QYDJ Film Festival: Night Five - What are you?

August 7th, 2008

After spending last night in space for our second last night of the film festival I was thinking of bringing it back to Earth, well DC Earth.   Welcome to Metropolis and Gotham City.

Batman

In a lot of ways Batman Begins has a lot more going for it over the 1989 Tim Burton film.   But I won’t say it’s superior, it is a Batman of a different time and certainly a different place.   This is Tim Burton’s Gotham.

The opening credits to this are simply wonderful, from the marketing through to this opening sequence Burton illustrates the importance of the symbol of the bat.   There is even a scene that has the Batwing flies up in front of the moon and creates the bat symbol.   The ending also finishes up with the Bat Signal.

The film is lavish, dark and gothic, Gotham is magnificent.

Michael Keaton owns the role, he captures this Batman/Bruce Wayne, I’m not going to debate the better Batman.   Nicholson is also brilliant, different brilliant to the current Ledger performance.   Oh and I have to say I love the Batmobile, it is just an awesome machine.

Turn the lights out, turn up the sound, let Elfman’s soundtrack do it’s thing.

Superman

You will believe a man can fly.   One of my favourite tag lines from a movie poster.   This is not a flawless film by any stretch of the imagination but it is an epic film.   Reeve is the perfect Superman but he’s an even better Clark Kent.   Right from that wonderful moment when he catches the helicopter in one hand and Lois in the other and she asks ‘you’ve got me, who’s got you’.   We see a turning point in motion picture special effects.

Even if you don’t like the story, the acting or the special effects close your eyes and listen to one of the greatest iconic soundtracks ever.

I also love that we get to see Superman distraught, beaten, angry in the pivotal scene at the end as he holds Lois after she has been killed everything about that scene is brilliant.

Before it is said, no him circling the Earth backwards is not cinema’s greatest moment.   But there is so much else in here that makes up for it.

Wow one more night, *phew* then I might go read a book!

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Some random thoughts about Superman

June 29th, 2008

Superman

I believe it may have been Quentin Tarantino (probably in Kill Bill if I’m remembering it right) who commented about the interesting thing about Clark Kent and Superman is that Kent is the alias, at his core Superman is exactly that, Superman and it is Clark Kent who is the mask.

It is something that always interests me about the character and despite my commitment to all things comic bookish there is actually very little that does interest me around the character. Batman has always been the more interesting of the DC comics titans (no I’m not talking Teen Titans I mean titan in its classical term).

I also think people often forget that he is actually an alien despite looking like the ‘perfect’ human.

I wonder if this is not similar to the way the Greek gods were portrayed. Although on second thoughts the gods were always portrayed with the human traits of envy, jealousy, anger and greed. These are not the traits that are often associated with the Man of Steel.

Except of course in Superman III which we don’t tend to give very much credit to.

A testament to the acting ability that Christopher Reeve had inside him are the extraordinarily impressive display of duality found amongst the mess of the Superman III plot.

The thing from a writing point of view is that Superman is very hard to write for. He can’t lose control because if he does he can wipe out an entire city.

Everything in his life is about control, from the smallest thing such as holding a coffee mug without crushing it to dust to not leaping too far over the tallest building and launching himself into space.

The problem then becomes that the character is flawed in his flawlessness, something that is often brought out by writers like Frank Miller and characters such as Batman.

He’s an icon though, can’t deny that.

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