Alright folks, I just finished Dark Victory, bringing my total count to:
Hush (1 and 2)
Year One
The Long Halloween
Death and the City
The Killing Joke
Dark Victory
does GR think that I am ready to fully apreciate The Dark Knight Returns?
I don’t know about GR - but you have served your time in purgatory (except for The Killing Joke - which ranks as #2 in The Canon). I envy you. I wish I was just about to read TDKR for the first (or even the second or third) time.
Good question!
There are two stories about Batman’s psyche that will indubitably benefit your understanding of the character, Ego by Darwyn Cooke (collected in “Ego and other Tails”) and Arkham Asylum.
But whether you read those or TDKR first is up to you, I don’t think it makes much of a difference at the point where you’re at.
Oh brother. As if they’ll appeal to the same crowd. (“Say, shall we go see a movie with a heroic lion in it or one with a completely ammoral, psychotic murderer in it?”)
Sorry yes - it appears to be a done deal re Gaiman. In fact the working title is Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? - which Superman readers will recognize from a pretty famous mid 1980’s story.
Are you willing to commute? How far are you from one of the smaller countries that doesn’t dub? Switzerland? Luxembourg? Belgium? (sorry Barb)
I read today that Dark Knight scored really big internationally and made even more money than in the US, and that says lot since the movie hasn’t been released yet in France, Germany and Japan, which are key markets.
Yeah, it’s steadily becoming the biggest movie of all time (at least up to this point).
Really? They always seemed so friendly…
because the Commies have chlorinated the US’s drinking water, thereby poisoning “our precious bodily fluids” (in his mind the explanation for being impotent).
Maybe that’s what happened to Batman…? 
A big part of Heath Ledger’s truly extraordinary performance (for once the critics got it right) is HIS voice. Sheeesh.
Agreed. If it’s dubbed, you’re going to lose a lot of the impact.
You hit the nail on the head. There had never been anything else like it. The plot is a mess at times, but in addition to the chemical plant and surgery scenes - that first scene of Gotham City comes in second to the opening of the original SW as the endless Star Destroyer fills the screen. It’s easy to forget how great the sets and the score were. Unfortunately, Nicholson’s goofy moments really tempered the impact of this very creepy/evil ones
Maybe I need to rewatch the movie. Perhaps I’m just thinking of it nostalgically. I remember it being a much better movie than a lot of y’all seem to be saying…
I also remain a big fan of Batman Returns - a lonely job. The writers (and Tim Burton) took a second rate villain in The Penguin and made him surprisingly menacing (after all, his end game is murdering children). The scene in his parents graveyard, the spitting of black bile because he is filled with so much hatred - whew. And the Michelle Pfeiffer being “brought back to life” by the cats licking her face and then destroying that cute little neon sign in her apartment so that it reads “hell here” instead of “Hello there”. Indelible.
I enjoyed that one too, but it had a very cartoonish quality to it, IMO. I did like Pfeiffer’s Catwoman a lot; she’s fairly twisted, but in a good way.
He’s definitely got an eye for the strange and unusual, which is probably why I enjoy his stuff so much, since I myself am… strange and unusual. 
I can’t really say I’ve seen anything of his that I haven’t enjoyed.
The second one? Or are you just now getting the first? As huge as TDK has been, it just seems like a really short-sighted move on the studio’s part not to capitalize on the worldwide “Batmania” before people start obtaining it BOM.
Which is which? :rolleyes:
For a movie? When gas costs the equivalent of 9$? I’ll wait for the DVDs to see it in English…
The second one? Or are you just now getting the first? As huge as TDK has been, it just seems like a really short-sighted move on the studio’s part not to capitalize on the worldwide “Batmania” before people start obtaining it BOM.
I don’t get it either. It’s the second Narnia and from I can see, the audience consists mostly of female kids/young teenagers with or without their families. Not the kind of people that would go to a scary Batman movie.
Okay, here’s the weirdest thing:
According to Amazon, the novelization of Dark Knight (the German translation even!!) was released around the end of July, three weeks before the movie comes out here.
Who’s responsible for that kind of crappy marketing? I can read the book almost a month before I can see the movie!
Well, I would see both. If Narnia had been done better in the first movie I would totally have seen Prince Caspian. I think there is a medium-sized crowd that would see both. Bigger if you include kids in the 9-14 range who will see anything.
Yeah but in the novel you don’t get the sound effects and HL’s totally frakked up voice (and everything else for that matter). So read the book - then you’ll still have to see the movie.
There’s always an iconoclast or two out there to keep the Earth (if that’s where we are) rotating on its axis.
Speaking of 9 - 14 year olds (who, indeed, will see anything) - I wonder how wise it is for a smart, imaginative 9 year old to see the movie? It’s sort of like the duller the kid’s mind is the earlier in life it’s OK to expose him/her to psychological horror and intensity. Oh well - it’s too late to worry about that for my children.
What I don’t wonder is how STUPID it was/is for the parents at the viewing I went to - who brought their FOUR AND FIVE year olds. Several of them.
Which reminds me, when Tim Burton’s Batman Returns came out, it too was rated PG-13. And one of the burger chains had the “buy a triple burger with extra mayo and get a The Penguin Eating a Raw Dead Fish toy” franchise. Which of course got all sorts of young children into the theaters to see it - and the mothers went nuts.
It seems that the memorable scene of all those cats licking Michelle Pfeiffer back to life and the final attempted crime being the murder of all first borns in Gotham upset some of the youngsters. Imagine that.
Although, oddly, the younger kids were cool with it.
My thinking is: those “old” films used to have one or two scenes that were more or less unsuitable or too shocking for kids, but that was okay because to be honest, the same thing was true for any Disney movie.
The movies of today, though, most of them are just blood and gore scene after scene and that’s really nothing for a four-year-old. Or an eight-year-old for that matter.
My guess (as a parent who appears not to have totally ruined his children - at least not so far) is that is so because “it” was all on the screen. A straight forward story - what you see is what there is. What movie are we going to see next dad?
My experience is/was that, if you want to get a child’s imagination working over time and sometimes scaring the bejesus out of him/her (too much so) - don’t show all the bad stuff and don’t answer all the creepy questions. Same as with adults - just moreso.
My guess is that those 4 to 6 and probably older year olds are not going to be so cool with TDK. (Also, as RMHPH also pointed out several days back, TDK is “more real” than the Burton Batman films. We keep focusing on The Joker because of HL’s terrific performance - what about what happens to one of the heroes in the story - Harvey Dent? I think PG 13 is a pretty good guide for that plot line - for most children.)
Whoaah. The younger kids were cool with it because they were less likely to be the oldest child. At that point it becomes wish-fulfillment.
Whoaah indeed. I wish had thought of that. In fact I’m going to claim that I did.
And yes, age does slow one down on the up take.
Don’t they make pills for that?
They’re for the take up. An obscure nuance of the English language.
I love anything that can be misconstrued.