Tag: Batman

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Film Features Film/TV

The Flash

Michael Keaton returns as Batman in The Flash.

If you see two animals with similar body plans — like say, a human and an ape — the theory of evolution suggests they both descended from a common ancestor which died out long ago. Unless, that is, they’re crabs. At least five separate lineages of sea life have adopted the basic crab form independently of each other. Apparently, if you live on the bottom of the ocean, a big, flat shell with multiple legs and pincers is the best design strategy. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: carcinization.

Just as Darwinian evolution tends toward crabs, big-budget Hollywood films tend toward Batman. There’s even a name for this type of convergent evolution: Batmanization.

Take, for example, the most recent movie about Batman, The Flash. Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, The Flash is not about Batman. It’s about The Flash.” But that’s just you showing your superhero ignorance. I, an enlightened comic-book-movie-watching guy, understand that all films must be about Batman because the story of Batman is the perfect form toward which all films have been evolving since Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman.

The Flash represents the ultimate stage of Batmanization: Michael Keaton plays Batman again. I realize I may come across as a tad cynical when I write about Batman movies, but I am not made of stone. Michael Keaton stepping away from the role of Batman after Batman Returns was such a titanic psychosocial event that when Michael Keaton made a movie about it, Birdman, it won Best Picture. Take that, Wes Anderson!

In The Flash, it is revealed that Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) became The Flash because he lost his parents at a young age. Then, at a slightly older age, he was struck by lightning while being doused with chemicals, granting him the power of super-speed, which enables him to do things like save an entire neonatal ward full of babies while also microwaving a burrito.

Like Batman, he’s tortured by losing his parents. So when he accidentally discovers he can travel backwards in time by running faster than the speed of light, his first instinct is to go back to keep his mother from being killed by an unknown criminal, and his father from being convicted for the crime. Despite dire warnings against tampering with the timeline from his universe’s Batman (Ben Affleck), Barry does it anyway. But when he tries to return to his present, he is thwarted by a mysterious figure and ends up in a parallel timeline where his parents are still alive, but where young Barry Allen (also Ezra Miller) hasn’t become Flash yet. Also, there’s no Superman, so when General Zod (Michael Shannon) shows up like he did in Man of Steel, there’s no one to stop him. Flash discovers that a Batman (Michael Keaton) used to exist in this timeline, but he’s retired because he solved all the crime. Together, they try to track down Clark Kent, only to discover that Supergirl (Sasha Calle) made it to Earth instead. Can Old Awesome Batman save the planet with the assistance of The Flash and Supergirl and also The Flash?

If, unlike me, you are a cynic, you might point out that, from Warner Brothers’/DC’s point of view, it’s a good thing they backed up the money truck to Michael Keaton’s retirement villa because star Ezra Miller has recently been outed as a Messianic psychopath who was kidnapping children to build a Mansonoid cult in Vermont. Even worse, since this is a time travel/multiverse story, there’s usually two of him on screen at any given time.

And that’s why it’s good that The Flash didn’t do Flash stuff like fighting his arch enemy, the super-intelligent alien apeman Gorilla Grodd, but instead went on a time quest for Batman. Otherwise, we’d just be sitting in a theater staring into Ezra Miller’s cold, desperate eyes for 144 minutes, wondering how a creep like that was ever cast as a superhero in a $200 million movie.

Batman to the rescue!

The Flash
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Fun Stuff News of the Weird

News of the Weird: Week of 03/30/23

Least Competent Criminal

Early on the morning of Feb. 5, 20-year-old Lantz Kurtz broke into a gas station in Palm Coast, Florida, and stole multiple items. He exited via the front door, apparently unaware that he’d left a big clue behind: his debit card, Fox35-TV reported. Officers responding to the alarm found the card and tracked down Kurtz, who told them he had intended to come back to the store and pay for the items. But Sheriff Rick Staly wasn’t having it: “Leaving a debit card behind does not absolve you from theft or committing a burglary,” he said. [Fox35, 2/8/2023]

Crime Spree

Robert Powers, 37, managed to terrorize multiple citizens of Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Feb. 6, WTAJ-TV reported. He allegedly broke into four different homes, telling one woman as he covered her mouth, “I’m Batman.” At the next home, he choked a man, went through his pockets, and held him hostage with a pocketknife. Next, he turned the man’s gas stove on and forced him into his truck, heading across town at speeds of more than 100 mph before crashing into a Jeep. Powers then kicked open the door of a nearby home and repeatedly asked, “Why’d you do this, mom?” as he walked through the residence. Finally, at the last crime scene, police were able to subdue Powers, who admitted he may have ingested meth or bath salts. [WTAJ, 2/7/2023]

Bright Idea

Jose Ruben Nava, former director of the zoo in Chilpancingo, Mexico, is under fire after officials learned that he slaughtered four pygmy goats to serve at the zoo’s year-end dinner, MSN reported. Fernando Ruiz Gutierrez, director of wildlife for the state’s environment department, said serving the goat meat “put the health of the people who ate them at risk because these animals were not fit for human consumption.” Nava is also accused of trading a zebra for tools. He was let go from his position in January after the death of a deer at the zoo. [MSN, 2/2/2023]

Irony

A 61-year-old butcher working at the Sheung Shui Slaughterhouse in Hong Kong died at the hands — er, hooves — of a pig he was trying to slaughter on Jan. 20, CNN reported. The unnamed man was knocked to the ground by the struggling pig, which had revived after a shot from a stun gun, and suffered a wound from a meat cleaver. Strangely, police said, the man’s wounds were to his hand and foot; a cause of death had not been released. The Labour Department extended its “deepest sympathy to his family.” [CNN, 1/21/2023]

Animal Antics

The Wyandotte (Michigan) Police Department opened an investigation in January after an officer was suspected of stealing another officer’s lunch while he was out of the room. The Today show reported that Officer Barwig was called away from the break room to assist in the jail; when he returned, K-9 Officer Ice was seen licking his chops, and Barwig’s sandwich was nowhere to be seen. “Officer Ice has invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and quite frankly is not cooperating with the investigation,” the department posted on its Facebook page. Later, dozens of attorneys offered to represent Ice in court, but the department decided not to pursue discipline or criminal charges. [Today, 1/23/2023]

Can’t Possibly Be True

Jesse and Deedee O’Dell of Tulsa, Oklahoma, normally spend around $10 for their Starbucks coffees, but on Jan. 7, their bill was considerably more, KOKI-TV reported. A few days later, when Deedee tried to use the same card at a mall, it was declined. That’s when the couple discovered that Starbucks had given itself a $4,444.44 tip on their $10.90 bill. They contacted the district manager, who said there’d been an “issue” with the network, and they received two checks to cover the enormous gratuity — but both checks bounced. While they wait for replacement checks, they’ve had to cancel a family vacation, “and the tickets are nonrefundable,” said Jesse. A Starbucks representative said new checks are on the way and the mistake was caused by “possible human error.” [KOKI, 2/7/2023]

NEWS OF THE WEIRD
© 2023 Andrews McMeel Syndication.
Reprinted with permission.
All rights reserved.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Not Your Father’s Batman

Adam West as Batman from the television series. (Photo: Wikipedia)

If you own a copy of Detective Comics No. 27, published in March 1939, you own a piece of history, and one worth a gold mine. Batman was created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. The character debuted in the 27th issue of Detective Comics, and he’s been punching and POW!-ing his way through the collective unconscious ever since. Not bad for an octogenarian who wears his underpants on the outside.

Producer Bill Dozier’s Batman television series, starring Adam West in the titular role, aired as reruns when I was younger, and I watched them with my dad. But my Bat-mania kicked into high gear when Batman: The Animated Series was released in 1992.

Decades later, I’m still a fan. Recently, my sister and I ate dinner at a local restaurant before catching a screening of the newest Bat-film. As we waited for our food, I drank a Memphis beer — a risky move considering the film’s nearly three-hour runtime — and asked my sister when she thought her son might be ready to visit Gotham for the first time. He’s about six months younger than I was when I started watching the Adam West reruns, so the timing seems right. Not to mention that my nephew tends to prefer characters who dress in black and act dramatic (He’s a huge fan of the evil queen in Snow White), so a cape-wearing weirdo who hangs out in a stalactite-encrusted cave should be right up his Crime Alley. The conversation got me thinking about different generations.

Batman, a part of the cultural milieu for so long, is a convenient vehicle for observing changing cultural norms and aesthetics. Though superheroes have conquered the box office in the last decade, somehow Batman seems to stand apart. Who knows why? Maybe it’s that Bats works on his own without elaborate stories mapped across the entire DC intellectual property universe. Maybe it’s just that he’s been around for 83 years.

My dad was the one who made sure I saw the 1966 Batman TV show. He also took me to see Mask of the Phantasm in theaters, and he was the one who rented Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns on VHS. He usually has kind things to say about Burton’s Bat-flicks, but if pressed, he always makes fun of Michael Keaton. Adam West, he’d say, is the best Batman, the “real” version. West is best; he didn’t need no stinkin’ rubber armor.

Whereas, if you ask me, Kevin Conroy, who voiced Bats in the animated series, is the best Batman. No contest. And my favorite Joker? Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger can sit down; Mark Hamill takes the crown as the Clown Prince of Crime. Why? His vocal range — he can go from mirthful to menacing on a dime. Or, more probably, because I watched the animated Batman show religiously while I was in the target age group.

So, if my nephew ends up being a Bat-fan, I’m sure someday I’ll be disappointed in the version of the character his generation loves. To be honest, I hope that Batman becomes more and more anachronistic as society changes, as our understanding of crime and its causes and solutions evolves.

In fact, as our film editor pointed out in his review of the newest Bat-flick, Batman is already out of date. According to Forbes, “Overdraft banking fees, specifically, cost consumers $12.4 billion in 2020. Though it’s a decrease from the authors’ findings of overdraft fees totaling $17 billion in 2018, it’s still steep.” When we think of crime, though, we often think of shady-looking individuals in ski masks breaking into homes. But according to the FBI’s website, “Victims of burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.0 billion in property losses in 2019.” Granted, Forbes is talking about 2018 and 2020, and the FBI statistics reference 2019, but there’s still between a $9 billion and $14 billion difference between losses attributed to overdraft fees versus burglary. It seems Bruce Wayne could do more good for Gotham by buying Gotham Bank and eliminating those fees. And I hope wage theft isn’t an issue at Wayne Enterprises, or Batman needs to haul himself into Arkham for questioning.

Maybe, like King Arthur and Camelot, Batman and Gotham will be enjoyed long after the world portrayed on comic pages and on-screen loses any resemblance to our own. Or maybe we will sacrifice the World’s Greatest Detective on the altar of a changing world. Even a super-fan such as myself can see that’s a worthy trade. So keep Batman in mind when considering a potential solution to one of our many challenges. Whether we’re combating income inequality, climate change, racism, or any other of the world’s worst villains, those of us old enough to legally buy a drink might be uncomfortable with the changes we must make. “That’s not how we did things in my day,” we might be tempted to say. “Not my Batman.”

Well, it’s a new world, old chum, and this ain’t your father’s Batman.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Batman

Robert Pattinson is the Batman in The Batman.

Batman is the most capitalist of superheroes. Superman is an immigrant, raised by farmers, who moved to the big city to become a journalist. Spider-Man is from the urban working class, the first in his family to go to college, who struggles to pay the rent. Bruce Wayne is the scion of a billionaire family who never had to work a day in his life. He lives in a city plagued by squalor and poverty, but when he is personally affected by street crime, he doesn’t pledge a part of his vast fortune to improve the lives of the most wretched, but instead decides to spend a mint on weapons, dress like a bat, sneak around at night, and beat up people. 

This is not a new criticism of the most popular superhero of the last 30 years. In Watchmen, Alan Moore made his antihero Rorschach the mirror of Batman in every respect except one: He’s dog-food-eating poor. Stripped of Batman’s playboy persona and big house, Rorschach’s secret identity Walter Kovacs is a violent, paranoid vigilante obsessed with right-wing media. Bruce Wayne is not a hero — he’s a traumatized psychotic with messianic delusions whose violent tendencies are enabled by his great wealth. That’s not really the sympathetic framing you want for your comic book hero, especially now, when the pandemic has laid bare the oligarchs’ inhuman greed.

Director Matt Reeves does attempt to address that less than generous framing in The Batman. His Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) is a rich heir who lives in a Trumpian tower penthouse, but early in the film, Alfred (Andy Serkis) tries to get him to meet with the Wayne Corp accountants, who are apoplectic because of Bruce’s excessive spending and neglect of the core businesses. Bruce isn’t really into that capitalism stuff. He wants to be left alone to use his tactical bat gear and jet car to fight crime. Like Rorschach — and another psycho vigilante, Travis Bickle — we hear Bruce’s thoughts through his journal entries. 

Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant Gordon, the last good cop in Gotham.

Gotham is plagued by a serial killer who is targeting the rich and powerful, beginning with the mayor. When Batman is called in to assist with the investigation by Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffery Wright) to investigate, Reeves teases out the Sherlock Holmes in the character’s DNA and lets Bats do some actual detecting. It seems the mysterious Riddler (Paul Dano) is leaving greeting cards addressed “To The Batman” at each crime scene. Bruce’s investigation leads him to Selena Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress braving crappy electronic music to work in a sprawling warehouse nightclub run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell). “You have a lot of cats,” says the guy dressed as a bat when he breaks into her apartment. 

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman confronts the Bat-guy.

Turns out, Selena is plotting elaborate revenge on the crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Is everyone in Gotham some kind of costumed maniac? Only the ones who aren’t cops on the take. The bat and the cat team up with Gordon to take down both a web of corrupt city officials (which included Bruce’s beloved dead father), The Riddler, and Falcone’s criminal syndicate. 

You might think that’s a lot to fit in a movie, but this one is 176 minutes long, so there’s plenty of time for too many bad guys, multiple false endings, and loving close ups of the Batmobile. Much of it works when taken on its own terms. Pattinson smears his eyeliner and broods with the best of them. The new Batmobile looks cool. Wright and Turturro own the screen. Dano is the best psychotic bat-villain since Jack Nicholson put on the Joker paint in 1989. 

But none of it can overcome the fact that this is yet another gritty reboot of Batman. Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was an emotionally crippled PTSD case during the first Bush administration. His chemistry with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was electric. But instead of dripping weaponized sexuality, a chaste Kravitz Kubrick-stares her way through repetitive set pieces. How can you cast two of the sexiest people on the planet as forbidden lovers and create not a single spark on screen — even when one of them is armed with a taser? 

There’s a good two-hour film buried in this bladder-busting, three-hour mess. If it had climaxed with the crackerjack scene where Batman confronts an incarcerated Riddler, I’d be singing a different tune. Instead, The Batman cops out and goes on for another 45 minutes of generic henchmen punching. “Maybe this is the end of the Batman,” muses a disillusioned Bruce Wayne. We should be so lucky. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

A Few Points on Zack Snyder’s Justice League

[ed note: In 2017, I structured my review of Justice League as “a series of bullet points presented without any overall organizing principle.” Keeping with the spirit of form following function, this review of the Snyder Cut of Justice League will be presented as a much longer series of slightly more organized bullet points.] 

  • Close your eyes. Envision Superman. What color is his costume? Is it blue, with a red cape and yellow trim? Wrong. It’s black, with black highlights, like Batman.
  • The S? Gray. 
Henry Cavill as Superman in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
  • In 2017, when the original Justice League was in post-production, director Zack Snyder had just turned in a cut of the film he called “90% done” when his daughter Autumn died. Snyder took a leave of absence, and Avengers director Joss Whedon stepped in to finish the film. Following the orders of Warner Bros. execs who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable,” Whedon rewrote the script and did some reshoots to bring it in under two hours. The resulting film grossed $657 million, and yet is considered a box office bomb. 
  • Last week, a Baltimore businessman offered to buy Tribune Publishing, the nation’s third largest newspaper chain, for $650 million. 
  • Disappointed that the film starring Batman (Ben Affleck), Superman (Henry Cavill), The Flash (Ezra Miller) , Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher) grossed only enough money to run the entire United States government from 1790-1836, DC comics fans on Reddit started a campaign to “release the Snyder Cut!”
  • Historical budget numbers are readily available online, proving that the internet is a glorious wonder for which we should all be thankful. 
Ciaran Hinds as Steppenwolf
  • The villain of the original Justice League is Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds), an utterly forgettable soldier in the army of the planet Apokolips. His master Darkseid (Ray Porter) is a new addition in the Snyder Cut. His inclusion helps the plot make slightly more sense. 
  • Darkseid, the biggest big bad in the DC universe, bears a striking resemblance to Thanos, the biggest big bad in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 
  • Maybe it’s the other way around. 
  • The character design tends to be both super busy and dull at the same time. It’s actually kind of impressive. 
Ben Affleck experiencing angst as Batman.
  • After a pressure campaign lasting years, the online Snyder Cut agitators got their way. Warner Bros. greenlit a restoration project, which eventually consumed an estimated $70 million, proving once and for all that the internet was a mistake. 
  • The running time for Zack Snyder’s Justice League is four hours and two minutes. Other films that break the four hour mark include Shoah, the 1985 Holocaust documentary that runs 9 hours, 26 minutes; OJ: Made in America, the seven-hour ESPN documentary series which had a limited theatrical run in 2016; Carlos, the 2010 biopic of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, which clocked in at 5 hours, 39 minutes; the 1927 silent epic Napoleon which takes 5 hours, 32 minutes to meet its Waterloo; and Sleep, which is just footage of Andy Warhol’s boyfriend sleeping for 5 hours, 21 minutes. 
  • You think I won’t keep wasting your time with random facts I found on the internet? Well, I sat through the damn Snyder Cut, so buckle up, motherfuckers! 
  • The record for the longest film ever made is held by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson. The sole pubic screening of their film Logistics at the House of Culture in Stockholm lasted from December 1, 2012 to January 6, 2013. 
  • What sets Justice League apart from those other extremely long films is that, as we enter hour four, we learn that Bruce Wayne was traumatized by witnessing the death of his parents, which later caused him to dress like a bat and fight crime. These stunning facts have never before been revealed in a film, with the exception of Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Batman v. Superman: The Dawn Of Justice (2016). 
  • The revelation about Batman’s parents comes via a conversation with The Joker (Jared Leto) during a dream sequence epilogue which has nothing to do Steppenwolf, Darkseid, or anything, really. I have no idea why it’s there, except to give Jared Leto cocaine money.
Ezra Miller as The Flash
  • Here is a partial list of scenes shot in slow motion during this four-hour, two-minute movie:
    • A close up of Bruce Wayne’s razor while he’s shaving 
    • Aquaman drinking whiskey on a pier
    • A man digging a hole. 
    • A woman looking at The Flash.
    • The Flash moving super-fast.
    • The Flash staring at a girl.
    • The Flash staring at a hot dog.
    • Cyborg playing football. (There’s quite a bit of this.) 
    • Cyborg looking sad because his father isn’t there to watch him play football. 
    • Steppenwolf picking up a handful of dirt. 
    • Superman going super-fast
    • A Humvee flying through the air
    • Cyborg’s father (Joe Morton) disintegrating. (This one worked.) 
    • A shell being ejected from the Batmobile’s guns. 
    • The heroes riding into the final battle with Steppenwolf. (This one kinda worked, too, even if we’ve seen it many times before, such as in Joss Whedon’s Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron.) 
    • The Batmobile exploding. 
    • The Superfriends just kind of standing there, not looking particularly happy, or sad, or anything, really, despite the fact that they’ve just won the final battle and saved the world. (The film still has more than 30 minutes to go at this point.) 
Jason Momoa as Aquaman, aka Moist Batman
  • Snyder’s direction of actors is indifferent, at best. Everyone seems to be instructed to glower grimly as if every trip to the Gotham DMV is the Battle of Gettysburg. In other words, he tells everyone to be more like Batman. This is another example of Creeping Batmanization. Wonder Woman? Girl Batman. Cyborg? Black robot Batman. Aquaman? Moist Batman. Superman? Super-Batman. The only character who doesn’t act like Batman is The Flash, and he is constantly shamed for it.
  • I don’t know if Jared Leto does cocaine. 
  • The big revelation in Superman v Batman: The Dawn of Justice is that both Superman and Batman’s mothers were named Martha. In the Snyder Cut, we find that Martha Kent was actually J’onn J’onzz, aka the Martian Manhunter, who was my favorite character in the 2001 animated TV series Justice League, which is superior to both cuts of this film in every conceivable way. 
  • GOAT Batman movie? Mask of the Phantasm. 
  • The excessive length of the film is a plus for HBO Max, the streaming service which debuted the Snyder Cut. Streamers value continued engagement above all other metrics, so the longer the better, as far as they’re concerned. 
  • In the time it takes to watch the Snyder Cut once, you could watch Mask of the Phantasm, which is also on HBO Max, 3.16 times. 
  • Instead of a standard HD 16:9 aspect ratio, or a widescreen 2.76:1 aspect ratio, the Snyder Cut is presented in an old-fashioned, square 4:3 aspect ratio. This is just pointless and pretentious enough that I like it. So, kudos to you, Zack Snyder.
  • $370 million, the total amount of money spent on the original Justice League and the Snyder Cut, is greater than the 2020 budget of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, combined.  
Don’t make Superman angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
  • In my original review of Justice League, I wrote: “The high-functioning sociopaths running the Hollywood studios are uniquely unsuited to making good superhero movies, because they fundamentally cannot grasp what is appealing about a character motivated by pure altruism.” This remains true. 
  • Snyder and writer Chris Terrio simply do not understand Superman. He is an avatar of the benevolent protector, and a fundamentally nice guy. It’s not edgy or insightful to point out that an invulnerable, super-strong alien who can fly and shoot freakin’ heat rays from his eyes would eventually come to view the humans it was supposed to protect as puny, flawed, contemptible things. That’s the purpose of Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen, which Snyder adapted for the big screen in 2009. There is a moral dimension to Superman. He is so powerful, he will always win any fight. So the key to writing a good Superman story is to put him in the horns of a moral dilemma. He must choose the lesser of two evils, or sacrifice Lois Lane to save Metropolis, or something like that. Superman’s purpose is not to be a badass, it’s to explore the nature of “goodness.” 
  • Henry Cavill remains the worst actor to ever play Superman. Give me drunk, chubby George Reeves any day. 
  • Don’t get me started on Lois Lane (Amy Adams). What have they done to you? 
  • Watchmen was the last Zack Snyder film I enjoyed. I even bought the Blu-Ray. 
  • Ben Affleck, who got all swole to play Batman, portrayed George Reeves in the 2006 film Hollywoodland. He was good in that film. He sucks as Batman. 
Ray Porter as Darkseid.
  • Remember that commercial for the video game Gears of War where the soldier dressed all in black is running through a dark, ruined city and fighting monsters, which are also black, set to a slow, romantic cover of Tears for Fears “Mad World”? Imagine watching that at half speed on a loop for half a work day. 
  • The Snyder Cut might make a good screensaver, except the blank stripes on either side of the screen due to the 4:3 aspect ratio would eventually lead to visible burn-in lines on your monitor. So it fails at that, too. 
  • When the Superfriends gather in Superman’s spaceship to use Kryptonian technology and a little Flash razzmatazz to bring Clark Kent back from the dead, the spaceship’s A.I. begs them to stop. In that moment, I felt kinship with the Kryptonian A.I.
  • The Wonder Twins, shapeshifting aliens from the 1970s Superfriends cartoon, are, sadly, nowhere to be seen. Come on, Zack! I want to see an eight-armed Arcturian space platypus solve a problem with a jackhammer made of ice, which is actually her brother!
  • RELEASE THE WONDER TWINS CUT!
Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman
  • Writer Chris Terrio, who penned Batman v Superman, Justice League, and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, is the greatest living example of the mediocre white guy who keeps failing up. 
  • Here’s a short list of scenes Justice League rips off from other films: 
    • Joker’s bank heist from The Dark Knight. 
    • The lighting of the warning beacons of Gondor from Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    • The cavalry charge from the battle of Helm’s Deep in The Two Towers. Twice. 
    • The climax of the 1978 Superman, where Supes flies faster than the speed of light to travel backwards in time and change history to save the world. (The Flash does it.) 
  • Let’s say you’re a film director, and you want to portray The Flash traveling at superhuman speed. You would show The Flash operating at normal speed, while the world around him is moving in slow motion, because that’s how things would look to The Flash, right? WRONG. The correct answer is that The Fastest Man Alive is depicted in slow motion, while the rest of the world is at, like, super slow motion. That’s why Zack Snyder is worshipped as a genius on the internet, and you are not. 
  • The boneheaded choice of casting Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor in Man of Steel still haunts us a decade later.
Ray Fisher as Cyborg
  • I’m not sure how he does it, but Snyder manages to ruin the sole good scene in the original Justice League, where Cyborg and The Flash dig up Clark Kent’s dead body in the middle of the night. 
  • At one point, Cyborg’s father is hassled by agents of the Office of Secret Intelligence from The Venture Bros. 
  • I’d watch a Cyborg movie starring Ray Fisher—provided it was less than two hours long.
Does that look like a trident to you?
  • After four years and $370 million, Aquaman’s trident STILL. HAS. FIVE. POINTS. Not three points, which is what differentiates a trident from a pitchfork. Five (5). All hail Aquaman, who rules as rightful King of Atlantis with the symbol of the seas, his mighty PITCHFORK! 
  • Credit where credit is due: the executives at Warner Bros. who called the Snyder Cut “unwatchable” were absolutely right.
Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot

Tonight at Malco Ridgeway, Indie Memphis presents Filmworker, the story of Leon Vitali. An actor who landed the part of Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, Vitali gave up a promising acting career to become Stanley Kubrick’s right hand man through the 1970s, 80s, and 1990s. The documentary is a story of creativity’s highs and lows, and a warts-and-all account of the making of some of the greatest films ever. Tickets are going fast for this one. They are available over on the Indie Memphis website.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot

Meanwhile, over at the Paradiso, there’s a 25th anniversary screening of The Sandlot, a cult coming-of-age film about a young boy who moves to Los Angeles and wants to learn to play baseball.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (2)

On Thursday at the Paradiso, there’s a filmed version of a Broadway musical version of a film: Newsies.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (3)

This week, the Orpheum Theatre’s Summer Movie Series hits a trio of high notes. First on Friday is the all-time classic The Wizard of Oz. If your kids have never seen it, they need to. If you haven’t seen it in a while, it richly rewards repeated viewings. If you don’t know anything about it, educate yourself with this trailer:

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (4)

Once you’ve gotten your fix of Judy Garland fighting witches, head on over to the Midnight at the Studio, where Mike McCarthy is presenting one of the most unlikely onscreen love stories ever made, Harold and Maude. The film about a May-December romance between a young pessimist and an old optimist plays at the witching hour on both Friday and Saturday.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (5)

Saturday night, The Orpheum returns with a sorely needed double feature for our superhero-obsessed times. At 5 PM, it’s Superman. Richard Donner’s 1978 film is a tour de force of pre-CGI special effects. Even 40 years and literally hundred of superhero movies later, no actors have come close to either Christopher Reeve’s performance as Superman or the recently departed Margo Kidder’s turn as Lois Lane.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (6)

Then, after you freshen your soda and popcorn, The Orpheum presents Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Often considered the first modern superhero movie, its success in 1989 was by no means a sure thing. That’s why Warner Brothers attached their biggest musical star to do the soundtrack. It doesn’t get much attention now, but “Batdance” was Prince’s fourth song to hit #1 on the Billboard pop charts, the R&B charts, and the dance charts all at the same time. Check out this batshit crazy video, directed by Purple Rain helmer Albert Magnoli.

This Week At The Cinema: Behind The Scenes With Kubrick and The Sandlot (7)

See you at the cinema! 

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Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

When Dave Brown Met Batman.

It’s WMC weatherman  and wrestling host Dave Brown’s last day on the job. He’ll be missed for many reasons. In addition to weather reporting he was a disc jockey, and hosted local TV shows like Dialing for Dollars. But this is how your Pesky Fly chooses to remember him— moderating a squabble between Jerry Lawler and Adam West.   

When Dave Brown Met Batman.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Jerry Lawler in a Batmobile

To the King Cave!

This week the internet discovered something Memphis wrestling fans have known for a long time. King Jerry Lawler is one of the biggest nerds on Earth.

Buzz culture website Uprox.com had this to say:

“Jerry ‘The King’ Lawler owns an original 1966 Batman TV show Batmobile. Maybe you already know this. It’s one of those stories I see, assume everyone knows about, see written up on Deadspin four days later and have to post about on day five for residual traffic. So, yeah, whether you were aware or not, Jerry Lawler owns a goddamn Batmobile.”

It’s true, of course. Sort of. Lawler owns a replica, pulled from the original Bat-mold.

Jerry Lawler in a Batmobile (2)

In 1966 George Barris built the original TV Batmobile. There were six additional stunt cars modeled after the original, and five duplicates built for promotional use. Lawler, a longtime collector of Disney, Coke, and superhero memorabilia purchased his a little over a year ago from Bat-fan and fabricator, Matt Dollar. 

It makes perfect sense, of course. Lawler’s origin story, as explained by former ring announcer Lance Russell, goes something like this. When the King was still a young prince he wanted to be a comic book artist and spent much of his spare time learning to draw the superheroes of DC comics. The skills he developed, however, lead to a surprise opportunity to draw Memphis wrestlers for use on WHBQ’s weekly televised wrestling programs. That, in turn, lead to Lawler’s colorful career in wrestling, which included dressing up in a superman suit and sparring verbally with West/Batman. 

Jerry Lawler in a Batmobile

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Time Warp Drive-In: Tim Burton

CREDIT: Lauren Rae Holtermann

Lauren Rae Holtermann

The September installment of the popular Time Warp Drive-In series celebrates American auteur Tim Burton. Like Stanley Kubrick, the subject of a past drive-in tribute, he is a director whose name has become an adjective. “Burton-esque” means a film with a Gothic outlook, elaborate set design, and a misunderstood outsider for a hero.

The program begins at dusk with Burton’s first feature film, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. Even though it was made in 1985, many consider it to still be Burton’s best work, and it contains most of the elements that would eventually become Burton trademarks. Pee-wee Herman was the creation of Paul Reubens, a Los Angeles comic actor and Groundlings cast member. His somewhat creepy children’s show for grown-ups originated as an experimental theater show that got noticed by HBO and turned into a late-night special. By 1984, it was selling out Madison Square Garden. Reubens and his co-writer Phil Hartman tapped Burton to direct the movie after seeing his legendary short Frankenweenie. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure showcases Burton’s visual inventiveness with the long introductory sequence that takes the audience inside the world that Pee-wee has built for himself. As it always happens with Burton’s characters, the trouble begins when the outsider is forced to deal with the mundane world: In this case, Pee-wee’s prized bike is stolen, and he must embark on a scary trip to grown-up land to retrieve it. There are also hints of Burton’s gothic side, as with the unforgettable Large Marge scene, which is as scary in its own way as any given scene in the slasher films that dominated the horror box office of the mid-1980s.

Michael Keaton as Burton’s Batman

The evening’s second feature is Batman. Looking back from the 21st century, it seems that Burton’s biggest single contribution to popular culture is the superhero comic book movie. When it was released in 1989, more than a decade had passed since Richard Donner’s Superman had dominated the box office without a repeat performance by a cinematic superhero. Befitting the character, Batman is much darker than Donner’s Superman, both visually and thematically. The switch from the campy 1960s take on the Caped Crusader to the attempt at psychologically grounding the character mirrored the cynical turn comics had taken in the 1980s in the wake of Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and Batman: The Killing Joke, and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. But Burton’s Batman is a long way from the glowering Christian Bale of Christopher Nolan’s trilogy. Michael Keaton plays Bruce Wayne as a guy who has enough self-awareness to understand that this whole setup is ridiculous, and yet he can’t help himself: He has to dress up like a bat and fight crime. Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker, and his clown-themed accouterments give Burton a chance to let his cartoonish visual imagination run wild on the screen. Mix in a soundtrack by Prince, and you’ve got a stone-cold Hollywood classic whose influence is still being felt today.

1988’s Beetlejuice is a critical part of Burton’s filmography. The Ghostbusters-influenced supernatural comedy was the first time the director’s Gothic aesthetic was fully unleashed. It was the first time he had worked with Keaton, and it launched the film careers of Winona Ryder and Alec Baldwin. This pre-CGI special-effects fest mixes live action practical effect, stop motion, and every other visual trick Burton had learned from studying classic horror and monster movies. The jokes in Beetlejuice hold up surprisingly well, mostly due to the deadpan commitment on the part of the actors.

The final film of the evening is my personal favorite of all of Burton’s work, Ed Wood. The stylized biopic of the man known as the worst director in the world benefits from a terrific script by screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who would later team up on the Memphis-filmed The People vs. Larry Flynt. It was the second time Burton would team up with Johnny Depp after 1990’s Edward Scissorhands. Depp is terrific as the unflappable, cross-dressing title character, as is the entire cast, which includes Martin Landau (who won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Bela Lugosi), Bill Murray, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Patricia Arquette. Those staying late for the final movie will find that the Time Warp has saved the best for last.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Film Retrospective: Batman (1989)

This week, 25 years ago, I was a knot of anticipation. The thing I wanted to see more than any other thing, the Batman film, was at last coming out. I’m not saying I wanted to see Batman more than I wanted to see any other movie at the time; I mean I had never been so eager to partake in anything, ever. In retrospect, I haven’t been so excited for the release of any other piece of pop culture. I think the only things to surpass it are real-life greatnesses: kissing a girl, getting married, the birth of my children. Seriously. (Where are you going? Come back!)

I was so excited in part because I loved and devoured the Batman comics. The character appealed to my maturing sense of identity and growing individualism. He was no less human than I was — he wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, exposed to cosmic or gamma rays, or orphaned from an alien planet — infinitely relatable to this here shy little nerd. What made Bruce Wayne into Batman was nothing but a common traumatic childhood; granted, my sheltered, suburban upbringing was far from harrowing. But, if you stabbed Batman with a sword-umbrella, he’d bleed like anyone else, and he became successful by dint of willpower alone. Plus, what kid doesn’t want to hear that it’s the monsters who should be afraid of the dark?

Michael Keaton in Batman

The movie Batman hit me square in the face, at age 13, the summer before 8th grade, a seminal moment at a seminal age. It marked my transition from an artless, prepubescent consumer of whatever happened to be in front of me to a relatively thoughtful observer of craft and commercialism. The coming of age was my (forgive me) Bat Mitzvah.

Batman felt like the first movie that was made for me. I pined for news in the build-up to its release — this was, of course, long before the internet, a lonely place of dying that left one starved for information. I watched Entertainment Tonight routinely, hoping for clips or updates; I scoured for showbiz tidbits in the Appeal section of The Commercial Appeal — this was pre-Captain Comics. Entertainment Weekly didn’t exist yet. MTV ran a “Steal the Batmobile” contest; I obsessed over the glimpses of the movie the promos and commercials showed. When the video to Prince’s “Batdance” premiered in advance of the film’s release, I was devastated: It didn’t show any scenes from the movie.

Finally, Batman came out. I saw it at Highland Quartet, the first showing on the first day. It napalmed me. I could not have loved it more. It buried itself in my DNA instantly. I bought the Danny Elfman score on tape and wore it out. To this day, it’s my all-time favorite soundtrack. I waited on tenterhooks for the box office results, finally delivered (at least, in my recollection) in the voice of Chris Connelly on an MTV News segment: Batman had a huge opening weekend. I felt personally vindicated. (As I said, I was a nerd.)

Batman was my first movie review. I wrote it for myself, in a journal kept in a spiral school notebook that has been, sadly, lost to time. After some attic digging, I did unearth the second volume of my journal, running from August 1989 to December 1990. Included within is my first ever movies list, presented here unadulterated:

Top 15 Movies, 6-29-90, 1:41-1:46 a.m.

1. Batman

2. The Hunt for Red October

3. RoboCop 2

4. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

5. Gremlins 2

6. The Jerk

7. RoboCop

8. Die Hard

9. The Terminator

10. Top Gun

11. The Blues Brothers

12. The Running Man

13. Young Guns

14. Blind Date

15. Parenthood

Looking back, there are plenty of things to commend in Tim Burton’s film. His German Expressionistic sensibilities (and Anton Furst production design) perfectly reflect the shadows of the mind cast within by Bruce Wayne’s psychological scars; Michael Keaton is surprisingly good as Batman; Jack Nicholson is terrific as the Joker. Its reputation was only burnished by the disappointments that followed, with the 1990s sequels Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin.

However, in 2005, with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan rendered the 1989 Batman irrelevant — astonishingly, but no less substantively. Nolan and Christian Bale made a grown-up adaptation — textually moodier, with characters more realistically beat down by life’s injustices — that thoroughly neutered the Burton/Keaton “original.”

The one thing missing from Nolan’s update was the childhood sense of awe and joy that I see bursting from the 1989 film. It’s not really Batman Begins‘ fault. How could it have possibly contained and inspired all that life-changing ecstasy? After all, I wasn’t there to provide it.