BatmanBegins Tagged Articles at Cinematical

We've been pretty hard around here on a certain movie with adamantium claws. Yes, whenever I'm reminded of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which comes out on DVD and Blu-ray today, I wish I had been shot with amnesia bullets. Still, I appreciated Hugh Jackman's determined efforts to stay out of the damn costume. Whenever Wolverine has donned a uniform in the previous X-Men flicks, he looks like he can't wait to rip it off. In his natural state, as the wandering, memory-challenged Logan, he repels latex like Congress repels taxpayers.

Most actors quickly declare that the biggest challenge in superhero movies is the costume: how to avoid looking sheepish or silly while wearing a form-fitting, custom-made suit that may reveal more than most of us are willing to bare at the beach? With advanced, super-realistic, computerized special effects and ripped body / stunt doubles available as needed, though, I think the bigger challenge lies in bringing the secret identities of superheroes to life: all those moments when supposedly normal people are leading supposedly "normal" lives.

Who, then are the most convincing superheroes without costumes? What actors and actresses have made you believe that their very human characters on screen could transform into larger-than-life heroes and/or heroines with a quick dash into a phone booth? Mind you, I'm not just talking Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen ...

1. Famke Janssen as Jean Gray in X-Men
She cuts a fine figure, doesn't she? Famke Janssen is undoubtedly sexier than Wolverine when they both suit up, yet she really shines whenever she's using her brain -- which is all the time. She doesn't need the costume to be one of the smartest, most empathetic, and most lethal people, in the universe.

Let's be real here: every 11-year-old boy lives to one-up the kids he's friends with. When I was a young lad, the kid next door to me was always buying the newest toys and then conveniently playing with them out in front of his house constantly so that everyone in the neighborhood would know who the cool kid was. Well boys (and girls), here's something that will forever make you the most popular kid at your school: the Batman Tumbler Go-Kart.

A dude by the name of T-Man created this go-kart (which he calls the T-kart) from scratch and filmed his every step so that you, too, can build a Batman Tumbler in your very own garage. The only downside is that it doesn't go in reverse or come with a host of different weapons, but one of those is an easy fix. You can follow T-Man's entire journey over on YouTube, but we posted video of the final product after the jump. Check it out.

From Pacman to Public Enemies, he's had more ups and downs than most other actors of his generation. Christian Bale has careened between extreme highs and deep lows, in the view of the folks at MovieFill, and they decided that a rollercoaster was the most apt visual metaphor for his career. A reduced-size version can be seen above.

They squeeze most of his films into the chart, though they left out a few. Before his sensational role in Mary Harron's American Psycho, he was very appealing in Metroland and got good notices in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine; pre-Batman Begins / The Dark Knight, he was fun to watch as a frisky villain in John Singleton's Shaft and an uptight, would-be psychiatrist in Laurel Canyon. I don't agree with every notation in the chart. Harsh Times, for example, is cited as one of his "lows," but Bale was riveting. Two notorious off-screen incidents are included, which both affected his public perception, though it seems somewhat unfair to lump those in with his films.

Still, the rollercoaster graphic provides an easy way to look back and consider the range and daring of what he's done, especially earlier in his career. Recently he's been in more big-budget productions than anything else, and next up is David O. Russell's boxing biopic The Fighter. I'd love to see him in a couple of smaller indie flicks. What are your thoughts on Christian Bale's career so far? More ups than downs?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in their continued efforts to avoid awarding Oscars to deserving efforts in film scores, has apparently disqualified Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's work on The Dark Knight. According to Variety (by way of In Contention), the same stipulation as to how many composers are technically listed on the cue sheet similarly screwed over their Batman Begins score -- the stipulation being that listing multiple names helps to award royalties to music editors and designers as well.

I'd argue that the film -- which is bound to crack a billion bucks worldwide any day now, and likely to rack up considerable awards nominations regardless -- owes a great deal of its sustained visceral thrills to this rousing score, and in an ideal world, the December 9th release of the DVD would be enough for the Academy to whip around and shape up their bureaucratic brouhaha. To them, I simply ask this: why so serious?

In a new three-part interview over at the LA Times, writer-director Christopher Nolan has returned from his Batman vacation and finally opens up a bit about The Dark Knight's ridiculous box office take, Heath Ledger's performance and whether or not he'd be interested in directing a third Batman film. Sure, on paper he'd appear stupid not to take a gig helming the next Bat-flick, but Nolan has always been a man who takes one thing at a time -- and notes in this interview how much he dislikes the whole act of "setting up the sequel," even though he kinda does it himself at the end of Batman Begins when Gordon shows Batman the Joker card. Regarding that scene, however, Nolan adds: "But for me that was just about the excitement of people leaving the theater with the sense that now we have the character up and running. I wanted people to walk away with that sense in their head. You know, that he's become the Batman in the movie."

Later on in the interview -- which covers Knight's box office, Ledger's performance and the inevitable sequel -- Nolan, who says he'd next want to take on a "very intimate, small story that happens to be photographed on a ridiculously large scale," questions whether he'd even want to make a third Batman film. He says, "There are two things to be said. One is the emphasis on story. What's the story? Is there a story that's going to keep me emotionally invested for the couple of years that it will take to make another one? That's the overriding question. On a more superficial level, I have to ask the question: How many good third movies in a franchise can people name? [Laughs.] At the same time, in taking on the second one, we had the challenge of trying to make a great second movie, and there haven't been too many of those either. It's all about the story really. If the story is there, everything is possible. I hope that was a suitably slippery answer."

What do you think? If Nolan doesn't direct it, do you egg his house next Halloween?

The alternate film universe must be an incredible place -- a land where George Lucas directed Apocalypse Now, Frank Darabont's Indiana Jones 4 script was made, and Joss Whedon directed Batman Begins. Actually, in that other dimension, Whedon has probably written and directed everything, including enough Firefly to sate our hungry souls.

Whedon told MTV that once upon a time, he pitched a Batman reboot to Warner Bros when Batman Begins was in early development. "It wasn't what they did but the vibe was very similar. Mine was a bit less epic. It was more about the progression of him and it was more in Gotham City. He didn't go to Tibet and meet cool people, but it was very similar in vibe." But most interesting of all was the idea that he didn't plan on using any villains from the comic book canon. "In my version, there was actually a new [villain], it wasn't one of the classics - which is probably why they didn't use it. It was more of a 'Hannibal Lector' type - he was somebody already in Arkham Asylum that Bruce went and sort of studied with. It was a whole thing - I get very emotional about it, I still love the story. Maybe I'll get to do it as a comic one day."

It's cool to see small replicas, funky cakes, or maybe something knit, but there's just something even cooler when your fan creation needs its own room for storage.

This latest bit of Fan Made comes courtesy of /film's Cool Stuff -- it's a working replica of The Tumbler from both Batman movies. The guy responsible, Bob Dullam, made this thing without blueprints. It was all done with photos found online, piece by piece. I'm beyond impressed. He says, "All parts are scratch built, 'cept tires, rims, brakes, engine, etc.. meaning all body parts brackets, just about everything external on the car." This isn't just a bunch of cardboard tacked onto a car he already had. And now he wants to make the inside look as close as possible to The Tumbler's real inside.

Man, imagine hopping in that thing and driving to the store? It'd be a madhouse. It's sure to make a number of fans go wild, and I bet make a few people teetering on the edge of sanity begin to believe that Batman is real. And do you even need a car alarm for that?

Check out a few more pics of the fan made Tumbler in the gallery below ...

Back in May, our Eric D. Snider made clear a common complaint regarding the latest Narnia offering, in that it was far too violent -- with or without blood -- for its given PG rating. The film went on to under-perform at the box office, for a litany of other reasons, but it was hard to ignore the potentially dominating influence of family-friendly Disney and their little Christian parable/looming blockbuster sequel on the decision.

Now, after stateside concerns along the same lines, come reports from the UK that box office behemoth The Dark Knight has merited a record number of seventy complaints in its first week of opening regarding the 12A equivalent from the British Board of Film Classification, which itself admitted to facing a modicum of pressure from studios who want lower ratings that in turn draw younger and wider audiences.

As someone who has seen that film more than once, in audiences that more than once had a parent shielding their child's eyes from the very badly burnt likes of Two-Face (um, spoiler?), it's obvious that the caution of a PG-13 (and the relative intensity of predecessor Batman Begins) failed to steer them away from the draw of the Caped Crusader.

So let's play the old-fashioned game of Point the Finger:

• Are we to blame the MPAA and BBFC for their lenient judgments?
• How about the parents who so willingly dismiss the ratings that actually are appropriate?
• For our more responsible readers, what measures do you take before allowing your children to see certain films? Do you see a film before they do and determine what's A-OK? Do you rely on reviews or websites tailored to providing custom criteria regarding a film's content?
• Sex, violence, or language: which of these factors will most likely send your child and the world at large on a moral decline from which we may never recover?

Look, I thought The Dark Knight had a lot of strong selling points: Combine a deft pace with thoughtful characterizations and a whopping IMAX design that turns the entire experience into a plot-driven theme park ride, and you've got one hefty dose of Batman adrenaline.

Still, comparisons to The Godfather Part II notwithstanding, The Dark Knight isn't foolproof -- in fact, no single movie in history is foolproof. The subjective experience of movie watching ensures that nothing can be universally liked by everyone, and rules of civility insist that humanity respect that truism. It's acceptable to feel passionately about a great work of art, and defend that perspective with rigorous argumentation, but much of the outrage over the minority perspective that The Dark Knight isn't any good has made such practical thinking impossible.

Deemed the first critic to pan the movie, New York's David Edelstein went out of his way to list the allegations against him sent along by various Batman fans. The House Next Door editor Keith Uhlich, meanwhile, fielded over a hundred rants in the comments section following his astute critique of director Christopher Nolan's questionable portrayals of violence. What's particularly shocking about this frightful deluge of negative responses is that many of these people began posting their disapproval before they even saw the movie.

There are many ways to anticipate The Dark Knight. You can assemble a fake plot out of the numerous clips circulating the web, you can stitch together adorable bat-toys, or just rewatch Christopher Nolan's first entry in the Batman franchise. However, there's a lot more to this sprawling, nearly three hour rush of furious confrontations and haunting corruption. The greatest Batman stories emphasize the character's shadowy nature, and Nolan pulls from many of them to create the intensely moody aura of the latest film. You don't need to know anything about the character to enjoy the movie, but it certainly expands the experience to do some research -- and allows for a greater appreciation of the filmmaker's efforts to honor the nature of the character.

Here's a look at some antecedents to the current interpretation from the last two decades.