Since there is no news on Sundays to speak of, I'm going to start a feature I employed on my last blog, Short Film Sundays. If you're curious, you can check out my old blog on Weebly and scroll through the days to find the first two entries of my featured short films, being the Quay Brothers' creepy Street of Crocodiles and Francesco Vezzoli's star-studded sexually charged Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula. My latest and inaugural Blogger entry will be a slight departure from these art pieces, and is instead a fan film of Bob Kane's beloved comic figure, the Caped Crusader, Batman. Directed by French first-timers Julien Mokrani and Samuel Bodin, Ashes to Ashes is by far the darkest, most grisly, disturbed version of the DC vigilante we have ever seen. I have always been a fan of the grittier versions of the character, including takes by Frank Miller, Kevin Smith and Alan Moore among others, not to mention the immensely popular film The Dark Knight. However, if the most unsettling thoughts from what all the aforementioned comic writers have brought to the character, and the darkly psychotic feel Christopher Nolan's film brought us, added with a pinch of the trippy sexuality that I've always imagined to had been included in Andy Warhol's lost fan film Batman Dracula, throw up a high quality Sin City-esque background and just a dab of Eli Roth's nightmares, and the proverbial demented iceberg of this darkly twisted short might be tipped.
Is it good? Ah, a question that I have pondered since I first saw it a few days ago. The colors and backgrounds are so rich, it is hard to follow the subtitles, and easy to lose yourself in the storyline, especially seeing that the main character is a petty criminal named Eddy, and not a Gotham regular. However, after a second viewing, once you let the text register, the storyline is actually quite good. I love the looks of The Penguin and Harley Quinn, and in a pre-Heath Ledger as Joker world, unknown Matthieu Lemeunier would have been the closest to the savage Joker we've come to love in comics such as The Killing Joke. Yet, it also goes too far. Is that hard to digest coming from a blogger that praises John Waters as a true visionary and an all-time great? Well, it could never make a main audience, and some of the filth seems to be there strictly for the purpose of being filthy. One the same token, Batman being pushed too far and breaking, and striking the extremely evil cord with The Joker could be done if a proper balance was found, and is by far the greatest fan film I have ever seen. And if for nothing else, let's hope that Nolan (Please God, I understand why he wouldn't, but don't allow us to suffer another Joel Schumacher takeover), or whomever Warner Brothers hires in his place will see this and consider a big screen version of Harley Quinn. Enjoy, and form your thoughts on this very interesting short, and visit the official site, or the film's MySpace page, whether you like what they did with Gotham's Dark Knight or not, and praise them for making such a visually stunning fan film, they deserve it.
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