Back in the early 70’s, when I was incredibly young (proving that, fuck you, I’m not that old) the Batman TV show had been canceled for quite a while already but it was still going strong in syndication (what we used to just call reruns), and it is very definitely one of those things from that era that is partially responsible for me being the geek I am today.  Looking at Adam West with adult eyes…actually, I don’t even want to address that.  But back then, he was a god.  He was Batman.  And like a lot of other geek tadpoles, I wanted to be Batman more than anything.

And when Halloween rolled around, I got to be Batman for a few hours by dressing up in this awesome Halloween costume:

Yeah, I was pretty fucking cool, and when I put it on, I looked a lot like this unfortunate tyke:

You can click on all three of those images for larger ones if you’d like.  Anyway, looking at that kid (that’s not me…there’s a picture of me looking a lot like that but fucked if I know where it is…) dressed in full crime-fighting regalia, there are a couple thoughts that might enter your head.  The first one might be, “Oh hey.  Little kid dressed as Batman.  Huh.”  And the second one might be, “That doesn’t look one fucking bit like Batman…not even the sunken-chest, alcoholic Batman.”  Both would be correct, for the record.

And that’s exactly what Babylon A.D. is:  A little kid in a Batman costume that doesn’t look a fucking thing like Batman.  Except, instead of a little kid aspiring to be a super hero, it’s a so-so movie aspiring to be a better movie called Bladerunner.  And just like the little kid…actually fuck the metaphor, it isn’t very good, but the point is you look at the movie and you clearly see Bladerunner.  Except, oh my God, it really isn’t Bladerunner.

This is exactly what happens when a studio takes a decent - or even great - idea and then doesn’t follow through with it.  If you want to make a movie like Bladerunner, you can’t just half-ass it once you’ve (kinda, sorta) got the look down.  You still have to have the excellent storytelling (writing, camera work, editing…the whole bit) and acting or all you’ll wind up with is a very attractive piece of crap.  Which, of course…

This movie should have been great.

About six months back, I read a really interesting article which asserted that Hitler actually had both testicles and that the widespread rumor that he only had one was just an urban legend.  The article went on to state that when a member of a group does something particularly horrible the other members of the group will do their best to distance themselves from him or her, which is easy to believe.  It further stated that we, as human beings, wanting to distance ourselves from Hitler as much as possible, would create various lies about Hitler so as to make him less human and therefore less like us.  I thought I’d saved or bookmarked this article but apparently I hadn’t and I’m now kicking myself in the ass for not doing so since it would be nice to be able to link to it here.

As interesting as this article was, I honestly have no idea whether or not any of the claims made within were true.  It’s certainly easy to believe that we’d make things up about that miserable cocksucker, but it’s equally easy to believe that an article on psychology that I’d read on the internet was completely full of shit.  And, as the only reason I’m now bringing any of this up is to satisfy my own childish sense of humor, I have absolutely no desire to find out.

Having said that, and assuming that Hitler actually did have both balls, two things come immediately to mind:

1. If we’re going to make shit up about Hitler - and we should - why would we stick with something so mundane?
2. What on earth did Rod Stewart and Richard Gere do to piss us off so much?

Seriously, what the fuck?  Richard Gere has stars in a handful of annoying movies and we claim he loves shoving gerbils up his asshole.  Rod Stewart sings a handful of ultimately forgettable songs and we claim he sucked so much cum out of so many cocks that he had to have his stomach pumped (since when was semen toxic, anyway?).  Hitler, on the other hand, murders six million Jewish people and all we can come up with is he only had one nut?  Fucking weak.

Why not make him a shit eater?  Why not have him dining nightly on fresh poop with a knife and fork?  Or walking into a whorehouse with a toilet seat around his neck?  One ball?  Any child on any playground at any school could have done better.  Jesus Christ, we may as well have just called him a Scientologist or something.

Here’s the one-line plot description as described by the folks at IMDB:

A young boy attempts to make the world a better place after his teacher gives him that chance.

And here’s my corrected version:

A young boy attempts to make the world a better place after his teacher gives him that chance…and then at the end he gets shanked by another kid and HE FUCKING DIES!

Fuck this movie.  Fuck it in it’s stupid ass.