Before Batman Began Again...

JA from MNPP here. This is making the rounds today, but perhaps you've missed it - from the new boxed-set of Batman blurays out this weeks comes the above audition tape from our most recent rubber-suited shadow dweller, Christian Bale himself! This was for 2005's Batman Begins of course, which began the whole Nolan era of Gotham and its gruff-voiced hero. Right off the bat (har) you'll see that Bale had that smoker's voice in mind for the character beneath the scowl - personally I was cool with it in Begins, but grew steadily sick of the affectation as the films wore on. (Although the same could pretty much be said of my take on the triology, give or take some Ledger.) But who's reading that opposite him? Might that be Lois Lane herself, one Amy Adams? To think what might have been with her in place of Katie Holmes...

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[Volvagia]

And the truth is that the "Nolan era" ISN'T REALLY OVER. Warner Bros has seemingly hitched their cart in this genre to Nolan and Berlanti, even though Nolan's level of love for the genre is spotty (Ra's without the Lazarus Pit?) and Berlant's crew was a big part of Green Lantern. Look, I get why Galactus was a dust cloud in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. The visual of Galactus (giant purple guy in a dumb helmet) would just not be threatening in a live-action context and no director (let alone Tim Story) could have ever made it threatening in that context. Parallax, on the other hand? A giant yellow bug skittering through buildings in the backgrounds of scenes, trying to get closer to Hal Jordan to possess him, getting closer and closer completely unnoticed, eventually succeeding at the end after the rest of the movie put him through an absolute ringer, physically and mentally. Sounds horrifying, doesn't it? Shame they made him a relatively less threatening dust cloud then, sucking out all potential creeping menace of the concept.