Silent Bob

No you're probably right, but it still wasn't as bad as most people say it was. Spider-man 3, that's as bad as people say. X3 is not.

Meh, I don't understand the X3 hate. Yeah, it wasn't as good as the first two movies (what threequil is?) and it did a few things wrong (wait...Cyclops is dead?) but it was still better than three quarters of the comic flicks out there.

I found a site that has 13 clips from The Dark Knight that run about 30 seconds to a minute each. All of the clips are high quality, which leads me to believe that they're officially sanctioned previews and won't be immediately yanked by Warner Bros, but you might want to check them out soon just in case. There isn't anything in them that's a major spoiler, but they do add up to about 10 minutes of footage so if you want to go into the flick completely cold, I'd avoid 'em.

Some things we learn from these clips (minor spoilers):

1. Anyone who didn't like Christian Bale's scary voice from Begins (I didn't mind it so much) will be disappointed. It returns.

2. If the brief fight scene in one of these clips is any indication, Nolan's greatly improved his fight direction. It also helps that Batman's new costume is a helluva lot more flexible than the last one.

3. Not that anyone needs more convincing, but Ledger's Joker really is unlike any other performance of the character. Darker, quieter, a little more grounded, and much scarier.

4. Apparently one of the Joker's big schemes is that Batman needs to go public and reveal his identity or he promises that (according to the very first teaser) "starting tonight, people will die".

5. Nolan must shoot a lot of takes, because many of the most memorable lines from earlier previews ("The dawn is coming." "This city deserves a better class of criminal. And I'm gonna give it to them." "I'll settle for his loved ones.") sound completely different in their final version.

6. Taking place just after the end of Begins, neither Wayne Manor nor the Batcave seem to be rebuilt yet, so Batman has a new lair (we've seen plenty of it in other previews already). He has, however, started putting together his classic, huge, multi-screen Bat-computer.

By the way, scroll down through the site if you get the chance. Not only has this guy collected every trailer and poster that has been released (and some that haven't), but he also has a clip on there that I haven't seen anywhere else - one that shows the briefest of glimpses of Two Face himself.

Brad Bird was going to do a Spirit movie! Aw Man! I can practically picture it! Insane action. amazing colors! It probably would have been a true adaptation.

Yeah, he's a big fan (note the Incredibles' masks...not to mention the comic appearance in the Iron Giant) and tried for years to get the rights. I heard he was pretty close around the time of Eisner's death. I even met and talked a little bit with one of Eisner's friends and biographer, who said it was practically a done deal (and even suggested that Bird might bring the property to Pixar for consideration as his next project). But I guess, being a close buddy of Eisener's, Miller was able to snatch up the rights before Bird had a chance. This is all just second-hand info, of course, but if even half of it's true, it's a damn shame.

Yeah, I guess your right. It's kind of hard to find a kid that can do that. What do you say... Alright you are the son of Superman, now go! Not many who could pull that off!

As far as the Spirit goes, doesn't it feel like a Sin City movie to you to? The Spirit I read actually had bright vivid colors. Will Eisner's art is hardly as monochromatic as they make it seem.

(Sigh) Yes it does. At first Miller tried to justify it by talking about how Eisner took the Spirit to such "dark and scary" places and he wanted to bring that forth in a modern way to a modern audience.

Now his line is that this is his interpretation of the Spirit, so he's going to do it the way he knows how to do. To which I say, "Fuck off, Miller. Give it back to Brad Bird because he could have done it the way Eisner knew how to do it."

I liked Superman Returns too except for

. That was crap.

i just watched the first five minutes of the dark night here,

watch it before they take it down

(Sigh) It's going to be a painful two weeks.

Yeah frankly I think this is going to be a battle between Frank Darabont and Rob Reiner. Neither of them can do any wrong as far as Stephen King is concerned.

Thanks to the recent advance screening of Dark Knight, some early reviews are trickling in, and the word is good. Insanely good. Here's Peter Travers from Rolling Stone:

Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil — expected to do battle — decide instead to get it on and dance. "I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Christian Bale's stalwart Batman. "You complete me." Don't buy the tease. He means it.

 

The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight. He's pissed that the public sees him as a vigilante. He'll leave the hero stuff to district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and stop the DA from moving in on Rachel Dawes (feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, in for sweetie Katie Holmes), the lady love who is Batman's only hope for a normal life.

 

Everything gleams like sin in Gotham City (cinematographer Wally Pfister shot on location in Chicago, bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy). And the bad guys seem jazzed by their evildoing. Take the Joker, who treats a stunningly staged bank robbery like his private video game with accomplices in Joker masks, blood spurting and only one winner. Nolan shot this sequence, and three others, for the IMAX screen and with a finesse for choreographing action that rivals Michael Mann's Heat. But it's what's going on inside the Bathead that pulls us in. Bale is electrifying as a fallibly human crusader at war with his own conscience.

 

I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."

 

The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."

 

The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. "Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.

 

The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you're busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce's butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss's spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys — wait till you get a load of the Batpod — but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character.

 

No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan — a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige — brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation. It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages. Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.

That's the second review I've read to compare the movie to Godfather Part II and A Clockwork Orange, and probably the fifth or sixth that has compared it to Heat. A Batman film being favorably compared to Heat...wow. I simply cannot wait.

Guys, the Marvel studio exec is named JIM BECILE.

Since pretty recently. I hadn't heard about that one, but it has enough buzz behind it to be on his IMDb page.

You're in luck, then. After he finishes (swear to god) Marvel's Doctor Strange movie, Pete Jackson's two Hobbit films, and possibly a third Hellboy, he's planning to make At the Mountains of Madness.

Y'see? Dr. G agrees with me. Dr. G's word is law.

Last I heard, his Silver Surfer movie got dropped thanks to the anti-success of Fantastic Four 2.

We want comics to be accepted as a valid art form, we want comic book movies to be accepted as more than a cash-in on a popular name, so is it so bad to want a movie to be a bit deeper than a birdbath?

Not necessarily. I think the best way to champion the validity of comics as an art form is to show the variety that is possible in the medium. In this country, comics and animation are treated the same way by the majority of the public - they consider it a genre instead of a medium. A superhero movie is a genre. A comic book movie should not be. Like animation, you can tell any possible kind of story through the medium of comics and therein lies its artistic validity. Some of the most acclaimed comic book movies have showcased the range of stories that most people wouldn't expect to find - Road to Perdition, V For Vendetta, A History of Violence, Ghost World, Sin City, Persepolis, even well done but drastically different superhero films like X2, Spider-man and Batman Begins. A Punisher movie shouldn't strive to be any more than what a Punisher comic book is. Instead, it should strive to show the general public that comics can do bloody, r-rated vengeance stories that are just as good as anything they'd find in Man on Fire, Kill Bill, or Death Wish.

Speaker of The Punisher, War Zone director Lexi Alexander recently posted this in her blog about the trailer's inability to show just how the movie will be.

I'm not sure what kind of impression I would get from this trailer if I didn't actually know the film. I am utterly impressed, though, they managed to find that much PG rated action footage at all. It had to be a challenge to cut a trailer from our action stuff without showing any gore and blood.

 

I've been told that you can't even show heads blowing up in red-band trailers. I hope that's not true because that would suck. It's weird to see Castle shoot all those bullets and not see the thugs who are catching them. That's the best fucking part about it.

 

I'm very happy that the hardcore Punisher fans recognized the lines taken directly from the comic books (all credit goes to Ray Stevenson for that), and that MAX fans appreciated the color theme that was also directly copied from the books.

 

Yes ...don't expect this Punisher to be set in an ultra-realistic world. Every director has to make a call on the vision and style of a film and putting The Punisher in a realistic and gritty setting would be like having Det. Vic Mackey of THE SHIELD run around with a big ass skull on his chest, or Ray Liotta's character in NARC suddenly go: "Hey, I think I just saw a guy whose face looks like a Jigsaw puzzle." Ha, ha.

 

Real crime stories and comic books are two different worlds for me. It was my first priority to please The Punisher comic book fans and with all the respect to two wonderful actors, I wasn't trying to become a member of the Dolph Lundgren or Thomas Jane fan club. This film is about the mythology of FRANK CASTLE, it is ultra violent and it will look not a little, but a lot like this [frames from the comic]"

You lie! Dillon has three faces, Bradstreet has four covers.

I can understand the animosity towards the guy, but he does what he does very well and I give him credit for that.

I saw parts of it. I actually found it to be a pretty good movie if you turn the sound down and keep your eyes focused firmly on Jennifer Garner's midsection.

Sorry, I stand by my convictions. Punisher movie = bad, Tom Jane = good. But I'll also defend the director's cut of Daredevil so what do I know.

Et tu, Brutus?

No. Pullo. This guy was Brutus.

I'd be a lot more excited about Ray Stevenson as the Punisher if Thomas Jane hadn't come first and completely nailed that character for me. The movie was far from perfect, but I thought he was great. That said, either War Zone has a horribly edited trailer (which it definitely does) or it's a badly directed movie (which it might be). Either way, I can't tell what the hell is going on in most of that trailer and that definitely hurts the movie's appeal.