29
FBBP #65 - Universal Resurrections
With Pedro risking his Dominican ass in Boston drinking Incredible Hulks, Chris, Jamaal and Joe discuss The Dark Knight. Seems like we miss having Pedro’s unabashed enthusiasm around, because we don’t really convey how much we all seriously enjoyed this excellent movie.
We also discuss news from the San Diego Comic Con, including two and a half superhero universes getting revived. So, keep your pants on as Chris tries to explain to me what is going on with Milestone, Impact and Image. Ill-informed idle speculation about the current careers of Christopher Priest, Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri and Robert Kirkman included!
Is it me, or does the podcast cut off after 3 minutes?
Aparently, it was me.
I hate to be That Guy, but having said that I’m going to go ahead anyway and point out that Blade Runner was adapted from a novel. Pretty much every other Dick movie has been adapted from a short story, though, with the exception of A Scanner Darkly.
Whoops.
I thought that “Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was a novel and not a short story…
Back on batman, I had an interesting conversation with someone who had enjoyed the “Batman Begins” far better than this one. He’s from chigaco, and didn’t buy for a second that the city was really under siege. He felt that under today’s post 9/11 climate, that it would be very unlikely that everyone would immediately flip out. He also felt that the city was strangely immaculate, didn’t have the grime of the first movie, despite that the city was supposedly going to the shitter.
I bought it when I saw the movie, and I still felt a very tangible fear, but I do agree that the city felt too clean.
Joe,
Wouldn’t it be more likely that people would flip out in the post-9/11 world?
And as far as the second point goes, I think the image of the ‘grimy and collapsing urban city’ isn’t particularly necessary for the fears that Nolan is trying to exploit. A lot of the concern associated with deteriorating American cities is tied to a narrative from the seventies and eighties, when people really did think that our cities were in a state of crisis.
Even though there are some notable exceptions (Detroit), I don’t know if that concern is as relevant. But people are still afraid of terrorism, and disturbed by public corruption. I think it’s significant that the movie singles out the corruption (and ineffectiveness) of public officials as the primary evil in Gotham City. There’s very little ordinary street crime in this movie, but I think that’s b/c we’re a lot less scared of that nowadays.
I’ll agree that the Harvey Dent plot was a little rushed and a little sketchy, but splitting it between movies wouldn’t have sat right with me. I like it because it’s an interesting character arc, but I love it because it’s a complete arc.
I like your assertion that Harvey was all image. Much of the way he and Batman were contrasted was about Harvey’s reputation. He was a hero people could rally behind, but in the end he was corrupted. The point here being whether he was ever a hero.
I thought it was pretty clear that the REGULAR street crime was being cleaned up. Scarecrow was talking about how hard it would be to find other dealers, since Batman had done so much to clean up stuff like that. I thought a pretty big theme was that a figure like Batman can only really attack symptoms and give hope, it takes someone inside the system like Dent to get to actual reform that deals with the causes of a place like Gotham.
Why must DC try to cram every property they own into their main universe? Why? What, exactly, is the point?
I agree, Onion. You’d think they’d learn from the mistakes made with the Marvel Family.
Never could I have believed that Didio/Dwyer would be only the second-funniest comic/tragic analogy in a given podcast. Thank you, Jamaal, for proving me wrong with Liefeld/Haim.