entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

I dunno, the whole decoy theory just grates on me. And anyway, the story about how Ra's uses the Lazarus Pit to remain immortal was essentially thrown out.

They didn't NEED to stretch themselves, but it seems like a waste to have excellent actors play a role that's so... eh.

From:

ratphooey.livejournal.com

I thought Freeman was much more wasted than Caine, who seemed to have his own take on a much more iconic character without, say, doing a Johnny Depp Wonka kind of thing.

From:

mmcirvin.livejournal.com

Morgan Freeman is in every movie now, mostly just reading his lines in exactly the same way. Never terrible, never unpredictable. He's become Extruded Morgan Freeman Product. Caine as Cockney Alfred, though, that was kind of interesting, and he had all the movie's best lines.

From:

erikred.livejournal.com

During his appearance on Inside the Actor's Studio, Freeman pointed out that the only roles he gets offered these days are ones with gravitas. He would really like to do another intense turn in something gritty and real like Street Smart (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094056/); I hope he gets the chance to do it.

From:

nyar.livejournal.com

My impression is that Watanabe was "Ra's", up until he got crushed. Then later Ducard became "Ra's". In the end, "Ra's" was more powerful than an single individual, because he was a symbol... like Batman!

From:

That was how i first read it. But then others poisoned my mind with their crackpot theories. Christmas was RUINED!

From: (Anonymous)

... what makes you think the Lazarus Pits were thrown out? Just because a brand-new Batman didn't hear about them? Besides, I knew when I saw Ducard always speak for "Ra's" that something was hinkedy, and that maybe Padme had a hand in the script. Neeson did miss the real queen for a looooong time in TPM ...

As well, Bale had been Batman, what, a few weeks when he did the car chase? He wasn't the Bat God we've come to know and love. He was, in many ways, a shmuck still learning. Later, he'd probably say, "Maybe I need a sleeker Batmobile, and to cause less damage ... and maybe set up a fund to take care of victims of my carelessness ..."

Freeman was amused at the role, and it showed. "Oh the Tumbler? You wouldn't be interested in _that_!" Best line in the movie, to me. Oldman was downplayed, which was indeed a loss.

From:

merde.livejournal.com

Batman would never be so careless as to crush civilian and cop cars just to save some chick's life.

see, i liked that part. remember, this is young batman. he's still feeling his way around. he's also got a lot more hormones in play than the older version. my take was that he'd look back on it later and think, "holy collateral damage, batman!" and realize he can't go doing that kind of thing on a regular basis.

maybe i'm wrong. but that was how i saw it.

otherwise, we're in 100% agreement.

From:

Yeah, maybe the DVD will expand the scene where Alfred is chiding Bruce for the car chase and have him nag Bruce about the damage and whatnot. That would work for me.

From:

rimrunner.livejournal.com

Cool idea. I too went "Buh?" at that. As I said elsewhere, I'm almost entirely ignorant of the Batman mythos; I have just enough to be like, "Oh, that Gordon!" and so on. But I'd always had the impression that for him, lack of people killed/shtuff blowing up = good. So, yeah. Young Batman. I can go for that.

Well, I can also GO for that. But anyway. ;p

From:

Batman probably wouldn't've pulled that 'I can doom you to death (probably) but not actively murder you' passive-aggressive shit, either.
And I will not stop complaining about how long that car chase was until it stops being so long.

From:

Yeah, the P-A bit was lame. And the chase was a bit overlong.

From:

See, I thought that Michael Caine rescued nearly every scene he was in, just by underplaying things while everyone around him was Emoting their little guts out.

I took the exact opposite view about Ducard's identity: Ducard picked up Ra's' name when the original Ra's was killed by the falling beam. Confusingly written either way, and that was the least of it: what was the League of Shadows' motivation, again? Kill petty criminals in the name of Law, but also sack and destroy major civilian cities in the name of Balance? That was either two script rewrites away or five rewrites past making any sense whatsoever.

And incidentally, this movie deserves its own entry on the Evil Overlord List: when I am an Evil Overlord, I will not keep open barrels of gunpowder in the main chamber of my mountain fortress. My wooden mountain fortress. The gunpowder, and all other explosives, will be stored in a locked metal shed at least 200 meters from my fortress, and only my trained combat engineers will have keys.

Every time Katie Holmes appeared on screen, it was like the film had an intermission. It was almost spooky: a perfect Negative Zone of non-acting.

The fight choreography and editing was baaaaaad. I know Liam Neeson is not a spring chicken any more, but would it have killed them to hold a single shot for more than .5 seconds?

For all of that bitching, I basically liked the movie a lot. The supporting cast was (excepting Holmes) great, and Bale was pitch-perfect even though he got saddled with all of the film's worst lines. I'm cautiously optimstic that they'll work out the kinks for the next film: less need for expository dialog and a conspicuous lack of crazed scientologist starlets can only improve matters.

From:

Heh, i thought of the Evil Overlord list in the blowing-up scene, too.

I thought that in the early ninja fights, the crappy choreography was OK, as it conveyed the confusion you might experience in such a fight. But it was really terrible in the train fight.

Also, note that this is pre-brainwashing Katie. I can only imagine how bad she'll be after this.

Finally, your absence from your own journal has been very conspicuous, so it's good to know you're still around.

From:

Thanks. I plan on making a triumphant return to my journal as soon as I can figure out a new set of things to talk about -- half a year and change after watching my entire country decide that group suicide was fine as long as they got to shit on my immediate social group in the process, politics is still a little too raw a subject for me, and I haven't had any major travelling to write about since Vietnam. Feh.

From:

I am super sick of that school of editing, mostly because what it usually means is that your actors aren't up to fighing convincingly, so you cut around them like a Dr. Katz episode. I would have liked the editing to have maybe changed in style over the course of the movie; either direction would have done. A couple of individual shots in the train scene showed what it could have been like had _all_ the editing been comprehensible, but that only served to highlight the miasma of aimless direction-free editing in the rest of the movie. Boo.

Read me Doctor Memory?

From:

so you cut around them like a Dr. Katz episode.

Not that you would, ah, know anything about that, eh?

From:

Hey, I didn't have anything to do with the editing. That was some guy named Ivan.

From:

Read me Doctor Memory?

Yessssssss, worker?

From:

I will refrain from asking about the porridge bird, so as not to make you broken.

When I first heard that album, I thought Dr. Memory's voice was a specific Reagan reference. I guess it is still possible, since he was governor when Bozos came out, right?

From:

merde.livejournal.com

when I am an Evil Overlord, I will not keep open barrels of gunpowder in the main chamber of my mountain fortress.

and that's why they'll never let you be an Evil Overlord. you obviously need to go back and re-read your notes from class. it clearly states in the regulations that all secret fortresses must have a fatal flaw. i think an open barrel of gunpowder lying around in a wooden fortress meets that requirement just fine.

re: the fight choreography, i actually kind of liked it, and i'm a huge action/kung fu movie fan. to me, it felt quite realistic -- things happen so fast you don't even have time to understand what's going on, in the bits with ra's (and i think it was liam neeson all along). and in the bits with other guys, it just shows you that bats is so good that no normal even has a chance against him.

ok, i admit, i'd have liked to see a little more of what was going on. but it didn't ruin the movie for me. nothing could've ruined that movie for me, except maybe giving katie holmes more lines.

From:

rbarclay.livejournal.com

The only good thing about this movie was the 3-hour discussion afterwards about how if it was worse than the one with your governor or just about on par.

From:

Dude, don't even joke about it. When you consider the amount of money it took to film it, as well as the star power amassed within, "Batman & Robin" is the worst movie of all time.

From:

rbarclay.livejournal.com

Point: I don't fucking care how much money it cost, it wasn't mine.
Point: wasn't Batboy&Robingirl the one with your governor?
Point: It has been predetermined in discussion that your governor. Well, I mean, your governor.

And it's been a rather serious discussion, the conclusion was that the SO likes the one with your governor more because it has the arse of Clooney hidden somewhere, and I would slap the writer who's had the fucking idea of fucking Ninja training so hard, he'd wake up on Uranus (if he's tough).

From:

Huh. Well, if you two seem to prefer "Batman & Robin" to "Batman Begins", all i can say is: Wie sagen Sie "You Austrians smoke some mighty fine crack" auf Deutsch?

From:

rbarclay.livejournal.com

I didn't say I preferred one to the other, I just said the writer of the Ninja parts wouldn't survive a meeting.

Personally, I'm still undecided.

In other words: your governor (was born not far enough from here).

From:

rimrunner.livejournal.com

I didn't mind Katie Holmes's acting; i think that the character was poorly written (perhaps even poorly conceived), and she made the best of it.

I agree. At first I was like "OMG, so bad", but then I realized that there was really no point to her being in the movie. At all. See, if we'd seen her actually being an ADA (or whatever her official position was) at some point, or something, that would've been cool. (I speak from almost total ignorance of the Batman mythos, so if that's something that happens later or something...fine. They still could've written her better, à la Gordon. Although, even if Holmes is better than this movie suggests, Oldman can still act circles around her.)

From:

merde.livejournal.com

AFAIK, her character was a complete invention. i recall no such character from any of the Batman comics i've read. (admittedly, i stopped reading comics in '91 or so.)

but yeah, basically she was written in because they felt they needed a love interest and for some reason, Commissioner Gordon's lovely daughter whatshername (who later becomes Batgirl -- shhhh, don't tell Bruce!) wasn't good enough for them.

i can't imagine why. at least she'd have made some sort of sense that way. instead of tossing in that crap where she LJBF's him -- i mean, honestly, who would LJBF him? holy crap, he's hot, he's a good guy, he's crazy rich, and he's a fucking superhero! -- they could've dragged out the sexual tension, with him having to keep concealing his identity from her because OMFG Gordon is her dad, and her eventually figuring it out and not letting on that she knows.

or, to put it more succinctly, Katie Holmes' character was the token chick.

From:

peglegpete.livejournal.com

I liked Bale's Batman voice. I thought it was effective.

Agreed -- I liked the raw edge to it. I think it really helped get across the fact that you are dealing with a seriously deranged psychotic who needs to dress up in rodent-ish fetish gear and beat people up in order to feel even the smallest shred of peace. It's a damn shame that most Batman stuff out there (well, okay, at least most of the stuff I've read/seen) seems to gloss over this.

I was confused by the juggling of Ra's Al Ghul's identity — was Ken Watanabe really Ra's and Ducard usurped the name afterwards, or was Ducard Ra's all along and Watanabe played... someone else? Gah! CONFUSION.

Huh. Ducard felt like RAG to me shortly into the training scenes, particularly given how little of Watanbe we see. RAG doesn't strike me as someone who would delegate the majority of the training of his Chosen One to someone else. Once I saw the little goatee bits on Ducard at Wayne Manor, it didn't even cross my mind that RAG could be anyone other than Ducard the entire time.

Gary Oldman was so good, it pissed me off that they deviated so far from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One; the book gives almost equal time to Gordon (as well as Catwoman, but she's not even in the movie, so whatever), and the lack of development of Gordon's character is a huge missed opportunity.

While I think 'BM: Year One' is a superb (and better) story, I'm somewhat boggled that you would even consider that 'Batman Begins' would have been an adaptation of it. I thought the whole time BB was being promoted as another Batman origin story, incorporating a few elements from Year One. Did I miss something?

I think a Year One adaptation would be sweet, but I don't think you could do justice to either the Wayne or Gordon stories if you tried to include both within the limitations of a single movie.

One thing that really bothered me was Batman's rush to save Katie Holmes. I know i'm being a big nerd here, but Batman would never be so careless as to crush civilian and cop cars just to save some chick's life.

This bugged me, too. But as others have pointed out, he's brand new at this, and this is the first time he's really driven his monstrosity like that. It'll be nice if a sequal shows a nice learning curve in a few areas, nicely emphasizing how much of an amateur he really was to begin with.

In conclusion, go read Batman: Year One. You might even find it at the library. Do it now.

Amen, brutha.

From:

I believe it was supposed to be an adaptation of B:YO but it mutated quickly.

One reason i don't buy the "he's new at this" explanation for the car chase is that, in B:YO, even after he forces the cop car where he's arrested to crash, he pulls the two cops to safety even though he's been shot.

From: