Dark Knight Strikes Again / Big Fish
Feb. 20th, 2004 10:05 amFrank Miller and Lynn Varley, The Dark Knight Strikes Again
Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was nothing short of brilliant. DKSA is . . . less brilliant. I dunno. It didn't really grab me in the same way. Too preachy, maybe. It felt like Miller was saying "I dislike the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of Sept 11, therefore I shall write a thinly-disguised Batman comic about it." Which is disappointing, 'cos I know he's better than that. The reappearance of all the old heroes came off feeling cheesy as well. Superman in DKR was handled brilliantly: tied down by the bureaucracy of the humans he's sworn to serve. Having the Flash be running a treadmill to provide electricity to the eastern seaboard. . . just not the same.
The plot itself? Again, eh. More superhero and less dark than DKR. Braniac blackmails Superman into doing his dirty work with the bottle-city of Kandor, and Lex Luthor is generally just there to be large & obnoxious. The Big S33kr1t Villain at the end felt like a rip-off as well.
Worth reading? Maybe, if you're seriously in need of more Batman. For me, it felt like a waste of time.
Tim Burton, Big Fish
To steal a bit from Gareth, the six-word, three-apostrophe review:
Tim Burton's Munchausen's Adventures Isn't Bad.
You've got an old guy on his deathbed, telling stories to anyone who'll listen and some (like his son) who won't. The stories all sound a lot like tall tales, but towards the end you start wondering just how much of them could have actually happened. Tim Burton's flashy visuals are more subdued here than in a lot of his other stuff: they kind of bubble just under the surface, or you catch something really cool out of the corner of your eye, but for the most part it's an almost-normal-looking film.
The plot involves the son trying to get to know his dad, a task made exponentially more difficult by Dad's tendency to overembellish everything. (Or maybe not?) Around midway through the film Dad says "[Son] probably told it wrong. Put in all the facts, left out all the truth." By the end, of course, Son learns to accept Dad's stories as being in a sense better than what really happened (especially with the doubt thrown over What Really Happened by the story of the lady in Spectre).
I dunno. It was good, but it didn't quite feel fulfilling. Maybe I need to watch Munchausen again.
Miller's The Dark Knight Returns was nothing short of brilliant. DKSA is . . . less brilliant. I dunno. It didn't really grab me in the same way. Too preachy, maybe. It felt like Miller was saying "I dislike the erosion of civil liberties in the wake of Sept 11, therefore I shall write a thinly-disguised Batman comic about it." Which is disappointing, 'cos I know he's better than that. The reappearance of all the old heroes came off feeling cheesy as well. Superman in DKR was handled brilliantly: tied down by the bureaucracy of the humans he's sworn to serve. Having the Flash be running a treadmill to provide electricity to the eastern seaboard. . . just not the same.
The plot itself? Again, eh. More superhero and less dark than DKR. Braniac blackmails Superman into doing his dirty work with the bottle-city of Kandor, and Lex Luthor is generally just there to be large & obnoxious. The Big S33kr1t Villain at the end felt like a rip-off as well.
Worth reading? Maybe, if you're seriously in need of more Batman. For me, it felt like a waste of time.
Tim Burton, Big Fish
To steal a bit from Gareth, the six-word, three-apostrophe review:
Tim Burton's Munchausen's Adventures Isn't Bad.
You've got an old guy on his deathbed, telling stories to anyone who'll listen and some (like his son) who won't. The stories all sound a lot like tall tales, but towards the end you start wondering just how much of them could have actually happened. Tim Burton's flashy visuals are more subdued here than in a lot of his other stuff: they kind of bubble just under the surface, or you catch something really cool out of the corner of your eye, but for the most part it's an almost-normal-looking film.
The plot involves the son trying to get to know his dad, a task made exponentially more difficult by Dad's tendency to overembellish everything. (Or maybe not?) Around midway through the film Dad says "[Son] probably told it wrong. Put in all the facts, left out all the truth." By the end, of course, Son learns to accept Dad's stories as being in a sense better than what really happened (especially with the doubt thrown over What Really Happened by the story of the lady in Spectre).
I dunno. It was good, but it didn't quite feel fulfilling. Maybe I need to watch Munchausen again.