One Million Hits and Counting!

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Photograph by Erin Nicole Bowman

Just a few minutes ago, we reached a milestone here at Through the Shattered Lens. What was that milestone? Well, as you might have guessed from the picture above, this site has now been viewed over a million times!

YAY!

I can still remember the day that Arleigh first invited me to help him with his site. Back then, the site was still known as Unobtainium 13 and I was so incredibly flattered to be asked to contribute. My first review for this site was of the odd 1970s blaxploitation film Welcome Home, Brother Charles and I remember how nervous I was when I first posted it and how happy I was when I discovered that the old saying was indeed true: If you write it, someone will read it. And, sometimes, if you’re really, really lucky, they’ll leave you a nice comment.

Back then, we had one subscriber* and we were excited if we just managed to get 500 views a day. The site has grown a lot since then and, two years after I first wrote that review of Welcome Home, Brother Charles, I can truly say that I still love writing for this site just as much as I did during those first few months. And I’m looking forward to continuing to write for this site for as long as Arleigh is willing to put up with me.

Finally, allow me to take a moment to thank two very special groups of people.

First off, thank you to my fellow Shattered Lens contributors for all that they’ve done and all that they continue to do for this site. This site, which is a true labor of love, could never have grown without each and every one you. On a personal note, I feel as if I’ve grown up along with this site and for that, I will always be beyond grateful.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has ever taken a chance and visited this site.

Whether you were looking for a film review, a music review, a comic review, a video game review, a grindhouse movie trailer, a pulp artist profile, the latest in anime, or a hottie of a day, thank you!

Thank you for visiting, thank you for reading, thank you for subscribing, thank you for voting, and thank you for commenting!

Thank you for giving all of us this moment.

I hope that, over the past two years, we’ve been able to entertain, enlighten, and engage you and I hope that we’ll continue to do so for the next two years as well!

Here’s to the next million views!

Photograph by Erin Nicole Bowman

—-

* Hi, KO!

Clint Eastwood’s Chair

Posted on September 1, 2012 by necromoonyeti

Politics constitute an indomitable itch for those of us inclined to discuss them. This is not a post about politics. This is a post about Clint Eastwood’s chair.

Clint Eastwood’s chair was first made known to me at about 3:30 this afternoon. I know, I’m behind the times. At my ripe old age of 27 it’s hard to keep up with the world. But I made that perilous journey to youtube, and with, I am proud to say, no great difficulty, I procured a mouse cursor in a blank textbox, from whence my journey began.

Arriving at my destination, and bearing witness the public oration there displayed, I found myself not at all befuddled or amused by an old man’s rant. Quite the contrary, I thought it a reasonably clever comedy sketch in consideration of his age, chuckled at his tongue-in-cheek endorsement (which amounted to little more than a ‘lesser of two evils’ vote), and felt inclined to comment on his behalf. Then my troubles set in.

I was caught off guard. The text below the video bombarded me like an artillery barrage, every 10 seconds a new string of demented rambling surpassing all of my direst expectations for the video at hand:

“LOL do you just make shit up? California well off? LOL just keep making shit up your boy will gone in November.” (kEMCO2)

“YOU’RE PROBABLY A LOSER SITTING IN YOUR MOTHER’S BASEMENT WATCHING FADING POSTERS OF OBAMA WAITING FOR YOUR NEXT WELFARE CHECK.” (Chloe Smith)

“You’re an idiot. You’re going to get old to you moron. Old age has nothing to do with dementia. People become deranged at 35, look at your hero Obama, he is as stupid as they get.” (DonDraperism)

“Ask the ones that OUR military freed and saved! Your a pansy and have no clue! Your part of the reason we’re in the shape we are!” (bessedchevy20)

“LOL. congratz u have been brainwashed” (bobilo95)

And I realized something.

I realized something terrible.

My internet was gone.

It was gone. It was dead. The shroud tailor measured it for a deep six holiday.

I didn’t believe it at first. I panicked, frantically hammering out search terms into Google, but no relief was in sight. I turned to Gogloom, dear old friend, but its springs too had run dry; IRC, my last vestige of hope, failed me.

And I thought maybe, just maybe, this tragic loss and the verbal assault upon Clint Eastwood’s chair were somehow related.

I was born and raised on the internet. I remember when we first got dial-up in 1996. I passed the tender age of 11 sharing insightful comments much akin to those I experienced today, only geared to my youthful interests. “LOL u dont even know ff3 is rly ff6 and u wasted $200 on a PSX even tho ff7s gonna suck NINTENDO FOR LIFE” Ah, such fond memories. A prodigy no doubt, I learned quickly to curb my intellectual idioms to placate the masses, adapting to the drudgery of coherent English in my teenage years and beyond. Was it some cruel twist of fate that now finds me linguistically isolated from the very internet users for whom I learned to converse? All I wanted to do was talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair.

The fact of the matter is the internet no longer functions as an outlet for sharing free thought. Oh, I am “sharing” my thoughts here, with the four or five of you who happen to read this, but should you choose to respond you will do so in the form of a comment, in reply to my post which I moderate. I am in charge here, and that means I am not really intimately engaging with anyone. These WordPress blogs completely lack an equal playing field for discussion, but they’re ideal for sharing one’s opinion with the wind. We’re all special. We all have a voice. Here’s mine.

That’s the state of WordPress. That’s the state of Facebook. That’s the state of Twitter, I suppose. I don’t use the latter two, frankly because the notion of making an isolated personal statement bores me save on rare occasions such as these. I post here because all of my previous outlets have slowly withered away. Are new outlets out there? I suppose there’s 4chan. The launch of /r9k/ encompasses some of my fondest memories of the internet, specifically due to the brief period of intellectual discussion it spawned. Coincidentally coinciding with the launch of Project Chanology, it generated countless debates on the political and social impacts of anonymity and collective thought, perhaps culminating in a collective realization of and expansion upon the notion of Stand Alone Complex (Ghost in the Shell). We were each participants, debating and trolling in turn, in the very social experiment we were conducting. It was a grand culmination of everything I loved about the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, but it was indeed a culmination–an end–because complacency and the totality of its form of anonymity rendered it non-sustainable. I remember acknowledging that at the time, and feeling as though my online world was passing away even as it stood resplendent in its most accomplished form.

And so it did. It took me four years to admit it, but the internet is dead. The pathways and connections through which such experiments as /r9k/ emerged as hubs for collective contemplation (a great majority of us, myself included, were not active 4chan members, and that fact was pivotal to elements of the discussion) dried up into defunct forums and dead irc channels. Our mutual file-sharing ties, the final tether, were severed by delayed but decisive corporate rationality headed by the likes of Apple and Netflix. The generation-spanning cultivation of anonymity was wiped clean and even culturally discredited by Facebook, with present-day internet users lavishly emblazoning their identity upon all electronic activity. The collective internet mind dispersed into relegated pockets. I am now an individual, and I despise that fact.

I wanted to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair, but I couldn’t. I could tell a few people about it. I’m not really doing so at the moment, but I could. I could also scream at the wall, as so many youtube users of voting age are doing right now. And indeed, they’re relatively anonymous. Chloe Smith and blessedchevy20 will certainly never know that I read their banter, and, though I could probably trace down their thorough identities with easy today, apathy preserves them. But they aren’t engaging anything. Their ‘thoughts’, if what they wrote even amounts to thinking, involved not but petty rebuttals to the most recent of 12,000 comments, by now surely buried behind thousands more. The /r9k/ ideal, of thoughtful engagement under the shroud of total anonymity, was short-lived. Perhaps it carries on in some diminished form. But the long-sustained anonymous community is what we’ve truly lost. The modestly sized forum; the casual irc channel; the self-contained communities where one could engage under independent but locally consistent identities: it’s their loss that we now suffer.

Would so many adults scream at the wall if they had any alternative? In an age where everyone has access to the internet, would we be so simultaneously excitable and yet devoid of well-formed opinions if we had any means of discussion? I can talk here and hope you hear me. I can shout on youtube knowing you won’t. In neither medium am I well positioned to receive an intelligible response by an identity in equal social standing. You’re either on my turf or in the combat zone with barely time to breathe before taking aim. And even if the spirit of youtube calmed down a bit, what can you meaningfully say in 500 characters?

I don’t want to talk about Clint Eastwood’s chair anymore. I was going to say some silly crap about a metaphor for lack of political leadership that would sound corny as hell but would spark up some discussion. But I can’t do that here, because as an editor I’m in charge and that means I have to maintain boundaries. And there’s no point in doing it anywhere else. I guess I’ll just go back to playing Warcraft, maybe discuss the new expertise cap or auction house inflation. In the absence of loosely-moderated discussion boards and public chats those seem to be the approachable topics we have left on the internet.

Which Way Forward For The “Batman” Movie Franchise? Take Four : The Power Of Three

Posted on August 27, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

There are those who insist that good things come in multiples of three and there are those who will tell you that bad things tend to come in threes — both camps have a Star Wars trilogy they can point to as evidence for their pet theory, and while neither are strictly correct, on a purely rational level, neither side is technically wrong, either.

So let’s just face facts here and admit there are some good movie trilogies and some bad ones, that within the good ones some better than others, and that within the bad ones some are better than others. All of which brings us back to that rooftop scene we started this “Rebooting ‘Batman'” series with, from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween miniseries, the second page of which is reproduced above (and I apologize for its crookedness, it’s the only scan of this particular page I could find online).

Quite clearly, the latest cinematic iteration of the Dark Knight Detective, as helmed by Christopher Nolan, was a trilogy, and flaws aside, I think that by and large structuring the whole thing this way, whether by accident or design, by and large worked, story-wise. We got a beginning, middle, and end to Batman’s career, and a forth installment probably would have been pushing things a bit much (okay, fair enough, folks who didn’t like the Nolan films probably feel like three was too many, but that’s another matter for another time). I guess I’m in the minority on this, but I would have liked to see Tim Burton get a third crack at the bat-franchise, as well. It certainly would have been better than Batman Forever.

And this is the point at which attentive readers will tell me to back the fuck up for just a minute and pick up on that “all of which brings us back to the rooftop scene” bit. Your wish is my command. Quite clearly, the Harvey Dent/Commissioner Gordon/Batman triumvirate that forms the thematic core of The Long Halloween is what I’d like to see at the center of the entirely-hypothetical next Bat-trilogy I’m building in my head, even if I’d take pretty much no other cues from this particular book whatsoever. I mentioned last time around that giving Bruce Wayne and/or Batman a real life that included some actual friends apart from Alfred would be an idea that I. and a lot of fans out there, would be receptive to. And of course, we all know that the story of Harvey Dent is, ultimately, a tragic one that could translate well into a central theme spread out over three flicks. I’m still working out all the details as to how to do it in my head — like I said in a previous post, I’m very much making this up as I go along — but how about this for starters? In our new Bat-trilogy, Dent, Gordon, and Batman start as uneasy allies, and are pretty firm, honest-to-goodness friends by the end of the first flick. Perhaps even to the point where Batman decides to clue them in on his secret identity (although that’s not, strictly speaking, necessary — just something to keep in mind).

If Warner Brothers were to decide to give this hypothetical “soft reboot”‘s director a three-picture guarantee, absolutely not unheard of in the movie business, then that would seem a natural enough relationship to build a trilogy around, and we can get into Harvey’s inevitable turn for the worse as we move into discussions of (the again completely hypothetical) parts two and three. If the first flick were to be a complete and utter flop, then hey, they can always fire everybody, go back to the drawing board, and us fanboys and fangirls can endlessly debate the “great Batman trilogy that never was,” which is always a pretty fun little time-waster in and of itself, as well.

So, to recap, here’s where we are right now — the next Bat-flicks are going to have a shift in tone toward the more heroic, old-school, brains-over-bran interpretation of the character that will result in a bit less “dark” an overall tone; we’ve established Detroit at the central filming location for Gotham City; we’re going the “soft reboot” route by going back to an earlier point in Batman’s career but not obsessing over the details of his origin too explicitly; and we’re planning for a trilogy of films from the outset, one with a genuine story of friendship between Batman, DA Harvey Dent, and Police Commissioner Jim Gordon at its core.

Sound good? Sound bad? Now’s the time to chime in, and I do appreciate all your comments, both good and bad, so far. On a minor “housekeeping” note, I’ll probably be stepping away from this series for the next week or so as I attend to some business on my “main” site (trashfilmguru.wordpress.com, in case you didn’t know), but will be checking, and responding to, comments on here just the same. A guy’s only got so many hours in a day to write, and I’ve been running a series of comic reviews over there that I really want to wrap up in the next few days before showing the love of my life (yes, that would be my wife) a terrific time for her upcoming 30th birthday. Once that’s all taken care of, I’ll be back to the task at hand here with the next entry in our series, which will focus on which details I’d keep, and which I’d scrap, from the Nolan series of Bat-films. Then we can finally get into the plot of the films themselves proper, followed by arguably the most fun part of all, ideal casting choices for all the characters!

Oh, and maybe we should start bandying about some names as to who we’d like to see directing these flicks in an ideal world, as well? But I did say one thing at a time was going to be the order of the day here, didn’t I? Must try to stick with that — if at all humanly possible!

Which Way Forward For The “Batman” Movie Franchise? Take Three : Setting The Tone

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

They just don’t draw Batman like that anymore, do they? These days, he’s a “ripped” steroid freak in a high-tech suit of armor who’s usually either thrashing someone to within an inch of their life or brooding silently. Ever since Frank Miller’s legendary Dark Knight Returns story — which, I’ll grant you, is still probably the single-best Batman story ever — he’s been getting increasingly somber, morose, and violent. Miller himself even portrayed him, essentially, as a child-abusing psychopath in All-Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder. The films, Joel Schumacher aberrations aside, have been getting increasingly darker over time, as well. People thought Tim Burton’s Batman flicks were a little too dark, so Warner went to Schumacher for a “course correction” that fell flat on its face, and then Christopher Nolan came along with the most popular, and darkest, cinematic version of Batman yet.

Then came the midnight premier of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.

I would argue that even before that tragedy, this whole “increasingly dark” thing had run its course, but now I think a change in tone is positively essential. Which is not to say that Batman should ever go back to the light-hearted goofiness of the 1960s TV series. Modern audiences like a Dark Knight who is — well, dark. But I think the right tone was struck in books like the one pictured above, by the legendary 1970s Batman creative team of writer Denny O’Neil and artist extraordinaire Neal Adams. Their Batman was a serious, determined, perhaps even obsessive guy, but he was as much a man of intellect as of action, and at the end of the day he was a hero first and foremost, and could always be counted on to do the right thing. I think modern audiences are ready for that again after seeing Bruce Wayne essentially degenerate into basket-case status by the beginning of Nolan’s third flick, only to heroically redeem himself at the end. Let’s pick any new series up from that point — not storywise, mind you, but tonally.

To be a bit more specific about what I have in mind — think maybe a little more Michael Keaton and a little less Christian Bale. I liked Keaton’s take on the character — you felt like he was a decent guy at heart who just had this fundamental inability to resolve a gaping hole left in his life by his parent’s murder and had enough money and free time to channel that pain in a really — well — weird direction, but would give all that up for a normal life in a heartbeat if he could just, ya know, figure out how to. Keaton;s cracking of the Joker’s poison code in Batman was also one of the few instances in any of the 1989-and-onwards Bat-films where we actually saw the Caped Crusader putting to use something that his name has always been, and always should be, synonymous with, namely his detective skills. I think it would be a great step in the right direction to see the next version on Batman on the big screen be just as at home in the Batcave’s crime lab or poring over information on its super-computer as he is kicking ass in a rainy alleyway.

I don’t think there’s any need for Schumacher camp, much less 60s-style uber-camp, but by all means, you can lighten things up a bit and still give us an essentially dark and mysterious character. 1970s Batman was pretty much all about that. And any Batman that’s going to “work and play well with others” in the inevitable Justice League movie DC’s cooking up will have to be at least a little more of a “joiner” than Bale and Nolan’s take on the character was.

To that end, I propose giving Bruce Wayne some actual friends apart from Alfred, a love interest who doesn’t get murdered, and an actual social life that’s not an OTT front from his crime-fighting activities and nothing more. But I promised to stay focused, and will get a bit more into the details of that tomorrow, as I examine the relationship that I think should be at the core of the next bat-series, and how it ties back into the rooftop scene from The Long Halloween that I started this whole thing with. I’ll also be getting into why I think a trilogy should be the plan for the next series from the outset — I know, I know, I said one thing at a time, but trust me, the “two” topics really are one and the same. In the meantime, of course, if you think I’m barking up the wrong tree with those whole “tone down the darkness a notch” stuff, now’s the time to say so!

Which Way Forward For The “Batman” Movie Franchise? Take Two : Building A Better Gotham

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

If there’s one area (and actually I think there are several, but that’s rather beside the point and I promised to remain focused like a laser beam on each individual subtopic in this “Batman reboot” series of posts) where I think Tim Burton’s Bat-flicks had it all all over Christopher Nolan’s it’s in their depiction of Gotham City. Not only did Burton’s Gotham have a fantastic Metropolis-gone-gothic look thanks to the late Anton Furst, but it felt like an intrinsically different sort of place than a real city, a place where you could sort of actually believe guys might run around in bat costumes and Joker facepaint , while Nolan’s Gotham was just, essentially, New York only a little grimier (even if his first two films were shot in Chicago).

I understand the reasoning behind making Gotham less fantastic, of course, and those reasons do make sense — Nolan’s Batman was supposed to be a more “realistic” character, to the extent that a billionaire who dresses up like a bat can ever be called “realistic,” and Joel Schumacher’s CGI Gotham was such an over-the-top visual disaster that a back-to-basics approach to Bruce Wayne’s hometown was a predictable enough move to make.

Still, I think something was lost, and that Batman works a bit better with at least some level of the fantastic still involved in its primary geographic setting. To that end, I think there are basically three things any self-respecting Gotham of the potential “soft reboot” of the Bat-franchise we were talking about should have —

1. It should look at least a little bit different than a garden-variety major US city. You needn’t construct anything as elaborate as Furst’s amazing two-city-block long set, but a city that has some fairly spectacular architecture in the form of bridges, tall buildings, etc. that you can focus in on would be a definite plus, especially if they’re all a bit past their prime and have seen better days, since Gotham pretty has to be a grimy place by definition. Some constructed set pieces that could stand in as fictitious local landmarks would be a plus, as well, so to that end it would be helpful if the filming location for future Batman flicks had something of an emptied-out urban core where you could build an Arkham Asylum, or a neat-looking miniature version of Wayne tower, etc. I’m thinking an ideal sort of look would combine elements of New York as depicted in Zack Snyder’s Watchmen combined with a toned-down Gothic feel at least somewhat reminiscent of furst’s Gotham, albeit scaled way the hell back.

2. There should be some ritzy neighborhoods or suburbs where you can find adequate exterior footage for Wayne Manor and its grounds. I don’t think the next Bruce Wayne needs to live in a fucking castle like Bale’s version, but certainly a “stately manor” that exudes old-school wealth and prestige and hearkens back to the city’s more prosperous days before it became Crime Capitol, USA (which Gotham pretty much always is).

3. As alluded to in the first two points, the majority of the city should be run down, and obviously well past its prime — a city in desperate need of a champion.

Finally, for reasons that will be made more clear as I get into the nuts and bolts of the plot outline I have in mind for this whole “soft reboot” thing, I think it would be essential for the city-to-stand-in-for-Gotham to be close to some wooded and even mountainous areas, since while the focus of this flick is most assuredly not going to be on the minutiae of the Batman’s origins per se, I still think some “flashback”-style sequences that show rugged wilderness survival-type training are going to be in order.

I suppose this is all rather just moot speculation since they’ll probably just film the next flick in Vancouver and it’ll look just fine because it pretty much always does no matter what, but just for the sake of fun speculation, I have something else in mind here — a locale that combines everything we’re looking for in terms of a run-down urban core; some truly spectacular architecture of its own; essentially empty areas that might as well hang a sign up saying “will build to suit;” palatial, ultra-wealthy, “old money” suburban areas; and fairly reasonable access to densely-wooded, geographically rugged forest. Batman Begins was filmed in Iceland, the UK, and Chicago, respectively, in order to capture all these various aspects, but you can do all this in exactly one place here in the good ol’ USA, and the state government is eevn actively engaged in rolling out the red carpet to film production in recent years, seeing the economic boom it’s brought to its northerly neighbor in Toronto.

Yes, folks, I think the next principal filming location for Gotham City — the ideal place to set the geographic tone for a re-launched, re-loaded (even if it’s done “softly”) Bat-franchise — should be (drumroll please) : Detroit!

I assure you, friends, I’m not kidding. Given the kind of place I think would work best for this “sot reboot,” as outlined in my (admittedly makeshift) criteria above, I think the much-maligned Motor City would be absolutely ideal, and bringing the production there would have the added bonus of generating great publicity for the film due to the positive economic impact it would have on an area that sure could use it. A multi-million-dollar Hollywood production setting up shop in Detroit? You can bet the city fathers (and mothers) would positively roll out the red carpet for Warner Brothers, and everything you would need is literally right there at your fingertips. Honestly, this idea’s almost too damn good. But maybe you’ve got a better one, in which case, please chime in before I move on to step three, which will concentrate on the overall tone of the film itself (now that we’ve — okay, I’ve — established a great location) tomorrow!

Which Way Forward For The “Batman” Movie Franchise? Take One

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Ryan C. (fourcolorapocalypse)

Bear with me, folks, ‘cuz this is gonna be a looonnnnng one. Not this post in and of itself, mind you — in fact I’m going to do my very best to keep things brief in this and subsequent installments (whoops! I just gave away what’s going on here, didn’t I?) and try, perhaps even desperately, to confine all postings in this series (and if I didn’t give it away before I sure did now!) to one particular aspect of what we’ll be discussing here each time so as not to throw too much out there at once before receiving input from you, dear readers, as to your own thoughts on what I’m talking about before plowing ahead to the next part. I know, I know — all bloggers say they genuinely want the input of their readership on what they’re posting, but in this case I really do mean it with all sincerity. I want this to be an interactive discussion about what we, as fans/movie geeks, want to see happen next with one of the most successful properties, arguably perhaps even the most successful property, in cinematic history.

I’m speaking, of course, of the Batman. With Christopher Nolan’s beyond-blockbuster trilogy having just wrapped up, speculation is already rife as to what DC Entertainment and its parent company, Warner Brothers, will do next when it comes to the adventures on the Dark Knight Detective on the silver screen. For an initial hint about were I’d take things, please refer to the famous page above from the Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale comic Batman : The Long Halloween. For reasons that will be made clear over this course of this series of postings, however long it may drag on, that scene — the famous “rooftop meeting” between Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and District Attorney Harvey Dent — is at the very heart of where I think the Bat-franchise would go next.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. First, let’s take stock of where we are now and the three, as I see them anyway, options DC/Warner has going forward. As of this moment, The Dark Knight Rises has taken in just a hair under $420 million dollars at the domestic box office, and just a hair under $1 billion worldwide. It’s a pretty solid bet that it will end up taking in $500 million domestically and will Avatar, Titanic, The Avengers, and The Dark Knight in the over-a-bliion-dollars-in-worldwide-ticket-sales club. That means that of the five highest-grossing films in the world in history, two will be Batman flicks. Clearly, Warner isn’t going to let this property stagnate for too long.

But they need to play their cards exactly right going forward, because this is one golden goose they absolutely need to keep laying eggs. Which brings me back those three options they have going forward, each of which carries some risk, as well as potential rewards. Let’s look at each potential path forward individually, shall we? Glad you agree.

Option #1 — The direct sequel. Nolan certainly left this possibility wide open with Robin/John Blake’s “inheritance” of the Batcave, and in many ways it’s the easiest and most painless way to go. Blake’s the new Batman (or Robin, or Nightwing, or whoever), some ambitious director would be more than willing to take on carrying things forward from where Nolan left them, and audiences are already primed and ready to accept Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the new man beneath the cowl.

But are they really? Let’s face it — Bruce Wayne is central to the Batman myth. You could argue that DC themselves are working on making him less central to it with the publication of such books as Batman, Incorporated and several storylines in recent years that have seen the likes of Dick Grayson, among others, assuming the Batman role for varying periods of time. Maybe they’re trying to test the waters with this whole someone-else-as-Batman idea on the printed page before going for it on the big screen? It’s possible, but sooner or later they always seem to come back to Bruce Wayne, and it’s easy to see why —

Frankly, it just never really works with anyone else as anything other than a temporary gimmick to boost sales for a few months. Sooner or later, the fans always want to see the “real” Batman back in action. A new guy might be interesting for a movie or two, but the speculation as to if and when Bruce Wayne — and, by extension, Christian Bale and maybe even Chris Nolan — would be back would be a Sword of Damocles hanging over the head of any “direct sequel” flick, no matter how good it was. And that just ain’t gonna happen. Bale’s done. Nolan’s done. These guys have made the studio a fortune. Let them get on with their lives in peace.

Option #2 — The “hard reboot.” This has been done, successfully, with the Bat-franchise before, obviously. Batman Begins is as “hard” a reboot of a character and his origins as you’re going to find. We’re used to seeing Batman reinvented every so often, and it’s never been a dealbreaker before. Every generation flat-out deserves its own iconic take on the character, right? Why go in any other way now? It would free up the next director, producers, and cast from having to do things the “Nolan way,” that’s for sure, and sometimes the best way forward is by taking a few steps back.

And yet — that might necessitate Batman sitting on the shelf longer than Warner wants him to be. The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t that bad a superhero movie by any stretch of the imagination, but even its most fervent partisans would, when pressed, admit that two Spidey origins within a decade is a bit much. And besides, it’s not like Batman Begins is going to appear especially dated within the next five or ten years, nor is it likely to be surpassed in terms of quality as a Batman origin story for the silver screen. Any “hard reboot” story is going to inevitably be compared to it, and any other cinematic origin story is going to come up short, more than likely. Unless, of course, it’s a work of such singular awesomeness that it just comes along and completely blind-sides all of us. But ya know what? Even then, I bet it’s still gonna piss plenty of people off. Plus, there’s the open question of just how necessary a “start-from-scratch”-type story even is. More or less everyone knows at least the basic details of the Batman myth — do we need to see them play out before us yet again to understand and appreciate a new cinematic interpretation of the character?

Which brings us, finally, to Option # 3 — the so-called “soft reboot” option. Admittedly, this hasn’t worked out so well for secondary comic-book-related properties like The Punisher and the Hulk, but they were both coming off first installments that were pretty iffy to begin with, to put things kindly. That”s not the case here by any stretch of the imagination. Even if Nolan’s Batman films weren’t your cup of tea, there’s no denying they’ve been tremendously successful at the box office and generally quite well-regarded by hard-core fans, critics, and more casual audiences alike. Maybe there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here, even if we’re going to go back into Batman’s career chronologically, the cast is going to be entirely different, there will be a new director and screeenwriter(s), etc.

Not that this option isn’t without some risk, too. It would essentially assume at least a rudimentary knowledge of the character on the part of the audience (anyone not know anything about the guy? Bueller? Bueller?), and it would subject the new film,series to more direct comparison with the Nolan flicks than, perhaps, option #2 (although that’s debatable, and flat-out inevitable in any case, anyway), and — well, that’s probably about it.

So — from where I’m sitting right now, that looks like the best bet to me. Let’s have a new take on the Batman franchise with new actors, a new director, a new writer or writers, new everything — but let’s not feel compelled to tell his origin over from the start. Let’s concern ourselves with concentrating on the various elements that have made Batman so appealing and enduring as a cultural icon over the years, tell a story that incorporates and elaborates upon all of those, and maybe throws a few new wrinkles of its own into the mix, and not feel like the wheel needs to be reinvented here. The Nolan films are going to be the standard against which all future films are going to be judged, anyway, so rather than run as far away from them as possible, why not keep what worked about them, and maybe present them in a new way?

If all this sounds just a little bit too abstract for you at this point, I wouldn’t blame you, but stick with me here — at least until you get bored. I hope that as things progress, what I have specifically in mind will become more and more clear. And keep that image from The Long Halloween in mind as we go along, because it’s central to where I’m going — even though I don’t think the comic itself was anything other than a somewhat-above-average Batman story (and yes, I’m hoping that sentence will make a bit more sense to you in the coming days/weeks, as well).

So that’s it for part one of this thinking-it-out as-I-go-along project. I hope to pick things up again tomorrow with some some thoughts on Gotham City — how it’s been presented in the past, how and why it’s central to the Batman mythos, particularly in film, and a really weirdly appealing (in my own twisted mind, at any rate) idea I’ve got as to exactly which major American city would make a great movie Gotham for the future. Until then, please — tear my opinion to shreds! Or agree with it! Or somewhere in between! But let’s see where we agree or disagree and find out where you think I’m right and wrong and why!

It’s Time For The Annual Self-Important Post About The Year In Film So Far

Posted on July 8, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

For the entire past week, something has been nagging at me. I knew that there was something that I needed to do but I couldn’t remember what it was. Earlier today, however, I was reading the latest critical blathering about the state of cinema over at AwardsDaily. As usual, that site’s editors were whining about the fact that the Social Network didn’t win best picture and also the fact that my generation is apparently the “WORST. GENERATION. EVER” and blah blah blah.

Fortunately, however, reading that post reminded me of what I had forgotten: We are now at the halfway mark as far as 2012 is concerned. This is the time of year that self-important film critics (both online and elsewhere) tell their readers what type of year it’s been so far.

So, without further ado — what type of year has 2012 been so far?

(By the way, you can also check out my thoughts from July of 2011 and July 2010 as well.)

(Also, please understand that the act of me posting this in no way guarantees that I won’t change my mind several times within the next hour.)

Best Film Of The Year (So Far): Cabin In The Woods. Compared to both 2010 and 2011, this has been a pretty slow year so far. There really hasn’t been a Hanna or an Exit Through The Gift Shop type of film so far. Instead, there’s been a handful of nice surprises, quite a few pleasant but somewhat forgettable films, and then quite a few films that i wish were forgettable. Cabin In The Woods, however, was a nice little valentine to horror fans like me and it’s a film that actually gets even better with repeat viewings. Runners up include Bernie, Damsels in Distress, Brave, The Hunger Games, Safety Not Guaranteed, Moonrise Kingdom, For Greater Glory, Jeff, Who Lives At Home, and the Avengers.

Best Male Performance Of The Year (So Far): Jack Black in Bernie. Runners up include Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man and Jason Segal in Jeff, Who Lives At Home.

Best Female Performance of the Year (So Far): Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games. Seriously, just try to imagine that film with someone else in the lead role. Runners up include Susan Sarandon in Jeff, Who Lives At Home, Aubrey Plaza in Safety Not Guaranteed, and Greta Gerwig in Damsels in Distress.

Best Voice-Over Performance Of The Year (So Far): Kelly MacDonald in Brave.

Best Ending Of The Year (So Far): A 3-way tie between The Cabin In The Woods, Safety Not Guaranteed, and Jeff, Who Lives At Home.

Best Horror Film Of The Year (So Far): The Cabin In The Woods

Most Underrated Film Of The Year (So Far): The Five-Year Engagement, a sweet and funny movie that was just a tad bit too long.

Best Bad Film of the Year: Battleship. Yes, the movie represented some of the worst impulses of big-budget filmmaking but I had a lot of fun watching it and Alexander Skarsgard was to die for in that white Navy uniform.

Worst Film Of The Year (So Far): The Wicker Tree. I could make an argument for both Rock of Ages and The Devil Inside here but no…just no. As the Trash Film Guru put it, “BURN THE WICKER TREE!”

Biggest Example Of A Missed Opportunity For This Year (So Far): Seeking a Friend For The End of the World. A great performance from Steve Carrel can’t save a film that has no idea what it wants to be.

The Get Over It Already Award For The First Half of 2012: The Devil Inside, for being the most tedious example of a “found footage” horror film yet. Coming in second: Rock of Ages, for reminding me that my parents had terrible taste in music.

The Trailer That Has Most Outgrown Its Welcome: The Perks of Being a Wall Flower. “Be aggressive…passive aggressive…” Okay, shut up, already.

The Cameron/Fincher Bandwagon Trophy (Awarded To The Upcoming Film That, Regardless Of Quality, Will Probably Be So Violently Embraced By People Online That You’ll Be Putting Your Life In Danger If You Dare Offer Up The Slightest Amount Of Criticism): The Dark Knight Rises

The Ebert Award (Awarded to the upcoming film that will probably get positive reviews based on the film’s political context as opposed to the film itself): Zero Dark Thirty

The Sasha Award (Awarded To The Film That I Am Predicting Will Be The Most Overrated Of The Year): Lincoln.

The Roland Emmerich/Rod Lurie Award For The Film That I’m Predicting Will Be The Worst Of 2012: Honestly, it’s really hard to imagine a worse film than The Wicker Tree (though, to be honest, Rock of Ages comes pretty close).

Films I’m Looking Forward To Seeing In The Future (An incomplete list): On The Road, Lawless, The Dark Knight Rises, Cosmopolis, Django Unchained, The Hobbit, The Great Gatsby, and especially The Master and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina.

And there you have it. 2012 hasn’t been a great year so far but there’s still a lot of time left.

Unless, of course, the Mayans were correct.

The Magic of Duels of the Planeswalkers

Posted on June 23, 2012 by Semtex Skittle

A couple of years back I was bored one afternoon and browsing the XBox Live Marketplace. I didn’t have any real expectation of finding a game that would get me through the afternoon, let alone something that would have real staying power for me, and I would revisit time and again. When I saw that there was a Magic the Gathering game, it was suspicions that became aroused, not interest. Out of a kind of morbid curiosity I selected the game and read a little more into it, saw that a couple of my friends had played it, and that it seemed to be a self-contained engine of a game, and not simply another attempt to sell me Magic the Gathering Online in a repackaged form (don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against MTG:O. In fact, it’s a clever idea to reach people who either don’t have an active local Magic scene, or hate their local Magic scene, but if I had money to waste on Magic, I personally would do it at my local comic store).

But, oddly, the complaint that I keep hearing from people about Duels of the Planeswalkers (aside from some more quantitative complaints, which I’ll get into) is that it’s a self-contained thing, not a beautifully rendered amalgamation of all Magic ever.

…Well, duh.

You may bring whatever expectations you wish into your gaming experiences, but I find it’s better to try and keep things a little bit in perspective. For a $10 XBox Live Arcade title – a game that by definition is not a full retail game – you are expecting a full pool of Type II cards, a fully operational deck builder, and carte blanche to build as many decks as you like and play them against other humans? How much money does that privilege cost in real life? If some quickly-researched netdecking can be believed, a couple hundred bucks will buy you a top end deck in the current meta (and someone bought those cards at $4 for each randomized pack or whatever at retail, let’s not forget). Let’s say each ranked DCI event costs another $7 as an entry fee. So for one singular deck, you must expend hundreds of dollars, and much of that income reaches Wizards of the Coast. Then, if you wish to change decks, you’re likely to need more cards. Wizards will release new expansions, and you will need still more cards. All of this generates revenue for the company that is printing the game (and all of the creative people behind its design, etc.) and you honestly approach Duels of the Planeswalkers with the expectation that it’s going to just replace the CCG model forever?

Come on.

So now that that soap box moment is out of the way, let’s talk about the game. 2013 is the latest upgrade to the now-yearly franchise. Much like regular Magic’s Type II environment, DotP can be seen as a sealed ‘block’ of decks of cards, and it evolves year by year. The game-play improvements in 2013, then, are very slight, since the game of Magic hasn’t changed much. The most meaningful one is the long-awaited ability to manually select your own lands to tap for Mana instead of letting the CPU select them for you (the CPU attempts to do this intelligently, but unfortunately, the CPU has no idea what it’s doing). The main difference is, therefore, the entirely new pool of decks that players can customize and compete with. The game launched with 10 available decks which come with a basic pool of 35 cards (plus the necessary land to make the deck function of course) and an additional 30 unlockable cards. The cards are unlocked – unfortunately – one by one, by winning duels, or if you’re lucky enough to be playing the console versions, by the purchase of Deck Keys (those cost about $1 of your real money each) which completely unlock the deck in question. This represents a large increase in possible customization over the selection offered by 2012.

The decks themselves are primarily monochrome, which is a shame. I understand that Wizards probably sees DotP as a tool to draw people into the world of Magic: The Gathering either on or off line, hoping to gain more lifetime players who are eager to experience the full game. However, many players do want to enjoy DotP as a game in its own right, and while monochrome decks are easier to play and make a decent introduction, the truth is that the Magic decks you’re going to see even at a local Friday Night Magic tournament are going to include a lot of paired colours for a simple reason – each colour is deliberately designed with shortcomings. Black has access to many easy fire-and-forget creature destruction spells and no enchantment removal at all. White has only a tiny splash of creature removal (and each of their ‘removal’ cards has a drawback printed on the card!) but many good cards for destroying enchantments or artifacts. If you combine the two, you can have both of those strengths, and cover for the weaknesses, at the expense of a deck that can be less reliable (since you must now possess two different colour resources) and harder to play. The trade-off is almost always worth it.

Hopefully DLC (it’s already in the works, of course!) will expand a little bit on this, and throw in some more two-colour decks (and a few fewer absolutely atrocious 3-colour decks. Please?).

As for the Planechase mode, I haven’t got much to say. I’ve never liked Planechase because it can really take a long time to play a single game of it, so I’ve avoided testing it extensively. I can say that it works just like I remember it working in real life, and it can definitely be fun if you have the patience to stick with it. The unpredictable and powerful effects of the different twisting Planes can really throw a traditional match-up on its head. Combined with the inevitable chaos of FFA multiplayer, and you definitely have a format with legs – no two games of Planechase will ever be exactly the same.

I suggest that you think of Duels as a Magic format much like Captains or, frankly, Type II… and enjoy it for what it is; a closed Magic experience that doesn’t cost you a lot of cash out of pocket to play. The added levels of customization (regrettably, still not the ability to pick how many lands your deck has in it. Grrr!) make the environment more varied than ever (mind you, I did not suggest the environment was balanced. It’s much too early to speak on that) so it’s definitely a game that’s got some depth if you’re willing to take the time to learn the format and delve into its own quirks and strategies.

The game reportedly suffers from numerous bugs. I have not encountered any that are more severe than the ‘mild annoyance’ variety, but I suspect there are uglier ones to be found in those innumerable lines of code somewhere. I wish I could say this was uncommon for releases in 2012, but I try to remain honest when I write these columns.

So there it is. I find Duels to be a fantastic addition to my summer, and I’m more excited than ever to waste countless hours trying to determine the best combination of 60 cards in the fixed pool that makes up my blue deck that will best let me control the decks I’ve seen people playing this week. Oh, and if you pick it up, do try it out with a friend in Two-Headed Giant at least once. It’s riotously fun.

1500 and Counting…

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Arleigh

It’s hard to believe it but the little entertainment site that begun one quiet morning the day before Christmas 2009 has reached another milestone.

1500 articles posted is no small feat considering that this was originally a site dedicated to just it’s creator’s random thoughts on entertainment with little or no focus. As the months went by more people joined wanting to contribute and each and every one contributed in their own way. Many have begun to follow the thoughts, opinions and ramblings of the crew that made up the this chaotic ship called Through the Shattered Lens.

Once again I say thanks to those who have become my blog nakama and who continue to stay on board this ship to destinations unknown. My biggest thanks has to go to the one I consider this site’s heart and soul and one who continues to make running this little piece of the entertainment blogosphere quite an adventurous and unpredictable experience: Lisa Marie Bowman.

Fair winds and following seas to the crew of Through the Shattered Lens both new and old!

The Academy Was Wrong: 20 Times That The Wrong Film Won Best Picture

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Hi everyone! It’s Oscar Sunday which, as we all know, is a national holiday.

And, like many holidays, things occasionally don’t go the way they should. Often times, the day starts with such promise and ends with such bitterness as the Academy announces that the best film of the year is a film that we all know didn’t deserve the title.

Below, you’ll find a list of 10 instances when the Academy got it wrong. Please note that these are just my own personal picks. You may disagree and you are welcome to do so (as long as you understand that, ultimately, I’m always right.)

Also, please note that I have limited myself to only considering films that were actually nominated for best picture. You could make a great argument for films like Psycho, 2001, The Dark Knight, and others. However, none of those films were even nominated for best picture and therefore, I have not considered them for this list.

(Also, if this list seems to be dominated by more recent Oscar picks, that’s because it’s more likely that I’ve been able to see a film that was released in 2007 as opposed to film from 1927.)

Anyway, here’s my chronological list of 20+ nominees that should have won:

1941 — Citizen Kane (lost to How Green Way My Valley)

1952 — A Place In The Sun (lost to An American In Paris)

1967 — The Graduate (lost to In The Heart of The Night)

1973 — The Exorcist or American Graffiti (lost to The Sting)

1976 — All The President’s Men (lost to Rocky)

1986 — Hannah and Her Sisters or A Room With A View (lost to Platoon)

1990 — Goodfellas (lost to Dances With Wolves)

1994 — Pulp Fiction (lost to Forrest Gump)

1995 — Sense and Sensibility or Babe (lost to Braveheart)

1996 — Fargo (lost to The English Patient)

1999 — The Sixth Sense (lost to American Beauty)