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Thursday, July 7, 2005

Dissenting Opinion on ‘Batman Begins’

Posted by on July 7 at 11:17 AM

Hate to disagree with Justice Mudede and Justice Nelson (who know from movies and have made a few themselves, whereas what the hell have I ever done?), but: Batman Begins ain’t the great movie they’re pretending. Mudede thinks the movie is so great he wanted us to put it in Stranger Suggests twice in one week. I saw the thing late last night. On materialistic terms, it’s fantastic. The scene when he’s standing in a cave of swirling bats: great. The jumping-through-air-while-on-fire: great. Liam Neeson and Michael Cane: great. But Jesus Christ a better script could have been written by a class of illiterate schoolchildren. I don’t understand why they can spend a bazillion dollars to make a huge movie and put the actors in these beautiful places and not have a single interesting thought behind any of it. The dialogue is piss-poor and loaded with cliches (someone’s been burning their candle at both ends, face your fears, didn’t you get the memo, why do we fall? so we can learn to pick ourselves back up again, etc, etc). And Katie Holmes is simply retarded. I’ve always thought her career was a Hollywood practical joke, but she’s abysmal in this (altough her nipples are at attention in every shot). About 30 minutes in she’s sitting in the car with Christian Bale and there’s this contrived conflict between them and she says, “Your father would be so ashamed of you.” I said under my breath, “Blah blah blah,” and my date said, “We could go next door and see the rest of Star Wars if you want.” And he had already seen Star Wars.