Captain Britain
Super Freak
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2008
- Messages
- 3,596
- Reaction score
- 6
I think that the overall American character of the movie was undeniable. Yes, some of the thesps were Brits, but the whole superhero genre is as American as Mom and Apple pie. Even the new Bond is a direct response to Bourne. I'm afraid indigenous Brit movies today tend to be either the cockney gangster rubbish that Ritchie produces, or depressing kitchen sink/ council (social) estate (project) that Ken Loach seems to like.
Brits are big in Hollywood, look at wor geordies Ridley and Tony Scott, Sam Mendes etc and the dozens of Brit actors, male and female who are huge over there and we can be proud of that. Without American money, however, there would hardly be a British film industry. I know what you are saying captain, but as someone with his ass planted on a fence in the mid-Atlantic I'd say you were in danger (probably inadvertently) of insulting our American friends by hinting at a degree of cultural superiority. Big Budget Movies are financed to achieve a certain return and therefore have to appeal to a certain mass demographic, usually the American teenage male, it is by ignoring such basic market philosophies that rendered the British film industry almost extinct.
The simple answer IMHO therefore is: No!
In answer to what you say above, which I've emboldened - definitely not! I've loved all things American for most of my life and definitely since I first saw Star Wars in 1977. I love American culture and movies, and on the whole I dislike British films, with very few exceptions, as they just seem small to me - small and self-important, most of the time.
But I really think TDK benefited from its foreign input (and not just British) for the reasons I described above, just as I think recent Bond films have benefited from the input of American writers like Bruce Feirstein, Michael France and Paul Haggis (and could have done with losing the services of their British writers Purvis and Wade!). In fact, it would be interesting to see Bond get an American director next time (there's never been one has there?).
It's not about asserting cultural superiority, its just that sometimes mixing things up produces very cool results, like TDK.
And incidentally - is the superhero genre really as American as Mom and apple pie? Superheroes in the first place were invented by a couple of second generation immigrants, and Batman's look was based partly on European influences.
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