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Next Batman to be Directed By Pi's Darren Aronofsky 192

Posted by CmdrTaco from the now-that's-looking-interesting dept.
tregoweth writes: "Variety is reporting that Darren Aronofsky, director of 'Pi' and 'Requiem for a Dream,' will be directing the next Batman movie (the one after 'Batman and Robin,' not the 'Batman Beyond' movie). He'll co-write it with Frank Miller, and it will be based on 'Batman: Year One.'" Pi was amazing, so it'll be cool to see where Aronofsky takes the Dark Knight.
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Next Batman to be Directed By Pi's Darren Aronofsky More

Next Batman to be Directed By Pi's Darren Aronofsky

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  • Yeah PI was pretty cool. Want to know the part I liked best? That super-powerful processor they tried to bribe him with. High Tech!
  • Pi was shot on a $60,000 budget (of which 60% was spent on the 'reversal' film stock alone). I can only imagine what a $60,000 Batman movie would look like. Even Monty Python movies cost more.
  • For the record, the Pi soundtrack was done by Clint Mansell, former member of Pop Will Eat Itself.
  • Sine!
    Cosine!
    Cosine!
    Sine!

    3 point 1 4 1 5 9!
  • That's funny. That's about the average time it takes my Java program to find the two prime factors of a 40-50 bit number. Oh, and an extra second for multiplicitive inverse. Try me. Until then, please limit your comments to a topic that you have some knowledge of. One more thing: Java CANNOT freeze anything. It will either crash the VM or throw OutOfMemory Exceptions. I've actually seen it seg fault, but that took remarkable level of stupidity.

    Information just wants to be left alone. I asked it.

  • i wonder what science fiction films you think are better than Star Wars or The Matrix or Pi for that matter? i'm inclined to agree with you about Batman, but you must recall that, when the movie came out, the only popular version of batman had been the tv show from the 60s(?). since the tv show was intentionally campy, it seems plausible that the movie would be as well. in fact, all tim burton movies have a quasi-campiness about them -- a good thing. so, i'm not convinced that the movie failed because the joker had an absurdly long gun, however the kim basinger character did become tiresome.

    as for Pi, i think it was one the better films ever made and a work of art. yes, perhaps, the 216 digit unspeakable name of god blowing up computer chips was unrealistic. but the film connects kabbalistic numerology with mathematical descriptions of nature with underlying patterns in languages we speak and write ala Goedel, Escher, Bach or The Grammatical Man. the repeated sequences of pills popping -- the number of pills increasing with each scene up to but not including seven (seven being important in many cultural/religious traditions) -- were a set of scenes among many sets that brought the viewer into the premise of the movie.

  • Maybe it's just me, but I found "Pi" to be a dumb movie. I came in expecting to see something vaguely associated with mathematics, but got a story that was completely lacking in any sort of math whatsoever and, instead, substituted unlikely happenstance and a secret code in a Jewish holy book?!? Might as well go watch "The Omega Code".

    But then, I didn't go to film school, I'm not the kind of guy who can appreciate the director's use of lighting, I just like watching movies.

  • Bah, i an beat that user number.
    --
  • didn't write Watchmen, or draw it. Not to take away from his stellar work on the Dark Knight, the Martha Washington books and other fine stuff, but Watchman was Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. ANd it was (and is) the greatest comic ever written. :)

  • What impressed me most was that Frank Miller, arguably one of Batman's most amazing writers over the years, has also signed on to write this baby.

    Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (which explores Batman returning after a ten-year hiatus), and Batman: YO are amazing pieces of gritty, realistic fiction. He's also written a bunch of other great stuff, including Sin City and a great run of Daredevil, including most of the sequence with Elektra.

    Very cool, however. I'm looking forward to this.

  • clint mansel (formely of pop will eat itself) actualy put together the soundtrack and did most of the music on it, he also did the music for the upcoming film "requim for a dream" by the same director. more info on clint and his works www.clintatthecontrols.com www.nothingrecords.com
  • That was an awesome line, the only part of the movie worth watching. Personally, I prefer the line in the Adam West movie on the pier with the bomb, "Some days, you just can't drop a bomb!"
  • I'm still waiting for one of my favorite plotlines ever to become a movie. Knightfall is the plotline where Batman becomes physically and mentally exhausted when there is a jailbreak at Arkham. Turns out the Jailbreak was Orchestrated by BANE to weaken Batman to the point where Bane could kill him.

    Batman survives Bane's vicious attack with a broken back (!) and while in rehab, an inexperienced replacement (later to become Azrael) proves unable to handle the mental rigors of being Batman.

    This would make for an outstanding movie, and I can't wait until Hollywood "discovers" it. Plus, I want to see someone treat Bane as something other than a lacky.

  • Cripes. Imagine if they use Clint Mansel again. That would go quite a long way in giving you the feel of the movie, I think.

    My .02,

  • Ack! I'm a little bummed. I saw Pi at the Capitol 8 in Columbia, SC, but, alas, no contest. The movie was only decent, but a poster would have been pretty cool.
  • A new Batman movie doesn't necessarily have to continue the series, because they can go back to the original source material - the comics.

    It's an interesting question - if they completely rejig the style (As opposed to Joel Schumaker's tactic of taking Tim Burton's style and adding neon lights), is it the same series? After all, there were a couple of Adam West Batman movies in the '60s, so it's not like Tim Burton's Batman was really the first Batman movie.

    The other advantage of starting over is that you can effectively disregard the killing of the best villains.

    I always liked the Batman cartoon, which was based on the style of the first movie, but went off in its own direction. Particularly great was Mark Hamill's voice acting as the Joker. Better than Jaaaaaaaack any day.
  • yeah... i guess killing joker again would get a little... well... i wanna see him die laughing in a dank sewer!!! ah well... we can all dream
  • "...a wonderful never-done-before plot..."

    Is this a joke? Never done before? Have you every read any science fiction? Ever watched Twilight Zone, Outer Limits or even Hollywood movies? Good gravy, the basic plot of The Matrix was invented by Rene Descartes!

    As for being a "tour-de-force on the senses": I agree. Too bad it didn't entertain the brain a little more.

    "Pi broke through the barriers of mathmatics being boring..."

    That barrier is something that exists between SF and everything else, not between Pi and everything else. That is, there are many many stories/books (and some movies, try "Donald in Mathemagicland") that deal with these issues. I'm not saying Pi (or even The Matrix) was no good--I'm saying they aren't particularly original or "amazing".

    "...maybe you should go into films with lower expectations."

    If this is the best defense that can be mustered for the low quality of movies as compared to written works, it's no wonder Hollywood isn't improving.
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • (Though I did like how Burton used parts of Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" - the flashback of falling pearls as young Bruce's mother was shot was very well done).
    Damn my memory. I think that was in "The Dark Night Returns".

  • OT Pi Story (Score:3)

    by taliver ( 174409 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @07:59AM (#764139)
    So I'm seeing this movie in a little theatre and before it starts, they have a contest: whoever can recite the most digits of pi wins a poster of the movie.

    So I listen to a few people try:"3.34532" and then "3.134542" so I volunteer "3.14156", to which the perosn running the contest says "right, you're the winner so far." The next person says "3.5132", and this continues for a few more people.

    Needless to say:
    1) I won the contest and have the poster
    2) I was in South Carolina at the time.

  • I don't think they could get an actor to portray Year One Batman. Animation is advancing quite well as an art form, and I think that's where Batman belongs.

    Too bad Dark Knight Returns won't ever be made as a movie, real or animated.

    ...steve

  • I just hope the new Batman won't be trying to solve math riddles...

    Nah, they already used the Riddler.
    /.

  • ...convinced Warner, Inc. to keep away from the neon-pain and nipple-costume...

    Interesting typo. It was a typo, right? Hard to tell.
    ___

  • Let's not forget the following fact:

    Batman 1 & 2: Great character, great production design, great music, great stories...overall GREAT movies.

    Batman 3 & 4: Throwaway characters, uneven production design, bad music, and horrible stories...overall BAD movies.

    As an aside: Batman 1 & 2, directed by Tim Burton. Batman 3 & 4, not. Coincidence? ;)

  • The real big thing isn't that Darren Aronofsky is directing, it's that Frank Miller will be adapting Year One for the screenplay. As bad as B&R was, it was only partially directorial problems. The biggest problem was that the story was a giant piece off monkey crap. The best any director could have done with that script would be to make it "watchable", I doubt anyone alive could have made it "good". As long as they stick to Year One, and let Frank Miller actually have a say in how it is transfered, then there is a great basis for a movie, and then the director can take it from "good" to "great". Now, if only they had chosed "Dark Knight Returns" instead...
  • Supposedly dubbed Batman 2000 or Bruce Wayne... Is this a rebirth of good Batman stories again?

    (I'll NEVER forgive Schumacher for what he's done...)
  • I went to the Pi website, and about 3 minutes were spent downloading Java classes. The next 2 minutes were spent with the mouse frozen (on an NT4 machine). Then, it began to calculate the value of pi as far as it could go. Kinda shows where Java stands; on a 386SX 20MHz, the value of pi to the 2000th place can be calculated with a C program in only 7 seconds. How pathetic.

    Java(TM). The only language proven to freeze Windows NT and Unix.

    Java is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., LLC, CRAP, ETC.

  • Alan Moore wrote _Watchmen_.
  • Are we also forgetting about Frank Miller's prior contributions to cinema, which include the abysmally bad Robocops 2 [imdb.com] and 3 [imdb.com]? To be fair, studio intervention probably got in the way of better scripts, but good comic book writer != good screenwriter. In any case, a mouthy individualist like Miller in a world perpetuated by committee thinking (major motion picture studios) has the forces of history working against his creative input really reaching any significant part of the screen. Ditto for Aronofsky.

    Don't get me wrong, I want the movie to be good, too. Just don't expect a revolution just because 'our boy Frank' is reportedly pulling some strings behind the script.

  • Certainly big a brooding - is he tall enough? Although that said, I've met Keaton and he is _really_ short, his head was below my shoulders and I'm only 6'1" or so. That said his bodyguard was dolf lundgren-esque... so maybe he's a good one?
    -------------------------------------------- ------
  • ), I was never under the impression that the math was anything other than gobbledygook.

    it was gobbledygook actually, they never really claimed anything else, no math people worked on that movie

  • While Frank Miller did originally write the Robocop 2/3 story, he wrote it as one movie. There were *many* writers that touched the story after him, hence the fact that it ended up not as one movie but two.
    Most movies have a lot more than the original writer. It's rumored that they might have given Miller creative control on the movie after that previous debacle.
  • Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if they do portray her as a prostitute (along with her underage cohort and pimp).

    I can see that having more of a chance of making the movie than the butch hair cut though.

    -Vel
  • Not to mention kind of stupid. I stopped watching these "movies" about the time I saw some stupid scheme the riddler had wherein he decided to get some machine to sap human neural energy and channel it into his cerebrial cortex.
  • Don't forget the elements in the first movie lifted from Allen Moore's The Killing Joke.

  • That's odd. I've never read the book (though I have read LOTS of other Heinlein) but that movie is one of my favorites.

    Your criticisms seem mostly to be based on presentation -- technology, weapons, combat scenes etc.

    However, I found the movie to be absoletly wonderful as a satire. What I thought most brilliant about it WAS the fact that the cookie cutter characters are right out of Ken and Barby land. Displaced directly from 90210 into the movie. It was so beautiful. Definately one of the best satires I've ever seen. And of course the gratuitous violence everywhere. You must have noticed how over the top everything was -- that's the point! And how can you miss all the fascism references?

    I can understand how you might have taken Heinlein's work and completely warped it to his own means -- since I never read it, I really don't know. It certainly didnt' feel at all like a Heinlein novel when I watched it, I was in a very different mindset. I think I enjoyed more than most of Heinlein's stuff, whose books are more in-your-face on-the-surface, and less satire.

  • Burton does some cool stuff, but Pi was... I don't know, it seemed to me like he took everything we learned in film school and put it all into one movie. you only need a few of the concepts, but he seemed to not get that and toss it all into one - don't get me wrong, I lked it - and the soundtrack frickin rocked. I think Terr Gilliam would be perfect for this - or who did Delicatessan and The City of the Lost Children?.... or was it Lost City of Childred... something like that
    -------------------------------------------- ------
  • Now I, even I would celebrate
    In rhymes unapt, the great
    Immortal Syracusan rivalled nevermore
    Who, in his wondrous lore
    Passed on before
    Left men his guidance
    How to circles mensurate.

    There -- now you know pi to 31 digits!
  • Yeah I know the book you mean. It was edited by Martin Greenberg. (Pretty sure it was Greenberg, I don't know about Martin). Had all sorts of other authors. There was (I think), 3 of them. Titles were something like Adventures of Batman 1 & 2, and the Complete stories of the Joker. Try this one, though the cover looks different. Maybe it's another printing. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567310761/ ref=sim_books/104-4876177-8038311
  • ...he uses the same guy to do the soundtrack as he did for Pi. That music gave the whole movie a layer of intensity that couldn't have been acheived with the typical swell-dwell-fade crap that so many drama-type films use.
  • I should add to my previous post - it looks like I misunderstood - I know Burton didn't do Pi, but the way I wrote it there makes it look as if I was saying it was Burton
    ------------------------------------------ --------
  • ... or does anyone else want to see an adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns starring Adam West as the over-the-hill Batman? Corny one liners and psychotic violence, it would be great!

  • Pi was a real strange movie. I saw it at some Uptown theater, and I must say the main character was quite the hobbit. He didn't care much for the outside world. The soundtrack was top notch.

  • No... Pi was actually a *bad* movie (Score:3)

    by Visigothe ( 3176 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @08:02AM (#764163) Homepage
    I understand that everyone is entitled to their opinion [and mine [grin]], but Pi technically was *bad* -- The writing/plot was shakey at best, camera work was amateur [there is a difference between "bad for effect" and "bad, go back to film school"]. I understand why quite a few people liked the movie. I was even entertained, but I wouldn't call it a good/great movie... Hell, people liked the Matrix... again not a "good" movie, but highly entertaining.

    Frank Miller, of course *needs* to do this! How could he not [other than the need to distance himself from the *really awful* post Burton batman movies]?

    Maybe this will be the movie that will but the franchise back to life. Maybe they'll get rid of the nipples on the costume. Only time will tell.

    Does anyone know who the villain[s] will be?

    This is a very exciting development, as I am looking forward to a Batman noir film

  • Found something small on iMDB about it here [imdb.com]

  • *IF* there is a Batman 5 movie... (Score:3)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @08:03AM (#764165)
    First, someone mentioned to me that Batman 5 was canned already, but given that's it's been doing it's best "I'm not quite dead!" impression, hard to follow.

    However, if you haven't been paying attention, Hollywood is running scared right now given the strike by the actor's guild regarding payment for ads they star in. Hollywood isn't moving, and because of this laxness, there's buzz that other unions in Hollywood (scriptwriters, technical people, etc) will be striking by March 2001, and effectively shutting down Hollywood. According to US News and World Report this week, this means films that might have scripts but haven't been filmed yet will be the first to be dropped, specifically refering to Batman 5 as one of the first on the chopping board. Instead, the studios are in a flurry trying to buy up as many scripts and episodes they can before anything mihgt happen.

  • Um...not sure if you realize it or not, but the original Burton Batman was based about as much on the Dark Night Returns as Hollywood is likely to see....
  • First, Pi wasn't "amazing". It was good, but not amazing. It was pretty average science fiction, if you compare books and movies together. (To gauge, "The Matrix" was sub-par, "Star Wars" is lame).

    Second, the only good Batman was the first half of the first movie. Starting with the moment Joker pulls the absurdly long gun from his pants the entire series began to suck. No really, that's the exact point it begins to suck. Go back and watch the first movie. Keep track of Kim Basinger's spoken line-to-scream ration before and after that point.
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • I would much rather see Elfman do the score. I have yet to see a composition of his age poorly. On the other hand, I've seen countless instances where "cutting edge electronic music" sounds worthless and un-interesting in less than half a decade. Batman deserves a classical composition, not pounding drum/bass jungle beats.
  • Boo... Pi humor. That's just bad. Moderate as (-1 Punny)
  • . . .I never understood MARTHA WASHINGTON. I guess it just went over my head at the time; I'll have to try reading it again some day. But at least it had a (more or less) coherent story, unlike, say, Bill Seinkewicz's STRAY TOASTERS. Blech.
  • So does anybody have suggestions for sci-fi movies which they consider to be good / above average?

    There's lots of bagging of the matrix / pi / star wars etc, do we have any constructive suggestions?

  • "Today we have kids/adults/teenagers that are so used to knock-offs of the original that we've become too jaded to see the good in it. Episode 1 was great for those younger than twelve who didn't yet have that 'I'm too cool for this' attitude."

    I was born too late to see the original 3 movies in the theater (combined with the fact that I didn't go to a theater until relatively late in life). I was also older than 12 when I saw Episode 1. I also agree that there are knock-offs that are worse done. HOWEVER.

    None of those things mean that Star Wars was all that good (or even original). Nor does it automatically infuse Episode 1 with any quality. Prediction: Anyone who read any quantity of science fiction (science fiction, not Anne McCrappy dragon junk) before seeing Star Wars likely found it mediocre at best. A lot of flashy effects, but no story (when compared to things like the Foundation series, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and the like). Episode 1 was even worse. Prediction 2: Find 10 people who saw Episode 1 fewer than 3 times. Ask each of them to tell you what the plot was (the plot, not just a series of scenes like "first there was the floating ship and the poison gas, then the race, then..."). No more than 2 people (if that many) will be anywhere close. Point? Episode 1 either had no plot or hid it behind too-flashy effects.
    --
    Linux MAPI Server!
    http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
  • Neon-pain is the best description of that costume.
    That thing was just freaky.
  • What I want is a story that tells of an ordinary man - no super powers to speak of - who is driven to combat the criminal element that has robbed him.

    I'm not a Batman expert, but I think that's why Burton's movies are good. Batman is a little nuts. That's why he runs around beating up bad guys instead of marrying a supermodel. The Burton movies are what Batman feels like. He's rich and he can't enjoy it because he's obsessed with fighting crime. And maybe he wishes he has super powers, so he tries to fake them with cool stuff. That's mostly why I like Batman, he's about as crazy as his villans.

  • Henry Rollins would be pretty good as batman. He would kick some ass. And Glenn Danzig could be the villain and there would be a massive fight to the finish. Then Danzig would finally kill Rollins with his enourmous belt buckle.

    Andrew
  • I'm an avid comic reader, and Batman: Year One is one of the best mainstream stories out there, but let's not forget that Miller [imdb.com] also wrote Robocop II [imdb.com] and Robocop III. [imdb.com]
  • Of course. Most people know next to nothing about the X-men, so the movie had to be made in a way to attractive your average movie goer.
  • It was on a Dell OptiPlex GX 110 with a T1 connection. Strange thing is, slower computers seem to run Javascript faster.
  • Not when I saw him at San Diego ComicCon two months ago. The original poster typo'd.

    --
  • If you want to be like that, take a gander at mine.
  • 10:45 - restate my assumptions: 1) The Riddler is the bane of all society. 2) Any super villan's actions can be represented and understood through numbers. 3)If you graph the locations of the riddler's crime points, patterns emerge. Therefore, the riddler does have a pattern.
  • Sheesh.
    Sorry but IMHO this series should have been dead and buried after Tim Burton left.
    Maybe this new director can breath life back into this rotting corpse of a series (I've never seen PI) but I'm not holding my breath.
    After all, Jean-Pierre Jeunet [imdb.com] of Delicatessen [imdb.com] and City of Lost Children [imdb.com] fame (two of my most favorite movies) was flown in to breath new life back into the Alien series with Alien: Resurrection [imdb.com] and that was the worse piece I've seen in a while. Kind of makes you depressed, don't it?
    I would imagine many movie execs would like to have a say in how the movie should be made.
    Don't give in to the dark side and go see Way of the Gun [imdb.com] instead.

    ---
  • Sure Miller has done some great comics, but he also wrote Robocop 3. So I'd say it would be wise not to get our hopes up that his classic work will be properly transported to the big screen. Scytle

  • Pi soundtrack ... (Score:3)

    by ian stevens ( 5465 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @08:08AM (#764184) Homepage
    he uses the same guy to do the soundtrack as he did for Pi. That music gave the whole movie a layer of intensity that couldn't have been acheived with the typical swell-dwell-fade crap that so many drama-type films use.

    The Pi soundtrack is just a compilation of so-called intelligent dance music from techno artists. You can find the soundtrack here [towerrecords.com].

    If they use the same breed of music it would certainly make it more interesting to watch but no doubt there will be a push to use higher-profile artists in order to sell the soundtrack.

    ian.

  • FYI: Joel Scheumaker directed the last two Batman films; he's been well known for flambuoyency to the extreme.

    As a neat inside joke, there was a episode in the last season of Batman: The Animated Series, where 3 kids discussed their various 'ideas' of Batman, flashing back to the campy 60s style as well as a modern cyberpunkish style (not Batman Beyond, but one that was suggested in the DC comics). In any case, the kids come across another kid, playing with a boa (garment, not snake), and this kid mentions how he adored Batman for his tight outfits, flashy gizmos, and the fact he heard his car could drive up walls. One of the other three kids says "Joel, give it a rest". Ouch :D

  • Not to mention the amazing run he had on Daredevil with Klaus Jansen back in the 80's. If nothing else, this should be a pleasant return to the darker side of the dark knight.

  • The Variety article notes that the script is being co-written by "Frank Miller, the author of the Warner Books graphic novel 'Batman: YO'."

    Ain't that the shiznitz? The sequel will no doubt be based on Miller's seminal "Batman: Word!" or the less well-received "Batman: Keepin' it Real."

  • Think of it as Batman 0. The storyline concerns Batman's first year - before the joker. Good stuff.
  • Robocop 3 was rewritten something like 7 or 11 times after it left Miller's hands. I remember that he tried suing to remove his name from the credits of the film.

  • I've seen Pi a million times, and it has opened up new avenues for my metaphysical studies. I can only hope he can bring some sort of "reality" back into Batman and make him once again the Dark Night, not some bozo in a stupid suit.

  • I have a teacher that always says that pi is approximately equal to 3.14, and if you need more digits, use a calculator.
  • I hope they include that scene where the Dark Knight gets his limbs chopped off, claiming that it's just a flesh wound.

    Oh, Batman? Ick.
  • Didn't know that. Surprising given Miller's rabid anti-censorship stance that he would let himself be re-written.
  • I attend San Diego ComicCon regularly. Back in '88 or '89 (when casting was complete and the movie was in production), Bob Kane, the inventor of Batman, did a panel. There was mass disappointment regarding Michael Keaton. And I admit I was a skeptic. So he talks on and on and someone asks him what he thinks about Keaton. There's laughter and boos, and then he replies. (I wish I could quote it, but that was a lot of years ago.)

    He said to give Keaton a chance. Kane had been involved in the film, including working on the set, and was personally quite impressed with the job Keaton had been doing.

    That was good enough for me. And when I saw the movie, I was more than satisfied. Keaton pulled off the psychological side of Batman perfectly: dark, brooding, almost borderline psycho.

    Let's face it: there can be no ideal actor for Batman. HE'S A COMICBOOK CHARACTER! No one has that physique: that's why the rubber suit! You need an actor who can do a good job portraying Bruce Wayne who can also emote while he's wearing 40 lbs of rubber.


    So what happened to the franchise? Jack Nicholson. Nothing bad about Jack's performance, it's just that the movie was written so that the star was The Joker, not The Dark Knight.

    That started the trend. We then have THREE villain stars in the second movie with one totally unresolved plot, and again Batman is totally eclipsed. They should have removed Penguin and focused on Catwoman and Max Shreck. The third movie comes along AGAIN with two stars to eclipse Batman, the fourth movie stars Arnold. Give me a break!

    Time after time the focus is on the bad guys, who invariably lose. Why do they bother calling the movies Batman? As for myself, I thought Arnold was the worst possible choice for Mr. Freeze as that villain had always been portrayed as a super scientist, not a muscle-bound Austrian. It had been rumored that Patrick Stewart might have played him: I would have been first in line to see that. As it was, I never saw #4. And I think I'm a better person for it.



    --
  • In general, the longer series go on, the worse the movies get. Look at the IMDB's Bottom 100 [imdb.com] and see how many have 2, 3 4 or more in the title.
  • Find 10 people who saw Episode 1 fewer than 3 times. Ask each of them to tell you what the plot was ... No more than 2 people (if that many) will be anywhere close.

    Of course, neither did I think it that good. It certainly didn't suck, but was simply mediocre. And having only seen it once, I followed the plot quite well. But to be honest, I waited until it came out on video, my local library purchased it and it made it out to my local library branch AND (this is likely why I followed the plot so well) I watched it with close captioning enabled.

    Having a hearing impairment, I can't follow dialogue worth squat unless I turn the volume up loud enough to shake the house to its foundations.

    I didn't find Jar Jar all that annoying either, but my guess is seeing his patois spelled out was less offensive to the asthete in me then hearing him speak.

    Anyway, Phantom Menace was pretty predictable and George Lucas likes to hit people over the head with foreshadowing. I managed to pick the exact point in the film when things stopped going bad and got wrapped up for the 'feel good' ending. Not that this was a great accomplishment on my part, the ending was almost identical to the ending of Return of the Jedi.

    However, taken for what it is, I rate the movie as being better written than the Matrix even though I found the Matrix much more enjoyable. The Phantom Menace at least captured my attention enough that I wouldn't mind a second viewing. I had fun watching the Matrix, but once was enough.

  • ...probably listens to They Might Be Giants all day. Speaking of TMBG, anyone know what song has the lyrics "Everybody needs to have a rock to tie a string around"?
  • I think 'they' should put out the Watchmen as a movie. Miller really churned out a winner with that series, and it would RULE on the screen.

    As much as I was disappointed with Wolverine in the X-Men movie, that guy would make a righteous Rorschach. Think about it, Hollywood!



  • Hey, I'm as much of a geek as the next guy (note the slashdot user number), but I thought Pi was stupid. The math in that movie tried to look sophisticated but it wouldn't even fool your grandma. Plus the movie was dumb, and boring.

    Sounds like he might be the perfect directory for the next Batman movie. The Batman movies were equally dumb, but of course on a much grander scale. We're talking the kind of stupidity that only hollywood can generate.
  • there is no villian, per se. batman year one is about his origins and his self doubt and his fear of being batman. his enemies are the organized crime racket/corrupt gotham officials. batman is first and foremost a detective. that's what this is about. catwoman DOES make an appearance, as does a pre-twoface harvey dent.

    ----- go to www.questionexchange.com.

  • Yeah, it's too bad that very few sci-fi movies can live up to the potential of sci-fi literature. For example, I'd love to see Benford's "In the Ocean of Night" series on the big screen, but I'm sure once it made it's way through Hollywood it would resemble "Lost in Space" a whole lot more than the original books. Other candidates for "please, don't make a movie of these" include Simmons' Hyperion series and Wingrove's Chung Kuo series.

    One of the few sci-fi books that sort-of made a good movie was "Starship Troopers". Not that it was much like the book, but at least it was both recognizable as being based on the movie but also watchable. It was just lacking the whole political understory that was really the moral of the book.

    As a side note for anyone watching recent Olympic coverage on NBC, do the "Log on now to find out more" bars that they put on the bottom of the screen remind anyone else of the "Would you like to know more?" buttons from Starship Troopers? Life imitating art (such as it were) a little, I think.

  • > Does anyone know who the villain[s] will be?

    Bah! It's high time they made a movie that's actually _about_Batman_, rather than a movie about a bat-villian. I think Frank Miller's primary accomplishment was reminding us that the true antagonist in the Batman saga is not an individual psychopath but is, in fact, Gotham City itself. Batman can be so much more than a modern cowboys & indians (Bat-clan vs. Arkham inmates) cliche. To show Bruce coming to the realization that humanity needs a protector in order to prevent it from feeding on itself would be to restore the sociological implications of the story that Tim Burton & company so blatantly ignored.

    _If_ the movie actually gets made, I hope it stays true to the comic and presents the Gotham City Police Department as the eventual antagonist.
  • Anyway, my original point was that the introduction to the story said it would be part of a series of Batman stories set in dramatically different contexts than the "normal" Gotham -- Is that the Batman Beyond series?

    That sounds like you're referring to the Elseworlds line (out-of-continuity stories placing some version of Batman in a different setting). The Batman Beyond series is set a few decades in the future (an elderly Bruce Wayne has reluctantly passed the mantle to Terry McGinnis).
    /.

  • "The Matrix" was sub-par, "Star Wars" is lame

    Star Wars was aimed at children. Fortunately, it involved themes that 'kids at heart' could get back in 1977. Hence, the whole world went nuts for the good/evil battle. Today we have kids/adults/teenagers that are so used to knock-offs of the original that we've become too jaded to see the good in it. Episode 1 was great for those younger than twelve who didn't yet have that 'I'm too cool for this' attitude.

    As for the Matrix, what more do you want? A hacker-mentality movie with an absolute (and you have to agree) kick-ass soundtrack around a wonderful never-done-before plot and cool fight sequences (they should pay royalties to John Woo though..). The Matrix is a true tour-de-force on the senses, and the DVD set the standard (currently the best selling DVD of all time) of all DVDs to come after it. Its a real trip to go into the mindset that nothing you do means anything for two and a half hours.

    Pi broke through the barriers of mathmatics being boring, intertwining the Jewish use of numbers as letters (and names) along with simple geometry and the stock market all in one. It worked on so many levels, and still manages to impress me on multiple viewings (the DVD kicks as too. Can you say TWO commentary tracks?). The ability to make such a low budget black and white film while still making it amazingly interesting and well written (could that ending BE any more shocking?), Pi is a great movie that most people have heard or expect too much out of. When you just take it for face value, the tempo and the mood and the pacing just take over.

    I'm sorry if I pounced on your 'I'm to cool' attitude, but maybe you should go into films with lower expectations.

  • For all Frank Miller fans (you seem to be one)
    Get the Frank Miller leatherbound Batman book. It is probably 250 pages or more, of full page drawing with little one page poems and prose.
    The most powerful tale of the dark knight I have ever seen.
    Here's an entry for what I'm talking about:
    Miller, Frank. The Complete Frank Miller Batman. 1st ed. Stamford: Longmeadow Press, 1989.
    After reading this book, I'm sure that the effects and cinemtography of Pi will compliment and complete any movie bound version of a Frank Miller story. Of course .. Robin was.. nevermind, wont spoil it for you if you want to read it :).

    [phpwebhosting.com]
    nerdfarm.org
  • No way, Danny Elfman all the way!
  • Aronofsky needed the money that bad, eh?

  • Frank Miller... (Score:4)

    by ChristianBaekkelund ( 99069 ) <draco AT mit DOT edu> on Thursday September 21, 2000 @07:54AM (#764261) Homepage
    Yes, "Pi was amazing"...this is true...
    But don't forget about Frank Miller! The Batman work he died was great...almost everything he's made I love. However, SinCity will always hold a special place in my heart:
  • Personally, I've never been happy with ANY of the casting choices for Batman. Keaton was okay, but let's face it, physically, not there. Classic Batman was always drawn very large and menacing. I can't even imagine who *would* be a good Batman. none of the "big" guys can be dark and booding enough (Shwartz- in "End of Days" did not, in my opinion, sufficiently pull-off dark and brooding - too much "Jolly Austrian" in him, see ya at Oktoberfest, Arnold).

    Anyone else have any ideas? As long as we're fantasizing.

    I imagine that since Pi was as much a psycho-spiritual thriller, and visually stunning in b/w, wonderful composition, that this Batman movie will be very visual, and psychological. I can dream.
  • have really ended up a disappointment so far. I'm hoping this is an improvement. I don't want to rant too much, but killing off every major villain was never a smart move on the part of the people behind the previous movies. Especially joker! One of the things that really impressed me with X-Men was that they left the possibility of all of the villains making returns in later movies. Batman was working towards only having scarecrow and arcade left to kill.

  • Excuse me? You've read Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and you think the movie was good?

    That movie was a butchery. As soon as I heard that the director of "Showgirls" and "Total Recall" was adapting one of my favorite Heinlein novels, I thought I knew what I was in for. Oh, was I wrong. It was much worse than I could've expected.

    "Starship Troopers" is a coming of age story. It's all about Rico learning to become a man in the military. The story is supposed to focus on him growing up, not on the Aron Spelling-esque high school "romance" that the movie foists on you as character development. The Hugo-award winning plot behind it all was essentially thrown out the window and replaced with a cheap, sleazy soap opera. Just the attitude of it made me want to take a shower afterwards. Of course, that's the effect any American Paul Verhoeven movie has on me.

    Then, let's talk about the way they took all the cool action-movie elements and ruined them too. First of all, power armor. Where the hell was the power armor? This was a great opportunity for them to show off the Hollywood movie magic. I mean, these lunks of high-tech weaponry and steel lept a half-kilometer at a time, leaving mini-nukes behind at every jump. How badass is that? But, nooo...

    They instead spent that special effect magic on ruining the Bugs. What happened to the cool technology that the Bugs had? We supposedly stole tech from them. Instead, the director decided to go with the biotech flavor of the year and create nonsense such as Bugs travelling via faster-than-light plasma spew (which orbiting ships could dodge, incidentally).

    Let's talk about how they screwed up the military. The (unarmored) soldiers are all carrying weapons with a half-mile effective range. What do they do? Do they build trenches and begin shelling the enemy lines with artillery? Do they line up and begin slaughtering the enemy waves long before they can even get to them? No, they run up to melee range with creatures that can't hurt them from a distance, surround them so that they could potentially shoot each other, and begin firing after the thing has already gutted one of them. Of course, this is really an excuse to show the horrors of war by blanketing the battlefield with dismembered human corpses. Blech. How cheezy. I'm not going to even go into the ways in which Verhoeven mocks the society that Heinlein set up in the book.

    Oh, and where were the Skinnies? One of the best badass perfect action movie moments had to be the 30-second bomb, where they rampaged through a Thinmen colony dropping bombs that delivered a warning that they could've taken them out for real at any time. Oh wait, that's right. You couldn't do that when you got rid of the power armor.

    I don't feel like going into the way they raped every character from the book that showed up, including one of my favorites, Sargeant Zim. I guess that's just one side-effect of destroying the plot. I can't believe that you've read the book and still like this awful, awful movie. The only people I've ever met who liked it had never heard of Robert A. Heinlein.
  • You make such a good point, I'm tempted to re-state it in big, bold letters, and spell out as an addendum that Frank Miller's primary accomplishment was NOT merely presenting Batman as dark and troubled. But I guess I'll just do this, instead.
  • Will the next Batman movie be called "Batman 3.14159..."?

  • Re:OT Pi Story (Score:3)

    by Azog ( 20907 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @12:00PM (#764295) Homepage
    Acutally, 3.14156 is wrong. Of the top of my head (really!), it starts 3.14159 26535 89793.

    When I was in grade 8, my math teacher put up an overhead once with pi to 10000 digits. I was so blown away I got a photocopy of it. That summer I memorized the first 100 digits, five digits a day. If you do it in groups of five, it's not that hard.

    In grades 9-12 I used to write out at least 10 to 15 digits worth when using pi in calculations, especially on math and physics tests. How pathetic of a geek am I, eh?

    Over on this Pi site [cecm.sfu.ca] you can get pi to 50 million places, and find out that some guy called Hiroyuki Goto is the current world record holder for the most digits of Pi memorized at over 42000 digits. (!)

    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • but what about the stock market????

  • He'll co-write it with Frank Miller, and it will be based on 'Batman: Year One.
    This is great news! Frank Miller's take on the Batman as a tormented, quasi-suicidal nutcase who identifies with his enemies in "The Dark Night Returns" is arguably the best stuff ever written about that character. I was hoping they would use more of his characterization in the original Batman movie, but unfortunately, Tim Burton had his own ideas. (Though I did like how Burton used parts of Alan Moore's "The Killing Joke" - the flashback of falling pearls as young Bruce's mother was shot was very well done).
  • No way, Danny Elfman all the way!

    Sorry, I lost all respect for Danny Elfman when we scored the Batman films. Instead of using Neal Hefti's Batman TV Theme, he replaced it with a song by The-Artist-Then-Known-As-Prince. He must have been on crack.

    Here's a quote from a Hefti Bio:

    But his theme was not used for the recent popular ``Batman'' movies, because the composer hired to the score the movies, Danny Elfman, ``hates it'' and couldn't do anything with it. Cleary, Mr. Elfman doesn't know anything about jazz, otherwise he would have realized that Hefti's catchy riff is probably the most flexible theme song ever written. Any of a million tunes could have layered over Hefti's basic twelve bar form, and made any sort of new composition out of it. Mr. Elfman should brush up on his jazz improvisation and reaquaint himself with the infinite flexibility inherent in twelve bar blues.


    --

  • When I was 5 my Mom told me not to stare... (Score:4)

    by AntiPasto ( 168263 ) on Thursday September 21, 2000 @07:58AM (#764308) Journal
    Batman is such a wonderful fictional exploration of human dreams... and dreams can be *dark*.

    You all remember how dark the first movie was, and me as a kid I remember just being absolutely enthralled with the retro-modern look that Tim Burton created.

    I would like to see them create live action based on *a lot* of plots. For instance I think the newer Batman Beyond has taken some cool dark themes (BM murdering Com. Gordon)... and I also remember some *brilliantly* dark stories written by guest authors in a book I read once (btw... anyone know what book that was? not a comic, but guest authors writing BM stories)...

    However, if the story inferrs that this movie is going to be the beginning of the legacy, then I'm all for it... what a great timeless story... how this man came to be after the murder of his parents. It has inspired countless generations.

    Technology. It's always been rather unrealistic. But the one thing I loved about PI was his convincing portrayal of fictional math. The stuff didn't make sense at all after some thought, but *damn* you sure thought it did.

    Perhaps he will take a cool technology edge to BM?

    ----

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