Supercut: The Bat-Turn
In 2007, when Christopher Nolan was filming his future blockbuster The Dark Knight, they didn’t yet know how successful it was going to be, and so people actually bothered to do all sorts of publicity press about it. On June 14, 2007, a number of nerd blogs were granted press access to a promotional photo of the Batman suit, which had been revamped since Begins. Now, the suit is revamped for every movie, usually for simple reasons like: it’s hot, it’s heavy, it’s difficult to get in and out of. And when there’s continuity of creative personnel, the returning actors and directors like to try and streamline the process of not having to wait on the mechanics of the giant bat-suit in the room. Later that same week, Entertainment Weekly published this same promotional image (with a bizarre claim of exclusivity) and the all-important caption:
[T]he cowls of past suits were firmly attached to the neck and shoulders of the costume — necessary to maintain that iconic silhouette and to prevent the actor from moving around inside the mask. The new headpiece — modeled after a motorcycle helmet — is separate from the neck, so star Christian Bale can now swivel his noggin side to side, or nod up and down.
“The first time an actor playing Batman can turn his head!” trumpeted the blogs, forgetting that Bat-actors prior to 1989 wore costumes made of cloth, which wasn’t quite so restrictive.
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R2D2COOL2B4GOTTEN
This blog doesn’t get many comments. In part because, well, who reads it? I get my fair share of hits from people searching for images of the lady who was fired for being too hot and for Patrick Bateman’s business card, but few people actually stop here and smell the proverbial roses. I am not controversial, trendy, clever, or charismatic enough in person or in print to have “followers”. My twitter feed and my defunct Beehive forum testify to this. I have achieved relative peace with this fact.
So it was a mild shock to receive an email from WordPress saying that some rando had been incensed enough with my eight-year old post about Star Wars vs. Annie Hall that he needed to set me straight! All comments are moderated, so it sits sadly in limbo until I’m done with this post, and then I will send it to its stygian destiny. Because, well, it’s idiotic. He wiffles on for 200 words about how Star Wars, because it’s imaginary, took more creativity in its writing and production, because making up names like “Dirk Starkiller” is haaarrrrrd. Despite his lack of capitalization and despite a superfluity of appalling clauses, someone had successfully taught this young padawan that one should concede a point to the opposing view to show that one is not a complete rhetorical monster. He does this with the following:
Annie Hall made me such a good time but did not reach me emotionally like star wars.
But his ultimate conclusion is that, “Annie Hall will be quickly forgotten.”
Batman Reunion
Batman Returns came out 20 years ago today.
I’m 36, and I had just finished my seventh grade year when Batman came storming into the theatres in 1989. I had seen the trailer for it a month earlier in front of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and I spent that summer suffused with Batmania. I repeatedly poured over a flyer of Warner Brothers Batman merchandise that I’d acquired at a screening of UHF, not just wishing that I had the cash for the garish, sideshow denim jackets, but also scanning the photographs for details about the costume, which I drew and redrew, trying to deconstruct and understand every gadget and widget of the costume. At age 13, I’d had enough experience trying to make Halloween costumes that I understood that a dress pattern from JoAnne Fabrics looked like one thing on the paper packet and a completely different, disappointing thing on one’s body. The 1981 Superman Movie Book had showed me that even Kirk Alyn had “baggy tights” in the original Superman movie serial, and despite desperately trying to catch reruns of Batman, I was always disappointed with Adam West’s barrel chest. But this new armored costume, while a departure from the lean ideal of Neal Adams and Jose Garcia-Lopez’s iconic work for the DC Comics Style Guide, caught my fancy with its attempts at real-world practicality.
While I was too young and too broke to do anything beside dream about those gaudy Batman baubles, Batman made a reputed $500 million in merchandising in addition to the $285 million worldwide gross in ticket sales. So when the sequel was announced, the marketeers jumped on board. Choice Hotels, Diet Coke, and McDonalds all featured ad tie-ins, and when the film came out, they were rebuked for marketing to children who were younger than the PG-13 content suited. The script was primarily by Daniel Waters, of Heathers notoriety, and it belied the “POW! BAM! ZOOM! Comics are for kids!” mentality that seems forever associated with superheroics. The 1989 film may seem laughably corny by today’s standards, but I remember the grim, unrelenting confrontation between Jack Napier and Jack Palance and being thoroughly creeped out by it. It took me three or four times to watch the Joker crispy-fry his dubious crime syndicate colleague with his joy-buzzer without peeking at it through protectively splayed fingers. That sort of nastiness only works on the very young, and the young turned out in droves to see it. A Concord Monitor article by Emily Laber has quotes from children as young as five years of age going to see it. And yet, the popular perception according to the previously linked AP article seems to be that Batman was too dark, and Batman Returns would alleviate that problem. Marketeers certainly believed that line, despite a crop of subsequent parental protest by those irate that PG-13 might actually mean what it stood for.
I remember attending the high school graduation of my senior friends when I was a sophomore and being surprised at the number of people excited about the imminent release of Batman Returns. People older than I, cooler than I, were eager to talk to me about my anticipation of Returns because they could be unabashedly thrilled by the prospect of more Bat-action. And since I was an odd comic nerd, inexplicable but harmless, letting their anhedonic defenses down in front of me would have no social repercussions. It didn’t last, of course. One of my best friends walked out of the film because her boyfriend found the Catwoman psychotic break scene too tedious and maudlin to be borne. The ironic humor and the lack of cleanly executed action scenes didn’t quite appeal to the masses. I mean, the film topped a year that made almost $5 billion based on ticket sales that had risen to a whopping $5, and one in five tickets sold that year was for a Warner Brothers film. So it didn’t do badly by most standards, but when it was announced that Burton wasn’t directing the third film, and that Keaton wouldn’t be starring, there weren’t many people I spoke to at the time who seemed very put out.
Bruce and Tim and Dick/ With their pumped-up kicks/ Better run, better run
I like to tell my students that I’m an official, franchised member of Batman, Incorporated, and will produce my official Batman Card upon request. But, upon reflection, I decided that I also needed to walk the walk. Figuratively and literally.
Related Links:
+ Converse: Create Your Own DC Comics Chuck Taylor High-Tops
+ The Beat: Heidi MacDonald reviews the design process
+ ComicAlliance: Bethany Fong orders some Catwoman kicks
Zero Days in Paris, One Day in New York
I was supposed to be in France right now. I haven’t done much in the way of traveling since jaunting off to Kathmandu several years ago to attend my sister’s wedding, and I was starting to get that itch to see something completely new just to really jolt one’s daily expectations. However, since my trip to France was going to happen under the auspices of chaperoning a student trip, it was not completely under my control and I didn’t make the chaperone cut (too many male chaperones, too many female students, and a justifiable need to try and achieve some balance). Instead, I have ended a quiet week off from work domestically revisiting former experiences in a slightly new way.
The first was that I attended Jason Reitman’s live reading of the screenplay of The Apartment at the Times Center in New York. Reitman had previously led a performance of this script as the second of his series of staged readings at LACMA in Los Angeles. I found out about it about a week and a half before the reading, and tickets were, despite a minimal charge of ten dollars, not sold out. I spent a frustrated few minutes with my cursor hovering over the purchase button, weighing whether it was worth it to abandon a prior commitment and fly out to L.A. for a single performance. It’s something I like to do — go to great lengths to attend a small event, not abandon commitments — I took a trip to Chicago just to see Terry Jones a few years ago, and once drove a crazed, weather-tossed twelve-hour round trip to see Peter S. Beagle for an hour. Both were minor, anecdotal adventures and well worth the stupidity.
In this case, however, I closed the ticket tab of my browser, told some L.A. friends about it, and resigned myself to missing it. It did sell out later that day, and a week later it was announced that Natalie Portman would be playing the role originated by Shirley MacLaine. Then Steve Carrell was announced in the role formerly occupied by Jack Lemmon. The casting coups for this tiny event went out over the entertainment wires, and all subsequent events in the series of six readings evaporated instantly upon pre-announcement. I had missed my chance to see something both star-studded and enviably ephemeral.
And then! Oh, yes, and then… things took a lovely turn. Read the rest of this entry »
Freedom (I Won’t Get You Down)
So, waaaay back in March, I began working on a post about my experiences with DC Universe Online. I have a coterie of internet chums, predominantly out on the Left Coast, who meet up virtually to kill mall zombies, snipe 14 year-olds and comic book professionals alike, and generally bond in a virtual environment. In part due to my East Coast isolation and my job-required early curfew — but predominantly because of my general ineptitude at videogamery in general and FPSes in particular — I haven’t really been able to join in the melee. But in this case, I decided to make an exception, I procured a PS3, and bought the game at launch so that I could experience it and learn about it with other players.
As boondoggles go, sixty bucks is not the most grievous penalty I’ve ever paid. And the experience was not entirely unpleasant. I can’t say the same about, say, Champions Online, where my stuttering, halting framerate completely obscured clarity of action and rendered me unable to determine whether my frequent, inevitable deaths were the result of poor gameplay on my part or a combat system that resisted easy fluency. That account was deleted quickly and with no small amount of vicious stabbing at the keyboard, and I didn’t regret no longer having to endure their faux-four color printing fetishism, which is not the aspect of superheroics that moves and compels me.
No, the reason I fell out with DCUO was because of bad timing. The PS3 was borrowed, and eventually needed to be returned. Unfortunately, a couple months into playing the game, Sony was rather aggressively hacked, and all gameplay was suspended as servers were frozen to prevent an exploit of user data (this is my hazy recollection of events, anyway). Despite some sops for the absence of access — a few costume pieces and free access to a new mission arc — much of the velocity was lost, and the community of players with whom I had hoped to adventure had dried up. Perhaps if chat had an easy fix, or typing on a PS3 controller has been at all feasible, we would have been able to feel like a group of friends, but gaming — to us — never felt like were were playing as a team, even when gaming together.
Full-Frontal Prescience
There are those who don’t like Doonesbury, finding it too political and too unfunny for the “comics” page. I contend that these people have never read the rest of the comics page, which regularly drives me unerringly to the crumbling cliff’s edge of depression. Doonesbury has wit and vigor, and I hope that anyone who disagrees reads some of the plaudits that creator Garry Trudeau received upon the arrival of the strip’s 40th anniversary, as they go a long way towards showing that his admirers are not just praising his longevity, but his depth, complexity, and journalism.
Perhaps the strip’s strongest asset is its ability to remain current. This happens in part because Trudeau apparently has a legendary deal where he is able to submit his work much closer to when it actually runs than other cartoonists. And in part, this happens because he is a keen observer of humanity and history, and in such observation some truths are immediately recognizable as universal. But Trudeau is also a remarkably canny bastard. In July of 1980, he included the following question on the back of a draft registration form that Zonker was required to fill out: “If called upon by your country, would you be willing to give your life to protect the interests of U.S. oil companies?” Canny, and uncanny. Funny, and — with perspective, while in the midst of the second of two Gulf Wars — impressively depressing.
Which leads me to a story that I saw gracing the crawl of New York magazine’s arts & entertainment column, The Vulture: NBC may be planning to deliberately include nudity in a upcoming show set in the Playboy Mansion. The show will obviously have to restrain itself, pixilate itself, or edit judiciously for primetime broadcast, but Variety speculates that this is to amp up the prurient interest in any potential future DVD releases.
Interesting news, you might say. Envelope pushing, even. But Doonesbury effectively covered this already… in 1978. At the time, Freddy Silverman, former president of ABC, came over to NBC to sex up their programming, and Trudeau produced a few strips to satirize the timbre of the possible consultation.
I’m not entirely sure why I carry this stuff around inside my head. Except that as a teen, reading this in collected form, the idea of that kind of television having potentially been possible, and that — if so — I had missed it burned itself into my brain. It’s no fun being a man out of sync with time. Unless you’re the far-seeing mind of G.B. Trudeau, and perhaps not even then.
PICTURESHOW: Pairings, or Very Short Memes
Maud reblogged this on her Tumblr account, and I attempted to trace it back to its source, and in doing so discovered that so, so, so many people had re-Tumblred it that it seemed like some sort of glaring error that I hadn’t included it in my collection of screen-shown business cards. This was further and quite quickly confirmed by the rapid-fire pullulation of links to this hangman-style movie quiz, which used Mr. Bateman’s proffering of his business card as it’s iconic object. Not the celebrated axe. A business card.
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BRIEFLY: Positively Final Appearance
I should have folded the previous post into this one, but in the heat of excitement about seeing my name and the feeling that I need to explain what on gods’ green Earth BSATCOP was, anyway, I forgot that I had been planning a short list of my recent appearances in media. After all, what’s the point of having one’s own website, except for it to be a clearing house for the results of one’s own ego-surfing?
Oldest first: whilst cleaning up the blog after the transition from Melbatoast to SmartOvercoat, I found the remnants of a promised second post about the Springfield, VT premiere of The Simpsons Movie. After having checked the saved links from the time and found that some were no longer valid, I did a little searching for alternate sites. And found myself hiding in the background of an image archived by a Life magazine photographer. This was surprising for two reasons, the first being that it’s always a little odd to be included in a real, professional publication. The second was that I was rather under the impression that Life had shuttered its doors in 2000. I’d read the press release about its deal with Google, which had only confirmed its defunct status in my mind, but had no idea it still had a print presence, or even reporters and photographers.
Somewhat more recently, I attended w00tstock at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston on Halloween in 2010. It’s getting harder, as I get older, to find occasions to dress up for Halloween. Working at a high school, I observe that the elementary school tradition of wearing a costume dies hard with some students, and it’s always good to find an opportunity to show teenagers that their teachers have pasts and tastes and enjoy their fair share of popular culture. So I like dressing up at work. This year, however, Halloween fell on a teacher meeting day — I can’t prove that this happened because the superintendent is a stick-in-the-mud who finds Halloween costumes both frivolous and unprofessional, but I maintain my suspicions. In any case, I wanted an outlet for my cosplay urges, and wore a Cameron Frye outfit to w00tstock, gratified that other nerds would surely be dressed up at well.
w00tstock, being w00tstock, was fairly well digitally documented, and at one point someone came ’round with a camera asking all of the people in costume to identify themselves — or, more importantly, the nerd-references they had clothed themselves as. I knew I had been filmed, but it was still a surprise to see my face staring back at me from the preview screen of a playlist of videos taken at the scene.
(There’s also a picture of me in the fan photo album in the Wilbur’s Facebook page, where my face clearly shows that I suddenly got uncomfortable with the prospect of having my picture taken, and my mouth and eyebrows tried to quickly get out of shot, leaving my skull behind. No, I rather think I won’t be linking to that one.)
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