But I know the rage that drives you. That impossible anger strangling the grief, until the memory of your loved one is just... poison in your veins. And one day, you catch yourself wishing the person you loved had never existed, so you would be spared your pain.
Umpteenth Viewing. Blu Ray. Kino Room. Don't laugh, but I have a background with this. In the summer of '89, I met five of my fellow fourteen year olds and we walked, caught a ride, or risked our lives hitchhiking down to the Point Nasa 6 Cineplex to see the thing that was the summer blockbuster to be, the reason for life itself, that film called BATMAN directed by the God himself and starring the dude from Gung Ho and Mr. Mom. That was our frame of fucking reference. And what we got was pretty much what you think you would get from that combination. And while I watched it, I thought to myself, "holy shit, this is fucking awful."
As a fan of everything that is Adam West, I thought for sure, it was going to work. SURELY they wouldn't fuck this up. Robert Wuhl? Batdance? I was so fucking put off, I went back to see it again JUST TO BE SURE I wasn't wrong. And boy, i wasn't wrong. Repeated viewings on cable and not one, not two, but three sucky sequels pretty much told me this was a franchise I was not willing to invest in or enjoy. Instead, i was pretty sure I was going to spend the rest of my life arguing all of it, including good decisions like hiring Joel Schumacher and bad decisions like whoever wrote Shwartezenegger's lines, all of it, was indeed shit.
Fast forward to 2005. Why, why, why, God, Cosmos, Buddha, why would I waste my time or my money on a fucking Batman movie. I more than ignored it. I told people to go fuck themselves. 'Want to see Batman Begins?' "Want to have me as a friend? Make a decision, asshole." was my typical reply. "It's go Ras Al Guhl as a villain!" "Ras Al who?" "You know, from the comics," "No, I don't know. And you don't either. Because you don't read fucking comics. At least I have Frank Miller at home in TPB, but I don't know anything about that dude and there is a 100% certainly this film is going to SUCK" "Buy why?" they would scream, and i would always scream back the same, "BECAUSE IT"S FUCKING BATMAN!" It was, by it's nature a SUCK. It should have been called SUCKMAN. No other WB movie had taken my money so dishonestly. At least with Independence Day, I knew what I was getting into. Like my friend D to the K to the motherfucking A to the Third Power says, "No one ever says Roland Emmerich made my favorite movie." And to that I would add the truth that all Batman films sucked. I never went. I never bothered. When people told me it was good, i thought a) they were fucking stupid or b) they were drug addicts or c) they obviously went to the wrong movie.
And so, about a year later, I'm on a job, in Newfoundland of all places. I'm getting ready to go out on to George Street with some friends. And in the hotel room, the TV is on. And when I say TV, I mean this is Newfoundland in 2006. This is a tele fucking vision. A bulb. Maybe it's seventeen inches. And on one of the channels that has shit cable reception, where the color is fucked up and the horizontal hold is not too good (occasionally it wipes up diagonally for all you people who remember such things), I saw a scene. An amazing scene. A child was hurt, and his father came for him.
This is where normally I some other writer would inject some sob story about their relationship with their father. I'm not going to, other than to say it was deep, emotionally painful, and hard to square with. My father wasn't abusive, but he was impossible to handle. he would also have done anything for me, and that's why this father reached out to me. I recognized Linus Roach, who once had the pleasure of fucking Helena Bonham Carter on screen, and anyone who could do that to the wife of the mother fucking son of a bitch who destroyed Batman, well, I'll give him five more minutes.
I had no fucking clue where this was going. The yard fight. The monastery. The audio wasn't too good, tinged with static, and occasionally would go out. So I missed certain important words like "Wayne" and "Alfred." I swear to Christ I was about forty minutes in when it finally occurred to me this was the Bat fucking Man, and this made no sense.
This movie was supposed to suck. I fought with the cable. I logjammed it. I failed, but I continued to watch. I probably should have shut it off and waited until i could go back to Tejas and watch it on a real screen. But no, i had to watch where this was going to go. And when that fucking Tumbler came out, I fucking lost it.
Fuck Tim Burton. With a big rubber dick. Because of him, I admonished the WB for having no ingenuity, cursed it for not taking seriously any aspect of entertainment. I sentenced to the dustbin of cinema any possibility of enjoying comic books on screen .The best I could get was the Rocketeer (underrated) and Broady and T.S. discussing the Kryptonite Condom in Mallrats (also underrated). Because of him, I never gave this film a chance. I passed it by like bad smelling garbage. So I never went to see it, and I was robbed of the chance of watching this unfold on the screen and seeing the Tumbler race across rooftops and mow down concrete barriers.
Robbed. I was robbed, I tell you. Maybe if someone had told me Nolan had directed it, I would have gone to see it. MAYBE. But most likely not, despite being such a big fan of Memento. No. I was robbed. Robbed of seeing what the Scarecrow saw, fucked up on that blue flower powder, the face of vengeance..."The Batman..."
This film is brilliant. I'll break it down some other time in some other review. The only reason why I didn't ace it out is because The Dark Knight is obviously better and The Dark Knight Rises is obviously worse. But not as worse as people think.
If you have not seen this...seriously...suspend all your prejudices. Give it a chance. There is no way in hell it can compete with the pure trash that exists between 1970 and 2004.