Brain Dead and Loving it!

    I remember in 1989 thinking just how dark and gritty Tim Burton's vision of Batman was. And ever since, except for Joel Schumacher's failed attempts at recapturing the goofiness of Adam West's 1966 version of the Dark Knight in BATMAN FOREVER (1995) and BATMAN & ROBIN (1997), every new cinematic versions of the character have gotten darker and grittier. Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN is only a confirmation of that trend, where even Bruce Wayne doesn't provide with some respite for Batman's sullenness. Robert Pattinson's definitely emo version of Wayne, lock of hair falling over his gaunt, humorless face, dark mascara spread around his eyes, conveys the lingering pain still troubling the world's most famous cartoon orphan (after Annie , of course.) There is no room for levity in this Gotham that rivals in griminess the diseased city portrayed in Todd Philips' JOKER (2019) . In that way, THE BATMAN is probably the most « realistic » movie ab...

''The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.'' I'm sure this quote by Alfred Hitchcock must have floated in the heads of the producing team behind Todd Phillips' JOKER, as they were bringing Batman's infamous nemesis to the screen in his first solo feature. And he certainly has a rich history as a character to warrant such a project. The Joker was created in 1940, as the main villain in BATMAN #1. Ghost artist Jerry Robinson (at the time, it was common for an artist like Bob Kane, the ''creator'' of Batman, to hire other artists and writers to do the work while he would grab all the credits) developed an idea for an opponent to the Dark Knight, and presented ghost writer and Batman co-creator Bill Finger with a sketch. The original sketch Jerry Robinson made of the Joker, inspired by the playing cards that would always lie around the studio. Jerry Robinson recalls: "In that first meeting when I...

When Disney Studios made Dumbo in 1940, they seriously needed a hit. They had invested heavily in a new studio in Burbank, and World War II was hurting their business. Not counting the fact that both PINOCCHIO (1940) and FANTASIA (1940) had cost the studio over 2 million dollars (a major sum at the time)  due to Walt's quest for excellence, which resulted in rather low profit margins (for the original releases, at least). Based on an unpublished children’s book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, Dumbo seemed an easier production to tackle. Closer to the feeling of the old Silly Symphonies, and even meant as a short originally, the animation, while sumptuous, never was as elaborate as with previous feature length Disney productions. Yet the story of the young elephant with freakishly large ears that would find its place in the world after facing the mockery of both its peers and humans by demonstrating its unique ability to fly would reach out to the public in need of soarin...

  The very first scene of JUSTICE LEAGUE pretty much sums up the film in a way. Superman had just finished a rescue mission, and kids are doing an interview with him for their blog. The point of view is from a shaky phone camera. The kids giddily ask the polite hero what's his favourite thing about Earth.  He turns his head and thinks for a few seconds. He frowns. The answer should be easy, but it's not. He then smiles and turns back to the camera. He starts to speak and his words are cut short as the scene brutally ends. It's probably my favourite scene of the film, showing a certain sense of poignancy in Henry Cavill's acting, and in the symbolic way the scene is cut short, the same way his life was in the unjustly maligned BATMAN V SUPERMAN . It has a charming sense of ''reality'' that has been lacking in a lot of the DC Films and translate well the inherent goodness of the Man of Steel as well as the admiration children may have ...

 The year is 1992. With a few friends, I leave Montreal in the early hours of the morning to take the plane that will bring us to San Diego, California. The goal of the journey is to partake in the Grand Mass of Geekdom that is Comic-Con. From humble beginnings in 1970 with an attendance of roughly 300 visitors, the Convention had grown into a multi media behemoth by 1992, being crowded by over 22,000 proud nerds, either on a quest for that rare comic book, or hoping to rub elbows with revered artists and has been actors. By this point, Comic-Con had started attracting the attention of Studios, who had rightfully noticed that an event attracting tens of thousands of voracious popular culture fanatics could be a good platform to promote their future nerd-friendly productions. Thus it came to be that after getting an autograph from Bruce Campbell, I sat in a large amphitheatre where Francis Ford Coppola was presenting exclusive scenes from his upcoming DRACULA. I had be...