Today's movie: Batman Begins. I can't say I'm a big fan of the genre, so my opinion isn't authoritative, but I think it's the best superhero movie I've seen. The cinematography is attractively bleak, whether the scene is the icy wastes of the Himalayas or the urban blight of Gotham, and the story is correspondingly more somber than the cartoonish previous installments. The presence of veteran actors Morgan Freeman, Michael Paine and Liam Neeson also lends gravitas to the proceedings. Batman is unusual among superheroes for being an unmodified human being, and so the account of how he becomes a masked vigilante has intrinsic interest. Good action sequences and nifty gadgets makes this a great view for males in adolescence or in a state of arrested development. Although not as chronologically experimental as Memento, this Nolan film does feature some interesting use of flashback. The combat scenes are a bit intense for younger kids, but from a Christian perspective the film is perfectly acceptable--no sex, no language, and the moral of the story is about distinguishing between justice and revenge. The only complaint I have is that the script more than once uses the movie cliche in which characters allude to earlier lines in the movie in more serious, poignant contexts, the sort of thing Kaufmann satirized in Adaptation.

Gluttony this evening: beef ribs, chicken, baked beans, homemade bread, Guinness stout, peach ice cream. Then about $30 of fireworks, which fascinated the nephew.