It took us about two decades to take a concept (comic books, their characters) that was supposed to be fun and render it completely grim and joyless, but we’ve done it! Per, Pattinson’s Batman was “Travis Bickle in the Batsuit, detached and disillusioned.” This was written in a fawning and complimentary tone. I present, as counter-evidence, Robert Pattinson’s recent, glum, guylinered, millennial emo-Batman. Caviezel’s mid-length hair was horrible, and his beard was sponsored by Just For Men but in a way that reminded you that you were watching a figment of someone’s imagination and not an exercise in gritty hyper-reality. The high spots (to borrow a wrestling term) were super fun, and it was peppered throughout with the little glimpses of humor that remind you that watching movies used to be enjoyable. The bad guys – Pearce’s grate-cheese-on-them cheekbones and smugness just scream “hate this guy” – were without complexity and nuance. “The Count of Monte Cristo” was as accessible and innocent as the look on Caviezel’s uncomplicated face for most of it. It was, I would argue, more moral and more God-saturated than the similar-era movies (the “Lord of the Rings” mega-franchise) that are usually credited with these things but just feel to me like people walking around in the dark. It was fascinating and very straightforward and very linear and very fun and very earnest and very “90s” despite releasing in 2002. It was the opposite of the kind of revenge action movie I watched with my high school buddies in the 1990s, in that it painted vengeance as something that only belongs to the Lord, and it showed Edmund Dantes to be, ultimately, unsatisfied in it.ĭelighted by the play, we rented the 2002 Monte Cristo movie starring Jim Caviezel and Guy Pearce and realized it may be the last entry into a time-capsule in which Hollywood “tried” morality on any level, and in which Hollywood painted God (or “ideas about God”) in a positive light. Again, I was struck by how beautiful and moral the story was. Recently we watched the same story on the stage, courtesy of Union University Theatre, and they did a tremendous job handling the many characters and overlapping storylines. It was full of love and revenge and intrigue and swashbuckling (what is this?) and I was in. To my shame I was already in college, and trying to impress a woman who, 26 years later, I am still trying to impress. “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas was the first “real” (non-sports) book I ever read.
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