FunBlog

How many people remember when Batman was a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek TV show about a somewhat pompous “Caped Crusader” who battled absurd over-the-top villains? That era seems pretty distant now.

The Dark Knight is the latest and darkest in a series of movies in which Batman is a grim, somewhat alienated hero, struggling furiously against a dark world dominated by corruption, inhumanity and madness.

(I don’t mean to suggest that the lighthearted Batman was the “real” Batman who has been lost. The Batman story always had dark elements. Batman, after all, is the guardian of Gotham City, and “Gotham” was the name of the English town that was famous in the late Middle Ages for being inhabited solely by lunatics.)

In any case this movie manages to be grimmer than any of its predecessors, and is definitely not for kids.
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It’s no secret that movies based on old TV shows generally stink. In many cases that may be because the original source material wasn’t very good. In the case of this movie I don’t think that’s the case. For those too young to remember: Get Smart was a 1960s spy spoof created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, probably the two funniest comedy writers of the era.

The movie doesn’t try to follow the original too closely. This is a Get Smart with high production values and cool special effects, with a Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) who is intellegent, nerdy, neurotic and clumsy, an Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) who is cool and snarky, a hot-tempered Chief (Alan Arkin), a Siegfried (Terence Stamp) who is a creepy psychopath who is not at all funny, and a Larabee (David Koechner) who is not stupid but a total jerk.
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I initially had mixed feelings about this show, but it’s definitely interesting, if a bit unsettling. I find that it grows on me as I rewatch it.

The show has some offputting elements. It has a grim vision in which the bright, safe world of everyday life is a thin veneer over a dark reality of lawless violence. Also the hero can be annoyingly stupid.

Good points: Firstly, Murasaki, a bossy 7-year-old girl who is an absolutely wonderful character. I think it’s worth watching the show just to see her. Murasaki is played by 11-year-old Aoi Yuuki, and it should be interesting to watch her future career. This show actually has several great characters, but Murasaki outshines all the others.
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Maybe being a superhero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You find a whale stranded on the beach. You pick it up and toss it back into the ocean. Then you get a bill for the yacht it landed on.

Nevertheless the hero of Hancock seems to handle it worse than most. At the beginning of the movie John Hancock (Will Smith) is a drunken bum living in a shabby trailer. He has a bad habit of flying low over the streets of Los Angeles while swigging from a whiskey bottle, colliding with birds, traffic signs and the occasional building. Indeed, the opening scenes provide graphic illustrations of why you shouldn’t use superpowers while under the influence of alcohol.
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Three announcements in quick succession:

1) ADV Films is in deep financial trouble and has once again lost the rights to several of their current anime series (including, frustratingly, Kanon just days before they were scheduled to release the final DVD.)

2) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to all the series orphaned by Geneon when it abandoned the North American market last fall. I predicted something like this, but this seems to have worked out even better than I expected. They plan to finish the incomplete series like When They Cry, the second season of Rozen Maiden, and The Story of Saiunkoku.

3) FUNimation Entertainment has acquired the rights to the series lost by ADV.
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