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BATMAN BEGINS
Cast aside your Batnipples! As a certain Patrick Bateman lookalike once said, “Well, a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues,” and this week, TGTPTU tackles these issues in Sir Christopher Nolan’s entry into the franchise that would define his middle career with BATMAN BEGINS (2005). Former cohost Jack returns from France to talk Bat and comics with a Gen Z take. Meanwhile, Ken, Thomas, and Ryan grapple and claw and melee in difficult to parse action sequences to control the mic and effuse about this first of the three Batman films covered this season of NOLAN VOID.
After Insomnia, Sir Nolan’s efforts to get his and Jim Carrey’s project (a Howard Hughes’ late-in-life insanity film) off the ground (or out the hotel penthouse) were stymied by Michael Mann developing The Aviator, a film that would take off with Scorsese as captain. Without a script of his own or film in development, Nolan would meet with the Warner Bros (and maybe their sister Dot) to launch a “reboot” of the Batman franchise with Hollywood’s resident comic book aficionado David S. Goyer.
Together with production designer Nathan Crowley who’d worked with him on Insomnia for Warner Brothers, Sir Nolan worked to create a realism beyond what had come before in comic book films. In fact, per Nolan, “Everything we did was about being in massive denial that there was such a thing as [a comic book movie].”
Casting Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne (Batman takes nearly an hour to appear onscreen) and making use of his split persona from American Psycho, Bale is joined by a series of heavy hitters, including Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Rutger Hauer, pod-fav Ken Watanabe, the estimable Mark Boone Jr (back from Memento), and, perhaps oddly cast and not-to-return to the franchise, Katie Holmes.
Exclusive this week! Hear the Batman Baggins summary delivered by Ken but written by our guest director, someone really famous and from New Zealand and whose name rhymes with Jeter Packson, who may have confused Nolan’s film with his own take on rebooting the Dark Knight as so many directors took a stab at the reboot post-Schumacher Schumacher Schumacher (hopefully you weren’t reading this aloud before a mirror). Also, enjoy this week an experimental sound mix to cover for Thomas’s brief absence from the mike as he deals with a dog releasing mind-altering gas.
