Holy Batman!

The first Batman movie is on cable right now and I’m stuck by how beautiful the design of the film is. I know that the fellow who inspired a lot of the cityscapes and buildings is long dead, but if they ever do a Watchman movie it should look like this movie.

Speaking of Alan Moore and the movies, we’re finally going to see V for Vendetta this weekend. Last weekend I was on deadline. We also going to try and see the stick-up movie with Clive Owen and Denzel Washington. I want to see it before the big twist/reveal becomes common knowledge.

People I know are a bit iffy about fitting all of V for Vendetta into two hours, but as I recall, the comic was a bit chatty. It was good chatty, back when Alan still had some good stuff to say, but I don’t think a lot of it will be missed from the movie. The Watchmen comic series was pretty chatty/fat, with a lot of stuff that was non crucial to the storyline going on, but the fans would have six or seven heart attacks each if anything is left out. I true representation of the comic can never be made into a movie because if you have Dr. Manhattan’s big blue dong swinging around that long it’ll drive the rating through the ceiling. My wife Valarie thinks that one of the cable networks might be able to pull it off. I think she’s dead right.

We watched the final episode of The Shield earlier this evening. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, let me just say that I thought it ended with more of a whimper than a bang. I was expecting a multi-megaton bombastic close. It was still entertaining as hell.

Ah, back on T.V. I just caught a glimpse of Billy D. Williams as Harvey Dent. He would have made for an interesting Half-Face. He sure couldn’t have done worse than Tommy Lee Jones.

Speaking of comic book movies, there’s been very little buzz on the movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. It’s being directed by Zack Snyder who did a Crackerjack of a job on 1994's Dawn of the Dead. 300 is a period piece and is going to be a hard sell without any big names in the cast. I guess time will tell. It 's too bad Miller had such a bad experience in Hollywood in the early 1990s with the RoboCop films. He could have been doing some fun films. Perhaps his acceptance level will be high enough after the Sin City films wind down for him to do the kinds of movies he’d like to do. It would be a waste if he didn’t.