Apples and oranges in my opinion. I loved both for different reasons.
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Keaton did a great Batman, but Bale gave him a new life, you can believe that the guy you are watching is really the Batman with his Bruce Wayne disguise... so I say Bale
in the case of the Joker, don't get me wrong for the idea of the 60's Joker, Nicholson did a great interpretation, and he would always be a great Joker... but Leighter... damn Leighter make the Joker what one expects of the Joker... a devious enemy, who you can't plan ahead of him, the guy is crazy... not funny crazy (Nicholson had some of this), just crazy... the idea was not for him to be funny, but terryfing... damn he put the fear of god in a city within days... almost forces batman to kill... Leither's Joker is simply The Joker... a guy who just wants to see the world burn for no better purpose than to see the flames engulf everything.
besides I have to agree with this:
Apples and oranges in my opinion. I loved both for different reasons.
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I liked Keaton's occasionally nice (and even a bit befuddled) Bruce Wayne better than Bale's surly punk. While I'm a big fan of Val Kilmer, from movies like Real Genius and Tombstone, he completely fell down as Bruce/Bats, and the less said about George Clooney, the better.
I'm split on the Joker. Both actors brought such different things to the role. Nicholson's came off as an angry over-the-top clown, but never a scary one. The new improved version was too grim and humorless, IMO.
But accept no subtitutes (especially not Halle Berry!), Michelle Pfieffer is the one true Catwoman. I'll even forgive the rocket-launching penguin nonsense at the end, just to see her again. (And Chris Walken's character was also incredibly cool, both funny and vicious, as is so often the case with him. If only the Penguin hadn't *also* been in that movie...)
The last two Batman movies, despite rave reviews, have felt cold and soulless to me. Bleak, unrelenting and tedious. I'd much rather watch Keaton's Bruce Wayne / Batman, and the more comic-book / surreal Burton Gotham than the grittier more realistic new stuff.
On the other hand, Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine's performances utterly saved the last two movies for me. Bests Alfred ever, and Lucius is pretty awesome, too!
Bale was the better Batman but Jack was a better Joker.
I can't really picture a Bale Batman together with an Jack Joker. It's all a matter of context i guess...
I mean Jack was good because Micheal was mediocre.
I always though Tim Burton's Batman was freakin terrible. And old man Jack Nicholson as Joker I was never a fan of.
People love to say the series got bad with Shumacher as director. Well to me it just got worse.
Batman begins and Dark Knight however were fantastic. As was the Animated series.
That just my opinion.
Posers,
If you want to talk Batman Nostalgia, then you want to talk about the REAL Batman!!!
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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My Bat-opinions:
Adam West: Deride him if you must, but his batman was true to the comics at the time *rolls eyes*
Michael Keaton: I actually was pleasently surprised in his Batman. He did balance the Bruce Wayne/Batman personas pretty well. For all the problems in the second movie, he showed that Bruce Wayne's strengths are Batman's weaknesses.
Val Kilmer: I thought Val did a decent job as Batman, but his Bruce Wayne sucked. (Yes, scripting didn't help)
George Clooney: The other end. His Batman sucked, but he played the billionare playboy part to the hilt.
Kevin Conroy: This! Is! BATMAN! *chest-kick*
Rino Romero: Eh, wasn't too keen on him, but didn't like the animation.
Christian Bale: Very dark, but true to the interpretation of Batman being the real identity and Bruce Wayne being a disguise.
Diedrich Bader: Still can't work past Oswald as Batman, sorry.
Jokers:
Ceaser Romero: *twitch*
Jack Nicholson: It's Jack Nicholson in Joker Make-up. Seriously, he was enjoyable, but lets be honest. That's what we were watching.
Mark Hamil: This is the essential Joker to me.
Heath Ledger: Very dark take on the Joker. He was sociopathic, not funny crazy.
Now as to Batgirls... Yvonne Craig, no contest.
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I'd much rather watch...the more comic-book / surreal Burton Gotham than the grittier more realistic new stuff.
I totally agree here. However, I like Christian Bale's take that Bruce Wayne is the mask and Batman is the core personality much better. It fits my view of Batman. Other heroes put on the tights to hide who they are, Batman takes his off.
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I totally agree here. However, I like Christian Bale's take that Bruce Wayne is the mask and Batman is the core personality much better. It fits my view of Batman. Other heroes put on the tights to hide who they are, Batman takes his off.I'd much rather watch...the more comic-book / surreal Burton Gotham than the grittier more realistic new stuff.
True, and that's a relatively recent 'read' on the character, that has, very quickly, it seems, been ported over to other characters as it was proclaimed to be 'genius,' such as Superman (whose identity of Clark Kent is deconstructed in Kill Bill as a sign of his contempt for humanity, a bunch of bumbling visionless nebbish nobodies) and Wonder Woman (who, to be fair, wears 'Diana Prince' even *more* as a mask than the other two, since she was never born Diana Prince, she just invented the character, much as J'onn Jonzz created Detective John Jones out of whole cloth, as a mask to disguise his non-person status).
It may have been explicitly stated first in the pages of the Justice League (by Superman, IIRC) that Bruce is the mask and Batman is the real identity, but it's not exactly a shocking concept to someone whose been reading comics with characters like Thor (to whom Donald Blake is a mask) or Nightcrawler (to whom the image-inducer generated face of Kurt Wagner is a mask) or Aquaman (who abandoned any sort of human life as Arthur Curry, lighthouse keeper, ages ago) for *decades.*
Maybe it was new to the viewing audience, and maybe the latest generation of comic-book readers needed to be re-introduced to the concept via some explicative text (since 'mask' characters like Donald Blake, Kurt Wagner, John Jones, Arthur Curry and Diana Prince haven't been seen much in the last decade or so), but it's not exactly a game-changer. It's a game-pretty-much-the-same-as-always kinda thing.
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Set,
I always thought the Superman/Batman dynamic was that part of Kal-El wants to be Clark Kent and leave Superman behind, and part of Batman wants to leave Bruce Wayne behind.
I'm not aware of any super hero that balances the secret identity thing. Iron Man may come the closest.
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Set,
I always thought the Superman/Batman dynamic was that part of Kal-El wants to be Clark Kent and leave Superman behind, and part of Batman wants to leave Bruce Wayne behind.
I'm not aware of any super hero that balances the secret identity thing. Iron Man may come the closest.
I agree, Superman wants to fit...
Batman just continues being Bruce Wayne because he needs to
other may hide to pass among humanity, John Jones, Diana Price, etc hidded their identities to integrate, like kind of sleeper agents... just in the good side...
but while not new the concept of Bruce Wayne as the mask is diffent, the others hide themselves between humanity to be part... Batman can no longer be Bruce Wayne, still he does, because Wayne's contacts and fortune are useful
I like both versions of Batman so far. But I also feel that the first Batman franchise went downhill very fast. The Dark Knight, at least, has not only lasted one good movie longer so far, it raised the bar by making a 2nd movie better than the first. How long it can keep it up given the inevitable studio interference, changes in personnel behind the camera, and all that likely to appear, I can't hazard a guess.
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I like both versions of Batman so far. But I also feel that the first Batman franchise went downhill very fast. The Dark Knight, at least, has not only lasted one good movie longer so far, it raised the bar by making a 2nd movie better than the first. How long it can keep it up given the inevitable studio interference, changes in personnel behind the camera, and all that likely to appear, I can't hazard a guess.
Okay I admit that penguins with rockets was aweful, but other than that, the movie wasn't bad and the penguin was an interesting take on the character.
I had a long post that got eaten about my faves but I'll just keep it short.
Keaton best batman
Bale So-so
Ledger best Joker (and maybe best villian ever)
Nicholson very good Joker.
And it wasn't bales take on the character, it was the writers, unless bale was the writer, in which case I take it back. And I agree it's the best take on batman as a character.
Okay I admit that penguins with rockets was aweful, but other than that, the movie wasn't bad and the penguin was an interesting take on the character.I had a long post that got eaten about my faves but I'll just keep it short.
Keaton best batman
Bale So-soLedger best Joker (and maybe best villian ever)
Nicholson very good Joker.And it wasn't bales take on the character, it was the writers, unless bale was the writer, in which case I take it back. And I agree it's the best take on batman as a character.
I agree that the second movie of the first franchise could have been pretty good and had some very good elements. The Catwoman plotline was doing pretty well, there was good chemistry between Batman and Catwoman... but the Peguin characterization dragged the movie down. Similarly, while a bit over the top, Jim Carrey's Riddler was enjoyable. But the rest of the movie stunk. I couldn't even sit through the 4th one.
The first Batman franchise has convinced me that too many villains will wreck a movie. There's usually just too much going on. They try to force too many plot elements to converge and end up looking stiffly contrived. Spiderman 3 suffers much the same problem.
The first Batman franchise has convinced me that too many villains will wreck a movie.
I would say the same of Wolverine Origins.
HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!
hehe....heh...
Ok, what is this thread really about?
*giggle*
No, really?
Keaton was a joke in '89. He's worse now.
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The first Batman franchise has convinced me that too many villains will wreck a movie.I would say the same of Wolverine Origins.
Or the third X-men movie, really you include colosus throughout the entire film and the one line he says in the entire movie has nothing to do with the plot but is giving directions?
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Regarding the Batman/Bruce Wayne conflict, I agree that in the comics and in many other iterations, it's clear that Batman is the real personality and Bruce Wayne is the mask. However, Bale's Batman is a little more complex. His heroism doesn't seem to be based entirely on his personal neurosis created by his parents' murder. It springs more from wanting to be a symbol that the people of Gotham can use to pull themselves out of the mire. In The Dark Knight, he thought Harvey Dent could take over as that symbol, and he'd be able to give Batman up - not what he'd do if he saw himself as Batman all the time. Instead, I'd argue that there are actually three separate personas in the new series - Batman, the public foppish Bruce Wayne, and the private Bruce Wayne, which is the real person. The real personality is the one you see when he's talking to Alfred or Rachel. In these films, Batman is a symbol created based on the ninja techniques that Ra's al-Ghul taught him in Batman Begins.
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Instead, I'd argue that there are actually three separate personas in the new series - Batman, the public foppish Bruce Wayne, and the private Bruce Wayne, which is the real person. The real personality is the one you see when he's talking to Alfred or Rachel. In these films, Batman is a symbol created based on the ninja techniques that Ra's al-Ghul taught him in Batman Begins.
people do stupid things for love, including denial. he saw that the only way to get the love of Rachel back was leaving the Batman behind... too bad she had already decided to marry Dent.
Rachel told him so in Batman Begins "no, this is your mask" talking about Bruce Wayne
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Instead, I'd argue that there are actually three separate personas in the new series - Batman, the public foppish Bruce Wayne, and the private Bruce Wayne, which is the real person. The real personality is the one you see when he's talking to Alfred or Rachel. In these films, Batman is a symbol created based on the ninja techniques that Ra's al-Ghul taught him in Batman Begins.people do stupid things for love, including denial. he saw that the only way to get the love of Rachel back was leaving the Batman behind... too bad she had already decided to marry Dent.
Rachel told him so in Batman Begins "no, this is your mask" talking about Bruce Wayne
However, I agree that he has two Bruce Wayne personalities. That becomes abundently clear in Baman Begins. However, it could be better said that the Bruce he shows to Alfred and Rachel is really just Batman without the mask.
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The first Batman franchise has convinced me that too many villains will wreck a movie. There's usually just too much going on. They try to force too many plot elements to converge and end up looking stiffly contrived. Spiderman 3 suffers much the same problem.
Spider-Man 3 (and 2, and 1) also suffers from the Batman movie problem of killing off the villain at the end of the movie. Sure, Batman (and Spider-Man) 'don't kill,' but you can hardly tell since everyone they face off against ends up in a body bag...
The survivors are almost inevitably the least interesting characters as well. In Spider-Man 3, both Eddie Brock and Harry Osbourne had complexity and depth and were, IMO, well-acted (and Topher was up against a lot of knee-jerk reaction on my part, since I don't like the actor and I loathe the character of Venom!). Sandman was a complete failure, so, naturally, he's the one that lived on to suck up more valuable screen time looking sad about his sick kid. Feh.
The Batman decision to kill off Two-Face in the same hour that they introduced him was just lame. He had great potential and, while he wasn't considered for any posthumous Oscars, I think Eckhart acted the hell out of those roles (Harvey Dent, pre and post). Huge waste of a character / storyline. The abrupt nature of his transformation and disposal just made his entire appearance in the movie seem like an enormous waste of screen time that could have been devoted to something else. I get that his life and death served as an example of how the Joker operated, trying to convince everyone else that they would be crazy psycho-killers too, if they had 'one bad day,' to justify his own failure to survive personal tragedy, but it just felt rushed and cheap, which may be a fault of the two-hour movie medium, more than a fault of the script.
It's possible that a good Joker story would require a six hour mini-series or something.