A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Showing posts with label The Batman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Batman. Show all posts

Thursday, May 28, 2026

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson in The Batman

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson. Screenplay: Matt Reeves, Peter Craig. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: William Hoy, Tyler Nelson. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

No, we didn't need a Batman reboot, and certainly not one at an epic length. But I appreciated Matt Reeves's visually and tonally dark The Batman for its coherent and sometimes original reworking of too-familiar material. If we must have billionaire vigilantes, let them be like Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne, at least a little tormented by self-doubt. Batman has always seemed to me the weirdest of superheroes, Wayne's role-playing being just this side of psychosis, and Pattinson gives the part some of that quality. I also like the transformation of the Penguin into a crippled mob henchman who hates his nickname, and I'm grateful that it gave Colin Farrell a chance to show what a protean actor he is, here and in the TV series that was spun off from the film. The considerable talents of Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, and Andy Serkis are well-used too, and I liked Michael Giacchino's melancholy score, with its variations on Schubert's "Ave Maria." But really, the best I can say for the movie is that as insults to my intelligence go, it was a well-made one. 

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