Noel Rappin Writes Here

It’s been a while since I lost my geek heart to a TV show that was so obviously doomed. Which brings us to The Middleman, on ABC Family of all places. I had been avoiding this on the grounds that it was just a silly-looking summer series and also the whole obviously doomed thing but a series of positive mentions on io9 and other Web sites (including a plug by Justine Larbalestier) led me to try the thing once.

I have about seventy-million little things to say about this movie. I will try, and probably fail, to keep this brief. Spoilers definitely ahead: The movie is really, really good. It’s not flawless, but it covers it’s flaws through a very strong sense of what Batman means and doesn’t mean as a character, and also because it’s very intense. The movie spends most of the time feeling like its on the very edge of chaos and conflagration – it’s probably the first time that I’ve genuinely felt that the hero wouldn’t “win” in superhero movie.

It seems like I’m forever mentioning that I’m not posting here as much as I’d like. I said a while back that between here and the Pathfinder blog I’d be posting two to three times a week. Turns out that’s actually been more or less true, just that all of it has been on the Pathfinder side. I do miss it here, and there are a few big genre/geek things in the last couple weeks that I really wanted to write about here, where nobody can interrupt me.