So I’ve been pretty excited about The Dark Knight…

I re-watched Batman Begins on my uncle’s new Blu-Ray set-up. It still bugs me that the new movie didn’t stick to canon and this Bruce is a bit on the whiny side, but I still love that the tone is so much closer to the comics than the old movie franchise.

I bought a hardcover special edition of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. Jim Lee’s art is amazing godly, but Frank Miller’s writing just kills me.

Today, I just watched Batman - Gotham Knight. For those of you who don’t know, this straight-to-DVD movie is Batman’s Animatrix - a series of tangentially connected animated shorts that take place between the two movies. The stories weren’t as philosophical as in the Animatrix, but that’s because Batman is both more fleshed out and closer to reality than the Matrix was. And art styles weren’t as diverse as the Animatrix, but there were still some great scenes. Oh, and Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman from Batman - The Animated Series and all the WB cartoons, is back in action.

Now, I just got tickets to see Dark Knight at a local IMAX theater after work on Friday.

Oh, and my personal hype aside, what’s with everyone and their mom saying Heath Ledger should get an Oscar posthumously for playing the Joker? I’m all for it if he deserves it, but the movie’s not even out yet, people! Maybe we should see how it is first before we start handing out awards.

And since I’m on the subject, I have one last tangent to cover… one movie critic wrote that Dark Knight is awesome because we get no back story. He goes on to say that all good comic book movies are the same way, and states as evidence that Spiderman 2 was better than 1 because of the lack of story. I disagree. On that count and on many others. Spiderman 1 was definitely the best movie in that franchise. Iron Man was awesome because Jon Favreau made you care about Tony Stark. The reason I think a lot of people don’t like the “origins” part of comic book movies is that the deeply nuanced canon has been ridiculously watered down or changed entirely to fit a director’s “vision,” a writer’s laziness, and/or time constraints. The only thing worse than that is when they constantly change the hero’s origins to make the current villain more threatening, like in the first Batman franchise. Good lord that annoyed me to no end!