There’s something about Batman
I have a confession to make: I’ve liked Batman ever since I was a little girl. Yes, I watched the cartoonish Batman series (“POW”) — religiously. Every week anxious to see how Batman and Robin get out of the traps evil Joker, Penguin or whoever has got them in. I even saw a lot of dreams of Gotham City. Full moon. Dark city skyline. Niiice.
Yesterday I saw Batman Begins (I started writing this yesterday but was too tired to finish). My friend was amused by the movie. I was fascinated. It was wonderful to see the development of all the equipment — very rough at first (oi, the car *chuckles*) and of course how Batman evolved (or Bruce Wayne, that is), and the connections to all things Batman. I’ve never read the comics, so I don’t know how faithful the movies are to the original story; my sister claims the beginning of Batman was portrayed wrongly in this movie (I told her the plot). I can neither disagree nor agree, because I can’t remember any details from the other movies.
This was a wondeful Batman movie. Serious enough (no Joker, and no Michael Keaton), gloomy enough, surprising enough (I don’t try to figure out movies while they’re running, I take twists as they come — I do often figure out things before they are shown on screen so don’t think I’m stupid). It was delightful to hear Bruce Wayne say “does it come in black?” My kind of guy. 
(Now, if there only was a real one out there somewhere…)
I never minded any of the Batman movies, regardless of how much each actor was frowned upon for their crappy portrayal of Bruce Wayne. How it could be a crappy portrayal is beyond me since the personality is based upon a comic.
I, too, never read any of the comics, so I don’t know the ‘original’ story. I just find them kinda campy and fantasy, so I don’t expect any great acting out of them.
And you had to be watching those Batman reruns on TV, cuz they were on the air when I was a kid (and I was watching them).
I don’t actually know if they had shown the Batman series in Finland when it originally came out. Probably… But I don’t know how international TV was back then. I think there hardly were many Finnish tv shows let alone fancy American ones.
Then again, I know nothing of TV history.
“POW”… a jump back in my childhood… My favourite was when they were climbing up the wall: they indeed made the trick having an horizontal wall and 90° rotated camera but… the cloaks where still subject to gravity, so they were perpendicular to the wall and parallel to the ground!
Ahhh! I remember the wall climbings! But not the cloaks! I must’ve been too stupid – or blinded by admiration or maybe even a crush – to notice!
Just to clear it up…the movie is *perfectly faithful* in every aspect. In fact Batman Begins is almost a direct adaptation of the seminal origin work (written by Frank Miller, the gentleman that also brought us ‘Sin City’) ‘Year One’. The story was written in the 80s, 40 years after Batman’s creation, as the TV series dragged the comics down into a period of goody-two-shoes stories that almost ended Batman. Frank Miller was brought in to restart the entire franchise, and every comic story arc since has followed his work, which is where ‘Batman Begins’ comes from. The only difference being the final act of the movie with the blockbuster ending, which was tagged on.
Rumour is the two sequals they are about to start work on will also be taken from a ground-breaking Batman comic trade, the next one featuring the Joker, and the third featuring Two Face.
More than you ever wanted to know about Batman.
Oh and the interpretation of Batman’s beginning was fairly correct. The Ras Al Ghul connection was pasted into the story, but there’s enough lee-way in his original origin story for an interpretation like that. The general jist is Batman came about after more than a decade of Bruce’s training which took him all over the world, and to many different martial arts experts and trained assassins. He learnt from his enemy in a way.
Mike (if you read this), maybe you could solve the “feud” between my sister and I. In Batman Begins the bats came from the hole in the well. My sister claims little Bruce was attacked by bats in a dark alley when he was running away from the man who shot his parents.
Does she have any basis for this? Is it from some other movie perhaps?
I’ve never heard that version of the story before, so can’t say where she got it from, but it’s not the accepted Miller version (obviously the story varies with writer, but they all follow the same framework).
Bruce had feared bats ever since that day in the well (that happened in Miller’s version) but he never even considered this at first. After his years of training he returned to Gotham, and one night went out in disguise to find out what the streets were really like. He picked a fight with a pimp, but got ambushed by the pimp’s ladies, and wound up with a knife in his thigh. He returned home, contemplated his failure, and then it struck him that he needed an edge, he had to give the criminals a reason to fear and respect him. As he contemplated this in his drawing room at the Manor, a large bat came hurtling through the window (bit of dramatic licence there) and he was instantly reminded of his fear of bats. This is the moment that Batman was born, out of a desire to bring about fear.
His parents death is actually more of a footnote in his history, it drives him but nothing much actually *happened* when they were murdered. It’s always been given that it was just a simple case of *bang bang*, they’re dead, the murderer flees. In fact, despite what Tim Burton’s version said, the murderer was never actually found.
lol sorry for the ramble, to summarise. You’re right. She’s wrong. The bats came from the well, no bats there when his parents were murdered (Crime Alley has many vermin, but only one Bat has ever been there ;)).
Rambling’s warmly welcomed! This is really interesting. I only know the X-Files “inside out” — which is a daring exaggeration. So all other aspects of entertainment are more or less a blur.
The murderer was caught in Batman Begins, too, wasn’t he? At least there was a trial where Bruce spoke up “on behalf of the Wayne family”.
I’m only right in the way that I saw the bats-from-well story in Batman Begins and sister has seen perhaps some of the other movies in the past. If even that.
Yeah but at least this time he wasn’t the Joker
This is one of the plots that is open to interpretation, but a lot fo writers like to use it as part of Batman’s modern-day outlook…he’s become this well balanced hero, no longer out for vengeance because of the realisation that he’ll never catch his parents’ killer, but that there are living people who need his protection still.
I wouldn’t really use the old movies as a basis as none of them used much of Batman’s history beyond the very basics. Plus in each movie, one of his protagonists was killed at the end (Joker, Penguin, Two-Face) when the comics refuse to allow them to be killed off, both for the sake of future plotlines, and for the preservation of Batman’s image as a seeker of Justice (Many complex plotlines stemmed from this, such as the death of one of the Robin’s at the hands of a man that Batman could have ‘dealt with’).
The movies were entertaining but have little or nothing to do with the actual timeline of the Batman stories (which have been fairly consistent since Frank Miller’s reboot in the 80s, though Batman Begins helped to revert modern-day Batman back to his early lone vigilante ways).
I stumbled across your blog and this entry caught my eye. First I felt a bit weird, and my initial thoughts were “Is this some kind of a joke, why is this person imitating me?”. Then I read further and realised this isn’t a copy of of my own entry about Batman.
So, I felt kind of obliged to say hi.
Hi
In your blog entry you mention Val Kilmer and George Clooney as bad choices for Batman. But what about Michael Keaton? Ick. Batman has to have a good chin because that’s all that we see on his face.
I haven’t really thought about the subject of chins, Batman’s personality has mattered more.
And no, Keaton wasn’t a good choise either, but perhaps the fact that he was in Burton’s movies made me like him more than I would have otherwise. And before Keaton I had only seen Adam West as Batman, so anyone else is an improvement.
And like I wrote in drool!blog, the bad guys are usually much hotter than Batman, so who cares what Batman looks like.
Although, Bale really had the right looks…
Oh yeah… personality. I forgot about that.