| Peter David.net

…he asks for a change of venue and gets his trial moved to Los Angeles.

Seriously, I don’t know how to feel about the Michael Jackson verdict. Part of me wants to think, “I’m so glad it turns out he’s not guilty; maybe there really isn’t anything to these charges. Which would be nice because it means he’s not a pedophile and children weren’t being traumatized.” And on the other hand I think about the impressive percentage of celebrities walking away from crimes in California and wonder if–despite the jury’s claims to the contrary–the cult of celebrity really does render them invulnerable. After all, Nicole Simpson reportedly told friends that she was convinced her husband would kill her and get away with it.

I swear, if Phil Spector gets away with having shot Lana Clarkson…I mean, unlike all the other participants in all the other cases, her I actually met and talked with…the day she died, in fact. It’s not like we became fast buds or anything, but for the brief time I met her, she was very sweet and seemed so full of life, and that guy claims she went to his house and killed herself out of the blue? It’s an outrage. So let’s see what happens with that.

PAD

Sturgeon’s Law is that 90 percent of everything is crap. So the obvious corollary to that is that 10 percent of everything is gold.

Since no less an authority than Isaac Asimov stated (to me, in fact) that Sturgeon’s Law is immutable, then we can assume that 90 percent of everything done with Batman in the past seven decades is crap, and 10 percent is gold.

So what would happen if someone went through and cherry picked all the stuff from that ten percent?

Well, you’d have “Batman Begins,” a slightly overlong (they could’ve trimmed ten minutes), occasionally bewilderingly filmed (the fight sequences seemed to have been edited by putting the film into a blender, leaving the top off the blender, and starting it up) but ultimately satisfying and superior film that kickstarts a franchise that had sunk under camp and an abundance of superstar supervillains.

Continue Reading “Batman Begins” →