Saturday, July 31, 2004

Candlejack
The quote from my last post belongs to an episode of "Clerks," which ran on ABC a couple of times. I became familiar with the show when it was released on DVD. Also, I think Tony mentioned how much he enjoyed it and instantly my piqued my curiosity. If Tony recommends something, you should probably go and check it out.

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I just got back from seeing M. Night Shymalan's "The Village." This film had some of the most misleading marketing I have ever seen. This is a horror movie, it has very little suspense and action, but I enjoyed it. The audience's reaction to it was poor, though. I doubt this will be even have as successful as his previous efforts were.

On a positive note, "The Village" does come attached to the teaser trailer for "Batman Begins." Like most teaser trailers, this one shows very little footage from the movie, or more correctly, very little footage that anyone will find interesting. You can view the trailer by visiting the official site. I'm very excited about this movie, but it's basic premise annoys me.

My small concern with doing a Batman prequel film is that audiences will be forced to sit through his origin story again. My personal opinion is that "Batman" and "Batman Forever" covered the events of Bruce Wayne's past, and his transformation into Batman well enough. There is little reason to tread over this material for the 15th time, but the new creative teams finds it neccessary to do a "younger, sexier Batman" that will appeal to a larger audience. Batman has always appealed to a mainstream audience, just because you want 21 year olds to see your movie doesn't mean that the main character needs to be 21 years old.

"Batman Begins," "Ultimate Spider-Man," and "Baby Looney Tunes" prove there are evil forces in the universe who are quite unhappy with our current set of American Icons. Why remake a character for a mass audience when you could use that energy and creativity to enhance the original property? It's this type of laziness that has caused great characters like Superman and Mickey Mouse to lose any sort of appeal they once had. These characters weren't always as dull as cardboard, their personalities were taken away because people stopped taking risks with them, and focused more creative energies on newer characters (Donald Duck, Batman.) In Superman's case the editorial staff was so afraid of tampering with him that they kept his character completely in-tact while they destroyed and reimaginied the entire universe around him.

So when they finally did tinker with Superman in the early 90's, it was the first bit of change that he had seen since the 1940's, and readers had no idea how to react. They got frightened and stopped reading. Of course, most of them had already stopped reading decades earlier, so it wasn't a major issue. They were reading Batman comics, since the character had received a surge of creative interests in the early 1980's.

And Batman is the cool alternative to Superman, so why do they need to toy around with something that is already perfect?

Oh well. Any Batman movie is good. Good for Shy, good for America. Watch the trailer and see the movie or you are letting the terrorists win.
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