Thursday, June 16, 2005

mmm Dark Knight-ey goodness!

Tonight a bunch of us went to see Batman Begins. Brilliant film! Cinema generally falls pretty low down on my list of personal priorities. For one thing (thanks to the house's resident videophile) I have a really nice TV at home hooked to a TiVo which spends every hour of every day busily sifting through the hundreds of channels being broadcast at it wading through the dross for stuff I might like to watch. After all that electronic effort it seems rude to ignore the results in favour of something else. Also if I'm going out with friends I prefer being somewhere where I can actually interact with them (that being half the fun of friends) and if I'm by myself I'd rather just go home, or up a hill.

That said something about the advertising for Batman Begins perked my interest and I'm glad it did because I've not been so gripped by a movie in ages. I suspect it is one of those films you need to see on a big screen... preferably close to. That's exactly how we did see it thanks to a school party thwarting Liz's usual preference for middle row seating. I really like being at the front for action movies (I find it adds to the immediacy of action secuences if they fill my field of vision) but not enough to make a point of it when most of my friends really prefer sitting further away from the screen...

Anyway the film was stunning - instead of being the kind of dried-up franchise-wringer it could so easily have been, it re-engages with everything I find appealing about Batman (and darkly-brooding-troubled-comic-book-heros-with-big-arms in general) presenting the whole thing in a completely fresh and yet thoroughly familiar way that I just loved: Gotham City feels real and yet still legendary and 'other' - this isn't just Comic action set in familiarly real surroundings (ala the excellent Spiderman movies) it's a place out of a whole other reality, but one you could perfectly picture yourself walking though.

Better still there are people in it! The acting is only 'holywood blockbuster' but that can still be good, in this case it really is... 'course when you're dealing with a cast that includes names like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine you'd expect good things, but I've been disapointed before - not this time though: characters like the setting feel solid and believable while still approriately removed from the mundane... this is comic-made-real, or at least as real as it gets on screen.

...and of course it didn't hurt at all that Christian Bale spends a fair amount of screen-time without his shirt on* ;) Seriously though if you like comic book movies at all and have (for whatever reason) been holding off seeing this one then (in my opinion) you should go see it. now.

* Bale's never really seemed like my type before and to be honest he still isn't outside the context of that film, but for 141 minutes there he was absolutely magnetic! ...must be a Batman thing: the same peculiar phenomenon happened with Val Kilmer iirc

No comments: