what the hell was up w/'Batdance' though? i was a new fan when it dropped and i loved and hated it fiercely at the time. now i'm firmly in the love camp w/it. as strange as it is.
2. "I thought that was the coolest thing about the Batman reboot" In response to Reply # 0
of all people to recruit for music to promote the movie... Prince?
I think I remember first hearing it on WTLC that summer, with the same reaction you had -- I didn't know what to think. Then the "Vicki Vale" part came on, and I started to grin.
3. "the idea made 0 sense to me at the time." In response to Reply # 2
having Prince do the soundtrack, i mean. but looking back that was a good fit. Prince's sensibilities back then and Burton's matched up well. and he really got into the characters in a fresh way.
i dunno if 1989 Prince could work the same thing w/TDKR. or 2012 Prince, for that matter. i think this series is too 'dark'. lol
4. "yeah. I'm listening to one of the 'Partyman' remixes now" In response to Reply # 3
>having Prince do the soundtrack, i mean. but looking back >that was a good fit. Prince's sensibilities back then and >Burton's matched up well. and he really got into the >characters in a fresh way.
and it does sound like something out of a Tim Burton movie. Even if it wasn't Batman, he could have written this to be for the first Pee Wee movie and changed the lyrics.
8. "he could have written this to be for >the first Pee Wee movie and change..." In response to Reply # 4
>and it does sound like something out of a Tim Burton movie. >Even if it wasn't Batman, he could have written this to be for >the first Pee Wee movie and changed the lyrics.
37. "Useless bonus-trivia:" In response to Reply # 2
When the second movie came out, Burton used lame goths Siouxsie and the Banshees (well, their early post-punk albums are good, at least the debut and I still dig their goofy 80's hit "Peek-a-boo" a lot) for the theme and he was invited to talk about the movie on MTV europe. He said that using Prince was a mistake and that Siouxsie etc. made more sense and was more appropriate. I wasn't surprised:Burton always looked like a fucking Goth to me and his movies have that vibe...
he said WB pushed him to use Prince songs? but all accounts i've read said he was gonna use older Prince material before Prince got involved and recorded the new songs. did he say WB pushed him to use those?
5. "I saw the movie long after I heard the music and watched this vid" In response to Reply # 0
I think that's the reason why I secretly always was a bit disappointed by that movie.
I mean, I had come off of reading Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum and I wanted the movie to have the same kind of demented, modern sensibility. I was let down that it ended up not having that madcap energy, and especially that they used a conventional Hollywood symphonic score (even though it's one that became iconic in its own right). I thought Prince's music was going to actually be the movie SCORE... That would have been bad ass.
10. "never saw the Schumacher movies." In response to Reply # 7
I understand they were pretty camp, but I doubt Prince would have fit because he actually respected and *believed* in the material.... He was not mocking it.
Don't know if you remember, but the story back in those days was that Prince doing the music for the movie was a consolation prize because he had actually campaigned to STAR as the Joker.
And I think in the "Partyman" video, he did a much, much better Joker than Jack Nicholson, who essentially played Jack Nicholson with clown makeup on.
15. "i hate the nolan batman era" In response to Reply # 0
but yeah, it wont have anything like that
cos nolans batman doesnt do FUN
he has to be grim and stoney faced all the time
cos otherwise the batman fanboys will get upset
and that wont do, sir, not at all
(not that i want it to be campy like the 60s series, but a bit of fun, just a small sense of it, wouldnt be a bad thing, something a tad fantastical or surreal wouldnt go amiss either)
16. "The *Nolan* fanboys... not Batman fanboys." In response to Reply # 15
>cos otherwise the batman fanboys will get upset
Most real Batman fans I know aren't too crazy about Nolan's version either because it doesn't capture the crazy surrealism often found in the comics. The need to explain everything logically... like making it clear that the Joker is wearing greasepaint rather than having him actually have white skin... that ain't the comics at all.
18. "But has Batman been very fun and ''surreal'' since Miller's Year One?" In response to Reply # 16
(not "Dark knight returns" or Arkham asylum-those ones were surreal) I don't know, I haven't followed it since the early-mid 90's but the John wagner/Grant and Peter Milligan-penned stuff wasn't really "fun" IMO and often more "realistic" than surreal (Grant Morrison might have been a bit more crazy but I'm mixing those brits up in my head) and "the Legends of the Dark Night" mag seemed to go out of its way to make the Batman-universe as dark and "moody" as possible.
Of course, I'm a marvel-guy and a bit out of my element here but anyway, the vibe they seem to be going for is the dark one and it's one I recognize from the batman of that era...
I'm not 100% sold on this movies series but I prefer it over the 90's version-I can't stand Tim Burton and the Schumacher-ones were ass...
21. "Grant Morrison's recent Batman is pretty wild" In response to Reply # 18
and full of all kinds of absurdities and full-on embrace of some of the earlier campy elements
But even apart from that, when I talk about Nolan's ultra-realistic ethos being at odds with the tone of the comics, I'm not talking about it just being "dark"... It's the fact that everything about seems like it has to be justified to be possible in the real world, right down to the setting.
Gotham usually is portrayed as a gothic, surreal art deco version of NYC out of an Edvard Munch's fever dream... Nolan's Gotham is just Chicago. And the movies feel like Chicago crime films that happen to have a guy in a cape and some deformed freaks in them.
I can't imagine Nolan embracing a character like The Ventriloquist (a mild-mannered, middle-aged nerd who expresses his murderous impulses through a wooden gangster puppet named Scarface) or probably even the Penguin.
I mentioned the Joker before... Part of his story is that he fell into a vat of acid that turned his skin white and his hair green. Does that make sense in the real world? Probably not... but that's just part of Batman's world! But Nolan could never accept something so illogical... he had to make sure we all see the smeared greasepaint and the roots of Ledger's hair so that we know "OH... He just painted his face and dyed his hair. Okay, that makes sense now!"
Part of the reason why people keep talking about how Batman needs to be rebooted before they can make a JLA movie is because the world in Nolan's Batman movies is not a world in which you can imagine a Flash existing in another city, or a Hawkman or Superman for that matter.
34. "I understand what you mean..." In response to Reply # 21
"Year One" and most of the Legends of the dark knight issues pretty much felt like fairly realistic, "noirish" crime-stories but the regular mags still had the more goofy villains and the Gotham-vibe you are referring to.
BTW, any "recent" (like past ten years) Batman-paperbacks worth reading? They have closed the only comic-book store that covered imports here and our library-which of course is years behind and don't take in too much is closed until december so I'm TOTALLY out of the loop when it comes to comics which I don't want to be but it's very difficult here in sweden nowadays to be a comic-fan and the discussions on PTP might as well be in sumerian to me because I don't recognize anything...
My favorite Batman ever outside of mini-series and one-shots is the 70's Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams stuff I grew up on as a kid (sweden were always years behind the US when it came to comics) as well as the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers and Jim Aparo shit from roughly the same era.
I'll peep it. And wow @ Detective Comics 871-877. I once wanted to read all Batman issues (=Detective Comics; Detective Comics *and* Batman would be too much) from issue 1 to now like I ¤(¤almost) did with a bunch of Mrvel comics but that seems like a lifetime of work, LOL!
25. "I know." In response to Reply # 23 Sat Jul-21-12 08:51 AM by AFKAP_of_Darkness
I'm not O_E here and I'm not knocking Nolan per se... Just observing a particular feature of his Batman movies that I do not altogether dislike, but I kinda wish were dialed back just slightly.
It looks like they might be trying to spin it out of the Superman movie, and it's very possible to introduce a new Batman in one of the sequels without having to go through the origin again.
42. "wrong" In response to Reply # 23 Mon Jul-23-12 02:53 PM by GumDrops
burtons films looked a 100 times better than the gotham in the nolan movies
gotham according to nolan basically looks like a modern city/metropolis as it would in any other big hollywood blockbuster in the last decade
thats my main beef with the nolan batman - there is no visual identity anymore, its made to look much more everyday and ordinary than the batman of old
that might be okay for our current anti-imagination times, but i hope the next batman films have more of a fantastical bent to them
edit - i see afkap basically said the same thing upthread
i think the nolan worship is way out of control personally - i loved memento and following but im still not really sure just why hes praised as being this great auteur of 'intelligent blockbusters' - if i can be completely elitist, id say he seems to make 'smart' movies for people who perhaps arent so smart.
46. "i dunno" In response to Reply # 16 Mon Jul-23-12 02:57 PM by GumDrops
i think theres a lot of batman fanatics who love the nolan batman cos they think it sticks closest to the idea of batman they want to see, ie as far from the comic book-ish look of the previous two batman films as possible, they want batman to be treated SERIOUSLY
which is fine in theory, but my problem is that nolan being nolan, for all his apparent 'intelligence' as a filmmaker, he really dumbs things down a lot, and worse than that, the last two batman films - which seem to be how he got his current reputation - have been really pompous, bloated/leaden, self-regarding and pretty much witless. never mind the politics of the joker as terrorists and batman as poor old beleaguered bush.
32. "I wanted that Joker tat that the Vale clone had" In response to Reply # 0
There’s a storm coming. You and your friends better batten down the hatches cause when it hits you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us"-Selina Kyle
33. "watching that video" In response to Reply # 0
in a way, I feel like that's one of the perfect expressions of "Prince" there ever was. The way he just seems to be pulling the strings at every turn, behind all the keyboards, playing the other instruments on cue as his normal self, and then the performance: the split Batman/Joker get up.
35. "RE: watching that video" In response to Reply # 33
>in a way, I feel like that's one of the perfect expressions >of "Prince" there ever was. The way he just seems to be >pulling the strings at every turn, behind all the keyboards, >playing the other instruments on cue as his normal self, and >then the performance: the split Batman/Joker get up. >
Agreed. IMO the best "real" music video he ever did.
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