Category Archives: DC Comics movies

Duncan only one case of unconventional superhero movie casting

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In noting Michael Clarke Duncan’s recent passing in this blog, I mentioned the minor furor after the “Green Mile” actor was cast to play the Kingpin in the Ben Affleck “Daredevil” movie.

Duncan worked as Marvel’s kingpin of crime however, and became the latest in a string of offbeat and unorthodox casting for comic book movies.

Some of them worked and others did not. Here are a few examples.

Offbeat casting that worked:

Michael Keaton as Batman. When Tim Burton cast Michael Keaton to play the title role in his 1989 “Batman” adaptation, the furor among fans was crazed. If the Internet had been in every basement at the time, it would have melted down. Keaton was best known for comedic roles like in “Night Shift.” And what about that jaw line? But Keaton was perfect as the grim-faced Dark Knight and the distant Bruce Wayne.

Hmmm. We’re still making up our minds:

Jessica Alba as Sue Storm. Alba is as beautiful an actress as you can find in Hollywood. But she just looked fake as the blonde adventuress, the Invisible Woman.

Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man. I thought director Sam Raimi’s first two “Spider-Man” movies were pretty damn good. But Maguire seemed too old to be a believable Peter Parker. Or maybe I was just reacting to foreshadowing of his emo-laden dancing in the third movie.

Nope. That’s just wrong:

Kate Burton as Lois Lane. “Superman Returns” had a number of problems. Brandon Routh wasn’t one of them, but Burton was. She’s a lovely actress but far too lightweight to be the tough and spunky ace reporter from the Daily Planet. Here’s hoping Amy Adams works better in “Man of Steel.”

Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm/The Thing. How much do we love Michael Chiklis? A lot. But while he was an okay Ben Grimm he just didn’t work in a Thing suit. And he just wasn’t tall enough. When “Fantastic Four” gets rebooted, I think they should go the Hulk route and combine live action and CGI.

Jack Nicholson as the Joker. Sorry, fans. I love Nicholson. But he wasn’t right for the Joker. He was too old, not physical enough and – while he had an admirably goofy vibe – just didn’t have the right psycho demeanor. When I’m watching “Batman” now I like Nicholson’s pre-Joker performance more than his post-Joker performance.

And one wild one: When the producers of the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movie were considering actors to play the Man of Steel, they considered everybody from Robert Redford to Paul Newman (two of the biggest stars of the time). One of the Salkinds suggested casting the most famous man in the world, Muhammad Ali.

Ali wasn’t right for the role, but what an idea!

‘Birds of Prey’ a model for an ‘Avengers’ TV show?

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While the geek universe is speculating about just what a TV series set in the “Avengers” movie universe might look like, I realized that we’ve already seen an example in the “Birds of Prey” series.

Airing on the WB network in 2002, the series was a small-screen take on DC’s “Birds of Prey” comic book series. The show featured Barbara Gordon in her Oracle incarnation (in other words, after the Joker’s brutal attack on Batgirl in “The Killing Joke” that left her paralyzed) leading a small group of crimefighters including Huntress (daughter of Batman and Catwoman in this scenario) and Dinah, the daughter of the original Black Canary.

“Birds of Prey,” which lasted only a handful of episodes, was a fairly standard police procedural dressed up with rooftop chase scenes and “Buffy” style fighting. Ten years on, some elements of the series look cheesy (the dialogue is particularly rough). But the series was overseen by Laeta Kalogridis, who went on to write and produce “Avatar” and “Shutter Island” and had a properly comic-booky feel.

Although only a few episodes aired, all 13 are available on disc.

How can the producers of an “Avengers” TV spin-off learn from “Birds of Prey?”

The “stars” of the story were off-screen. Nobody expects Iron Man or Thor to show up on a weekly TV series. Not while there are big-ticket movies to be made. “Birds of Prey” dealt with the absence of Batman and Catwoman by deciding the former had stopped patrolling the alleys of Gotham (sound familiar, “Dark Knight Rises” fans?) after the death of his beloved (in this case, Catwoman). Bruce Wayne was never more than a silent presence on the other end of a telephone line during conversations with Alfred.

The show was made on a TV budget, not a movie budget. It helped, probably, that no one flew in “Birds of Prey,” although Huntress did a lot of diving off rooftops. Dark Gotham City streets, a couple of oddball metahuman characters and some futuristic weaponry helped achieve a comic-book feel on a budget.

The show didn’t make major changes in its universe. A TV series set in the “Avengers” movie universe isn’t going to make major changes to storylines or characters, that’s for sure. We won’t see Loki killed off or Iron Man retire. “Birds of Prey” had the same restrictions, of course, beyond the initial killing of Catwoman. With Batman out of town, the most dramatic event the series could give viewers was a climactic battle, in the final episode, between Huntress and Harley Quinn, the Joker’s looney moll. But it made for a nice little payoff for the series. What about how they killed off the original Black Canary in the “Birds of Prey?” Well, did you see a body?

The show didn’t betray familiar characters. It’s safe to say that SHIELD isn’t suddenly going to become a terrorist organization, nor will we hear that Black Widow or Hawkeye have gone back to their previous careers. “Birds of Prey” had to dance around major changes to the core Gotham City characters. One episode featured the return of a Batman protege and apparently the character was originally going to have been Robin/Nightwing. But because the guy goes astray, so a change of secret identities was called for.

Although it didn’t make much of an impression on TV audiences or the DC comics universe in general, “Birds of Prey” did show it was possible to mount a weekly TV series in a thickly populated comics universe without interfering with a big-screen movie franchise.

 

‘Dark Knight Rises’ review and spoilers

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I didn’t expect to like “The Dark Knight Rises” as much as I did.

The conclusion to director Christopher Nolan’s Batman saga – and make no mistake, this is a conclusion, as well as a new beginning – has sounded a little frustrating from the word go. Nolan’s well-known aversion to the more comic-bookish aspects of the Batman legend has irritated me a bit. Sometimes his decision to play it realistic worked quite well (Heath Ledger’s Joker). Sometimes it just seemed like a case of an embarrassed auteur ashamed to be playing around with comic books.

“Batman Begins” worked in Nolan’s realistic world, particularly as it established the mechanics of how a driven billionaire would become a street-fighting vigilante. “The Dark Knight” elaborated on that premise and at times seemed more like a gritty heist and robbery cop movie than a superhero movie. But it worked.

“The Dark Knight Rises,” as everyone knows by now, opens eight years after Batman has been framed for the murder of District Attorney Harvey Dent. As we saw at the end of “The Dark Knight,” Batman and Commissioner Jim Gordon agreed that to martyr Dent, who had slipped into madness and become Two Face, and make Batman a criminal was the best way to bring peace to Gotham City.

In the new movie, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a recluse with bad knees, coming out of the rebuilt Wayne Manor only when Bane (Tom Hardy) attacks the Gotham Stock Exchange and Selina Kyle, a cat burglar with a great shtick, gets mixed up in the action.

At about two hours and 45 minutes, “The Dark Knight Rises” is long but doesn’t feel like it. The movie has some pretty nifty action scenes and some that are uncomfortably similar to the real-life tragedy that took place in Aurora, Colorado, a couple of nights ago. Scenes of Bane’s bad guys walking into crowded rooms and opening fire might make you squirm.

“The Dark Knight Rises” is intense and brutal and definitely not for kids.

So what worked and what didn’t work about the movie?

Spoilers ahead. Seriously.

What worked:

The character relationships. Alfred and Bruce. Batman and Jim Gordon. Even Batman/Bruce’s banter with Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle – and her roguish, you’re-never-quite-sure-of her-allegiance stance, which could have been corny but wasn’t – felt just right. So did her badass, “I can do this” attitude.

Batman’s words of wisdom: During the movie, Nolan foreshadows the change that’s coming by showcasing Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s earnest police officer John Blake. I mean, he’s an orphan, for goodness sake. And at one point he discards a gun after killing a man. (He does arm himself later, however.) But of all the telling instances pointing to John Blake’s ultimate destiny, the most interesting is a scene in which Batman tells Blake that he wears a mask not to protect himself but to protect those that he cares about.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Oh man, how Nolan kept all of us guessing for months about the role that Gordon-Levitt was playing. Would be be a bad guy? Would he be Robin? Nightwing? Azrael? By the end of the movie, it was obvious Nolan intended for Blake to carry on in Bruce Wayne’s boots. The clincher? Blake’s real name was Robin. And how about the ending in which Blake, working from directions given him by Batman, finds the Batcave and steps on a platform which rises under him? Future Dark Knight Rising, anyone?

Returning characters: Jonathan Crane, AKA Scarecrow, and most importantly Liam Neeson as Ra’s al Ghul, made this feel like a circle-completing movie. I totally understand why Nolan didn’t want to bring the late Heath Ledger back as the Joker even though I’m sure there were many ways he could have done so. Still, seeing Crane and Ra’s al Ghul made me want something … just a little something … to acknowledge the Joker.

The ending. It was obvious that Nolan intended to take his Christian Bale Bruce Wayne/Batman off the chess board before Warner Bros. could sully the character with any Justice League or Batman vs. Superman movies. I didn’t seriously think Nolan would kill Bruce Wayne off, but he did something just as dramatic: He retired him. And, for the most part, it felt right. And it made me glad that they did it in a way that ushered in a new Batman.

What didn’t work:

Batman’s eight-year absence. So after lifelong friend Rachel dies at the hands of the Joker in “The Dark Knight,” Bruce – motivated not only by grief but the idea that the law-abiding people of Gotham no longer need him – decides to become a recluse and STOP FIGHTING CRIME? No. No way in the world. The implausibility might have been lessened, to some extent, if we had seen a montage of scenes of Batman up on a fire escape, ready to swoop in if a mugger approached a family in one of Gotham’s most notorious alleys, only to realize he was no longer needed.

And doesn’t Batman’s hiatus contradict one of the premises of this movie? For eight years Gotham has been a peaceful place. So Bane traps most of Gotham PD underground (and don’t even get me started on how stupid it was to send all the cops – all of them – into the sewers) and the peaceful people of Gotham City decide to riot?

Bane. It’s a sign of how strong the rest of “The Dark Knight Rises” is that the movie works despite the fact that Bane is the weakest villain of the three movies. Even the Scarecrow was a better character. Sure, Bane is a tough guy and a good fighter. But Ledger’s Joker gleefully killed guys like that in “The Dark Knight.” And having Liam Neeson return as Ra’s al Ghul, even in a dream sequence and in the person of a good younger double, just emphasized how much more interesting his character was compared to Bane.

Tom Hardy. Sorry, Tom. How many ways did you detract from this movie? Maybe it was the truly bizarre mask. Or the fact that you’re just not big enough to be Bane. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the bizarre accent that too often sounded like, as some Internet wit pointed out, Darrell Hammond’s hilarious impersonation of Sean Connery on those old “Saturday Night Live” takeoffs on “Jeopardy.”

“The Dark Knight Rises” was a good finale to Nolan’s Batman tale. He did a good job and made the character memorable. Now I’m ready for some Marvel Comics-style universe building for the DC comics movie universe.

New ‘Man of Steel’ trailer: Huh?

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My first reaction when I saw this weekend’s “Man of Steel” trailer for Zack Snyder’s revisiting of the Superman franchise was that it didn’t look like a trailer for a “Superman” film.

What is this, Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan’s big-screen version of “The Deadliest Catch?”

If you haven’t seen the trailer, the preview is filled with shots of foggy landscapes, a kid running around in the yard outside his house and a bearded guy hitchhiking and working on a fishing boat. (The bearded guy, of course, is Henry Cavill, the star.)

Only at the end, after the “Man of Steel” title, do we get a “Chronicle”-like glimpse of Superman streaking through the sky, breaking the sound barrier.

The trailer raises a lot of questions, most of them about the choices Warner Bros., Nolan and Snyder have made about the movie and how they’re going to market it.

Why, why, why another retelling of the story from the beginning? Are filmmakers unable to resist the mythology of the death of Krypton and Clark’s Smallville years? Haven’t we seen this already, more than enough times?

Are they playing the “Amazing Spider-Man” game? The makers of that recent movie tried hard to convince us there was an untold story to Peter Parker’s parents and his origin. There really wasn’t one. Is the point of this movie (and trailer) to create the impression that the few early scenes in which Clark struggles with the decision about what to do with his powers are as important as what he does later? Isn’t that a dangerous game considering we all KNOW what he does later? Wouldn’t that be like devoting half of a movie to Sherlock Holmes’ dithering about whether to become a detective or a blacksmith?

Who is Clark imitating? When Clark is running around his yard using a red towel for a cape, who is he imitating? Really? In Nolan’s one-superhero world, why would young Clark possibly be wearing a cape before he becomes Superman? And are we supposed to believe that the down-home Kansas Kents would have red bath towels?

Wait, Superman can fly? Really, the build-up in the trailer is to a shot of Superman flying? Is that considered the most impact-full image of Superman they can present? Or a feeble attempt to reassure us that, yes, all that pretty but meandering footage we’ve already shown you is from a Superman movie.

I’ll go see this next May, despite this seriously bungled early marketing attempt and my misgivings, previously noted, about the “edgy” tack they’re apparently taking.

But so far I don’t have a good feeling about “Man of Steel.”

‘Dark Knight Rises’ spoilers? We’ll know soon

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I haven’t yet seen “The Dark Knight Rises” and I won’t even see it when it opens Friday because of a prior commitment. So almost everyone reading this will know before I do if there’s any truth to the spoilers circulating in the last couple of days.

In other words, keep in mind I have no idea if these spoilers are true. But based on what I’m reading, at least some of them are pretty accurate.

Oh yeah – SPOILERS!

The movie’s ending indicates more adventures of the Dark Knight are going to happen. We already know Warner Bros. wants to reboot the character after Christopher Nolan finishes his trilogy. The studio would love to build to a billion-dollar Justice League movie.

So after months of speculation that Joseph Gordon-Levitt would inherit the Batmantle in this movie … early indications sure make it sound like that happens, at least in some respects. Some reviews have outright said the ending sets up an “offshoot” movie, which certainly makes it sound like a continuation that isn’t another movie about Bruce Wayne.

A villain returns … but not the one you might think. Although the Joker survived “The Dark Knight,” Heath Ledger’s untimely death made it impossible for him to make even a small appearance in the movie. Rumors persisted that Nolan would include Ledger nonetheless, perhaps through unused footage or CGI.

Nolan is saying this week that Ledger is not in the new movie in any form. But early indications are that Cillian Murphy returns as the Scarecrow for at least one scene.

Batman bites the dust? Considering that in the comics Bane breaks Batman’s back and puts him out of commission for a while, everybody expected something dire to happen in this movie.

But I’m thinking David Letterman was kidding when, in a recent interview with Anne Hathaway (Selina Kyle in the movie), he says that Batman gets killed. Anyone who watches Letterman – who, during his days as a weatherman in Indianapolis forecast “hail the size of canned hams” – knows that’s typical of his humor.

I do believe that “The Dark Knight Rises” brings Bruce Wayne’s story to an end. I just don’t think the movie kills him off.

We’ll see this Friday. Well, at least some of us will.

 

 

New Comic Con images: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ ‘Man of Steel’

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The news was coming out of San Diego Comic Con faster than a speeding bullet tonight.

The Warner Bros. panel, according to online reports, included footage of Zack Snyder’s “Man of Steel,” the latest Warners/DC reboot of Superman.

The company also released a new teaser poster showing Henry Cavill as Supes:

The Marvel Films panel had some interesting news, including some titles: “Thor: The Dark World” for November 2013; “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” for April 2014 and “Guardians of the Galaxy” for August 2014.

Those follow the previously announced “Iron Man 3” for May 2013.

The “Winter Soldier” portion of the next Cap title would lead fans to expect that Bucky, Cap’s sidekick who “died” in the first movie, will be back. That’s because in the comics, after an absence of several decades, Bucky returned as the Winter Soldier, an assassin trained and maintained in youthful form by the Soviets.

“Guardians of the Galaxy” is an even more interesting turn of events that has, so far this evening, split fan opinion online.

The movie has been predicted for a few weeks now since Thanos, Marvel’s cosmic villain, showed up at the end of “The Avengers.” The Guardians, who have been around in one form or another since the 1960s, are longtime enemies of Thanos.

As another superhero team for Marvel movie-making besides the Avengers, they make as much sense as anything and are a more likely group in some ways than the Inhumans (fan fave characters who might have too many ties to the Fantastic Four for Marvel’s film arm to have the rights to) or the Defenders (which has included, over the years, such off-limits characters as the Silver Surfer and already-familiar ones like the Hulk).

Yet “Guardians” feels like a risk because it is cosmic in scope – a concept that was tested in “The Avengers” but still feels pretty disconnected from the “reality” established in Marvel’s movies so far – and because the characters are an unusual bunch, including Rocket Raccoon.

It’ll be interesting to see who Marvel chooses to helm “Guardians” and what direction the movie takes.

 

You shoulda been a superhero: Some inspired ‘Batman’ casting choices

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It’s a guessing game – a match game of sorts – that comic book fans have been playing for decades. Who should play their favorite superheroes and villains in a movie?

With Marvel Comics movies, the casting game is going on, officially and unofficially, in Hollywood and in Everytown, all the time these days. With a couple of Marvel movies in the works, including “Iron Man 3” and “The Wolverine,” and a couple more in the offing – “Guardians of the Galaxy,” maybe? – somebody’s being cast as a Marvel character every few days.

With “The Dark Knight Rises” coming out soon and Warners and DC Comics planning a reboot for the Batman character, I got to thinking about ideal or almost-happened casting for Batman movies in the past. Only one of these falls into that “almost happened” category, though. The rest are just random thoughts that popped into my head over the past couple of decades.

Michael J. Fox as Robin. Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. Remember the controversy when Michael Keaton was cast as Batman” in Tim Burton’s 1989 movie? Keaton was primarily a comic actor with a receding hairline and not enough chin. But he did a great job.

I know from reading an early draft of the script – more about that another day – that Robin was originally meant to be a character in the movie. So, given the late-1980s period, why not cast 80s star Michael J. Fox as Dick Grayson/Robin? Fox had the right stature, both physically and Hollywood-wise, for the part. He’s quite capable of pulling off a dramatic scene and he might have brought a Burt Ward-style energy to the movie.

Marlon Wayans as Robin. Early in the history of the Tim Burton “Batman” movies, there was talk of a street-wise, “urban” actor being cast as Dick Grayson. There’s a Dick Grayson character in that early script and Wayans, who was 17 when Burton’s movie was released, was set to play the part. Wayans even said in 2009 that he got paid for the role but Burton didn’t include the character. As we all know, Dick Grayson didn’t show up until the third “Batman” movie and by that point was played by future “NCIS” TV star Chris O’Donnell. I wish we’d gotten the chance to see Wayans in the role.

Ray Liotta as the Joker. Liotta is familiar to most of us from “Goodfellas” and other films, but take a look at him above from the 1986 Jonathan Demme movie “Something Wild.” Jeff Daniels plays a mild-mannered guy who falls in with a wild woman played by Melanie Griffith. It’s all fun and games until the woman’s homicidal ex-boyfriend shows up, played by guess who? I remember sitting in the theater in 1986 seeing Liotta’s crazy and scary expressions and thinking, “Damn, this guy would make a good Joker.” He sure would have been more physically intimidating than Jack Nicholson.

Willem DaFoe as the Joker. I liked DaFoe as Norman Osborn in Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man” movie. I wasn’t crazy about the Goblin outfit, but that’s another story. Anyway. Osborn wasn’t DaFoe’s first opportunity to play a bad guy. Here’s how he looked in Walter Hill’s 1984 action musical “Streets of Fire” as the murderous leader of a biker gang. Look at that face and tell me he wouldn’t be ideal as the Joker.

Armie Hammer as Batman. Or Superman. Everyone knows that DC and Warner Bros. are struggling to get their superhero film franchises off the ground – other than the very standoffish “Dark Knight” movies. They’re planning to reboot the Batman character almost immediately and want to jump-start a “Justice League” movie. (Of course, they’re only about $1.5 billion behind the box office take for “The Avengers.”)

But as fans know, Warners almost got a “Justice League” movie off the ground in 2008. A script was completed, casting had begun and apparently some costume tests were done. I’d like to pause right now to wonder how it’s possible that none of those costume photos have ever been leaked to the web. Anyway. Armie Hammer, later known for “The Social Network,” was cast at Batman before the movie got derailed. Hammer, who’s like seven feet tall, would have worked very well as a young Bruce Wayne. Or a young Clark Kent, for that matter. With Henry Cavill coming next year in “Man of Steel,” it’ll be interesting to see if he figures into future “Justice League” movie plans, if Hollywood will circle back to Hammer or find some virtual unknown for the role. That tactic worked very well with Christopher Reeve.

‘Metal Men’ movie in the works?

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Here’s one for the true geeks: How’d you like to see a “Metal Men” movie?

If you don’t remember the Metal Men, they were among the out-the-ordinary heroes of DC Comics in the Silver Age. In the 1960s, besides stalwarts like Superman and Batman, DC featured offbeat comics about oddball characters like the Doom Patrol and the Metal Men.

What was so odd about the Metal Men?

They were robots, named after elements like Gold, Iron, Mercury and Platinum, and had been created by a DC comics scientist, Will Magnus (from the Magnus: Robot Fighter comics).

Each of the Metal Men had not only the physical characteristics of their namesake metal but also, in weird ways, emotional characteristics. So Iron was not only heavy and durable but a pugnacious tough guy. Tin was skinny and pliable. Gold was sturdy and flexible.

Platinum was the only “female” member of the group. Not only was she called “Tina” but she had a crush on Magnus.

The comics helped some of us prepare for future chemistry lessons. Maybe more than our textbooks did.

News broke today on the Interwebs that “Men in Black” director Barry Sonnenfeld, who previously been rumored to be planning a 1960s-era DC Comics movie, was working on a “Metal Men” flick.

Considering that DC and Warner Bros have been struggling to get a “Superman” movie off the ground and hope to succeed with next year’s “Man of Steel,” and remembering the debacle that last year’s “Green Lantern” turned out to be, “Metal Men” might seem to be an odd choice. The characters aren’t first- or second-tier heroes. Maybe not even third tier.

But Sonnenfeld, if the rumors are true, must be pursuing the movie as something of a labor of love. So who knows? “Metal Men” might beat the Justice League onto the big screen and it might be far and away better than some of DC’s misfires.