Tag Archives: Batman

Whenever I think about Ben Affleck as the new Batman, I can’t stop that episode of South Park from playing in my head, the one where his long-lost biological parents have butts for faces

Everybody’s talking about Ben Affleck being cast as Batman in the new Superman movies. Well, almost everybody. I doubt the Dalai Llama is talking about it. But you know what, that’s not really fair of me, just assuming that His Holiness isn’t a fan of superhero movies. So I’ll rephrase it: a lot of people are talking about Ben Affleck taking over as Batman.

My immediate reaction was pure disbelief. And while I don’t want to let my instinctual, “You’ve got to be kidding me!” prevent me from giving Affleck a fair shake, it’s really pretty tough to imagine him as the Caped Crusader. Do we have to get into Daredevil?

All right, let’s get into Daredevil. Superhero movies were just beginning to breach the mainstream. The X-Men and Spider-Man franchises were such undeniable hits that Hollywood decided to dip into the Marvel canon to see which other costumed crime fighters might make for successful big screen blockbusters.

And that’s how we got Daredevil. It was a cheesy movie. And I’m being nice here. Go ahead and search the Internet for other opinions or reviews about Daredevil. Some point to it as the reason why Hollywood should be out of the comic book movie business all together. And fair or not, Ben Affleck is the lead. Draped in his red leather jumpsuit, Ben Affleck is Daredevil.

Affleck should feel lucky that Daredevil didn’t derail his career in the same way that Catwoman destroyed Halle Berry’s. And we as an audience should feel fortunate that Daredevil didn’t prevent the studios from going ahead and green lighting future superhero projects. Just imagine what could have went down if the exec who approved Batman Begins had happened to catch a few minutes of Dardevil playing on FX right before he was scheduled to sit down with Christopher Nolan. I shudder to think of a world absent of The Dark Knight.

Which is why casting Affleck as the new Batman amounts to six steps backward after three monumental steps in the right direction. I kind of understand where DC is coming from. Marvel Comics clearly holds the advantage in terms of its ability to turn even its tertiary characters into big screen behemoths, and after The Dark Knight Rises wrapped up one of the most successful trilogies in movie history, everybody was eager to maintain the momentum.

That’s why we had Man of Steel earlier this year. And I get it, in terms of its money making ability, the new Superman was an undisputed success. But was it a good movie? I didn’t think so. It was too serious, and once the fight scene that comprised the entire second half of the movie got underway, it was too boring.

Still, numbers don’t lie, and adding a rebooted Batman to the equation, especially in light of The Avengers super-group success, it was the next logical decision. What doesn’t make sense is Ben Affleck. With moviegoers around the world more than willing to pay upwards of twenty dollars to see a movie that hasn’t even begun filming, why risk spoiling the fun with a man whose talents clearly belong behind the camera rather than in front?

I realize that I’m not even giving Ben Affleck a chance to prove me wrong, but he just doesn’t make sense as Bruce Wayne. I don’t see pain, I don’t see a lifetime of training to fight crime, I just see Ben Affleck, I see Daredevil, I see the guy in the Runner Runner commercials screaming over-the-top obscenities at Justin Timberlake.

I hope that I’m wrong. Nobody wants to see a successful Batman/Superman movie more than me. Well that’s probably not true, there are probably other people who want to see it succeed more than I do, like people who have a vested interest in its performing well. Like Ben Affleck, I’m sure he wants it to succeed more than I do, to prove everybody wrong, to give the Bruce Wayne performance of a lifetime. If I see it, and it bombs, I’ll just be like, well, that was a bad movie. If he makes it and it’s no good … well, I guess he’ll still be OK. He got past Daredevil. Right? Yeah, Ben Affleck’s going to be OK either way.

These comic books don’t make any sense

I’m always thinking about comic books, about superheroes, and I know it’s really nerdy to ask questions, to point out inconsistencies, but sometimes I’m just like, I can’t take it any more, I need to bring this stuff up, I can’t enjoy the stories because these glaring problems are just stuck right in the center of my mind.

Like Spider-Man, right? Just try gettin past the fact that if he wanted to do some serious good, he could’ve sold his webbing device to a huge company, he could have made billions on his inventions. With those profits, he could have financed like a professional crime fighting operation. Think about what Batman did with his billions. He bought all sorts of ridiculous stuff. But Spider-Man’s always thinking small, just using his webbing to get from point A to point B, living in poverty, barely scraping out a living.

OK forget about that, just accept the fact that he’s this scientific genius that can’t figure out how to make any money. What about his wall-crawling powers? How are those supposed to work? Like, in the Spider-Man movies, it’s these little microscopic spider claw things that come out of his skin, which I don’t buy, because if I did buy it, what happens when he puts on his costume? Those micro-claws are supposed to be able to get through the material and then cling onto whatever it is he’s crawling up? Sorry, I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make any sense.

Let’s go back to Batman for a second. Don’t think he’s getting off just because I was commenting before on how wisely he spends his money, buying all of his bat-equipment, his bat-planes, and bat-mobiles, and bat-cycles, and bat-copters. My problem is, OK, sometimes the police are after him, like think about the second Batman movie. Right? And they’re like, “Who is Batman? Why can’t we figure this out?”

And I’m just like, are you serious? Get a police helicopter or a police plane or something, or call up the army and have them put one of those drones in the sky, right? And just point a bunch of cameras or satellites down at the earth, and the next time Batman takes his giant car or plane or experimental waterskis out for a spin, just follow it wherever it goes. It’s not that hard. We live in a really sophisticated world. The police could watch the bat-mobile driving away to some hole by the road. OK, now go check that road out. Now call for backup. There you go, that’s the bat-cave. It can’t be that hard.

Like it’s the same with the X-Men. Where the hell are you going to get some giant invisible supersonic airplane? And the air traffic controllers, what, they don’t see any blips on their equipment when they’re directing traffic? Cyclops, like what kind of flight training does this guy have? How come he’s never crashing into any other planes? And again, the military doesn’t notice these jets everywhere? You’d think they’d see it immediately and get on it, find out where it is, who owns it. Is it the Russians? The Chinese? Terrorists? No, it’s the fucking X-Men, but still.

And while I’m on the X-Men, come on, so Cyclops can blast laser beams from his eyes but what, his eyelids don’t get blown off? And Wolverine, whatever, you’ve got metal bones, you don’t age, fine. But what’s with that haircut? What kind of a person wakes up in the morning, sees that both sides of his hair stick straight up in these weird spikes, and thinks to himself, huh, OK, that’s a pretty good look. What, and then he designed his costume to make sure that those spikes stayed in place? What kind of a statement is he trying to make? I don’t understand.

I don’t get why the Green Lantern’s powers don’t work against the color yellow. Isn’t the color green just a mix of the colors blue and yellow? So how can green even work at all then if it’s really just half yellow? And what about orange? That’s half yellow also. What about when he has to pee, that’s yellow, does it hurt coming out? Does it take away from his powers? The sun’s yellow. How is he able to walk around outside during the daytime without getting hurt?

How is the Flash able to breathe when he’s running so fast? How are his shoes not wearing out every time he runs a couple of laps around the world? How is Mr. Fantastic’s costume able to stretch exactly like Mr. Fantastic stretches? What is it painted on? How come Ice Man isn’t soaking wet every time he de-ices? What, does it go from ice to air? How does it do that without going to liquid first?

And what about Superman? He never makes a mistake? He never gets bored, or lazy? What’s the super-equivalent of throwing a gum wrapper on the ground because nobody’s looking and you just really don’t feel like holding that wrapper anymore, looking for a garbage can, never finding any garbage cans? You don’t think he ever makes a mistake like that? Like, OK, I just saved this rocket from crash landing out of orbit, but I don’t feel like figuring out what I’m supposed to do with all of this debris. Do I have to bring it to the government? Are they going to ask me to just hold on a second while they figure out which branch of the military has to take care of this? Or is it more like, jeez, I’m tired, I just caught this rocket, and I’m really hungry, and I don’t feel like dealing with this anymore, so nobody’s looking, I’ll just toss it in the ocean. Come on, somebody make a story like that, give me something to relate to. Everything’s just so unbelievable.

I’m going to climb to the top of the Queensboro Bridge

Whenever I cross the Queensboro Bridge, I always get this urge to get off my bike and climb to the top. It looks so easy. Batman did it in The Dark Knight Rises. He’s just standing on top, staring at the city, planning out that whole part where he makes that line of gasoline that goes all the way from the base of the East River to the top, where it’s shaped like a flaming bat. I want to do it too, minus the flaming bat. It doesn’t even look that tall. Like, if I could just get past my fear of heights, if I could just focus on one step at a time, like a ladder, or not one step at a time, but one rung at a time, I’m sure I could be standing on the top in no time.

A couple of years ago there were like three guys that climbed to the top of the New York Times building. The whole thing is wrapped in these bars, something to do with green energy, I’m not really sure. But it’s also shaped exactly like a ladder. And so first, this guy who’s famous for climbing buildings, he did it. And then some other guy did it, and then another guy, until they had to remove the bars from the bottom floors.

So there’s definitely that urge. Sometimes the urge is barely there. Sometimes it’s all I can do to block it out of my head. When it’s at it’s strongest, I’ll look up from right underneath and picture myself doing it, where I’d start, at what pace I’d have to climb. I look at gaps in between some of the larger expanses of cable and steel and imagine how I’d realistically be able to make it across.

I’m confident that I could make it to the top, no problem. But will I ever get the chance? New York’s a pretty tightly guarded city. There are cameras everywhere. I don’t doubt for a second that if anything ever goes even the slightest bit off on one of the bridges or tunnels, the police must know about it almost instantly. One time I was riding my bike across and there were these weird graffiti tags spaced about every ten feet apart. I got to the middle of the bridge and there were like twenty cops surrounding this guy with cans of spray paint. If that guy couldn’t get away with his stunt, I doubt I’d be able to get away with mine.

Or maybe I’d be able to at least get started. I’d get like a quarter of the way up before someone notices what I’m up to. I’d have to travel light, so as not to give an impression that I’m carrying any sort of bomb or weapon. The crazier part of my imagination is cooking up some scenario where the police commissioner is staring at a TV screen somewhere, barking orders into a walkie-talkie, “Take him down! Now!” and some lieutenant would be like, “But commish, he doesn’t look like he’s up to no good … he’s just climbing.” But nobody wants to take that type of risk, not post-post-9/11, and so maybe they’d off me, cover up the operation, I’d die in obscurity, not ever having made it to the top.

Getting all the way up would be easy. And once I got up there, I’d bask in the view. I’d do a Batman pose and pretend like I’m reenacting the moment right before he took back the city from Bane. And then I’d probably just wait, frozen. Because while going up seems easy, climbing back down, that’s got to be tough. Making sure you have a controlled descent. I don’t know why, I imagine climbing up and I’m fine, but I imagine coming back down, and that kind of gets my palms all sweaty.

I’ll definitely do it someday. Maybe I’ll definitely do it someday. Probably. I always think, what’s stopping me? Fear? Of what? Getting in trouble? What are they going to do, lock me up? For how long? I’ll get out eventually, and I’ll never have to think about what it would be like to climb up, because I’d have already done it. And so I won’t have that nagging sensation in the back of my brain, every time I ride my bike to work, come on Rob, just do it, it looks so easy, you’re going to be an old man someday and you won’t be able to then even if you wanted to. You can totally make it up, come on, don’t be a weenie, just do it.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises: Part 2: Of the Review

I wrote last summer about how obsessed I was with the new Batman movie. It’s been a while now, but the obsession hasn’t diminished. In fact, I think that I’m even more obsessed with it now than I was when I saw it the first time. Or the second time. Ever since movie theaters stopped showing it, and because I haven’t yet bought it on DVD, I have no way to satisfy the gaping hole in the core of my very being that cries out on a daily basis for more Batman. Seriously, that movie was f’n ridiculous.

You remember the beginning? That airplane scene? I can’t think of any movie that’s had a more gripping or a more dramatic opening. Remember when they dragged those hostages onto the plane and the CIA agent pulls off the one hostage’s mask, and it’s Bane, and he’s wearing his breathing mask, and the CIA guy says to Bane, “Will it hurt if I take off this mask?” and Bane goes, “Yes … for you!” Seriously, remember that scene? Right before he somehow gets out of his handcuffs, and then the other plane comes out of nowhere and somehow Bane escapes? I think I actually passed out from excitement during those first five minutes. I must have, because when I saw it the second time, I was like, wait a second, I don’t remember exactly what happened. I have a sense memory of euphoria, followed by a warm and fuzzy sensation, so yeah, I must have fainted. I can’t wait to see it again because, maybe I lost consciousness during the second viewing also, and so it’ll only be after repeated viewing that I’ll be desensitized enough to actually make it through the entire movie awake. I’ve never been more hopped up on visual stimuli than I was when I saw Batman.

Seriously, sometimes when I’m sitting around with my friends, I’ll just go, totally unprompted, into the whole, “Yes … for you!” bit. And maybe nobody will get it. Maybe only some of the people will get it. Even if you get it, it’s a pretty random thing to just say, totally out of context from whatever else we might be doing or talking about. But it’s so awesome. Bane was such a badass bad guy.

And if you haven’t seen the movie, one, I have a little piece of advice: go see the movie. It’s so amazing. I’ve tried watching other movies since I’ve seen Batman, but they’ve all been terrible. That’s not to say that they’re terrible movies, although they might be. All I’m saying is, Batman is such a good movie, hold on, such a good film, that it’s going to ruin movies for you for the rest of your life. And films. It’s like that whole every square is a parallelogram but not every parallelogram is a square thing, but with movies and films, and Batman, and Batman is the film. Get it? What I’m getting at here is after you watch Batman, you realize that nothing else is ever going to come close to making you feel the way you did when you saw Batman for the first, second, third, five-hundredth time.

So you might be saying to yourself, why would I want to go see Batman? If it’s going to ruin the movies for me altogether, why bother? Because. It’s so fucking awesome. Even though you’ll never be able to watch another movie again, it’ll totally be worth it, to see Batman, to see The Dark Knight Returns. And besides, you won’t ever have to go see another movie again. Because eventually it’ll be released on DVD, or Blue-Ray, or whatever format happens to be the current standard, and any time you hear colleagues or family members talking about how much they loved a recent picture that came out, you can just go home and pop Batman in, and I’m serious here, I guarantee that you’ll be having a better time watching Batman over and over and over and over again than all of your friends and family watching all of those other movies combined, at the same time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense until you see it. I hope you already saw it.

And that opening scene? The whole “For you!” part that I was talking about before? It only gets better. I remember when I wrote my original Batman review, I was still a little bitter with my wife, because she made me wait to see Prometheus with her, but then she quickly lost interest in seeing Prometheus all together, and so we never wound up seeing it. I thought this was a bad thing. I thought I was being held back. And that’s one of the reasons I went to see Batman by myself, behind my wife’s back, while she was at school.

And when I finally did see Prometheus, I was left totally underwhelmed. Angry, even. It was more of a confusion that gradually built up to anger as I contemplated what Ridley Scott had just snuck up from behind and shoved my face in, but this is all really small minded of me. Now that I’m a couple of months removed from Batman, I can safely say that God himself purposely made Prometheus turn out to be a totally terrible movie, if only to show me that my wife wasn’t about to let me see a huge summer blockbuster by myself, and when I missed the Prometheus train entirely, I realized that I couldn’t let the same mistake happen with Batman. And so, if Prometheus hadn’t sucked so bad, maybe I would have waited for my wife to take a break from her books to see Batman with me, and in this scenario, maybe we would have never seen it, and I’m forced right now to contemplate a reality in which I’ve never seen Batman. And I can’t stand to even think about it. But then I think about all of the other alternate realities, universes in which I’ve never seen Batman, and it makes me crazy, to try and imagine a version of me that hasn’t seen Batman, that doesn’t recognize it as the greatest film in the multiverse, and that thought makes me insane with despair. And so if somebody ever invents a machine to travel to parallel universes, that’s going to be the only thing that I’ll want to do, to hop around from Earth to Earth, warning any potential Rob’s to see Batman immediately. But I’d also need a time machine, so I could first travel to the alternate world, and then go back in the past, back to this summer, when Batman came out, and I’ll grab myself by the collar and say, “Go see Batman, now!” But what if he’s like, “Batman? What? Who’s Batman?” And I’ll have realized that maybe I’ve accidentally travelled to a world where there is no Batman. And that’s too much. It’s too much to even think about. And so I’ll have to travel back to my original reality, kidnap Chris Nolan, and take him with me, to that and every other parallel universe where Batman doesn’t exist. And I’ll threaten him, scream at him “Make the Batman movie! Or I’ll never take you back to our Earth! Now!” And he’ll have to. And I know, it’s crazy, because there are probably an infinite number of worlds out there, and so I probably won’t have time to take Christopher Nolan to every single alternate reality. But I’ll try as hard as I can. Because that movie was so fucking sick, so unbelievably amazing. And so if all I’m doing is just increasing the number of realities where Batman exists, even if it’s just a handful of worlds, then it’s all worth it. I just … I just … I just, really, really, really, really love that movie.

It’s another one of those posts where I talk about going back in time and talking to a bunch of cavemen about how much better the future is than the lame past they’re all living in

I haven’t talked about the future in a while. Sometimes I get on these kicks where all I can think about is time travel and space portals to distant dimensions, or even not-so-distant dimensions, like dimensions that might occupy the same space that we’re occupying right now, but just on another plane, (whatever that means) so everything’s happening right around us, but at the same time totally removed. Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about stuff like that. Ever since I saw Batman really. I already wrote pretty extensively about how I thought Batman was so amazing, but it’s gotten past the point of ridiculousness. Like I never think about any of that other cool future stuff anymore because my mind’s still chewing on The Dark Knight Rises. I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago – I know, I’ve written about that a lot too lately – and while I was there I saw Batman again, but this time in Spanish. I thought that maybe seeing it all dubbed up would maybe loosen its grip from my mind, but if anything, it just made it even stronger, because I feel its appeal is universal, not just limited to American audiences.

But the Batman is wearing off of for a second and I’m starting to think about the future again. Or the past. I was thinking about imagining up a time machine and going back in time, like way back, no, even further back than that, to visit some of the very first human beings. Genetically, we’d have to be almost identical, right? I mean, we’d be the same species and everything. But how would we communicate? Language isn’t something that comes preloaded into our brains, which is kind of stupid if you think about it. You don’t have to teach a puppy how to bark, it just does it. One time I took this medieval history class in college and the professor was talking about one of those crazy medieval kings and how, at the time, there existed this rumor or legend that if you left babies to grow up without any parents or other humans around, they’d naturally start speaking Hebrew. So this crazy king locked up a bunch of babies in isolation, but they just cried and cried and eventually died. I always wondered if that professor wasn’t just full of shit, but to be perfectly honest, I actually haven’t thought about that class probably since I took it. I have no idea why that little anecdote just popped in my head.

But back to my little thought experiment. What would it be like to be a member of the very first generation of human beings? All of the sudden these people are just aware of the universe in a way that only humans are. But they can’t talk to each other. What do they do, just grunt, point, throw rocks? And they have to hunt everything to eat. And they don’t have any parents telling them not to eat all those poisonous but tasty looking berries, and so a bunch of them probably died right off the bat. And they can’t write. How does that first generation teach itself to be potty trained? How do they know not to drink their own pee? I’d like to go back and talk to them, or communicate with them somehow. I’m sure I could teach at least one of them enough English for a conversation.

And I’d be like, “Hello! I’m your great-great-great-great-great-great-(you get the idea, right?)-grandson! Being a human in the future is so cool. We have everything. Clothes, TV, Internet. It’s all so awesome. We have so much time to just sit around and chill out and drink. Oh yeah, you guys haven’t even invented alcohol yet. Well, it’s awesome. And so is McDonald’s. Trust me, whatever you guys are doing to get us all to that point, keep up the good work. OK, bye!”

But then I’m thinking a few things. I’m thinking first that, would it even be possible for those really early humans to understand exactly what I’m trying to say? Could they imagine all of the wonders I’d be telling them about? Or would they think I’m full of shit? I always picture my grandparents, growing up during the Great Depression, sharing a baked potato for dinner with their entire extended family. Even if I could tell them then about all of the technological breakthroughs we’ve made since then, all of the abundance our society has come not only to love, but to expect, to demand, would they even be capable of believing me?

In the 1960s, Star Trek gave us all the idea for cell phones. But did the people watching it back then really imagine we’d actually all have them just fifty years later? And not even that, but our cell phones are even better, much cooler than what they had in Star Trek. Sure, we’re not in space, like visiting aliens or anything, and yeah, we can’t transport stuff. That is, not yet. What’s the world going to be like when I’m eighty? Maybe there will be transporters. I’m guessing there will have to be a few Holodecks. That’s going to change everything. But right now it’s all pure imagination and I can’t really get myself to picture it happening.

And then I’m thinking that there’s no way this caveman would get it, and I’d try to explain it for a while, but then what if he did get it, and was just pretending not to get it? He’d think to himself, why the hell did this clown come back from the future, to rub it in my face how much better he has it than I do? And when I least expect it, he’ll knock me out, take my time machine, and take my place in the future, watching TV, going to see Batman again, downloading stuff from the Internet. And I’ll be stuck there, trying to outrun a herd of elk or whatever animal it is that they hunted back then, but I’ll be so out of my element. I’ll never catch one of them. And even if I do, what am I going to do with it, eat it raw? I’ve never made a fire out of sticks before. I’d have no idea how to even start. I’d probably just get a huge blister on my hand and it would get infected, but antibiotics wouldn’t exist yet, so I’d try eating some mold or something, because I heard that’s where the inventor of penicillin got it from, but this wouldn’t work, because you have to do something to the mold first before it turns into medicine, and I’d probably get even sicker.

And I’d lay there dying, hungry, alone, and centuries later some archeologists would find my bones and the leftovers of my iPhone, because right before I died, and right before my phone died in the past, I’d record a video, I’d say, if you’re seeing this video in the future, it’s because I got stuck in the past, please, please send a crew back in time to help me, to find that caveman who switched places with me. But that caveman was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for, because one of the first things he’d do upon arriving in the future is to pose as an archeologist, find my remains, and destroy the phone before any real scientists could get their hands on it.

All this stuff sounds crazy, but not as crazy as all the stuff today must have sounded in the past. That’s my whole point. That today, more than at any other point in history, we can really look around and look back and forward and think to ourselves that there’s truly no limit to what’s coming, holodecks, time machines, World War VIII, everything. It all has to happen. And I’m calling it. Call me a futurologist. Seriously, call me that.