Dilogies

Friday night I was in the mood, for the first time in a while, to see a movie out at the theater. There's a big multiplex right near the hospital, so I headed over after work to see what was playing. The answer of course was all the usual summer dummies. I gave serious thought to seeing Star Wars - I'd seen the other two movies in the 2nd trilogy, after all, and this was supposed to be better than those stinkers. But... I just couldn't get into it. I don't care what happens next. I realized this is the second time recently that I crapped out on a big movie trilogy; the other was The Lord of the Rings. I actually liked the first two movies, but after the passage of time, I just didn't care any more about what happened, not enough anyway to pay $10 and sit there for 3 hours. It seems a little odd to me invest in the first two movies of these two trilogies and pass on the third, not because I hated the other movies but just because... eh.

So instead, in the spirit of filling out a lapsed series, I went to see Batman Begins. I hadn't seen any of the Batman movies after the first two (not counting, of course, the great Adam West original, which will always be the BEST Batman movie) and I can't really imagine why I even saw those. Dreadful. So why'd I bother with this last one? Two words: Christian Bale.

Woof.

As brainless superhero movies go, it was pretty good, approximately as uninsulting to the intelligence as Spiderman was, but with more kung fu. Yeah, I know, kung fu! Ninjas, even! That was a plus, as was watching Michael Caine as the butler Alfie Alfred, just because watching Michael Caine do anything is a plus. On the down side, there was seeing Liam Neeson embarass himself playing a villain who was half over-the-top silly and half take-it-easy-with-the-Osama-bin-Laden-references disturbing, and wanting to smack the puffy lips off Katie Holmes for a) being convincingly self-righteous in the film, and b) having anything to do with Tom Cruise, who, by the way, is why I did not even consider seeing War of the Worlds. On the subject of Katie Holmes, I don't quite see why she's supposed to be such a knockout. Most of her looks comes from looking young - she IS young, for one thing, and she has babyfaced features that make her look sort of archetypally young. But she's not really beatiful like, say, Nicole Kidman, who's so perfect she makes your teeth hurt to look at her. It seems to me like Holmes' appeal is less to an ideal of beauty than to a barely-legal impulse. And now she's a Scientologist. Ugh... Tom Cruise - So. icky.

Yeah, so the summary review for Batman Begins: Christian Bale - hotter than anyone but me seems to realize. Katie Holmes: not as hot as everyone but me seems to think. Batman Begins - fortified with extra kung fu and a much cooler batmobile than that prettyboy sports car of Tim Burton's. Speaking of looks-good-less-filling Tim Burton, I may not like him, but I'm still going to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

One note on the movie theater - I like going to the movies alone (as well as with other people) because I get to sit in my favorite seat: the very front row. Friday, though, I actually had to get up and move 4 rows back just to be able to resolve what was on the screen, and because the headrests on the chairs made it impossible to comfortably tip your head back and look up to the middle of the screen. The nice thing is that the screen was huge, but the couple rows were just too damn close to do anybody any good. Now, my question is, what's the point of that? I know that theater owners want to maximize ticket sales and minimize square footage, etc, but there's no way I would sit still for being stuck in the front row in this theater even in a sold-out situation. And I like sitting in the front row. So how could it possibly work out for this theater to have 3-4 aisles that are too close even for first-row enthusiasts like me? I don't get it.

The only other thing to be said on this subject is a little love note to the MPAA. A couple of weeks ago, I went into the bodega here on my street to get some... whatever, milk, bread, beer, etc. The Yemeni guy who owns the place was entertaining himself behind the counter with one of those tiny-size DVD players like you can rent at the airport. The movie he was watching? Batman Begins.