After Christopher Nolan’s fabulous trilogy of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises, I was sure we wouldn’t see The Caped Crusader in a standalone film for a long time. Nolan’s series was pure perfection. Whichever director attempted to bring, arguably, the most storied superhero in comic book history was already behind the eight-ball before a script was even imagined. With its 29% Rotten Tomatoes score, 2016’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice was far from what we all hoped it would be. 2017’s Justice League (39%, 68%) didn’t help much. However, However, Zach Snyder’s 2001 director’s cut, while chalking in at over four hours, faired much better (71%, 94%). Matt Reeves’s (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Cloverfield) The Batman is a darker, more mysterious take and is the perfect movie to bring the iconic superhero back to the big screen in his own story.
Category Archives: John Turturro
Exodus: Gods and Kings
Exodus: Gods and Men was a movie I thought would be great, then terrible, and then okay. It ended up being pretty good. I am a massive fan of Christian Bale (The Dark Knight Rises, Out of the Furnace) and Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator). Bale has had numerous hits over the last decade. I’ve seen 13 of his previous 15 movies, and I’ve been a big fan of all of them. Once as reliable as they come, Scott has had some misses in recent years, most notably The Counselor and Robin Hood. Both of these movies should have been great, and both underwhelmed.
Bale plays the role of Moses. Say what you will about Bale, but he’s not afraid to venture outside the norm. He takes chances. I love him as an actor. In the last 5+ years, only a handful of actors have been better (DiCaprio, Pitt, Gosling, Gordon-Levitt, Michael Fassbender, Bradley Cooper, and Tom Hardy) come to mind. The traditional heavyweights outside DiCaprio and Pitt (Hanks, Will Smith, Washington, Cruise, Day-Lewis, De Niro, etc.) have dropped out of the spotlight. Others (Day-Lewis, Hanks) have fallen into the pattern of doing the same movie repeatedly (Tom Cruise saves the world, Denzel Washington saves a plane, a train, a subway, a boat from catastrophe, etc.). Others have gotten into the habit of just making movie after movie to earn a paycheck without the intent of making a great film (De Niro).