Update

So, the bad news is that my Batman project seems to have failed. I couldn't track down the Adam West version, and I can't figure out how to revive my VCR and play my old 1995-era videotape of Batman Forever. The good news is that I'm seeing The Dark Knight at midnight tonight, so I should have my thoughts up on that soonish.

Things I Find Tiresome This Week

Sure we get Dr. Horrible, new Hold Steady, and The Dark Knight this week, but that doesn't mean there's not tons of things I find tiresome:

Jib Jab - McCain's old! Obama likes change! Hilary's a bitch! Insightful stuff

The Coverage of the New Yorker Cover - The Congress voted to go ahead with impeachment hearings, and all we're hearing about is a stupid cartoon?

Katy Perry - I was in Europe and completely missed the rise of this song, but it is truly terrible

Summer TV - When does Mad Men start?

The hype for Inglorious Bastards - Can someone explain to me how this is going to be different from any other Quentin Tarantino movie?

Not releasing Where the Wild Things Are - If there's one thing we learned this summer, its that ambitious, creative children films are a poor bet.

Batman Week: Batman (1989)

Its difficult to remember now, but in 2006, when The Dark Knight was first in production, there was a lot of consternation over Nolan's choice to revive the Joker, because how could any performance possibly match up with Jack Nicholson's work in the 1989 Batman. It seems kind of silly now, given the deafening buzz that Heath Ledger's performance has received, but I remember a lot of people trying to convince me that bringing back the Joker would be a devastatingly poor choice for the series. After watching Batman, my view is quite different. In my opinion, while Jack Nicholson does a fine job with what he's given to do, the film and its interpretation of the Joker ultimately fail.

Although its called Batman, the film is really about the Joker. Batman's the first major character the audience sees, but after the first scene, he disappears. We don't even see the unmasked Bruce Wayne until about 20 minutes into the film. Instead, most of that time is filled introducing and developing Jack Napier. We learn about his work as a criminal, his illicit affair with the boss' wife, and his generally insane disposition. Before we even meet Bruce Wayne, the character that we're supposed to invest in and care about, we've spent 15 minutes learning about the problems and characteristics of Jack Napier.

This gets at the film's biggest problem, its complete indifference to Bruce Wayne. He's a bland and boring character who is just as empty at the end of the film as he is when we meet him. There's no reason to invest in his character because he doesn't do anything until he dresses up as Batman. The film attempts to hit a couple of points, but it doesn't really care enough to develop any of them. The closest it comes is attempting to set up Bruce's issues with trust, by having him spend most of the movie dodging Vicki and not telling her the truth about his identity. But there's not any real reason for him to need to tell her, since he barely knows Vicki, since she happens to be a reporter who's trying to find the truth about Batman, and especially since she's almost as uninteresting and wooden as he is. There's very little chemistry and almost no reason to invest in this story. And, if that's not enough, Bruce doesn't even tell her the truth. Alfred takes her down to the Batcave without even consulting him. The other attempt at an arc, the concept of revenge, is certainly more fertile ground for a Batman movie, however the film bungles that by saving the story of Bruce's parents its almost over. This idea feels like an afterthought, and doesn't factor into the movie.

In addition to that, I have a couple of problems with the Joker. One is that the film's Gotham City doesn't really have a crime problem, it has a Joker problem. Pretty much every act of violence in the film is planned or executed by the Joker. This may not seem like a problem at first, after all he is the villain. But the whole Batman mythos is predicated on the idea of Gotham as being this awful cesspool of crime. If everything is reduced back to one man, the Gotham doesn't really seem so bad anymore. This goes back to the biggest change that the movie makes: the Joker's responsibility for the Waynes' murder. Batman is no longer a creation of and reaction to a world of senseless violence. Rather, he's been created simply to fight the Joker. The Joker isn't as much the opposite of Batman, as Batman is an answer to the Joker. Another major problem with Burton and Nicholson's Joker: he's funny. The Joker is not a funny character. He's a psychopath who dresses like a clown and murders people. By making him funny, he becomes more harmless. And that's the biggest problem with this interpretation of the Joker. He's a funny, wacky character, who wins over audiences. He's both more watchable and more interesting than Bruce Wayne. And ultimately, he seems more like an advertisement to sell toys than a real villain.

I was going to talk about Harvey Dent (played by Lando himself, Billy Dee Williams), however he really has nothing to do in this film. He's really only in there to tease fans about a future Two Face appearance, and adds nothing to the film.

Ultimately, a superhero movie succeeds when the external threat mirrors the hero's internal struggles. In Batman, this really is not the case at all. Batman has no internal struggle to drive the film and the Joker ends up making a far more lasting impression than Bruce. Tim Burton has said in interviews that the Joker was always a more appealing character to him than Batman. Yet the Joker, like any great archnemesis, really only works in duality with Batman. He can't contrast with his enemy, because his enemy is blank. This is the big failure of Batman, and in my opinion it damaged the series from the start.

Announcing...BATMAN WEEK

So its almost here! After a lengthy wait, this week will see the release of The Dark Knight, which is probably the most heavily hyped blockbuster since The Lord of the Rings.

In celebration of the release, I'm declaring Batman week here on the blog. All this week I'm going back and watching older Batman films to analyze how they dealt with the Joker and Two Face. Here's the tentative schedule depending on how lucky I get at the video store:

Monday: Batman (1989, dir. Tim Burton)
Tuesday: Batman: The Movie (1966, dir.Leslie H. Martinson)
Wednesday: Batman Forever (1995, dir. Joel Schumacher)
Thursday: Batman Begins (2005, dir. Christopher Nolan)
And hopefully I'll be seeing The Dark Knight at midnight

I haven't seen any of these films in a long time (except Batman Begins), so I'm curious to go back and look at them. However, my somewhat faded memory is that all of them have some big problems. But we shall see!

Hell. Yes.

It turns out the secret to making flying saucers was ionized air! Who knew?

[blockquote]If a professor at the University of Florida (U.F.) has his way, the first flying saucer to grace Planet Earth's skies isn't likely to come from outer space but rather from Gainesville, where the faculty member is drawing up plans to build a circular aircraft that can hover in the air like a helicopter without any moving parts or fuel.[/blockquote]

That's all kinds of awesome.

Movies from My Life

Like this but with movies (Thanks AV Club):

1987: The Princess Bride (Dir. Rob Reiner)
1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Dir. Robert Zemeckis)
1989: Do the Right Thing (Dir. Spike Lee)
1990: Goodfellas (Dir. Martin Scorsese)
1991: Barton Fink (Dir. Joel Coen)
1992: Unforgiven (Dir. Clint Eastwood)
1993: Schindler's List (Dir. Steven Spielberg)
1994: Ed Wood (Dir. Tim Burton)
1995: Se7en (Dir. David Fincher)
1996: Fargo (Dir. Joel Coen)
1997: L.A. Confidential (Dir. Curtis Hanson)
1998: Rushmore (Dir. Wes Anderson)
1999: Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher)
2000: Best in Show (Dir. Christopher Guest)
2001: Amelie (Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
2002: Adaptation (Dir. Spike Jonze)
2003: City of God (Dir. Fernando Meirelles)
2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Dir. Michel Gondry)
2005: The Constant Gardener (Dir. Fernando Meirelles)
2006: Pan's Labyrinth (Dir. Guillermo Del Toro)
2007: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (Dir. Seth Gordon)

I'm going to hold off on 2008 for now, because I haven't seen anything that I really think is as good as anything on this list. But it would probably be Iron Man.

On a happier note

To leave you with some levity today, I give you the funniest thing I've seen on the Internet in some time...Michael Bay's rejected screenplay to The Dark Knight. Most of the attention has gone to the Joker's "Howdy Batman. Got time for a little...prank," but this part is my favorite:



Be sure to read the whole thing.

Meta note: The dearth of blog postings recently has been because I'm in Europe, however when I get home I should have new music reviews to write (Go Hold Steady!), as well as a ton of movies to see and write about. So Stay Tuned!

So Stupid...

The Beltway pundits, the people whose job it is to analyze the world of politics, put out such a stupefying number of ridiculous and wrongheaded claims every day that it seems worthless to sort through them all. But occasionally, one example shines through, showing just what exactly the problem is with those in the swamp. Such an article appeared yesterday in part of the Washington Post's opinion section (quite possibly the worst opinion section in a non-Murdoch newspaper in the country)

Stumped is a kind of political Dear Abby, where people write in to ask an Informed, Serious Expert questions about the political world that they, a lowly citizen, cannot possibly know, as they don't live in Washington or go to the right parties with the right government officials. Anyway, this week's question is about what would have happened if Al Gore won the Presidency. The writer asserts that there would have been no 9/11 and no wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. Andres Martinez's response, "are you right about all of this? I think not." In fact, despite the fact the he says he agrees Al Gore should have been President, he finds this sentiment to be "kind of creepy." Its creepy to imagine how nice the world would have been with a competent leader?

Unfortunately, it only deteriorates from here. Martinez spends his first paragraph of substantive argument fighting a straw man. He finds the letter's comments about 9/11 vague and so he wants to dismiss the notion that "al Qaeda wouldn't have attacked an America presided over by a more benevolent President Gore." No one suggested this idea, because it is ridiculous. Al Qaeda doesn't base its decisions to attack based on who's President (something I think we should all keep in mind, given the way McCain's rhetoric has gone so far). "That is patently absurd," says Martinez to no one in particular. For the very first paragraph of argument, Martinez sets up an easily disprovable argument that no one has made and then easily disproves it, making the person he's arguing against seem ridiculous even though that person never made such an argument to begin with.

Now that Martinez has made the person he's debating seem foolish, he begins to address the actual concerns of the letter. According to Martinez, the idea that Gore could have stopped 9/11:

blends irrational partisanship with that quintessentially American belief that all tragedies -- whether on the playground or elsewhere -- are eminently preventable.

Actually, the argument is predicated on the notion that the administration ignored evidence of a rising threat from al Qaeda, probably because they were more worried about finding a way to invade Iraq and get access to that sweet, sweet oil. Martinez points out the famous "Bin Laden Determined to Attack the United States" security memo that Bush treated with the same attention that I'm currently giving to Jane Austen's Persuasion. But it was okay! says Martinez, because "none of this was terribly ground-breaking." Really? I remember George Bush "nobody in our government at least, and I don't the think the prior government, could envision flying air planes into buildings." Certainly, I had never imagined such a thing was possible, and if I couldn't then no one could, right?

In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center.

Also, that report was not the no-shit-Sherlock kind of report that Martinez describes it as. Instead it contained the claim that "FBI information... indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country, consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attack."

This is not to say that Hypothetical President Gore would have 100% been able to stop the 9/11 attacks. However, what I am trying to argue is that Martinez's interpretation is childlike in its simplicity and fails to take into account the fact that there was a legitimate amount of concerning information. Information that, perhaps in the hands of someone competent, could have been used to stop an attack.

If this were the end of Martinez's article, it would have been stupid, but not the kind of "you've crushed my soul stupid" that would inspire a long rant. However he goes on to make one of the dumbest claims I've ever seen. Assuming 9/11 happened under President Gore, Martinez still thinks we would have invaded Iraq. Think about that for a moment. Martinez is so diluded that he still sees the Iraq War as a natural response to 9/11. According to Martinez:

it is easy for us now to forget how much the 9/11 attacks weighed on the initial decision to take on Iraq at a time when Saddam Hussein was acting like another looming threat.

Anyone over the age of 18 and not suffering from amnesia should be able to remember the run-up to the Iraq War with relative clarity, especially if said person's job is following the political world and then commenting on it. Apparently, in Martinez's world, in late 2002 the vast majority of the American public suddenly demanded an invasion of Iraq. The Bush Administration tried to explain that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but the American public just wouldn't be satisfied. So, reluctantly and with great sadness, the Bush Administration began an invasion of Iraq.

Yeah, something about that just doesn't seem right. I seem to remember there being an orchestrated effort by the Bush Administration to tie Iraq to 9/11 and al Qaeda, with Cheney going on Meet the Press to claim that Iraq is "the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9-11."

If only there were some archive which documented this massive public relations effort.

And what did Al Gore say during all of this:

I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

That's in 2002.

In the law, there is no distinction between a lie and reckless disregard for the truth. Therefore, I have no problem saying that Mr. Martinez lied to his readers when saying that the Iraq War was an inevitability, regardless of who was President. This may not seem like much in the big picture, but it is important that people understand the history of the Iraq War so we do not repeat the mistakes we made. When people like Mr. Martinez publish articles like this, they serve to help the Bush Administration by taking the blame away from them for lying and manipulating their way into an illegal war for profit. It is also important because this example demonstrates the excellent judgement Al Gore has shown in the past. If we had listened to Al Gore in 2002, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

P.S. So the political stuff doesn't start to dominate, I want to mention that all three amendments to the FISA bill have failed, meaning that the bill will pass with Teleco Immunity and with it will go the fourth amendment and the notion that we are all equal under the law. Almost 35 years after Watergate, Richard Nixon's notion that the President can do anything he wants and its legal because he's the President has gone from a fringe view to the stated policy of this country.

Mad as Hell

I try to keep my political blogging on this site heavy on snark and light on self-righteous outrage, so I apologize if this post and the next one come off as particularly Howard Beale-esque, but I guess I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

Remember that time when some crackpot went in the media and impugned the honorable service record of a combat veteran. No, I'm not talking about Wesley Clark's appearance on Face the Nation. I'm talking about the moronic Swift Boat Veteran for "Truth" campaign in the 2004 election. The one that claimed that John Kerry faked or simply didn't receive the injuries that led to his Purple Hearts as part of some elaborate 35 year plan to one day run for President at a time when our nation is in great peril so that he can defeat our noble leader and surrender to the Terrorists. Or something. Of course, none of them were there for either of incidents they were talking about. Some of them weren't even in Vietnam at the same time as John Kerry (note: when I first published this the sentence said Iraq instead of Vietnam. Talk about a Freudian slip). But they were just so patriotic that they knew the exact details of every attack involving a swift boat. To summarize, the whole thing was mind-bogglingly stupid. The traditional media's response to this: play the ad nonstop on the news and raise vague questions about whether or not it was accurate.

So let's fast forward to 2008, when Wesley Clark said that he doesn't "think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." The media exploded in outrage. There were claims that Clark had criticized McCain's service, "impugn[ed]" his "heroism," or questioned his patriotism. This despite the fact that people said THE EXACT SAME THING about John Kerry in 2004. Rightfully so. I know a lot of people who served in the military, but I don't necessarily think they are automatically qualified to be President.

The extreme fetishization of John McCain's military service has become one of the major narratives of this campaign. The media is so enamored of him that they require any opponent to automatically cede authority on issues of security and defense to McCain, despite the fact that in his time as a legislator he has shown remarkably poor judgement on these issues. If this how its like in July then we are in for a long five months.

Music From My Life

Thanks to Idolator for this sweet list-making idea. The concept is simple, pick your favorite album from each year you've been alive. A disclaimer, these are all basically impulse picks that are subject to change depending on my daily mood. With that said, here we go:

1987: The Joshua Tree, U2
1988: Surfer Rosa, Pixies
1989: Disintigration, The Cure
1990: Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy
1991: Loveless, My Bloody Valentine
1992: Automatic for the People, R.E.M.
1993: Transmissions from the Satellite Heart, The Flaming Lips
1994: Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, Pavement
1995: Wowee Zowee, Pavement
1996: Pinkerton, Weezer
1997: OK Computer, Radiohead
1998: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel
1999: Utopia Parkway, Fountains of Wayne
2000: Kid A, Radiohead
2001: Oh Inverted World, The Shins
2002: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco
2003: Transatlantacism, Death Cab for Cutie
2004: Shake the Sheets, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
2005: Illinois, Sufjan Stevens
2006: Boys and Girls in America, The Hold Steady
2007: In Rainbows, Radiohead
2008 (so far): Narrow Stairs, Death Cab for Cutie