Juvenile Cinephile

THE MILL AND THE CROSS

DIRECTED BY LECH MAJEWSKI

Lech Majewski gives us a hybrid film in The Mill and the Cross that goes inside the canvass of the Pieter Bruegel’s The Way to the Cavalry.   On one hand the film features backdrops of canvass itself in deep focus to the painting’s subjects come to life.  It is not even pretending to give an illusion to reality or grand sense of artistry that you would find in old Pressburger and Powell pictures.  It remains strictly Bruegel, thanks to modern CGI technology, and therefore a transcendent marvel to look at as a viewer.  On the other hand the film has a natural and slightly obsessive yet distant sensibility to it in showing the glacial pace and monotony of labor in those times and locations that lends itself to Tarkovsky and Kubrick.  Still, the film remains a feast for the eyes amid its unconventionality that marries the world of Bruegel and Majewski. 

The film explores what was really happening in the canvass, looking into the lives of about a dozen citizens of Flanders directly effected by the Spanish persecution of the region.  There is very little dialogue said with exceptions for the film’s noticeable leads with Rutger Hauer as the observant Bruegel, Michael York as the witness Nicholaes Jonghelinck, and Charlotte Rampling as the steely-eyed Mary, mother of the Christ figure in the painting. 

The symbolism that the film looks into speaks for itself and into the mind of Bruegel.  Majewski is fairly disciplined, if perhaps too narrow, in his look into Bruegel’s canvass but it is completely fascinating for a film to achieve such an effect for a film that audibly says so little.  It is no mistake of the last sequence in the film is having the audience being removed from the canvass.  It almost feels like we were right there with Majewski if not were Majewski himself. 

The Mill and the Cross may not be the most aesthetically ambitious movies of 2011 but it is certainly the most unique and different I have seen this year and in a while as a movie-goer.  On a side-note, I think Rutger Hauer should just have a whole series of narrating the works of Bruegel a la Bob Ross in The Joy of Painting.  He is just one of those actors I could listen to read the phone book.  He is one of the many reasons why this film is so entrancing to watch.  

LIKE CRAZY

DIRECTED BY DRAKE DOREMUS

Falling in and out love, pulled apart by circumstances you lost control over, and trying to regain something because of nostalgia and memory are what drives the couple Jacob and Anna in LIKE CRAZY.   Though the movie toots its own horn with its naturalistic style in acting and dialogue, the film feels like a recreated French New Wave film, specifically its jump cuts that recall Godard’s BREATHLESS.  But LIKE CRAZY is too full of itself to ever achieve the irreverent, sexy, and personal naturalness of BREATHLESS.  Instead Doremus is pushing a romance that is very one-sided, Anna loves Jacob more, as a tragic romance of Love Story proportions with beautiful music played over montage shots of this couple in locales are listed as options for what your dream date is on OKCupid. 

The film does not help itself when it has a leading man in Anton Yelchin who does not really have the gravitas to play a stubborn but desirable, much less believable, builder who manages to snag women the caliber of a Jennifer Lawrence (who feels underused if because she is also way more interesting than Yelchin as an actor and deserves more than being ‘the rebound chick’) or a Felicity Jones.  Yelchin is better served as a sidekick in any kind of film but not so much here where he is just a wet blanket that holds the film back in that you wonder why she would be interested in him in the first place.  The same cannot be said with Felicity Jones’ performance whose vulnerability, sense of wonder, and guilt are palpable, sincere, and far more interesting than this movie altogether.  I wish this film was just built around her point of view as she is just far more watchable than the sad trombone of Yelchin’s Jacob.  It would have been another film and a better one.  Jones is an actress to watch and I hope she finds projects that are better than this one.

ONE DAY

DIRECTED BY LONE SCHERFIG

This movie is sobering in a number of ways.  I have never seen a serious movie about romance feature every character in it be written as so unlikeable as ONE DAY treats its characters.  Except of course for its main character of Emma (Anne Hathaway) whose affair she had with a married man in the novel this film was based on, is wiped away from the film version (the author of the book, David Nicholls, is responsible for his own adaptation on screen) to ensure she achieves martyrdom as a hybrid of the manic pixie dream girl meets beautiful all along later bloomer who “fixes” the Tory bourgeois arsehole Dexter (Jim Sturgess) after he hit rock bottom.  Think of this movie like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but instead of age it is emotional depth and looks that are lost and gained to eventually even out in this relationship. 

Nicholls really fails his own novel’s positives.  The side characters to Emma and Dexter are rendered mostly as unsympathetic and unmemorable for the audience to care how these two affect their lives.  Dexter’s parents are made to just give moralizing speeches to their son increasingly becoming sucked in corporate greed working on television.  Dexter’s mother dies before Patricia Clarkson can say anything interesting or personal in a terribly breathy faux-British accent and Dexter’s father just feels too damn detached for me to care.  Dexter’s ex-wife oddly becomes much more interesting when she begins to drift apart from Dexter.  Ironically, she is emotionally far more invested in him after their divorce.  Then there is Ian, played by the incomparable Rafe Spall, who arguably should have been the guy to have gone through the ‘fix’ Emma wanted to give Dexter but is clearly not in her peripheral vision even as they co-habitate.  There is actually a very well-done scene of Emma watching Dexter waste away on his television show while Ian is walking back and forth in the room physically sending her signals about getting intimate.  She never bats an eye to Ian, whose face we never see in that scene, but one can only imagine the anger and sadness that befalls him.  But Emma is made to be flawless in this adaptation and that is the film’s great problem.  

Emma’s treatment of Ian is practically defended by both Nicholls and Scherfig on incredibly petty terms such as his bad sense of humor, his bad haircut, his bad taste in art, and his lack tact in being romantic.  He is a man-child essentially but at least has awareness of his shortcomings, which is steps ahead of Dexter who is already too good-looking to warrant a cosmetic overhaul (and if you have seen recent photos of Rafe Spall, you know under that man-child was a striking-looking man).   Yet Emma lives with Ian for years based on the flashing of the calendar year of July 15th while there is no real change in Ian.  He is still the stubborn, unfunny but lovable, stand-up comic, while in contrast Emma and Dexter are changing by their own agency or by the world changing against them. 

Nicholls cannot see past his own conceited design of his novel not working on screen.   There is no reason why it should be so significant yet it manages to make the film a drag that offers no real growth or interest involved in characters not named Dexter or Emma. Aside from one side character, the ex-wife, there is no change of the characters and we just see them leave and return to the screen in certain intervals.  Meanwhile, you see enough of Dexter to know the boy needs to get his house in order but when he finally gets together with Emma it is after he reveals a child-like jealousy that Emma found revolting in Ian’s behavior but endearing with Dexter.  It just feels like being cheated seeing these characters get together after one acts like a jerk through most of the film until he hits rock bottom while the other just has to wait it out and get good advice to achieve her goals and then it is all happily ever…. no, on second thought Nicholls also stuck with the novel’s ending that was total bullshit.  

Anne Hathaway is pretty good aside from thinking that imitating Julie Andrews gives off a proper Yorkshire accent.  Jim Sturgess is a lot more acceptable than his American counterparts in these type of roles but his character is still pretty terrible rather than tragic. 

LOVE & OTHER DRUGS

DIRECTED BY EDWARD ZWICK

This is one of those troubling adaptations where you wonder what the hell was going on in the thought process of these filmmakers and screenwriters.  In the case of LOVE & OTHER DRUGS, it takes the prescient memoir HARD SELL by Jamie Reidy (name in the film changed to Jamie Randall, and not just because he looks nothing like Jake Gylenhaal) about the broken health care system controlled by big pharma that directly involves Reidy (a respected college grad and Army vet) who gets an entry level job that pays six-figures he loves to realizing what the system does to people like him, medical professionals, and patients screwed out of the system, specifically Reidy’s own friends that really turns him cynical.  That world does not exist in the film, well, just not until a lot of not so significant time has gone on in the film.

Zwick’s film begins practically as a Tucker Max-fueled fantasy in the form of Jamie Randall, a guy with a libido that gives him a false sense of rebellion and independence, as he has backroom sex with a co-worker, who also is involved with the manager at some low-end tech store, gets him fired.  Gyllenhaal’s smirk throughout the film, in the past used to create both uneasiness (Donnie Darko and Bubble Boy) to All-American earnestness (Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac, and October Sky) just does not feel right that it is now being used to parlay a cynical, snarky fratboy as a leading man.   It is not really derided by Zwick, who gives us a seat at the Randall dinner table (which rivals the purposely bizarre comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeosie in shameless, gross, consumerism at one dinner table) to find out he is hardly the worst Randall, oh boy, is he not the worst Randall.    Josh Gad as Josh Randall, as in Jamie’s brother, is almost from another dimension, not just from another movie.  The pudgy, doughy, ‘lives in mom’s basement’, incapable of human interaction and intimacy is something I don’t even think the creative team behind Porkys would have written out just because it would be too stereotypical.  Gad’s turn up the energy to 11 does not help matters as it adds to the disgusting obnoxiousness and intrusion of his character throughout the film.  How does Zwick want us to believe those two came from the same womb (RIP, Jill Clayburgh)?   It reminds me of Zwick, whose TV background includes thirtysomething and My So-Called Life that each seemed obsessed with creating individual characters with complete 180 degree dichotomies from the next character.  Gad (who I cannot believe was not nominated for a Razzie) is the Scrappy Doo of a film marred in several problems, but he is definitely a key component of one of those problems.

I mentioned before it is nothing like the source material.  Think of it as a contrast to an equally wretched adaptation of book, Up in the Air (which for a movie hailed by limousine liberals as the film of OUR time, it predictably faded into Oscar-bait obscurity).  That book was perfectly fine in its original form and a potent enough in its message about living that it did not need to be updated to have the recession as a backdrop, that ultimately rung hollow in a film that was also tied up in what tone it was going for between its script, direction, and actors.  Meanwhile, Zwick’s film takes a prescient memoir about big pharma and a broken healthcare system and turns it into a film about a guy seeing the light through a very ill woman that changes him for the better.  Oh, and there is a lot of sex and nudity to show just how connected these two are with each other. 

Unlike ONE DAY, this change does feel slightly more genuine but it really is itself a whole other movie.  When Anne Hathaway’s character, Maggie, enters the picture, we are forewarned about her condition, except Jamie who is apparently deaf when the audience hears ‘early onset of Parkinson’s Disease’ but we see them on a continuing path of hot sex and intimacy until she really takes on the illness and then we see montages of testimonials by real people with Parkinson’s Disease.  Now that is sobering.   While those scenes are far less intrusive as the real-time firing scenes in Up in the Air (except when Zach Galifianakis, who felt like he was in another film, gets fired), it just shows what depths Zwick had to go to give the film’s lead character an emotional reckoning (that includes a rather disgusting conversation with a pseudo-intellectual man with a wife who has Stage 4 Parkinson’s Disease). 

The film’s sex scenes do not feel like a breath of fresh air in depicting sex (under the guidelines of the MPAA, of course).  It just feels slightly gratuitous, including a truly voyeuristic shot that almost puts the audience as a third party watching these characters have sex behind a building.  The insights to sexuality just feel pretentious and all too conceited to think of this as nothing but a poser film that is really just a romantic comedy, that is not at all funny, with all the trappings.  Go watch films like Shortbus if you really want an honest, sex-positive, emotional, and truly funny film. 

It is surprising Zwick went to his TV roots and movie beginnings based off a story that is pretty much gift-wrapped to him in its source material in social consciousness.  I guess the movie did not involve the white guilt and white man’s burden he has obsessively done in the past decade for him to really take on this material in a serious manner.  Not that LOVE & OTHER DRUGS is not serious.  It is, however, a film that takes a bait and switch in tone with remains of its very unwatchable first half that felt like Zwick’s attempt at the Apatow crowd that in the second half tries to recover from to no avail.  

Gyllenhaal is given the task of different tropes of characters that is in the end is a humbled goofball with the body of gladiator that while still room for improvement is an upgrade from sexual predator in the first half.  Hathaway again toes the line of manic pixie dream girl with a performance that the film is not worthy of serving in any capacity.  She is good and believable but the rest of the film is a canvass with the depth of a McDonald’s chain. 

TABLOID

DIRECTED BY ERROL MORRIS

Errol Morris is one of my favorite documentarians.  I feel like I can count on him not to indulge.  That he can actually bring social change without being a blowhard.  Even films where I detest the subject and question their motives, like Robert McNamara, I definitely get enthralled watching them.  He manages to bring a cinematic hmph to his work that really elevates the documentary form.  TABLOID is devoid of any of those qualities and unfortunately is stuck with a documentary subject where it requires more than just one person directly involved to talk and or any person for the matter to actually say something without pretense.

TABLOID talks about Joyce McKinney’s rather risque story that became a phenomenon in the UK due to McKinney being um…. eccentric and the guy she was after being Mormon.  I was pretty jarred seeing a really terrible and outdated anti-Mormon cartoon used as McKinney just was casually talking about how any of her supposed weirdness is off-set by the general weirdness of Mormonism.  I expected more from Morris. I think the whole Mormons are weirdos motif wore thin as did a lot of other things. 

Morris has no restraint about his subject, instead he indulges and takes joy in all of it.  It reminds me of Jim Jarmusch’s CRAZY HORSE documentary where he clearly was having fun with it but the movie was sloppy and completely beneath his abilities as a filmmaker.  I was going into the film expecting something a little more than Morris getting a kick out the witty phrases by boorish UK tabloid journalists.  In fact, I expected some critique of the tabloid industry. 

TABLOID is really one of Morris’ weaker films.    Check out his other stuff but for goodness stakes, steer clear of this one. 

IN TIME

Directed by Andrew Niccol

In Time by Andrew Niccol is like most of the director’s previous works where the concept intrigues the audience.  How much there is to says beyond the concept that varies in his movies, but his last science fiction film S1mone, about a producer who makes a Hollywood starlet computer engineered, was very much all concept as the rest of the film folded like a house of cards. 

Actually, even one of Niccol’s better films, Gattaca, was mostly the concept of a world where children were all born genetically engineered than a real undertaking of the human condition, and believe science fiction is a genre where that is possible, Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go a most recent triumph with similar themes.  But In Time very much is the same story of Niccol’s other films.  High concept, beautiful palate and beautiful people all well tailored and well dressed, the subtlety of a sledgehammer bashing its audience in the head with its issues and themes, and almost nothing beyond that.  However, what makes In Time ultimately fail is the fact Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried cannot help elevate the script’s lame, rushed attempt at making this sci-fi’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde.    

Like all of Niccol’s films the dangers of ‘playing God’ come into play and this time, yet again, it is science that is the guilty party.   In 2161, all the people in the world have been genetically modified to not age beyond age of 25 (which gives the film a real eeriness until Niccol does not even care to take it as seriously).  When people hit 25 they are now given approximately a year to live with a digital timer ticking off on their forearm.  There are however ways of manipulating the system and its name is money.  The rich live longer and the poor live shorter.  This is where the film’s politics on inequality comes in and if it were just slightly a bit subtle and not repeated over and over with so much dialogue, I would be a lot of more positive over this film. 

Timberlake’s character Will Salas drones on about this unfair system, even as he gets a special gateway into the world of the rich after earning 100 years of time from a rich man (Matt Bomer) who lost his will to live.   He ends up kidnapping the richest man in the world’s daughter (Amanda Seyfried) that leads to a cat and mouse game chase with a policeman ‘Time Keeper’ (played by the always reliable Cillian Murphy).   But by the third act the film really loses its footing and feels like an origin story for outlaws of the future.

In Time is a self-righteous, pretentious film that if not for the sleek look of the film, with set pieces and costumes that mirror the sci-fi French New Wave directors Truffaut and Godard made with Fahrenheit 451 and Alphaville respectively, it is just a pretty movie with nothing beyond concept.  The themes of inequality and class warfare are Politics 101 but nothing too deep when Niccol could have gone deeper or conveyed a much deeper sense of doom and dread in this dystopia plated around a new gilded age. 

10.) Time Bandits- “Parents Just Don’t Understand”

Terry Gilliam’s exploration of a child’s dreamscape is a real treat that is both fun and absurd.  But when it gets dark, boy, does it gets DARK.  The child, Kevin, ignored by his parents engulfed in their own own consumerism tags along with a band of dwarfs through different time periods ultimately facing off, and defeating, the embodiment of evil.  As Kevin meets the Supreme Being but is left behind by the Supreme Being and dwarfs to be awoken by a toaster fire in the house that contains a ‘concentrated evil’.  Kevin warns his parents to not touch it and well… they don’t listen.  The end.

9.) Carrie- “She ain’t never gonna be right!”

After Carrie takes down the whole school with her after being monumentally embarrassed at the prom, she goes back home to destroy her mother and herself.  The only person who manages to survive the horror is Carrie’s biggest tormentor.  Is she finally sympathetic?  Is she haunted?   Does she think she can be forgiven?  She definitely has a guilty conscience and by extension, pretty touchy-feely.  

8.)The Iron Giant- “You are who you choose to be.”

Brad Bird capturing the wonder of a child when the Cold War hit a fever-pitch so beautifully immediately stuck to the back of my mind as I was growing more and more disappointed watching J.J. Abrams inferior yet very similar live-action Super 8.  There is pulling at the audience heart strings in a completely genuine way and then there is the lazy, rushed version Abrams gave.  With The Iron Giant, Bird raises the stakes as in the film’s climax with the end of the world possibly happening in a matter of seconds.  To save the world, the Iron Giant take on the interesting concept of machine from another world versus the man-made terror of a nuclear weapon.  I never would have thought the simple line of “Superman”, let alone it being said by Vin Diesel, would send chills down my spine but it got me when I was 9 and it still gets me 12 years later. 

7.) Chinatown- “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown”

Hot damn, does this movie remove all the pretense of romanticism to an already unromantic genre of film-noir.  Roman Polanski and Robert Towne make Noah Cross the most despicable villain and repressive force of a nature in the state of California.   Jake Gittes can only watch in horror when the people he has come close to cannot escape Cross.   Then the horror becomes resignation.   Nobody wins except Noah Cross. 

6.) Night of the Living Dead- When the unintended becomes a statement

The cheap, low-budget film that started the zombie genre indirectly became a political statement.  The politics through the movie is pretty explicit with vigilante justice being just as fearful as the zombies themselves.  But then that comes to a head when the last person standing gets shot.  A little line of dialogue by the shooter leaves a lot of ambiguity.  Was it a mistake?  Was it intentional?  Was it motivated by something that has pervaded the Earth longer than zombies?   Romero had no intention of having the latter but it was 1968 and it certainly was not completely out of the question.  Romero’s movies after would deal with political themes more explicitly but none of those film’s politics would be as shocking to the system than the ending to Night of the Living Dead. 

5.) Let the Right One In-Dismembering tormentors from a pools eye view. 

A post-Columbine world has made a lot of movies, particularly Carrie and Heathers, have become pretty jarring to modern viewers in school-related vengeance and when the bullied fight back.  Let the Right One In, however, pretty much do not get gratuitous in its revenge story.  For one thing, the bullied boy, Oskar, is put in a vulnerable position where he cannot, as he is in real danger by his bullies, and the act of ‘revenge’ is done by vampire, Eli, defending the boy.   But we only see the boy in the whole sequence with his tormentors scene in the background in a losing battle.  The relationship of the boy and the vampire shows a real devotion that is warm amid the Scandinavian coldness.   You will have a smile on your face.  Eat it, Edward and Bella. 

4.) Vertigo- Well, at least Scotty got cured.

Some people get pretty angry about this ending.  Such a cruel trick was already played on Scotty Ferguson, does he really deserve that kind of deja vu and irony?  I personally think Hitchcock knew exactly what he had as a protagonist.  Scotty Ferguson was not a great man and his selfishness and obsession ultimately consumed him.  Why should he be rewarded? That he no longer had vertigo was Hitch throwing a bone.

3.) Brazil- How was this not a happy ending? 

Terry Gilliam pretty much blew a gasket when the US distributor Universal Studios acted in the interest of being accessible entertainment.  Now, I don’t think the “Love Conquers All!” ending is some crime against humanity.  I just wonder how the ending for our protagonist Sam Lowry, is considered bad or unsafe.  

2.) Dr. Strangelove- “We’ll Meet Again Some Sunny Day”

-The ending in its time period was pretty irreverent.  It still is in 2011.  Incredible montage of stock footage of nuclear bomb to a cheery, optimistic WWII song shows the irony.  Man are ultimately the Doomsday Machines and their great creation can destroy everything. 

1.) Oldboy- Is he a monster or man?

The ambiguity of the final shots of Oldboy is still a matter of debate.  I have addressed the universal monsters aspect to the character of Oh Dae-su.  Is he inherently evil or was his evilness a creation by a vengeful colleague to do worse things in order to destroy himself (he certainly was no model citizen in the beginning of the film).  The audience itself is left wondering what should we think of Oh Dae-su.  He was the film’s protagonist and we were rooting for him, as we have done with many popular anti-heroes of cinema’s past, the whole way through but are in the final moments left reconsidering who this man is, man or monster.   Oh Dae-Su has either his memory erased for his past sins to get a second life or he cannot escape his own guilt (or evilness) to ever let go his really, dirty secret.  The expressions of a face can be interpreted in so many different ways and Oh Dae-Su’s with Oldboy either shows a guilty conscience or a man overcome with the joy or a man who does not remember anything.  It is too easy to say that you could go either way but the ending’s brilliance is that it pushes the audience to see the film over again to re-access Oh Dae-Su instead of just having to see a film again due to plain ambiguity for the sake of ambiguity (Looking at you, Inception). 

I am doing an assignment for a computer science course that will have posts from this blog linked.  It will be made up of some reviews and lists.  A LOT OF LISTS. 

Don’t be alarmed by the sudden proliferation. 

BATMAN: YEAR ONE

DIRECTED BY SAM LIU AND LAUREN MONTGOMERY

This was the comic series that caused a sea of change in a lot of circles of the Batman universe and among the fandom of Batman.  This made everything go from the Adam West camp to the dark, brooding, Count of Monte Cristo level of vengeful Bruce Wayne turning into the masked vigilante of Batman.   The comic titles and even the animated series took notes from this comic by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli.  It took the feature films far, far longer, however, with Tim Burton in a German expressionist phase and Joel Schumacher stuck on the Adam West series.  No doubt, however, that Christopher Nolan took a lot from the series and by the sounds of it there are even more elements of the comic that are being stretched into The Dark Knight Rises.  Still, I wish Aronofsky had his attempt at doing the real live-action Batman: Year One, though the notoriously aborted version is probably better left unsaid with some pretty absurd bastardizations of canon that would have re-defined nerd rage and made the complaints about Tim Burton’s interpretation seem harmless.   But let’s get to the animated version of this film.  

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, this is a very adult animated film, completely embracing the darker and sketchier realms of the Batman universe that Miller embraced.   Selina Kyle/Catwoman (voiced by Eliza Dusku) is a prostitute who has a maternal/sisterly bond with a younger prostitute Holly Robinson.  Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) just returned from overseas and years of secret training just around the time another hard-edged gentleman also comes to Gotham City, Lt. James Gordon (Bryan Cranston).  Since Gordon is the seasoned cop he gets a lot more storyline and a lot more drama since most of us already know the Batman origins story enough to know anytime Bruce Wayne/Batman is off-screen is for good reason.  Gordon is dealing with marital issues, being singled out and threatened by the crooked police force, and the only person he trusts, his partner Detective Sarah Essen (Katee Sackoff) is in love with him.  This really lets Gordon, a background character in the live-action movies under the Nolanverse happened, get a much deserved fleshed out narrative beyond the comic panels and Cranston is pitch perfect with the voice work.  Can Cranston be Gordon for a Gotham Central adaptation, please? 

As for the guy in the batsuit, I thought McKenzie was a good in the role that was a hybrid of Bale’s gruff voice without sounding too incomprehensible and expressing a really dark edge to the character.  There was no Ryan from The OC to be found and really fellow Batman fans, enough with the Kevin Conroy calls to do all the voice-work.  He is in his fifties and this Batman story calls for a guy in his twenties.   Move on! 

Most of the voice actors were very excellent, though Holly Robinson sounded too Jubilee which for her character was not really what I imagined.   As for the animation it was gorgeous blend of noir and even some anime that was a good tribute to Mazzucchelli although the fight scenes involving Selina Kyle almost was confusing her gender at some points (and this is from a person who would gladly take a Michelle Rodriguez, buff woman over Anne Hathaway as Catwoman any day of the week).  

As for the story itself, Gotham is so corrupt it is hard to draw the line on who is exactly good and who is exactly bad.  Gordon, as mentioned above, has a lot of character faults but that is what makes Gotham really fascinating and continues to be a favorite subject to pick apart in both the comics and movies.  Batman: Year One may have came too late to the screen and its influence alone can make it difficult to watch the film on its own merits but it is a really well-done movie and tribute to the creators and a fine showcase of a character also coming into his own right around the time Bruce Wayne was creating his own suit.