Yet another prequel

I'll be the first to admit that the premise behind Batman Begins is not original. It's dark, it's psychological, it's how does the badass in the black suit become the badass in the black suit. (sound familiar?) If only Episode III had been directec by Chris Nolan... (and I really liked Episode III). BB, however, was both neater and more complete. It did a better job of explaining how Gotham City and Batman came to be, including offering explanations for things I had never bothered to wonder about, such as "why does Gotham have so many dellusionally psychotic criminals?" I had always chocked that one up to "we are writing a comic book and need visually interesting bad guys," but BB succeeds in presenting the audience with a reasonably plausible scenario for the creation of said visually interesting bad guys.

Moreover, this is one of the few films I've ever seen with equally hot eye candy on both sides of the moral devide. Liam Neeson finally gets to be the badass zen motherfucker he was cast to play in Episode I (but Qui Gon's character was so badly written that Neeson just walked through the movie and read a few lines and went home (and took way to fucking long to die)), and Christian Bale, while not handsome, has an intesity that is rather compelling. Plus he has very nice shoulders.

So Batman Begins: it's dark, it's creepy, it has an abundance of hot man eye candy, and it has Michael Kane, which quite frankly is really all you need anyway.

Did I mention something earlier about deep, thought-provoking blogs? Whatever...