirut and Baghdad and military zones of control, yet it's still the village and it's still its own. Fascinating concept. That's what's good about alternative forms of literature or stuff that you read..."

http://uk.filmforce.ign.com/articles/714/714752p1.html

The real plus to getting Robin Williams to play The Joker is that he is pretty crazy himself ;)
 
Robin Williams? Oh, come on! Why don't we just ask Joel Schumacher to come back and direct the sequel while we're at it!

Isn't it blindingly obvious that Crispin Glover was born to play the Joker? He's already proved he could cope with the action sequences with his creepy-stick-man Martial arts thang in Charlie's Angels, and he certainly has the mad intensity to make the character come alive. Imagine Glover doing his stick-thing against Bale's Keysi fighting style. It would be awesome!

And now imagine Robin Williams wearing a fright wig and gurning a lot.

Which would you rather see?
 
Yes, the Joker has to be Crispin Glover.
 
Crispin Glover is so obviously made to play the Joker that the whole idea seems uninteresting to me. Adrien Brody seems like a good choice, or Billy Bob Thornton, who would make a great Joker in my opinion.
 
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