Even MORE on "Batman Begins!"

Conversations I had with a moron and a pretty sharp guy, from pinoyexchange (leave it to you to guess who is who):

Keaton--well, I talked about what I thought of him compared to Bale in my article upthread. In a nutshell, my favorite, because he delivered the most surprises.

jdlc: Well the curly haired Bruce Wayne will always hold a special place in your heart . The biggest surprise that Keaton gave me was that he was able to pull off the Batman role despite earlier criticisms by the comic fans when he was cast. But after seeing Bale in the role, I'd say he is THE Batman.

Prefer Keatons' Batman--he wasn't an obvious choice, and he didn't use an electronically amplified voice (I hear Tom Cruise does ). In fact, I don't remember him raising his voice at all when he was in costume...

And his Wayne was interesting--he played him as a man constantly in need of sleep, as if he kept long hours at night. Or as if he was the kind of man who had problems getting enough sleep at night (only innocent men have no troubled dreams).

I wrote that maybe the best relationship between filmmaker and fan is an antagonistic one.

Burton was true to his vision--truer in Batman Returns.  

kireigonjin: I didn't like it because Batman's voice was irritating and distracting. So electronically amplified pala kaya ganon...Anyway, I am willing to watch it again. Maybe without my noisy nephews, I can appreciate it more. But first, I have to condition my mind about that electronically amplified voice And snap out of the thought that Batman is not the reincarnation of Darth Vader who decided to get re-trained by Quai Gon Jin  

One gimmick too many? Dustin Hoffman, a proponent of Method Acting, was on the set of Marathon Man . He stayed awake for days, screaming his head off, to achieve the hoarse, exhausted look of someone being hunted by Nazis. Laurence Olivier, his co-star and the film's villain, said "you should try acting, my dear."  

kireigonjin: Ha ha. Somehow, Hoffman's voice in Marathon Man worked for me. But Bale's Batman voice sounded like he was trying too hard to sound tough and scary. The voice defeated his purpose  

jdlc: Not necessarily. He used that "sore throat" voice effectively when he interrogated Flass. Yup it's over-the-top/theatrical but it served its purpose at least for that scene. He does need a bit of work on this one but an almost irrelevant reason for me not to like the movie.

kireigonjin: But Bale's Batman voice sounded like he was trying too hard to sound tough and scary.

Bingo.

Mind you, and I've said this before, I loved Bale's Bruce Wayne. When he threw all the guests out of the party, he reminded me of Patrick Bateman. And he did it so assuredly that you wonder if he was completely acting--if, at some level, he wasn't expressing his utter contempt for Wayne and the society he represented.

But with the cowl on, he was definitely trying.

Art critic and poet Jolicco Cuadra once said to me: "So quiet! Real killers are like that. The loud man walking down the street, I don't notice. I'm afraid of the quiet man."