Been reading some golden-age comics over at comicbookplus.com (formerly goldenagecomics.co.uk). Going over some of the Centaur comics for info for my golden-age encyclopedia website and I am again struck by the talent that was working at this relatively short-lived company. In Keen Detective Funnies #6, there's a story written by prolific pulpster Norman Daniels and illustrated by Fred Guardineer, before he became known for doing backwards speaking magicians. Another story has artwork credited to Hoffman but shows some Milton Caniff/Frank Robbins type of style. Lastly, an early story by Will Eisner that's very much a hard-boiled story though still showing some of those atmospheric qualities he'd be honing to a razor's edge by the time of The Spirit.

The Dark Knight Rises

Been a point of view of mine for some time that if you are going to go off model, make sure that your version, your vision is strong enough and compelling enough to warrant it. When Ditko did something decidedly different with the Blue Beetle from what went before, his Ted Kord creation was that much better than what was being done by Charlton before. When Denny O'Neil and Denys Cowan did The Question it was very different than what Ditko had created, but they ended up like Ditko creating a series that was unlike anything else at the time.

Nolan's Batman films are along the same lines. Much of the character is still there, still recognizable under that padded armor. In some ways, his Batman is an outgrowth of Tim Burton's. The suit, the sci-fi look of the vehicles. Yet the difference in the storytelling makes it as different from Burton's as Burton's was from the 60s television show. Nolan sees and wrings out real story from the mythos. The characters are fleshed out, each having their own story, their own point of view. More importantly, he never loses sight as to whose movie this is.

So, I can forgive the liberties taken from the comics, because while watching I am fully vested into the story. I am impressed with how this movie ties into the other two, making them all feel as one narrative yet each one still stands well enough on its own. At almost three hours in length, other than the needed bathroom break, it didn't feel that long. There was just that much story going on.

Unfortunately, it's after getting out of the theater and thinking about it that the problems do come to mind. Where the themes that movie espouses on one hand are completely undercut by the movie itself. The one flaw that comes to mind while watching the movie is the ridiculousness of the suit. He is so armored that the flimsy cape is obviously a completely different material and looks out of place. Imagine Iron Man painted gray and then someone puts a cape of gauze and you get the general idea. The armor interferes with movement and having any really good choreographed fight scenes and then when he really needs armor... he is very easily stabbed.

I don't like guns but I will use cannons. A lot. He makes a point to Selina Kyle that he doesn't use guns. But, he in fact uses them quite a bit as all of his vehicles come equipped with deadly offensive weaponry and we see them getting used a lot. He even has weapons that look like guns, they just don't fire bullets.

Batman is a symbol. Anyone could be Batman. Providing they have access to millions and weapon prototypes. Tony Stark could be Batman. But, hardly anyone else. Special fighting skills not really required. Yeah, a recurring problem with the movie is that there's a lot of Batman using and fighting from vehicles. He mentions several times and the ending plays out the idea is for Batman to be a symbol, to inspire people to take up the good fight (not necessarily to become Batman themselves per se). But, for most of the movie, his being Batman is because of the cool toys he has, toys that he won't share. This is further underscored near the end when comes back after being sent away by Bane and he has lost his fortune, vehicles and weapons. This would have been a prime time for Nolan and Batman to prove what he's been saying: that he puts together a costume, one of cloth and simple leather and still fights back and wins the day. Instead, luckily Lucius had a few spare items for him and his flying vehicle is parked on a roof where no one has been able to see through the camouflage that doesn't look anything like what's around it.

Bane: I must break Batman physically and spiritually even though he's already broken. Maybe Nolan liked this theme so much, that's why it's in there twice. Bane makes a big spiel about beating Batman, not just physically but spiritually. He busts Batman's back and sends to the hell-hole of a Middle-Eastern prison that he's from. The problem with this is the movie starts off with Batman already broken. His leg is busted, he's been a recluse for years as both Bruce Wayne and Batman. He's a man just waiting to die. For the most part Bane defeated a man that was already defeated. In reality, his escape from the prison isn't about him escaping from the prison Bane sent him to but the one he already was in. This kind of lessens Bane as a villain though. He doesn't defeat or arrange a defeat of Batman at the top of his game, he doesn't really push Batman into a place he wasn't before.

 I am the world's dumbest detective. He seems oblivious to many things and has to be told about them as opposed to figuring them out for himself. A couple of revelations would have worked better if we were shown Bruce Wayne figuring them out as opposed to being told to him, one while a knife was in his back.

Ok, they have references to Selina Kyle being referred to by the press as a thief called the "Cat" but nowhere is that really explained. In fact, about the one type of thieving she doesn't commit in the movie is cat burglary. The movie also has her friend, Holly Robinson, but I don't recall the character being called by name once during the movie. Something that is increasingly becoming a pet peeve, characters with names in the credits but never named in the actual film. But, how they can get her costume pretty close and hugging every curve, not at all realistic for a cat burglar and Batman is heavily armored and padded. Beyond her being a gorgeous woman.

Another area where the film kept me guessing to the end was Joseph Gordon-Levitt's role as the policeman named Blake. Incidentally, what's up with IMDB having spoilers to one character's story arc in the credits but not another? The problem here is that there's a character named Blake that is part of the Batman comics already ie that's the real name to Catman. Someone, somewhere should have pointed out that his name needed changing. The final revelation was a bit stupid, a little too cutesy in a movie that otherwise stayed away from such stuff. Hire a woman and make the character Montoya. Or keep Levitt and name him Bradley, Corrigan, Harper, Richards, Garrett, Bard, or something. But, his being named Blake was almost as much of a distraction as recognizing so many of the supporting actors popping up in roles and trying to place them such as Burn Gorman (no relation). I kept expecting that there to be a reason for him to be named "Blake".

All in all, this is a very good movie that's close to being great. Many of the problems were easily fixable just by making the costume closer to being something a person could easily move in and have Batman do a bit more hand-to-hand and less from a cockpit.

A neat little nod, or maybe it was just me, but the logo and mascot to Gotham's football team? A dead ringer for the Shadow only with a  yellow scarf instead of red. The plot itself of Bane taking over the city, criminals holding court against cops and ordinary citizens? Straight out of several Spider novels to the point that at times I felt like I was watching something that would almost work better as a treatment for the Spider.

Ray Bradbury RIP

Ray Bradbury passed away at the age of 91. Sad, sad news. He is one of my all-time favorite writers. One of my few professionally published works was a book review for the newspaper of Green Shadows, White Whale, a novelization of his Irish short stories. Known mostly for his science fiction, he wrote some of the creepiest short stories this side of Edgar Allen Poe such as "The October Game", leaving the most disturbing scene up to the imagination of the reader.

That was the lesson in his writing. He loved words and phrases, but he worked with the reader's imagination. When the father in Something Wicked This Way Comes sees his son and friend running, he sees with the mind's eye how the friend runs, focusing on speed and winning the race while his son runs for the pure joy of running, to feel the wind on the face and the earth beneath the feet speeding by. He describes what cannot be seen so that we can see it in our minds. It's what made either Hitchcock or Serling comment that they'd love to have filmed more of his stories, but what made them great, that love of language and words, made them unfilmable.

Yet, they tried. Something Wicked This Way Comes made into a movie with Jason Robards. "I Sing the Body Electric" on The Twilight Zone. Then there was the Ray Bradbury Theater that did a fine job adapting many of his short-stories. A Sound of Thunder has as much to do with the short story as I Robot has to do with Asimov's work. EC Comics adapted several of his stories into comics, purportedly at first without permission.

He also wrote some great essays on writing (The Art of Writing and How to Feed Your Muse) and life in general. Several decades ago he wrote about how society seemed bent on reducing human interaction, starting off with the automobile where we can close the windows and turn up the radio, shutting out the world. People jog with radios in their ears (an invention inspired by something similar in his novel Fahrenheit 451) And, the world has furthered its way down that path since the essay. How hard is it to call customer service and get a real person on the phone (how often are you directed to email them or fill out an online form)? How many people do you communicate via Facebook instead of face-to-face? ATMs, automated check-outs at stores and automatic gas pumps so you don't have to even deal with a cashier. Then, there's the essay on lost-ness. The reason that we travel is so that we can safely "get lost". That we don't know what's around the corner. We might be a little unsure of the food we're eating. The Horton Plaza mall in San Diego is based a little around that essay and could be summed up by the phrase "you can't get there from here". Built on several levels with an open air center, just going up or down one flight, or getting to a store across the center divide can be an adventure. The builders when designing the stairs and walkways seemed to use an M. C. Escher drawing as blueprints. Yet, on the other hand it's a failure of the lesson of the essay as all the stores are pretty much exactly the same as the stores in other malls all over the country.

His later works became more and more abstract in hard details, but carried simply by the power of images and senses built simply by words. He'd describe a house not by how it looks, but by the wind blowing across it, starting with the wind's origins in the Arctic North and route it takes through various lands and cultures, picking up dust of pharaohs and queens and animals long dead along the way before brushing across the shutters of the house. I figured if he lived long enough, he'd produce a book that was shorn of all narrative structure and be simply an abstract painting of language, words and phrases juxtaposed together to dredge up images and memories from some collective subconscious of a world that never quite was.

You'll be missed.