*sigh*
A word about Affleck.
I don't hate the guy. I've really liked some of the movies he was in. What I've seen of him in the director's chair is fantastic.
And as an actor he is always- always- recognizably Ben Affleck. Best friend who aspires for Matt Damon to make something of his life Affleck = Roughneck oil driller blowing up asteroids Affleck = Sad sack mysteriously attractive to Liv Tyler Affleck = yes, blind lawyer with superhuman senses and reflexes Affleck.
To limit the comparison to Bale as "both made some goofy movies" completely ignores the fact that Bale actually made some significant transformations in those years of characters, and I'm not talking about some Hollywood crash dieting and gym training.
Go watch The Machinist, American Psycho, and 3:10 to Yuma and tell me if Bale is playing the same character. Hell, be honest: if you didn't know otherwise, would you think it was the same actor?
I'm not cheering for Affleck to fail. I hope he can pull it off. But overconfidence isn't warranted, and heaping undeserved scorn on Bale makes less of a case for Affleck's superiority and more of a case for a lack of critical perspective.
As for "the Bat", to continue to flog the "Oh we would be so much better off if we could get a fun Batman" line in the same stream as describing the character as "Mitt Romney with a doomsday bunker and a leather fetish" is wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. "The character will be awful until they do what I want them to do with him?" Does that sound slightly familiar amidst the torrent of abuse directed towards "entitled" fandom?
Yeah, yeah. Darker and grittier is getting old. I get it, just as I get how in another month a Superman movie that originally got a mixed-to-positive review is going to have metamorphosed into the sludge scraped off of some Hollywood producer's shoe.
I'm still hoping for a good Batman. And I really don't give a plugged nickel if that's a Batman so dark he makes Joel Schumacher's Batman and Adam West's Batman retroactively cease to exist, so long as it's interesting to watch. Batman has been a lot of things even in the relatively narrow range of comics I've read- a sane man in an insane world playing psychotic to keep his enemies off-balance, the philanthropist trying to create a Gotham that can stand on its own feet in the absence of its night-stalking vigilante, a rebel against a corrupt police-state, the uncompromising and unlikable commander of what amounted to a small army.
I would be thrilled to see any of those interpretations, as unlikely as they might be in the world of capsule summaries and high-concept pitches. What I don't want to see is "can't we make Batman more light and fun" without any deeper conception of what they want to do with him.
Last time they did that, it sucked hard enough to bring down a franchise.
A word about Affleck.
I don't hate the guy. I've really liked some of the movies he was in. What I've seen of him in the director's chair is fantastic.
And as an actor he is always- always- recognizably Ben Affleck. Best friend who aspires for Matt Damon to make something of his life Affleck = Roughneck oil driller blowing up asteroids Affleck = Sad sack mysteriously attractive to Liv Tyler Affleck = yes, blind lawyer with superhuman senses and reflexes Affleck.
To limit the comparison to Bale as "both made some goofy movies" completely ignores the fact that Bale actually made some significant transformations in those years of characters, and I'm not talking about some Hollywood crash dieting and gym training.
Go watch The Machinist, American Psycho, and 3:10 to Yuma and tell me if Bale is playing the same character. Hell, be honest: if you didn't know otherwise, would you think it was the same actor?
I'm not cheering for Affleck to fail. I hope he can pull it off. But overconfidence isn't warranted, and heaping undeserved scorn on Bale makes less of a case for Affleck's superiority and more of a case for a lack of critical perspective.
As for "the Bat", to continue to flog the "Oh we would be so much better off if we could get a fun Batman" line in the same stream as describing the character as "Mitt Romney with a doomsday bunker and a leather fetish" is wanting to have your cake and eat it, too. "The character will be awful until they do what I want them to do with him?" Does that sound slightly familiar amidst the torrent of abuse directed towards "entitled" fandom?
Yeah, yeah. Darker and grittier is getting old. I get it, just as I get how in another month a Superman movie that originally got a mixed-to-positive review is going to have metamorphosed into the sludge scraped off of some Hollywood producer's shoe.
I'm still hoping for a good Batman. And I really don't give a plugged nickel if that's a Batman so dark he makes Joel Schumacher's Batman and Adam West's Batman retroactively cease to exist, so long as it's interesting to watch. Batman has been a lot of things even in the relatively narrow range of comics I've read- a sane man in an insane world playing psychotic to keep his enemies off-balance, the philanthropist trying to create a Gotham that can stand on its own feet in the absence of its night-stalking vigilante, a rebel against a corrupt police-state, the uncompromising and unlikable commander of what amounted to a small army.
I would be thrilled to see any of those interpretations, as unlikely as they might be in the world of capsule summaries and high-concept pitches. What I don't want to see is "can't we make Batman more light and fun" without any deeper conception of what they want to do with him.
Last time they did that, it sucked hard enough to bring down a franchise.