Blast from the Past Movie Review: Batman and Robin (1997)

The other night as part of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, we watched Batman and Robin, a film remembered so poorly that we couldn't find anybody willing to defend it. Here's the individual podcast. Our exalted host Nick had to do it himself. In this gem, Batman and Robin must fight on multiple fronts--not only Mr. Freeze, but also new villains Poison Ivy and her henchman Bane. Complicating things is the arrival of Alfred's niece Barbara, who has secrets of her own...

The Good

*The opening scene where Batman and Robin take on Mr. Freeze and his hockey-themed gang in a museum is entertaining.

*When Uma Thurman is in her Poison Ivy persona, she's not too bad.

*They had some nice tie-ins with Batman Forever,including seeing Two-Face and the Riddler's gear in Arkham Asylum and Poison Ivy and Bane having to run off the raver gang Robin fought when he stole the Batmobile in order to claim a new hideout. Robin invokes his family's circus act the Flying Graysons in a squabble with Batman as well.

*Chris O'Donnell is less intolerable as Robin this time around. Given the length of time implied to have elapsed between this movie and Batman Forever, it makes some sense that the character wouldn't be a teenager anymore and having an adult actor wouldn't be as obnoxious.

*They kept Mr. Freeze's more complicated and sympathetic back-story from the comics. Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't the best actor in the film, the problem with the character was his constant punning, not the character himself.

The Bad

Where do I begin? The movie was so poorly received the major Batman film series that started with Batman in 1989 ended and had to be rebooted by Christopher Nolan with Batman Begins years later. Not only rebooted, but rebooted in a Darker and Edgier way that repudiated the campiness of the Burton-Schumacher era. It was a straight-up Franchise Killer.

*So many butt and crotch shots of Batman and Robin, plus the infamous Bat-nipples and six-packs on the two. Given how movies often objectify female characters turnabout's fair play (and some of Myopia's female crew appreciated the view), but the way it was done was so groaningly unsubtle it was annoying.

*Campiness in limited quantities is funny. Campiness in the amount ladled on this film is just bad. The museum battle scene at one point featured Batman and Robin deploying ice-skates from their boots so they can engage Mr. Freeze's hockey gang on the ice. And the puns. So many puns. So many bad puns! I love groaner puns, but in moderation. This went way, way too far. Whether this is director Joel Schumacher's fault or the executives' fault I don't know, but either way it was very bad.

*Plugging in Batgirl the way they did was stupid. She's not British even though she's supposed to be Alfred's niece and a student at a British school, she's explicitly the daughter of his sister and not a great-niece (which would make more sense given the massive age difference between her and Alfred), and her disappearance from a big chunk of the film (so the viewer can be surprised she's a covert street-racer and her eventually becoming Batgirl is foreshadowed) could have been handled better.

Although her reasoning for being there is creative at least--Alfred apparently used his salary from the Waynes' employ to support her after her parents died and she wants to repay him so he can retire--she has absolutely no reason to think his situation is that servile and she just comes off as really rude. Alicia Silverstone is dreadfully miscast--she's not British, she doesn't seem to be in the physical condition needed to do the stuff she does, and even though Barbara's reason for being there is absurd, a better actress could have made her feelings more convincing. Could Keira Knightley have been a better Batgirl? She might've been too young at the time to (not creepily) have the romantic tension with Robin, but still.

*Per the Knightfall saga, Bane is not only a very powerful warrior but also very, very smart. In this one, he's basically Poison Ivy's semi-retarded henchman. According to TVTropes this is the studio bosses' fault and not Schumacher's--Knightfall wasn't that long before and they wanted to work Bane in somehow, so they basically replaced an established Poison Ivy minion with him. Children, this is why Executive Meddling is quite often a bad thing. The only thing they got right is that Bane is Latin American background instead of being Middle Eastern like in The Dark Knight Rises. However, the Batman animated series (which depicted Bane as this glorified Mexican wrestler with an obvious accent) did that better.

*In her deranged-scientist mode (when she's not being Poison Ivy), Uma Thurman is obnoxious and not very good. She's generally a good actress, so maybe really bad direction?

*The way Batman and Robin fight with each other, with Robin apparently honest-to-God thinking Poison Ivy actually likes him, is freaking stupid. If Robin were depicted as a teen played by a teen actor it might've worked--but played by the 20-something Chris O'Donnell it's obnoxiously bad. And the where Batman shuts down Robin's motorcycle so he doesn't try to jump between buildings and Robin screams at him as he flies away is unintentionally funny. But not that funny because then I might have enjoyed it.

*Where's Dr. Meridian, Nicole Kidman's character from Batman Forever? The end implied she and Bruce were now a couple, and since she knows he's Batman that's not going to be the kind of problem it'd be for anyone who isn't Catwoman. However, unlike Vicki Vale, she's gone without a mention. Instead he's dating this random woman and apparently has been for some time.

The Verdict

Let this franchise-killer lie dead and forgotten. 4 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Batman Forever (1995)

Yesterday some friends and I gathered for our weekly recording of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood. That afternoon, we watched and discussed Batman Forever, in which the Caped Crusader faces established foe Two-Face and new villain Riddler while acquiring a "ward," the angry young Dick Grayson. Here's the individual podcast. And now for the review...

The Good

*The first half of the movie is really entertaining. It starts out with a bang--Two-Face is robbing a bank (or some other institution that has a vault full of money) atop a high-rise in order to lure Batman to fight him. Things get more and more insane once Batman arrives, including a trap full of boiling acid and nothing less than the Statue of Liberty. It's really well-done.

*Although this will horrify some of my fellow reviewers, I thought a lot of the pithy lines were hilarious. The "chicks love the car" line when Batman is fending off the amorous attentions of Dr. Chase Meridian (more on her later) is one of the most amusing lines in the film. So's "the bat-signal is not a beeper." And then there's Alfred's bit about "the OTHER car" and how what's really the secret entrance to the Batcave is where Bruce keeps his dead wives.

*There are some good establishing character moments for Bruce Wayne himself--on the news we hear that he's announced a profit-sharing plan for workers in Wayne Enterprises and we later see him insisting that the family of an employee who (apparently) committed suicide receive full benefits even though that's against company policy for suicides. And when the Riddler, now the powerful executive of the NygmaTech corporation, tries to crassly triumph over him at a gala, Bruce good-sportedly congratulates him on his success, revealing that for all his success and grandiosity the Riddler is nothing more than a petty jerk. Val Kilmer does a good job playing the character and apparently he was creator Bob Kane's favorite Batman.

*Jim Carrey's performance as the Riddler is brilliant. He's hilarious and his line delivery is great, plus he can do the creepy aspects (he has a The Cable Guy-esque fixation on Bruce, his former employer) and the arrogance (he demands an answer from Bruce, the owner of the company where he works, NOW rather than sending his designs to Bruce's secretary) very well. The latter is actually somewhat painful to watch--here's a man who had the ear of one of the most powerful men in Gotham and threw it away because he was a demanding entitled jerk.

*Tommy Lee Jones is having a lot of fun as Two-Face and he's fun to watch.

*Although it's different from his comic-book origins, I liked seeing the birth of Robin and how it was tied into both Two-Face and Batman. Even though the rest of the Grayson family doesn't get much screentime, I did like their characterization. Rather than cower before Two-Face and his thugs, they hijack the bomb he's using to hold the circus hostage and use their acrobatic skills to maneuver it out of the tent and into the river, at a terrible cost to themselves. It's very well-done.

*To that end, the deaths of Robin's family at Two-Face's hands causing Bruce to have a lot of flashbacks to the deaths of his parents and how he developed his fixation with bats and his attempt to keep Robin from becoming what he's become (the early Batman depicted in the prior two films is a killer) makes a lot of sense.

The Bad

*The second half of the film suffers from a major case of the slows. Things pick up toward the end after Two-Face and the Riddler deduce Batman's true identity and attack Wayne Manor, but there's a long stretch of boredom.

*Chris O'Donnell is grossly miscast as Dick Grayson. I don't think he's a bad actor, but he is way, way too old for the part. There's no reason for Commissioner Gordon to leave him with Batman as his ward when he looks like he's 25. I'm not familiar enough with the lore to know just how old Dick Grayson was when he became Robin, but he would have probably been in his earlier teens. Yet we meet him riding a motorcycle to Wayne Manor and Bruce discusses him catching up with the circus (now "halfway to Metropolis") as though that was a serious option. He acts like an older teen or twenty-something much of the time, except for one scene where he basically flips out on Batman in what comes off as a temper tantrum.

(And his "kung-fu laundry folding" routine is just ridiculous to watch. Although I imagine its purpose was to show that he was capable of fighting before he rescued that girl from the gang of ravers, this could have been exposited some other way. Perhaps Bruce catches him beating on a punching bag or something.)

*Two-Face, though quite entertaining to watch, is completely out of sync with his comic book character. The DC character who commits violent crimes while laughing maniacally and acting hyper is the Joker, not Two-Face. Two-Face is a grim, violent nihilist with a split personality. I've only read a few Batman comics, but the impression I've got is that Two-Face's depiction in The Dark Knight is much more in sync with his comic-book character (and the character I vaguely remember from the animated series I watched as a kid).

*During the scene where Two-Face takes the circus hostage, Bruce Wayne proceeds to beat the hell out of a bunch of Two-Face's minions while trying to get to Two-Face. Note that I said "Bruce Wayne," not "Batman." The fact that billionaire Bruce Wayne got into a fistfight with a bunch of armed men and straight-up destroyed them is something that any media account of the event will include. That'd attract attention to Bruce that he doesn't really need. Granted, he was willing to reveal his identity as Batman to appease Two-Face earlier in the scene (but nobody heard him, not even his date or the annoying reporter who was hanging out with him) and there is a giant bomb that's about to go off, but at least some consequences would've been nice. Given how Commissioner Gordon brings Dick to Wayne Manor in the next scene, he could say something about how impressed he is with Bruce's fighting ability and Bruce could wave it off by saying he's been taking krav maga or something.

*Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) is a really annoying character. She has some kind of love triangle thing going with both Batman and Bruce Wayne, even though the former is explicitly not interested. She's useful in precisely three ways--her kickboxing comes in handy when she and Bruce hold a staircase in Wayne Manor against a group of Two-Face's minions, she does a nice callback to Batman Returns when she asks if Batman would be more interested in her if she wore vinyl and wielded a whip, and her idea to play on Two-Face's fixation with coin-flipping comes in handy at the climax. Otherwise all she really does is throw herself at Batman at any given opportunity. She does have a meaningful name, which I did appreciate.

*"Holey Rusted Metal Batman." Yes, I know they were trying to make an in-joke about Robin's exclamations from the earlier Batman material in a way that was true to the new character (he's actually making an observation), but this one was a groaner. And coming from me, that's a big deal. And some of the campy aspects of the film were ridiculous rather than funny--the security guard panicking over the "BOILING ACID" was hilarious rather than frightening.

*During Batman and Robin's invasion of the Riddler's lair, Robin has the chance to kill Two-Face. Despite challenging Bruce's warning that desire for revenge will consume him for most of the movie, he suddenly has a change of heart without any obvious conflict.

The Verdict

*It has its entertaining parts, but it's not that great of a film overall. If only it had been edited a bit more tightly. Six out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Batman Returns (1992)

I wasn't able to attend the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood screening of Batman due to a church social event, so I made sure to participate in the podcast focusing on Batman Returns, which I wasn't allowed to see when it came out but whatever. In this one, Batman faces two new threats--a grotesque "penguin man" who emerges from the sewers to seek Gotham's highest office and a mysterious cat burglar wearing a lot of tight leather.

Here's the podcast. And here's the review...

The Good

*One of my fellow panelists described how Batman could have had an arc from the 1989 film through this movie to Batman Forever, but this got botched. However, I did some thinking and I think there's actually one there. In the first film, Batman kills the Joker and in this film Batman kills several members of the Penguin's gang. However, in Batman Forever, Batman tells Robin that if he kills Two-Face (who had killed his parents) that won't be the end of it. It's like he's warning Robin against going down the path he's walked already and managed to get off.

(The "Fridge Brilliance" TVTropes page, which I read after I came up with theory, suggests that his getting to know Catwoman and realizing not all criminals were faceless monsters might've been the cause for the change in behavior. Considering how the early Batman would kill and the later Batman would not, this means the movies were following the comic books).

*Another area where it shines is the acting and characterization of its villains. From the beginning the audience sympathizes with the Penguin, the victim of a comically Tim Burton-esque attempt at infanticide by his wealthy parents horrified at his deformed appearance and bizarre behavior (he did attack the family cat--by dragging it into the scarily cage-like playpen he was being kept in). He starts out wanting to find out who his parents were and reclaim his "birthright," although there are some hints that the evil plan of the climax is already stirring when we see him in the Gotham hall of records. Due to his lack of socialization (he was raised by penguins before being put in a freak show), he acts like a psychotic man-child much of the time, which can actually be pretty amusing (if vulgar).

Meanwhile, Catwoman starts out as an oppressed ditsy secretary whom her boss attempts to murder for knowing too much about his own evil scheme. Her acts of villainy--which are much less extreme than the Penguin's--are driven by a desire for personal empowerment vis-a-vis a world that has disdained her (and a boss who, before trying to kill her, was rather rude to her) rather than malice per se and she's rather conflicted about the whole thing rather than being remorselessly evil. Meanwhile, industrialist Max Shreck is greedy and amoral, but he's depicted (rather thinly) as a man who rose from nothing and wants to leave something for his son.

*The absence of Vicki Vale (Batman's love interest from the first film) is noted and explained.

The Bad

*Shreck is not a particularly good villain. He's trying to convince the Gotham city leadership to allow him to build a new power-plant (even though it's made repeatedly clear the city has plenty of power), a "power-plant" that actually drains and stores power from the city grid. When his secretary Selina Kyle discovers this he attempts to kill her (causing her to become Catwoman) and he sets up the boorish Penguin as his puppet candidate for mayor (causing most of the battles with Batman) to get rid of the mayor opposed to the plan. However, he's the most thinly-characterized of the villains and is a background figure most of the time. Furthermore, how does he plan to conceal this from the citizens? He's depicted as having committed other sins as well (owning "firetrap" slums, dumping toxic waste, and even having killed a prior business partner), but those are the sort of things that are relatively easy to conceal. Building a power-stealing fake power plant isn't. And trying to make a man who is for all intents and purposes a deformed vagrant your candidate for mayor? Really?

(Granted, the ridiculousness might be explained by this being a Tim Burton film...)

*The Penguin's scheming gets more and more ridiculous as the film goes on. He's for all intents and purposes a homeless man who has a gang of ex-circus performers as henchmen, but yet he commands a ridiculous amount of resources. If it was made clear he was diverting monies Shreck gave him for his mayoral campaign into, say, creating an army of trained penguins armed with rocket launchers, that would make more sense. I know the film isn't trying to be more realistic like the Nolan Batman films (in which the "supervillains" are terrorists and mobsters rather than, well, supervillains), but one wonders how he's actually doing this. Before this, he sends a circus train (similar to the trains you see carrying around little kids in malls) to kidnap the firstborn sons of Gotham's social elite to murder them--a train seen driving around the city without opposition or even notice.

*When Selina wrecks her apartment and begins her transformation into Catwoman, she assembles her new outfit out of a leather jacket. I don't think there's enough leather in that one jacket to make a full body suit. It would have been better if she was depicted as having several such jackets. She does seem to have a lot of clothes, so it wouldn't have been that hard.

*Batman's costume is really not that good. He can't turn his head and that affects his fighting style. At one point he tears his mask off and it looks like its made of pleather.

The Verdict

It's not boring, but it's really not that good. Six out of 10.

"Batman Maybe" Hilarious Music Video

Here's a video my friend Patrick shared on Facebook.



It's an absolute riot.  It has spoilers for The Dark Knight Rises, so be ye warned.

Here's the original video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJ5l5ls0hP4&feature=youtu.be

Building A Better "Birds of Prey"

On my alternate-history discussion forum, the gentleman whose handle is TheReturner posted a thread asking how one could make the television series Birds of Prey successful.  The show is basically about Batman and Catwoman's illegitimate daughter Huntress and the Oracle (the former Batgirl, crippled by the Joker) fighting crime, with the chief villain being none other than evil psychiatrist Harley Quinn, lover of the Joker.

Sufficient to say, it wasn't successful.  Here're some ideas that the board member whose handle is Antonio and I came up with to make it better:

*Don't call the city "New Gotham."  I don't see why they made that change.  There's no point.  Antonio suggested making this a generic near-future setting, perhaps by stylizing some of the items.  Heck, given how Batman could have been active for decades and might've had his affair with Catwoman years ago, they could even set it in the present day.

(I doubt the Joker could have gotten away with constantly being declared legally insane and then breaking out of Arkham Asylum every few months in the "tough on crime" 1990s, so setting Batman's heyday in the 1960s and 1970s makes sense on those grounds.  Also, the board member whose handle is Black Angel suggested it could be a direct sequel to the Adam West Batman series and when we actually meet Bruce Wayne, he could be played by West.)

*There was an animated series called Batman Beyond that ran from 1999 to 2001, just before Birds of Prey, that featured an elderly Bruce Wayne mentoring a new Batman many years later.  Something that was in a similar vein--basically "Batman: The Next Generation" with female protagonists--would have probably been better-received than Birds of Prey was.

*Dump the "metahumans" aspect of the story entirely.  It came off to me like they were cribbing from the X-Men or even Dark Angel, which was on at the same time.  And Catwoman in the comics was an ordinary human, not a mutant.

*The show depicts Batman as having left Gotham in his grief for Catwoman's death.  I remember at least some fans complained about that, claiming it made Batman a coward.  If I were writing it, I would depict Batman going insane with rage at the Joker's killing of Catwoman and killing the Joker himself, then having a Heroic Blue Screen of Death and going into self-imposed exile for violating his one rule.  Antonio said that if the crippling of Barbara Gordon and the death of Jason Todd (the second Robin) took place at the same time, it would be enough to push Batman to outright homicide.  That's actually a really good idea--the TV show included a flashback to Joker shooting Barbara and the Joker actually killed Jason Todd in the comics.

As I said on the forum, this gets Batman out of the way in a manner true to his character and eliminates the Joker, allowing for Harley Quinn to come into her own as a major villain rather than simply being the Joker's girlfriend/minion.  Making the Joker's sidekick into a full-blown Big Bad in her own right (I guess that would make her a Dragon Ascendant) was one of the more creative ideas of the show.

Also, it could lead to a really interesting flashback episode (or even series of episodes) if Huntress sought her father out for answers.  Batman would say something to the effect of, "Helena, let me explain..." and we see a full-blown Batman arc in the midst of the Oracle/Huntress show.  Even if the show still fails, those episodes would likely be beloved by Batman fans.

*Batman doesn't seem to be the type to get a woman pregnant without marrying her, nor abandon a child.  The TV series dealt with this by making it so Batman wasn't aware of his daughter, at least initially.  Another idea might be to have Batman and Catwoman marry and retire from their respective lifestyles.  Then the Joker breaks out of Arkham one last time and rampages, killing Jason Todd (who might try to continue being Robin on his own), crippling Barbara Gordon, and then killing Catwoman and (apparently) Helena.  Batman puts on his costume one last time and literally tears the Joker apart, then leaves.  Alfred discovers Helena is still alive, but cannot find Batman and so, like he did with Bruce, raises Helena himself.

Building a Better Bane ("Dark Knight Rises" Spoilers)

On my alternate-history forum this morning, the board member whose handle is d32123 posted about how he finally saw The Dark Knight Rises.

He said if he were writing the film, he would make Bane a genuine revolutionary and "a believable anti-villain" rather than someone putting on a facade of leading a class revolt all while plotting to kill everybody anyway.

(d32123 is a Marxist.)

Although the climax of the film reveals a much better side to Bane (he protected the young Talia al-Ghul from other inmates in the prison and as a result, was left disfigured and in constant pain), the film would be more interesting if it turns out Bane really did believe in his revolutionary rhetoric and was only using the threat of the fusion bomb to prevent the military from invading Gotham and crushing his little commune.  Meanwhile, it's Talia al-Ghul who wants to destroy Gotham regardless, to finish the work her father Ras al-Ghul began in Batman Begins.  Bane isn't interested in this, being both a sincere revolutionary and having been cast out of the League of Shadows by Ras as a constant reminder of his failure to protect his wife, Talia's mother.

To leave some grayness for Talia (rather than making her an ingrate willing to kill the man who protected her in prison), perhaps she plans to save Bane, the League of Shadows loyalists, and the genuinely-revolutionary Gotham residents (presumably as a favor to Bane) rather than simply killing everybody and herself.  The only idea I've got to make this happen is perhaps letting it "slip" that the bomb no longer works, prompting the military forces outside Gotham to invade.  She then persuades Bane and friends that all is lost and they need to get out of there.  Then once they're a safe distance away, blow up Gotham, wiping out the soldiers and most of the city's residents.

At least that's the plan.  I imagine Batman would have something to say about that.  :D

Also, having the military invade Gotham would be better than having a bunch of police who've been trapped underground for five months Zerg-rushing Bane's goons without any tactical sense whatsoever.  If Talia, Bane, and their loyalists are fleeing via some secret tunnel, that might also explain how Batman was able to sneak back into Gotham unnoticed.

In Memorium: Mikaela Banes (Transformers)

This post is a little out-of-date in terms of the subject matter, but Transformers: The Dark of the Moon hasn't come out yet, so it could still be appropriate.

By now, I imagine everybody has heard that Megan Fox will not be returning for the film and that her character Mikaela Banes has been replaced with a new character named Carly, who appeared in the original series as the girlfriend and later wife of the original "Spike" Witwicky.

However much I can understand why Michael Bay would not want Megan Fox around (really, publicly comparing a Jewish director to Hitler was not cool), replacing Mikaela with an entirely new character rather than simply recasting her (as was done when Katie Holmes did not wish to return for The Dark Knight) is really going to be problematic for the story.

Let's see--given Sam's age and fixation on cars and girls in the first movie, chances are Mikaela was his first girlfriend.  And due to the whole alien-invasion thing, they'd been through a colossal amount of crap together, crap that could break a lesser couple.  Ending such a relationship would be extremely difficult to say the least--what problems people in a relationship typically have compare to surviving repeated attacks by evil extraterrestrials and a near-death experience?

Given how they re-shot the scenes Fox had already performed with the new actress playing the new character, it seems to me they'll simply shoehorn Carly in Mikaela's place without an explanation and that would just be gorram ridiculous.

The only thing I can possibly think of that could explain this in a non-idiotic manner is if Mikaela's dad was the cause of the problem.  In the first movie, Sam freaks out upon learning of Mikaela's criminal background (she said her crime was refusing to testify against her dad, but she *does* know how to hot-wire cars).  If her father backslides into his criminal ways and Mikaela refuses to cut ties with him (as would be in-character), that could be a major problem for Sam.

If this were the cause of the breakup I've read about, it left Sam seriously despondent (as it likely would), and it was Carly who pulled him out of it, I could buy Mikaela being replaced by an entirely new character.

But given the plot problems that Revenge of the Fallen had, something tells me including an intelligent explanation is not going to happen.  I don't despise Michael Bay like some people do, but when a film wastes its potential to the point it inspires one to write a "fix fic" to do it better (my story The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot), that's pretty bad.

And I'm probably one of the few people who actually like the character of Mikaela Banes.  Most people thought she was basically there to have Megan Fox run around looking hot (and were quite satisfied) and/or provide a "trophy" for Sam, but she was a lot more developed than that.

*Firstly, she had a particular skill--her mechanical abilities.  And these skills actually played a part in the story, when she hot-wired a tow-truck to pull a wounded Bumblebee back into battle at the end of the first film.  She didn't just stand around looking pretty.

*Secondly, she was not some cliched damsel-in-distress.  When the Decepticon spy Frenzy attacked her and Sam in the first film, if I remember right she cut him in half with a chainsaw while Sam was the one who panicked.  In the second film, she tortured and interrogated the Decepticon spy Wheelie and broke him to the point he became her adoring pseudo-pet.  Torturing another being requires a great deal of personal steel, since most people have built-in inhibitions against deliberately causing pain.

*Thirdly, although a female member of my alternate-history forum wrote this off as "being at the mercy" of her father and boyfriend, her refusal to testify against her father when he has committed crimes (based on her comments, I imagine he was running a chop-shop working on stolen cars) and helping him readjust when he gets out of jail rather than following Sam to the East Coast, her staying with Sam no matter how much personal danger it puts her in, and her rescuing him from the LustBot when she has every reason to think Sam is cheating on her with a human girl shows that her character values loyalty.

I've gotten into arguments over this, once with a female member of my writing group (who eventually conceded Mikaela was a "weak character" instead of a trophy) and once with an author at DragonCon after the "what women want in speculative fiction" panel.  And since I'm writing all this here, I stand by this position.

If Transformers: Dark of the Moon does well, as it probably will, and Fox gets an attitude adjustment (something that hopefully came with the poor performances of Jennifer's Body and Jonah Hex), maybe they'll bring her character back for a fourth film?  That would be very interesting story-wise and could provide a reason for Mikaela's disappearance.

Not to mention geeky guys who identify with Sam would love seeing two pretty girls fighting over him.  :)

Anne Hathaway as Catwoman, Tom Hardy as Bane, in "The Dark Knight Rises"

http://www.slashfilm.com/anne-hathaway-catwoman-tom-hardy-bane-dark-knight-rises/

Hmm...good to see Anne Hathaway taking on a unique role.  Playing Catwoman (or perhaps the pre-Catwoman Selina Kyle) is certainly rather different from any role I'm aware she's played.

I don't know much about Tom Hardy, although I do own the comic book where Bane "breaks" Batman.  I remember someone online saying that they thought the next logical story in the Nolan Batman movies was "Knightfall"--Bane's defeat of Batman.  Plus Bane would be an interesting character--he's physically powerful enough to take on Batman, but he's also extremely intelligent.  He deliberately tired Batman out by breaking all the criminals out of Arkham before he attacked, after all.

A Comic Book Commentary

I was hanging around the East Cobb Borders this morning, killing time until I met up with a friend for lunch, and a comic book on the rack caught my eye.

It was Brave and the Bold #31, in which lesser-known DC hero Atom is paired off with the Joker.  It turns out that the Arkham Asylum medical staff needed help treating the Joker for a brain disease and Atom, against his better judgement, decided to help them.  Given his ability to shrink to microscopic size, he ended up literally getting inside the Joker's head.

It was there that he ended up viewing and being affected by the Joker's memories.  This gives us (drumroll) another Joker origin.

SPOILERS


In this one, the Joker clearly had issues from the beginning.  As a child, he pontificates to another child about how he's going to make the world as weird as he is.  Then he goes berserk on a bully to the point the bully needed stitches (and a meeting between his mother and the school principal makes it clear that excessive violence is a problem the kid has had before).  The next memory is him as a teenager, preparing his house to burn while his parents discuss how they know he's been torturing and killing dogs and cats (BIG sign of psychopathy).  The pre-Joker jams the doors shut and the next panel shows him walking away from the burning house.

We later see him and some hooligan types robbing a convenience and, just when they're about to leave, he shoots the shopkeeper for kicks.  Another gang member tells him that they had agreed not to actually kill anyone so the whole group wouldn't be charged with murder--the pre-Joker responds by telling him it's fun to kill and then shoots him for challenging him.  We later see a montage of Joker-related mayhem clearly based on The Dark Knight, including him robbing the bank and challenging Batman to hit him with his bike.

I'm not really a big DC comics aficionado (beyond having seen the films and being really good at mimicking the Heath Ledger Joker, much to friends' and siblings' aggravation).  I did like the artwork for this one, especially the creepy way the pre-Joker was drawn.  His green eyes in particular stood out.

However, I liked the Joker origin story in Batman: The Killing Joke better.

SPOILERS


In this one, the pre-Joker is an engineer at a chemical plant who quit his job to become a comedian.  He wasn't very successful and his wife was pregnant, so he let some gangsters talk him to sneaking them through his old factory so they could rob the place next door.  His wife and unborn child are killed in an accident and he tries to back out, only for the gangsters to outright bully him into going along.

They get into the factory (the pre-Joker wearing a costume to make it look like the gangsters are the accomplices of a supervillain) and Batman and the police intervene.  The pre-Joker ends up falling into a vat of chemicals and when he sees his disfigured face, he loses his mind.

This origin would explain his obsession with making people laugh (there's a scene where the pre-Joker complains to his wife about how nobody laughs when he tells jokes) and his technical skills, as well as him trying to prove the world is as bad as he is (the graphic novel revolves around him trying to prove "one bad day" would affect Commissioner Gordon as severely as it affected him).  It would also make him more human (and thus a more complex character), as opposed to the born-evil "bad seed" of The Brave and the Bold.

Of course, even in the primary Batman canon, the Joker's origin isn't entirely clear.  The Wikipedia has a quote from TKJ in which the Joker comments on how, as far as his past is concerned, he'd like it to be multiple choice.  It also has other scenarios besides TKJ and The Brave and Bold (which I added earlier today).

Any comments?