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mygif

I don’t have any comment on this excellent analysis, other than to say that I love your writing and wish there was more of it. Is there anyplace other than this blog that you are publishing?

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mygif

There’s a pretty extensive archive of his movie writing, restaurant reviews, and political analysis at Torontoist:

https://torontoist.com/tag/christopher-bird/

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mygif
Cybishop said on July 31st, 2020 at 2:07 pm

Holy shit, MGK came back! Welcome back! It seems like the whole worldwide (but increasingly America-centric, but anyways) disaster has had lots of weird effects on the blogosphere, at least the corners of it I frequent/ed.

I’m not going to reread these old, exhaustive arguments, but if I remember correctly, Chris Sims’ position was that Batman Begins and Batman and Robin were better than (1989) and Returns for two main reasons.

1. They weren’t apologizing for or embarrassed about being superhero movies. The Burton movies spend lots of time out of costume and try very hard to be serious. Whereas in Batman and Robin, for example, there’s an early line where Commissioner Gordon actually refers to Mr. Freeze as a “villain”. Using comic book lingo and happy to do it.

2. They were more faithful to the source material. Not in every detail, but in a lot of important ones. In Burton’s movies, Batman’s and the Joker’s origins were linked, Catwoman wasn’t an elegant cat burglar and had a quasi-mystical connection to cats, and arguably most important of all, Batman murdered a whole bunch of people. The Nolan movies and Returns made a big deal about Batman not killing anyone.

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