Left to my own devices

"I'm of a mind to make some mooky. Phonebook."                                                          -- The Joker Tim Burton's Batman opened at the North American box office 32 years ago today. It remains one of the most viviv movie-going experiences I've ever had, or will have. Paradoxically, that day, now over three decades ago, seems like ancient history and also as if it had happened. yesterday. In those seemingly halcyon days of the late nineteen-eighties, superhero movies were not as commonplace as they are today. Getting something like the 1989 Batman movie was a real treat. It arrived at a time when I was an avid comic book reader. Marvel was my brand of choice, with Thor, Captain America, Spider-Man, and The Avengers as my monthly stalwarts. Batman is a DC comic, yet I was still very much stoked for this modernized version of h...

T he latest installment of the MARVEL superhero movie universe opened last week, and I saw it on opening night. Avengers: Age of Ultron hit all the perfunctory notes that a modern comics-to-screen film should, though I left the theater without feeling thrilled. That's ok. I'm not really the target audience for the genre anymore. As a teenager, I collected comic books for a few years, almost exclusively Marvel.   Among my favorite were: The Avengers, Captain America, Spider-Man and Thor . After awhile, I stopped collecting, mostly because it became obvious the story lines would never end. It's one reason why I'm not a fan of soap operas. In spite of having abandoned serious comic collecting in the early '90s, I still enjoy a good superhero film. There have been many and, at last count, I'd seen 29 movies of the genre (though how to categorize them is up for debate. I do not, for example, consider V for Vendetta to be a superhero movie. Great film? ...