scans_daily | Two-Face and the Riddler get stoned together

Hmm, thanks for the link.

Still, I'm miffed about them leaving out certain things from the franchise.

Yeah, I wondered about that when you speculated so, as I know O'Neil wrote the novelization for THE DARK KNIGHT.

That said, I'm curious, what are your criticisms? I am critical of the Nolanverse myself.

Actually, O'Neil wrote the Novelization of Batman Begins, I believe it was Nolan's brother who did the Novelization for 'The Dark Knight'. I heard O'Neill did a few 'fill in the blanks' with the novellization, like adding Zorro to it but I haven't read the novelization yet.

My criticisms are mainly:

-The Zorro angle. I thought the original origin was perfect, Bruce watches Zorro, he is happy, he is skipping around, they go into an alley, some mugger comes in, Thomas tries to protect his family, Martha puts her arms around Bruce to protect him, Thomas gets shot, Martha screams and the mugger shoots her as well. Then he runs away in fear.

-The distinct lack of Leslie Tompkins was a downer.

-Bruce running away: which was actually even *more* unrealistic because now people just have to think "Bruce Wayne...parents murdered....comes back after several years of gone missing, mysterious Bat-person with Big Car is capturing criminals.....HOLY SHIT Bruce Wayne is Batman". The original at least gave Bruce 'Refuge in Audacity' since he was partly in the Public's Eye all of the time.

- Batman not being a detective; which is something that bothers in the comics as well since people keep emphasizing his martial arts skill more and more than his detective/strategic skills.

-Bruce Wayne not being a charity organizer/humanitarian. 'It's not just about winning the battle, it's about wining the war'.

- Rachel....just Rachel.

- Selina Kyle not being part of the franchise.

-The Karl Reese plot line should *really* have been saved for the Third Movie.

-Harvey Dent: Okay I admit, I'm not a fan of the Joker, it's always been either Penguin, Riddler or Two Face with me and Aaron Eckhart was the whole reason why I watched TDK so I thought he got shafted a bit when Harv was killed off at the end. I also thought fridging Rachel was a cheap way to get Harvey to snap when there was so much good 'non-fridgey' material for Eckhart to work with.

-Also, the lack of effort to generate sequels. It strikes to me that Nolan is not interested in doing a long term Bat-Franchise.

Originally, from what I've heard, Harvey's transformation was supposed to be in the third movie but they moved it to the second and killed him off. It strikes to me that Nolan wasn't interested in doing a Trilogy or a long term franchise. I think he may have wanted to wash his hands off of the Bat-stuff albeit too quickly imo.

Also, I think ignoring the 'sillier' aspects of comic books like say, Robin are pretty much next to impossible as the Nolan verse has inadvertently ended up teaching me. I'm also sad that we now have *another* generation of fans after TDKR that wants Batman to be all 'dark, grim n' gritty' but this time thinks 'Robin is unneeded', which why I'm thankful for the existence of the 'Batman: The Brave and the Bold' otherwise I would have been driven to drinking.

I think so far the best superhero movie for me is Iron Man (haven't seen Iron Man 2 yet) , which is funny because Civil War was my first Iron Man comic, the point being though that the Iron Man franchise was the exact opposite of the Nolan verse; it was fun, funny, inspiring and heart warming at the same time while having a love interest and a female character that you actually like and not to mention building into a much larger universe that has me all giddy and excited.

See, I'm pretty critical of the Nolanverse movies myself, but I do have a few nitpicks:

Nolan actually explained why he removed the Zorro angle here. I don't completely agree but hey, it's his choice.

Re: franchise. The third movie is slated for 2012 (so no comment on Selina). I don't think you can really milk more movies out of this verse without fatigue, really. Not many movie series have more than three movies, so I wouldn't be surprised nor would I blame him if he didn't want to direct more Batman movies after the third. Besides, apparently he wants to do Superman next? Haha, I really wonder if his approach will work for that one.

I agree with you on Leslie and Robin (and Rachel) and other points, though. I recall some complaints about how the movie kinda fails on the female front (as in, there are so little of them and the most important one gets fridged) and I understand those complaints.

I have to wonder if the only reason Rachel fell flat is because in 2005, Tom Cruise losing his mind affected how people saw Katie Holmes, which in turn affected how people saw Rachel. Nolan and Co. were probably dead set on killing her even before they had to recast the part.

Leslie Thompkins is often a downer in the comics, thinking that Bruce becoming Batman means she failed him and his father. She would probably be an even bigger downer in the movies. Her saying "Violence is bad" in a Batman movie would be hypocritical, and TDK was practically saying "hypocrisy keeps people happy." (I'm hoping Batman 3 addresses and rectifies this, especially Rachel's letter that Alfred burnt.)

To me personally, the best way to fix the Robin/Rachel/Leslie problem in one stroke would be schoolteacher Helena Bertinelli. Huntress can work in a way Batgirl and Robin wouldn't.

I've often stated on this board Two-Face would work best as the Punisher with a coin fetish. (Especially the Bendis Punisher from ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP.) Harvey being angry over Rachel's death gave him a motivation beyond "my handsome face is ruined!" I'm think Nolan and Co. added "Harvey kidnaps Gordon's family" to the end so the audience wouldn't sympathize with Harvey *too* much (no pun intended). I thought it was a bit of a jump.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Rachel's whole character should have been Harvey Dent from the start.

I have to strongly disagree with you on Leslie, the best writers of the Leslie/Bruce dynamic are the ones that understand that they are both *right* and *wrong* at the same time. Essentially, they are two of the same coin and want the same thing but goes about it in different way.

To be fair, as a writer myself, I believe it's entirely possible to do a long term franchise and not fuck up along the way. Not to mention that we have comics and animated mediums for a reason y'know so the actors won't get too old and the writers can tell all the stories they want before they are sick of the whole thing.

Yeah, but does Christian Bale truly strike you as an actor who would want to play in more Batman movies? He really sees himself as a serious actor, so I'd say not. :/

Chances are bigger that the franchise will get a reboot 10 years after the third movie, if the other DCU movies don't become a success.

I'm hoping that other movies become a success, I want to see characters other than Bats get their fair in the spotlight.

Funnily enough myself and a few others I've talked to didn't get that Harvey supposedly died. I was fully prepared to see him get the full spotlight in a third movie. And then I find out the character died and of course Heath Ledger unfortunately died (when his character survived). Weird sort of cruel irony there.

The moment I walked out of the cinema after Iron Man I said it was the best super hero movie made so far and I still stand by that. Iron Man 2, while enjoyable, is not.

Actually, O'Neil did write the TDK novelization! I just double-checked on Amazon to be sure.

I understand WHY they lost the Zorro angle, because Nolan and company wanted to establish themes of fear and guilt. But really, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

The Leslie loss was all the more frustrating considering that there were no other major female characters in the story other than Rachel, and as we've established, ugh, Rachel.

Completely agree about Harvey, unsurprisingly. What a waste.

And yes, thank you! People think I'm nuts when I consider IRON MAN to be the superior superhero film to THE DARK KNIGHT. I feel like there're these levels of character depth in IM that no one notices because they're too distracted by what seems to them to be light fun fluff action.

I could go on forever on these comments, but appropriately enough, I'm too exhausted by being frustrated at INCEPTION, which I just saw. Good grief, this is the film people are creaming themselves over? Ah well.

I thought they were both good films, and 'Dark Knight' certainly deserved a lot of its accolades, but I think it could have done with a little more tinkering before they released it to theaters. For one thing, most of the ending sequence with the Joker is virtually incomprehensible - it takes the whole 'fast, choppy cuts' thing and amps it up to eleven. This is a terrible shame, too, as the set-up for it is terrific - the whole dilemma with the two boats, innocent people in the place of the Joker's men, the cops surrounding the building, Batman closing in, the Joker waiting with his dogs - and then BZZRWWMMP, there are about a billion different cuts going zipzipzip, and then it finally slows down just in time for the showdown with the Joker, which takes about twenty seconds or so. Also, I agree that Two-Face was completely wasted as a villain - the whole next movie could have been about him. I held out hope for quite a while that the ending was inconclusive, and that he MIGHT have survived and just be being held in Arkham or someplace as a John Doe while they held his funeral, but now I think it's been officially stated that he's dead. Crap. Oh, well.

I wonder if they squeezed Two-Face (with the rather abrupt "Must kill Gordon's family!") into TDK because Nolan wanted to get cracking on Inception and didn't want a cliffhanger going into BATMAN 3 hanging over him.

For now, our best hope for "a proper Two-Face story" would be Bruce Timm and Co. doing an animated DVD adaptation of "Eye of the Beholder" from BATMAN ANNUAL #14 in 1990, or one that uses elements of that story. For me, Peter Sarsgaard would be Harvey Dent and John Malkovich would be Harvey's father. (I thought of this before Maggie Gyllenhall, Sarsgaard's real-life fiance, was cast as Rachel.) Sarsgaard and Malkovich played father and son in "The Man in the Iron Mask" and have similar but distinctive voices.

I would so dearly love for Timm and Co. to do "Eye of the Beholder," but it's sadly far, far more likely that they'll just animated LONG HALLOWEEN instead.

If it's the one I'm thinking of, that's probably not quite action-packed enough to work as a Batman film, except possibly as a series of flashbacks showing how Two-Face got to where he is.

:rechecks sources: DAM YOU, WIKIPEDIA! YOU LIED TO TO MEEEEE!

- Still though, unlike most I can't really wrap my mind around losing the Zorro and the Detective angle. It's like taking away Stark's iconic moustache and a significant portion of his engineering skills and later have him build a circuit board in the next movie and shout 'See! See! He's doing engineering and stuff now!'. It's something that goes all the way back to the Kane/Finger era and just dropping those two aspects are just mind boggling. Not to mention Bats isn't really about fear and guilt, it's about justice, not letting others go through the same pain as you have gone through and trying to do the right thing and your fair share in a crap sack world.

- Yeah I agree, Leslie is one of those characters, as long as no writer tries to simplify her, would have made a great foil to Bruce/Batman. It's helps if the writers keep in mind that they are *both* right and wrong to the same extent.

- They get the best possible guy to play the part and have him deliver the best on-screen performance of the character only to have him killed off when his character finally becomes what we were all waiting him to be. Ouch!

-Exactly! Iron Man is one of the few superhero movies to have captured the spirit of comic books. The best comics are the ones where I can switch between reading for the light hearted, fun super hero fluff the first time and the deeper more subtle stuff the second time. It's never one way or the other when it comes to the best comic books, it's both!

-Thanks for the heads up for 'Inception', I've been torn all week between my gut instincts telling me not to watch it and stay veeeeeery far away from it and everyone else telling how awesome it is. BTW, what didn't you like about it?

And thus you've nailed the very core problem with BB's Bruce.

My problem with INCEPTION was, first off, that I could see where it was going from early on, already guessing the big climactic reveals and the oh-so-secret ending that everyone has been telling everyone else not to talk about because OMG SPOILERS FOR THE SHOCKING TWIST...

... all of which would have been fine if they had populated the film with characters who were actually interesting people rather than bland plot devices serving their function in a fantastical heist picture. At least then, I could have cared about watching the story unfold. I could have cared about the whole journey of the main character. I could have actually given a shit when it ended the way it did, instead of thinking about what a boring, humorless, lifeless, ponderous slog that was.

But mine is the minority opinion, as I've read the three words "INCEPTION is awesome!" so many times by now, it's like a frickin' meme. Some people find the exploration of lucid dreaming absolutely fascinating, and indeed, the film does give people a whole world with rules to play around in, which is why I think it would make an awesome video game.

At the end of the day, when it comes to Nolan and his themes about wives, guilt, and one's own preferred reality, I'll still take MEMENTO, thanks.

I see. I think the 'people as plot devices' was something that was partly visible at times, in his Bat-verse as well.

I also, realized that I forgot to mention the exclusion of Martha Wayne in the movie. Seriously where the hell was Bruce's mom? /sarcasm.

So, Inception is off of my 'have to see this one day' list. I might watch it just so I can pitch in to a conversation should one turn up.

Speaking of Memento, I've been planning to watch the Hindi movie 'inspired' by it named Ghanjini. So far from what I've seen, no standard copy catting, it looks like the only thing that they have in common is that the main character suffers from Antegorade Amnesia and his wife was killed so he uses Polaroid pictures and tattoos to track the man who did it, every thing else is, thankfully, completely original. Plus, it looks I'm going to be satisfied on the female front as well, since the wife gets her back story expanded and part the main narrative follows a female medical student investigating the main character.

For that matter, where the hell is Martha Wayne in the comics themselves? Thomas gets all the love and focus in his flashbacks, it seems.

I dare say it's worth seeing if you at all care about being in on something which shall undoubtedly influence nerd-culture for awhile. The AV Club already reported, as if it were actual pop culture news, that the Urban Dictionary has the word "ineption" for anybody who doesn't appreciate INCEPTION. So there you go.

Huh! Sounds intriguing, I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

Eh, I noticed that even the most ignorant writers seems to at least dedicate a panel for the character but sadly not many writers (including Paul Dini sadly) are interested in developing the character. However, there have been some good Martha Wayne stuff, there's that one DCAU tie in issue with wittle Bruce and Martha, the Batman:Family mini series involving a villain named Celia whose origin is tied to Martha, Batman: Death and Maiden (written by Greg Rucka) and I even heard about an interesting Martha Wayne-centric book which deals with child slavery in Turkey, not sure wth happened to that. I think the problem is, that unlike Thomas, no one has really taken the bait and started developing what other writers have set-up. :(

I guess I should, the last thing I want is to fall back on today's pop culture nerdiness.

It was released in 2008 and very popular, so I guess it shouldn't be too difficult to find it. Plus, I don't think I would have had the heart to recommend it were it not for the fact that Aamir Khan was starring in it. Whatever he has done this decade since Fanaa is worth watching. Also, I listed another potentially interesting movie that was released last week.

To me that's the fundamental irony of trying to make superheroes realistic. There's only so much realism that can be spun out of the premise of Batman or Superman without shredding the entire point of the characters. Superman is a Space White DudeTM with powers derived from the Sun. Is that plausible? No, not really. Should it have to be? No.

There can be a place for the Marvelman-style horror stories but mainstream superheroes and grittiness aren't really easy to pair together. I know that if *I* saw a man dressed as a flying rodent I wouldn't be scared I'd burst out laughing.

IA, at the same time comic books have, ever since TDKR, writers keep trying to re-capture the trauma of Bruce having his parents killed and ever since the DCAU, make him more dysfunctional. Only to result in making Bruce appear as an unfeeling dolt especially in light of people who have gone through much worse than he ever did and left readers wondering which of him left is actually *functional* compared to the rest.

The bottom line is, it's never cool to retread or imitate what other writers do. Or in other words; TELL YOUR OWN GODDAMN STORIES WHILE NOT FUCKING UP WHAT EVERYONE ELSE BEFORE YOU HAD DONE.

Where it gets especially problematic is that trauma of any sort requires delicacy and tact to write well. Such things are not among the qualities with which comic book writers and editors both as late have been blessed with in abundance......

True, even some research would be good as well.

Two-Face and the Riddler get stoned together

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