I am become Rooney, complainer of things

Am I just getting old or-ok, fine, yes. Linear time. We're all getting old. But what I'm asking is am I personally just getting, you know, old. Like, in that way that olds are always complaining about how things were different or better in the past.

Has it come to this?

Do the people who buy calendars know
about smartphones and the internet?
If they don't, should we tell them?

First let me clarify that I don't mean old in the sense of biological age. There are plenty of people who are chronologically old but are still able to embrace new movies without winging on about how-yeah, this is about a movie. Specifically The Batman. Yeah, I'm having opinions about a movie that I not only haven't seen yet, but is also like nine months off. Because the internet, that's why. What I'm getting at is have you seen the shots of the Riddler in this movie? An image from a calendar has leaked and--yeah, I know, a year into this pandemic and this is what we're reduced to. Zooming in on leaked images of tie-in merchandise to catch a glimpse of a character from a comic book movie. Remember when humans walked on the moon and cured polio? Welp, here we are.

Yeah, I can't make anything out from that either, but luckily for us there's also been some footage of the movie and this is the Riddler as played by Broadway actor Paul Dano:

He's not so much riddling here as he is wrapping
his murder victim's corpse in duct tape. Fun!

Do not bring back the lycra.

The comparisons being drawn are to the Zodiac Killer or the villain from the Batman comic Hush, and yeah. Gone is Jim Carry's green lycra and the question mark suit Frank Gorshin wore, instead Dano's Riddler is straight up serial killer. And again maybe this is me going through some early onset curmudgeonry, but I wish these movies would lighten up. I'm not saying bring back the lycra, not literally I mean, but maybe bring back the lycra, you know?

Pictured: two guys who maybe
took Batman way too seriously.

I'm just over grimdark comic book movies. It's like every movie pitch must be starting with "what if we did a superhero movie but dark and gritty?" Things like Invincible and The Boys I kind of get. Like, I'm not watching that shit, but I get that they started off with a violent and cynical premise. But Batman is about a billionaire who puts on tights and battles theme crime, he's not Serpico. If every superhero movie is trying to subvert superhero tropes doesn't that subversion at some point become a trope in itself? A tropeception, if you will (but don't).

Sure, this movie is months away and I've only seen like a two-minute clip, so what am I even on about? And I also think a lot of the Marvel movies are kind of dumb, fun, but dumb so please, take my opinions with the requisite amount of salt--that is to say, all of the salt--but there's got to be something between campy CG nonsense and Joaquin Phoenix's incel Joker shooting Robert DiNero in the face, right?

What I'm saying is that they put the Joker on kid's pajamas
and lunchboxes so maybe take it down a notch?