fantastic_four

That Mezco Conan looks really, really good.

All I see is Gollum every time I see Andy Serkis, but I liked him fine as Alfred.

One thing I REALLY liked about this Batman was how he didn't look like he gave a jack about anyone in his way. Oh, you're standing there being menacing? I don't care at all, I'm walking right past or through you like you're not even there. What's this, you're dumb enough to try to stop me? OK, fine, I'll kick your arse in one to two seconds, then. This Batman was all offense, all the time, and I loved that. The only time I recall him taking any kind of defensive stance was when Selina first met him and was trying to attack him, and then he just easily deflected every kick or punch she threw at him, no sweat, no chance.

I thought for sure they were arrows for some sort of crossbow, but they weren't used in the movie.. or did we miss it? If they're crossbow bolts we definitely didn't see him use them that way. If they're a more readily-available version of a grapple gun then we saw him use them many times. I wondered what they were several times but figured there would be a clearer shot where we saw what they are, but I never saw any scene that clearly illustrated what they are. And I now don't recall if he had a device in his hand when he fired his grappling hook.

Bruce Wayne is easy to play so he's hard to mess up. He's an obsessed one-note dude. Daredevil is similar. I never understand any praise or scorn laid upon anyone who has played Bruce, nor did I get the scorn laid upon Affleck for his Matt Murdock. Everyone who's ever played him is fine, although my favorite to date even though I disliked the films he was in was Affleck as Wayne. There's not a ton of acting required for the character. As long as whoever is playing Wayne is somewhat big, fit, and a decent physical actor they're fine. I generally liked Pattinson acting semi-depressed in this film, but anything Wayne does is such a minor part of any Batman film it didn't really matter much and I would've been fine if he was more like Nolan's Wayne, or Burton's Wayne, or whoever's version of the character. All of the director and actor versions are similar enough to where I barely care which gets inserted in.

Wasn't a fan of Catwoman but that's me and I knew it going in. I'm partial to tall, curvy women with long hair, so I was always going to prefer Anne Hathaway to Zoe Kravitz. Julie Newmar is still my ultimate Catwoman for all the wrong "male gaze" reasons, although I still like Michelle Pfeiffer's performance and suit better than all the others.

Is that the most frequent instrumental we were hearing? I thought it was multiple remixes of Nirvana's "Something in the Way." They played parts of that song at least twice with fragments of the lyrics spoken, and I thought I heard multiple very slow remixes of it along the way as well.

What were those long, silver things on Batman's forearms? You can see them in the pic below; there are five of them. Arrows? Multiple grapple gun shots?

WTF? When was this released? Marvel mostly ate DC's lunch around this time, so watching DC try to denigrate the characters that were killing them is ironically funny.

When Bruce was fighting the Riddler guys up on the platform at one point it looks like they've wounded him severely and he can't even walk or stand up, but then he presses some kind of button-like thing on his leg and can suddenly walk. What was happening there? Was it a morphine or adrenaline injection release mechanism?

I was impressed by the Penguin makeup...but why? There are dozens of guys who look like that naturally, like Paul Giamatti. I was impressed for a few minutes, then got tired of looking at it. I'm not particularly looking forward to the supposed Penguin series we're getting on HBO Max, but who knows, maybe it'll be great.

I just realized that I've mostly heard that in previous Batman works. I think Danny DeVito's Penguin called Batman a flying rat in Returns, and I know I remember Joker calling him a flying rat in Killing Joke.

Don't know how to feel about the film yet other than I definitely don't need to search for any new vocabulary for awesomeness like I did after seeing The Dark Knight. I'm seeing it again next weekend and kind of want to not think about it in comparison to other Batmans for a while, because my gut for now is that it's well above the majority of them but significantly below all three Nolan films. Yet I clearly see it's above those in certain aspects, just not in ways I find as compelling as I did the Nolan films. What I can absolutely say that I can't imagine I'll flip on is that both the writing for Riddler as well as Dano's performance as him isn't half as compelling as Goyer's writing on Joker or Ledger's performance as him. He was good, but FAR from great. I thought Tom Hardy as Bane was pretty good but not terribly memorable, and I much prefer Hardy's Bane to Dano's Riddler. I could see myself prefering Dano to Hardy after more reflection, but not after one viewing. Part of me dreads seeing this again because it should NOT have been three hours and I'm not sure it'll hold my attention for another three. And I could have done without the Joker scene. Apparently there was originally two Joker scenes--one early on that was more significant, and then the one we got. Reeves pulled both out in an earlier cut, but then re-added the last one. He should have yanked it and substituted something else showing Riddler reacting to his plan getting foiled because I didn't find him all that compelling and he was severely distracting from watching Riddler's reaction.

Perhaps I'm out of the norm in being a lifelong animal and wildlife lover, but all ll I kept wondering was how the heck are these two guys thinking a "winged rat" could ever be a stool pigeon or a penguin. Pigeons don't look anything like rats, and most penguin species are WAAY bigger than rats, and even the smaller penguins are at best still a bit bigger than the larger rats. I've heard bats referred to multiple times as "winged rats," however, because both bats and rats are notorious disease carriers, a fact we're all particularly well aware of now since that's the best guess for the origin of SARS and SARS-CoV-2. Rip the wings off of any penguin species and you've got a bowling pin waddling around on two legs. Rip the wings off a bat and it looks just like a creepy rat or mouse running around on all fours. Where does anyone get the idea that rats and penguins are at all similar?

How did Dano's performance compare to Ledger's? I rank Ledger second-best among villain performances across ALL films. Anthony Hopkins as Lecter is first, Ledger second, Bardem as Anton Chigurh in "No Country For Old Men" third. The truly transformational element with Ledger is he was the first Joker who didn't feel like a caricature of villainy. I loved Nicholson's Joker a TON, but he was really hamming it up. Ledger just looked nuts in that role. Dano looks like he COULD be similar in the trailers, but we'll see.

Where do you place it in comparison to the three Nolan films? That's my biggest question going into it, how it will compare to that trilogy. I rank the Nolan trilogy as Dark Knight - Begins - Rises. I'm hopeful this film fits between Begins and Rises, but we'll see if it's better than Rises. I'll be shocked if it exceeds Begins, but if it does, great! I'll need to find a word stronger than "shocked" to describe whatever film eventually eclipses TDK. I was a lump of jelly after that film was over. I thought it would be good, but I was floored it was as good as it turned out to be.

What separates one a-hole connoisseur from another is that some people's a-holes are more reasonable, rational, and well thought-out as compared to others.

I also really liked him in that role from Little Miss Sunshine, but I will always remember him first weeping as Daniel Day-Lewis tells him that he drinks his milkshake. I've always wanted to create a list of the best scenes in film history, and this one is DEFINITELY somewhere in the top fifty.

Not even close for me. There are way too many good comic book movies to reference now in a ranking beyond just modern DC and Marvel. Oops, my bad, I glossed over "comic book movie" as "superhero movie" which is the only thing I rank since superheroes are so endemic to comics. Plenty of comic book stories have nothing to do with superheroes so they're definitely two different sets of rankings.

Riddler was better He wasn't better than Ledger's Joker though, was he? I've been skeptical of the glimpses of Riddler we've seen in the trailers. I have HIGH confidence in Paul Dano and absolutely loved him in There Will Be Blood, but I wasn't sure about Reeves's take here. I see potential in the trailers , but I couldn't tell much beyond that.

Not even close Agreed. It's definitely top twenty though, and I rank it tenth best ever.

Any idea where I can find the full story you're referring to? I know a lot about the Lee/Kirby dynamic, but him intentionally holding back ideas starting at a specific point in time isn't ringing a bell. Was he pissed at Stan, Martin Goodman, or both of them? And is it conjecture, or is there direct evidence of it? Kirby didn't usually speak his mind publicly so I know most of what we know about him is either reverse-engineered from his work or based upon hearsay from others, particularly Stan Lee. It certainly makes general sense given that he left Marvel 2 to 3 years after FF 68 released.

There's a movie that came out, oh, it seems not all that long ago where Bruce spent the ENTIRE film using his detective skills to fight the mob and find Joker. Maybe they didn't see it? It's called "The Dark Knight," and it's only the finest superhero film released to date. Techniques he used include: Irradiating money to track its use by Maroney and his mafia buddies Remote-controlling the Batmobile in the parking garage so he could take Scarecrow, the Chechen, and the vigilante Batman group by surprise Staging a yacht cruise with the entire cast of a Gotham ballet as an alibi for where he would be, planting a sonar phone in Lau's Hong Kong tower to disable power and track people within the building, setting charges to detonate at a specific time to break the windows, and timing his cargo plane to fly over shortly after the charges went off to whisk Lau out of the building Wiretapping 911 calls to listen for reports of the Joker's activity Digging bullets out of a wall and reconstructing them to get fingerprints off of the shells Matching the fingerprints to a person at an address that overlooked the funeral of Commissioner Loeb Interrogating Maroney to find the Joker's location Going along with Dent's plan to draw out Joker by claiming he was Batman while Bruce shadowed his paddy wagon waiting for Joker to strike Interrogating Joker Identifying the names of Gotham police officers with relatives in Gotham hospitals anticipating that they would be motivated to kill Reese before he revealed Batman's identity so that Joker wouldn't blow up a hospital Shadowing the police car Reese was in to prevent citizens from killing him Using his cell phone radar tech to use every cell phone in Gotham to act as a sonar to locate Joker Scouting the building Joker was in with his hostages to make sure the people who looked like doctors and henchmen were indeed doctors and henchmen Collaborating with Gordon to falsify evidence to make it look like Batman killed all of the people Harvey Dent killed So I'm left feeling very, very confused by all of these reviews suggesting we're suddenly getting our first taste of Batman as a detective. Perhaps they're thinking that using your intellect to track down criminals only counts if you don't use expensive technology to do it?

I like a line from this review comparing it to Dark Knight while also comparing it to two other really good detective films: http://grouchoreviews.com/reviews/5201

Review-wise this is settling in right around the level of critical praise Batman Begins received. That's good company to be in. I agreed with critical assessment of Begins back in 2005 (7.7 / 10.0 average Rotten Tomatoes rating, 84% Tomatometer) because I wasn't as big a fan of the second half of the film as the first half. I flipped my opinion about the second half of Begins about a year before Dark Knight was released after five or so viewings in 2006 and 2007 and thought Begins was severely underrated and that the second half was absolutely excellent. The origin story is superb, but the attack by Ra's on Gotham while enjoyable isn't at the same level. Iron Man mostly parallels this--superb origin first half, less-spectacular second half as each hero faces their first villain, but comparatively the second half of Begins is FAR superior to the second half of Iron Man and Stark's fight against Stane and Iron Monger. I still rate Begins as the third-best superhero film made to date, although if you overwrote the quality of the first half of the film with that of the second half it almost certainly wouldn't crack the top 20. We're hearing what's working against this film that was easy to guess before the reviews came out--it's too long at three hours. Despite now loving the second half of Begins which is 2 hours 20 minutes I still think there's a better version of that film that's closer to 2 hours that reduces the amount of content in the second half. Reviewers are currently saying the middle of this new film has some fat to trim, but we'll see.