Tag: Michael Keaton

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Now Playing Sept. 6-12: Beetlejuice!

Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice. (Courtesy Warner Bros.)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Tim Burton’s all-time classic from 1988 gets a sequel after 36 years. Winona Ryder returns as Lydia Deets, the goth girl of your dreams now all grown up. She’s the host of Ghost House with Lydia Deets, and the mother of Astrid (Jenna Ortega), a teenager who is just as gloomy as Lydia once was. When they return to their old home in Winter River, Astrid discovers the portal to the afterlife in the family home’s attic, and releases Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). Catherine O’Hara returns as Delia, Lydia’s art dealer stepmother, and Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, and Justin Theroux are along for the supernatural ride. 

The Front Room

Brandy returns to the big screen as Belinda, a mother-to-be who is expecting her first child with her husband Norman (Andrew Burnap). But just as the couple is building their new nest, they have to take in Solange (Kathryn Hunter), Norman’s stepmother who was long estranged from his family. Now, they will realize why she has been estranged, and deal with the shocking consequences. Max and Sam Eggers, brothers of The Northman’s Robert Eggers, direct this A24 suspense film from a short story by Susan Hill. 

It Ends With Us

Blake Lively stars as Lily Bloom in this hit adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s bestseller. Lily is caught between Ryle (Justin Baldoni) an intensely emotional neurosurgeon, and Atlas (Brandon Sklenar), her old flame. Can she stop her family’s generations-long cycle of abuse?

“Mama’s Sundry”

On Thursday, Sept. 12 at Crosstown Theater, a new collaboration between Memphis filmmakers Brody Kuhar and Joshua Cannon will make its debut. “Mama’s Sundry” is a 15-minute documentary about Bertram Williams and Memphis musician Talibah Safiya‘s neighborhood garden project.

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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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Now Playing In Memphis: The Fast and The Blackening

Ember (Leah Lewis) and Wade (Mamadou Alflie) in Pixar's Elemental.

If you’re into box office handicapping, it’s the most competitive of the summer so far. (Just wait until Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer square off on July 21st!) For you, the film consumer, that’s good news.

DC enters the multiverse with their speediest character, The Flash. Star Ezra Miller, whose offscreen insanity and ensuing legal entanglements are bigger news than the film, plays multiple versions of Barry Allen, who uses his super-speed to travel back in time in an attempt to prevent his mother’s death. Is it a bad sign that Miller is being upstaged in his own solo movie by the return of Michael Keaton as Batman? To be fair, Keaton does that to everybody.

Pixar storms back into theaters with Elemental, a parable about earth, wind, fire, and water. Ember (Leah Lewis) is a no-nonsense fire elemental who falls in love with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a “go-with-the-flow” water elemental. Can the two opposites make it work? Are little steam babies on the horizon? The Good Dinosaur’s Peter Sohn directs, and listen for a voice cameo from Adult Swim’s calmest Yooper Joe Pera. 

If you’ve watched a lot of horror movies, you know that the Black guy usually dies first. With The Blackening, director Tim Scott asks, what if it’s ALL Black people trapped in a cabin in the woods? Checkmate, knife-weilding maniac! Not so fast, says the killer, who attempts to rank his prey by degrees of Blackness, so he’ll know where to start. The Prisoner’s Dilemma meets Get Out in this horror parody. 

Indie Memphis presents Looking for Langston on Wednesday, June 21st at Studio on the Square. Video artist Issac Julien made this experimental feature in 1989, which uses a surrealist vision of Harlem as a backdrop for readings from Langston Hughes. Tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.

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Ten Things About Ten Years Of Marvel Movies

The Paradiso is filling the traditional late summer movie doldrums with some repertory at the IMAX. For the last week it has been the spectacular presentation of 2001: A Space Odyssey providing an unparalleled cinema experience. This week, Marvel Studios is celebrating their 10th anniversary with an IMAX marathon. In the Marvel spirit of giving people what they want, here are 10 highlights from the 20 Marvel movies, arranged in the form of a numbered list to give it that little bit of extra narrative tension. Everybody loves lists, right? Let’s do this.

10. The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Marvel

Back in the lean comic years of the 1980s, a struggling Marvel sold the film right to some of its creations. Marvel’s A-list superheroes, The X-Men, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four wound up with Fox or with the Sony corporate hegemony, where films of varying quality were made in the early 2000s that whetted the appetite for comic book films. When producer Kevin Feige took over in 2007, just as the studio’s business model was changing from licensing its intellectual property to making their own films, Marvel was forced away from their flagship heroes to mine deeper into comic history. This proved incredibly freeing, and opened up new opportunities. Guardians of the Galaxy (Saturday 3:40 p.m.), for example, was one of the most fun blockbusters of the past decade, even though it comes from one of the more obscure corners of the Marvel comics library.

9. Marvel’s Biggest Failure

Of the 20 films Marvel screening this Labor Day weekend, exactly one, Ant-Man and The Wasp (Monday, 10 PM) has a titular female lead. And Evangeline Lilly as The Wasp gets second billing to the worst lead actor in the entire Marvel universe, Paul Rudd. Black Widow, portrayed iconically by Scarlett Johansson, is arguably the most interesting Avenger. If Marvel had wised up and given her a solo movie five years ago, they could have stolen DC’s Wonder Woman thunder, and we could have possibly avoided the Ghost In The Shell debacle.

8. The Most Comic-Book-y Comic Book Movie

I’m going to offer the hot take that Christopher Nolan has been bad for the superhero genre. He successfully brought gritty realism to comic book movies, but in the process he sacrificed the comic book form’s biggest strength: outlandish visuals. Marvel films, especially the later ones, have embraced the possibilities of CGI. None have veered farther from photorealism than 2016’s Doctor Strange. Director Scott Derrickson channels the Sorcerer Supreme’s creator Stephen Ditko with wave after wave of psychedelic freak outs — while also lifting some licks from Nolan’s Inception for good measure.

7. You Need A Good Villain

You know why Batman is everybody’s favorite superhero? Because he’s got the best villains. Superhero films live and die by the charisma of the bad guy, and the plausibility of their plan. The best recent example was Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man Homecoming (Sunday, 9:50 p.m.). The sotto voce threats he delivers to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man while Peter Parker is trying to bone his alter ego Adrian Tooms’ daughter Liz on homecoming night may be the single best acted scene in any Marvel movie.

6. The Guardians’ Secret Weapon

Who is the heart of the Guardians of the Galaxy sub-franchise? If you said ubiquitous hot guy Chris Pratt’s Star Lord, you’re mistaken. The correct answer is Karen Gillian as Nebula. Gillian has been low-key walking away with every movie and TV show she’s been in for the better part of a decade. She propped up Matt Smith’s mediocre Doctor Who for three years as Amy Pond, one of the best companions in the show’s 50-year history. Just last year she stole the Jumanji reboot out from under The Rock. Nebula, tortured and twisted and intensely physical, plays nemesis to her sister Gamora, and the scenes between Gillian and Zoe Saldana always crackle with emotion. When she reluctantly teams up with them, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (Sunday, 7 p.m.) her pouty sarcasm fits right in with the rest of the crew. In real life, Gillian just wrote and directed her first feature film, The Party’s Just Beginning.

5. The Third Act

The “Marvel Third Act” has become a shorthand for a big ending where our colorful heroes fight a horde of grey, identical monsters, with lots of attendant property damage, but no consequences for the heroes. It was perhaps best executed in 2012 by Joss Whedon in The Avengers (Friday, 3:40 p.m.), but its unimaginative imitators have been a plague on the multiplex ever since. Interestingly, Whedon commented on the Marvel Third Act in Avengers: Age Of Ultron (Saturday, 7 p.m.), when the destructive aftermath of the Battle of Sokovia would haunt the heroes.

4. Smaller Is Better

One of the problems with writing stories about superheroes is that they’re larger than life. That means the stakes must always be growing larger to give the overpowered protagonists a decent challenge. But after the fifth time you’ve seen someone save the world, you think maybe it isn’t that hard. The best Marvel stories turn out to the ones where the stakes are smaller, and the heroes alone. Ant-Man (Saturday, 9:55 p.m.) excels despite its flat lead because the conflict is almost beside the point. The real fun is the giddy special effects sequences that are like a jazzed-up version of The Incredible Shrinking Man.

3. The Evolving Hero

The creeping Batmanization of the world compels every lead character to be dark, tortured, and brooding. Only manly men who experience no pleasure in their lives can aspire to the title of hero. Marvel has resisted this, and their bread and butter has become redefining what a hero can be. In Captain America: Civil War (Saturday, 1 p.m.), Vision, played by Paul Bettany, wears a sensible sweater/oxford combo and cooks breakfast for his superpowered girlfriend Wanda Maximoff (Elisabeth Olsen). Then, in Avengers: Infinity War (Monday, 7 p.m.), he offers to sacrifice himself to save half the universe.

2. Killmonger Was Right

Why was Black Panther (Monday 3:40 p.m.) so good? The number one reason is that director Ryan Coogler did his homework and delivered a perfectly constructed action movie. Each scene builds on the last and leads to the next. And most importantly, both the hero Black Panther (the unbelievably charismatic Chadwick Boseman) and the villain Killmonger (the unbelievably charismatic Michael B. Jordan) have believable motivations and coherent cases to make for their sides. T’Challa is the king and defender of the status quo in Wakanda. They have been kept safe by their advanced technology for hundreds of years. But Killmonger rightly points out that while Wakanda has stayed safe, they have allowed the colonization and genocide of Africans outside their borders. Killmonger wants to use the power of Wakanda to rectify that situation and colonize the white world right back. Black Panther defeats Killmonger, but T’Challa is moved by his vision and opens Wakanda up to the world, hoping to make it a more just place. It’s a rare bit of moral complexity in a genre that is pretty much defined by its black and white ethical structure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger

Coming in at number one on our countdown that is in no way an actual countdown is Captain America: The First Avenger (Friday 1 p.m.). Director Joe Johnson hits the superhero sweet spot with this Nazi-punching triumph. Johnson’s influence looms large over the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He is a special effects innovator whose debut film Honey I Shrunk The Kids, was basically a look book for Ant-Man. His 1990 film The Rocketeer, about a man who finds a super flight suit and battles Nazis in the 1930s, was a box office failure at the time, but provided a template for The First Avenger. Chris Evans, who had previously played The Human Torch in Sony’s failed Fantastic Four adaptation, gives a performance on par with Christopher Reeve’s Superman as the once-scrawny kid from Brooklyn who would become the moral center of the Avengers. The overriding theme of all of the Marvel movies is Stan Lee’s maxim “With great power comes great responsibility,” and no one sets a better example than Captain America. 

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Spider-Man: Homecoming

In the flurry of desperate corporate maneuvering in the wake of the 2014 North Korean cyber attack on Sony Pictures in retaliation for The Interview, the most significant move may be the return of the Spider-Man film franchise to Marvel control. Spider-Man is the crown jewel of the Marvel superhero stable, which is why the film rights were sold for big money back in 1985, way before the comic book company was mining its rich vein of intellectual property with Disney. Eventually, Sony ended up with the property, and, after the success of Brian Singer’s 2000 X-Men movie, the studio did three Spider-Man movies with director Sam Raimi starring Tobey Maguire as the webslinger. Raimi’s first two films are among the best blockbusters of the century, and, personally, I like the third one, even though that’s a minority opinion. Then the studio rebooted the franchise with The Amazing Spider-Man starring Andrew Garfield. While Garfield matured into a good actor, the two Spider-Man movies he starred in were clumsy and charmless.

Sony was reportedly planning on creating a Spider-Man series to compete with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but after Kim Jong Il’s minions splashed the confidential contents of their servers all over the web, they needed to raise money in a hurry and preemptively surrendered to the Marvel juggernaut. It turned out to be the best decision Sony has made in a long time.

Spider-Man defines the Marvel approach to superheroes. He’s not a superhuman paragon of virtue like Superman. He’s young, flawed, often scared, and while his heart is always in the right place, his judgment is not always the best. Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige cast Tom Holland as Peter Parker and fed him through the Marvel Cinematic Universe assembly line with relative newcomer Jon Watts at the helm. In a Hollywood that is exhibit A for bad decision-making processes, Marvel got everything right this time.

What’s most appealing about Holland’s Spider-Man is that we get to ride along while he discovers his powers. But this is not an origin story; we don’t have to see poor Uncle Ben die again. Tony Stark recruited Parker for Civil War, and created a high-tech Spidey suit, partially as payment and partially as initiation into the Avengers clan of super-beings. But Parker’s still in high school, so he’s just as invested in his Academic Decathalon team and the homecoming dance as he is in what he calls “my Tony Stark internship.” Spider-Man may be on the A-list in the real world, but in the Marvel universe, he’s C-list at best.

Michael Keaton as Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming

Wisely, the villain of Homecoming is also a C-lister trying to increase his Q rating. In a bit of genius casting that was, in retrospect, blindingly obvious, Michael Keaton, formerly known as Batman and Birdman, plays the villain Vulture. The character is a scrap metal dealer who used the broken bits of alien technology littered around New York after the Avengers saved the city from the Chitauri invasion to build himself a flying super suit. Keaton deftly straddles the line between the realistic and fantastic with a riveting performance. The confrontation between Keaton and Holland prior to the big finish is the best single scene in the entire Marvel movie canon. The world is not in peril in Spider-Man: Homecoming, and it’s all the better for it. Instead of a city-destroying battle between the forces of good and evil, it’s just novice hero vs. novice villain. The human-sized stakes make it more exciting, and it’s considerably easier to follow the action with fewer moving parts. You don’t come out of the film feeling like you’ve been beaten over the head for the last half hour.

Another vital element done right is the strong supporting cast. Marisa Tomei represents a radical new version of Aunt May, which totally works. Jacob Batalon is excellent as Parker’s best friend Ned, and Disney teen star Zendaya is sharp as smartass classmate Michelle. Comedian Hannibal Buress is pitch perfect as Parker and Ned’s distracted gym coach. Unsurprisingly, Homecoming only falls down when it’s trying to connect with the bigger Marvel universe. Robert Downey Jr. is his usual snarky self as Tony Stark, but an extended subplot with Iron Man director Jon Favreau playing Stark’s henchman Happy Hogan periodically grinds the momentum to a halt. But that’s not enough to derail Spider-Man: Homecoming’s fun.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

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The Year in Film 2015

It’s fashionable to complain about how bad Hollywood movies have become. But from the perspective of a critic who has to watch it all go down, it’s simply not the case. At any given time in 2015, there was at least one good film in theaters in Memphis—it just may not have been the most heavily promoted one. So here’s my list of awards for a crowded, eventful year.

Worst Picture: Pixels

I watched a lot of crap this year, like the incoherent Terminator Genysis, the sociopathic San Andreas, the vomitous fanwank Furious 7, and the misbegotten Secret in Their Eyes. But those movies were just bad. Pixels not only sucked, it was mean-spirited, toxic, and ugly. Adam Sandler, it’s been a good run, but it’s time to retire.

Actually, I take that back. It hasn’t been a good run.

Most Divisive: Inherent Vice

Technically a 2014 release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s ode to the lost world of California hippiedom didn’t play in Memphis until January. Its long takes and dense dialogue spun a powerful spell. But it wasn’t for everyone. Many people responded with either a “WTF?” or a visceral hatred. Such strongly split opinions are usually a sign of artistic success; you either loved it or hated it, but you won’t forget it.

Best Performances: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, Room

Room is an inventive, harrowing, and beautiful work on every level, but the film’s most extraordinary element is the chemistry between Brie Larson and 9-year-old Jacob Tremblay, who play a mother and son held hostage by a sexual abuser. Larson’s been good in Short Term 12 and Trainwreck, but this is her real breakthrough performance. As for Tremblay, here’s hoping we’ve just gotten a taste of things to come.

Chewbacca

Best Performance By A Nonhuman: Chewbacca

Star Wars: The Force Awakens returned the Mother of All Franchises to cultural prominence after years in the prequel wilderness. Newcomers like Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver joined the returned cast of the Orig Trig Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in turning in good performances. Lawrence Kasdan’s script gave Chewbacca a lot more to do, and Peter Mayhew rose to the occasion with a surprisingly expressive performance. Let the Wookiee win.

Best Memphis Movie: The Keepers

Joann Self Selvidge and Sara Kaye Larson’s film about the people who keep the Memphis Zoo running ran away with Indie Memphis this year, selling out multiple shows and winning Best Hometowner Feature. Four years in the making, it’s a rarity in 21st century film: a patient verité portrait whose only agenda is compassion and wonder.

Best Conversation Starter: But for the Grace

In 2001, Memphis welcomed Sudanese refugee Emmanuel A. Amido. This year, he rewarded our hospitality with But for the Grace. The thoughtful film is a frank examination of race relations in America seen through the lens of religion. The Indie Memphis Audience Award winner sparked an intense Q&A session after its premiere screening that followed the filmmaker out into the lobby. It’s a timely reminder of the power of film to illuminate social change.

Best Comedy: What We Do in the Shadows

What happens when a group of vampire roommates stop being polite and start getting real? Flight of the Conchords‘ Jemaine Clement and Eagle vs Shark‘s Taika Waititi codirected this deadpan masterpiece that applied the This Is Spinal Tap formula to the Twilight set. Their stellar cast’s enthusiasm and commitment to the gags made for the most biting comedy of the year.

Best Animation: Inside Out

The strongest Pixar film since Wall-E had heavy competition in the form of the Irish lullaby Song of the Sea, but ultimately, Inside Out was the year’s emotional favorite. It wasn’t just the combination of voice talent Amy Poehler, Bill Hader, Lewis Black, Mindy Kaling, and Phyllis Smith with the outstanding character design of Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness that made director Pete Docter’s film crackle, it was the way the entire carefully crafted package came together to deliver a message of acceptance and understanding for kids and adults who are wrestling with their feelings in a hard and changing world.

It Follows

Best Horror: It Follows

The best horror films are the ones that do a lot with a little, and It Follows is a sterling example of the breed. Director David Robert Mitchell’s second feature is a model of economy that sets up its simple premise with a single opening shot that tracks a desperate young woman running from an invisible tormentor. But there’s no escaping from the past here, only delaying the inevitable by spreading the curse of sex and death.

Teenage Dreams: Dope and The Diary of a Teenage Girl

2015 saw a pair of excellent coming-of-age films. Dope, written and directed by Rick Famuyiwa, introduced actor Shameik Moore as Malcolm, a hapless nerd who learns to stand up for himself in the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Inglewood, California. Somewhere between Risky Business and Do the Right Thing, it brought the teen comedy into the multicultural moment.

Similarly, Marielle Heller’s graphic novel adaptation The Diary of a Teenage Girl introduced British actress Bel Powley to American audiences, and took a completely different course than Dope. It’s a frank, sometimes painful exploration of teenage sexual awakening that cuts the harrowing plot with moments of magical realist reverie provided by a beautiful mix of animation and live action.

Immortal Music: Straight Outta Compton and Love & Mercy

The two best musical biopics of the year couldn’t have been more different. Straight Outta Compton was director F. Gary Gray’s straightforward story of N.W.A., depending on the performances of Jason Mitchell as Eazy-E, Corey Hawkins as Dr. Dre, and O’Shea Jackson Jr. playing his own father, Ice Cube, for its explosive impact. That it was a huge hit with audiences proved that this was the epic hip-hop movie the nation has been waiting for.

Director Bill Pohlad’s dreamlike Love & Mercy, on the other hand, used innovative structure and intricate sound design to tell the story of Brian Wilson’s rise to greatness and subsequent fall into insanity. In a better world, Paul Dano and John Cusack would share a Best Actor nomination for their tag-team portrayal of the Beach Boys resident genius.

Sicario

Best Cinematography: Sicario

From Benicio del Toro’s chilling stare to the twisty, timely screenplay, everything about director Denis Villeneuve’s drug-war epic crackles with life. But it’s Roger Deakins’ transcendent cinematography that cements its greatness. Deakins paints the bleak landscapes of the Southwest with subtle variations of color, and films an entire sequence in infrared with more beauty than most shooters can manage in visible light. If you want to see a master at the top of his game, look no further.

He’s Still Got It: Bridge of Spies

While marvelling about Bridge of Spies‘ performances, composition, and general artistic unity, I said “Why can’t all films be this well put together?”

To which the Flyer‘s Chris Davis replied, “Are you really asking why all directors can’t be as good as Steven Spielberg?”

Well, yeah, I am.

Hot Topic: Journalism

Journalism was the subject of four films this year, two good and two not so much. True Story saw Jonah Hill and James Franco get serious, but it was a dud. Truth told the story of Dan Rather and Mary Mapes’ fall from the top-of-the-TV-news tower, but its commitment to truth was questionable. The End of the Tour was a compelling portrait of the late author David Foster Wallace through the eyes of a scribe assigned to profile him. But the best of the bunch was Spotlight, the story of how the Boston Catholic pedophile priest scandal was uncovered, starring Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo. There’s a good chance you’ll be seeing Spotlight all over the Oscars this year.

Had To Be There: The Walk

Robert Zemeckis’ film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Philippe Petit, the Frenchman who tightrope-walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, was a hot mess. But the extended sequence of the feat itself was among the best uses of 3-D I’ve ever seen. The film flopped, and its real power simply won’t translate to home video, no matter how big your screen is, but on the big screen at the Paradiso, it was a stunning experience.

MVP: Samuel L. Jackson

First, he came back from the grave as Nick Fury to anchor Joss Whedon’s underrated Avengers: Age of Ultron. Then he channeled Rufus Thomas to provide a one-man Greek chorus for Spike Lee’s wild musical polemic Chi-Raq. He rounds out the year with a powerhouse performance in Quentin Tarantino’s widescreen western The Hateful Eight. Is it too late for him to run for president?

Best Documentary: Best of Enemies

Memphis writer/director Robert Gordon teamed up with Twenty Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to create this intellectual epic. With masterful editing of copious archival footage, they make a compelling case that the 1968 televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal laid out the political battleground for the next 40 years and changed television news forever. In a year full of good documentaries, none were more well-executed or important than this historic tour de force.

Best Picture: Mad Max: Fury Road

From the time the first trailers hit, it was obvious that 2015 would belong to one film. I’m not talking about The Force Awakens. I’m talking about Mad Max: Fury Road. Rarely has a single film rocked the body while engaging the mind like George Miller’s supreme symphony of crashing cars and heavy metal guitars. Charlize Theron’s performance as Imperator Furiosa will go down in history next to Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven and Sigourney Weaver in Alien as one of the greatest action turns of all time. The scene where she meets Max, played by Tom Hardy, may be the single best fight scene in cinema history. Miller worked on this film for 17 years, and it shows in every lovingly detailed frame. Destined to be studied for decades, Fury Road rides immortal, shiny, and chrome.

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Spotlight

2015 has been a big year for movies about journalism. We’ve had a journalist try to get inside the mind of novelist David Foster Wallace in The End Of The Tour, a journalist get snookered by a manipulative psychopath in True Story, and superstar journalists fall for black propaganda in Truth. Director Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight is the best of the batch.

The Boston Globe‘s Spotlight team consisted of four investigative reporters: Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton), Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James), Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), and Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams). We first meet the team in 2001, as new editor Martin Baron (Liev Schreiber) takes over at the paper. Baron pushes the team of reporters, whose specialty is in-depth, long-form stories, to look into the long-simmering reports of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy in the Boston area. As Ben Bradlee Jr. (John Slattery) says, Baron is from out of town and Jewish and so has no preconceived notions about the church’s oversized role in Boston civic affairs. But once he gets Robinson and his team rolling, they methodically uncover a much bigger story than they set out to write: thousands of children, both boys and girls, who had been molested by Catholic priests all over the world, and the church’s sophisticated and pervasive efforts to bury the story and pressure the kids and their parents into lowball settlements and nondisclosure agreements.

Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, and Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight

Journalists used to be common heroes of films. Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, is a newspaper man, for example. But after hitting its peak in the 1970s with All The President’s Men, the stereotype of the crusading journalist slowly soured onscreen into the rumor-grubbing, ethically challenged hack. Spotlight is very much in the tradition of All The President’s Men, using the tricks of the police procedural to dramatize the often tedious job of the investigative reporter. Like a good episode of Law and Order, it’s the bit parts that make it work, such as Neal Huff as the manic advocate Phil Saviano. Michael Cyril Creighton is especially good as recovering victim Joe Crowley, who sums up the awful effect the predatory pedophiles had on the children’s long-term mental health: “It was the first time in my life anyone had told me it was OK to be gay. And it was a priest.”

Keaton, Ruffalo, and McAdams are all extremely good as the core of the reporting team, but the entire ensemble is strong, especially Schreiber, whose low-key portrayal of the editor Baron keeps you guessing right up until the story is published. McCarthy, who co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, manages to tell a dense story with a triple-digit cast of characters while maintaining tension and keeping the pace lively. There are a few missteps, like a late Christmas montage set to a children’s choir singing “Silent Night,” but the overall effect is tight and occasionally moving. For journalists and people who care about democracy and the value of open society, Spotlight is a master class on how things should be done.

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Horrortober: Beetlejuice (1988)

Micheal Keaton rules as Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it almost was, according to IMB: 

The original script was a horror film, and featured Beetlejuice as a winged, reptilian demon who transformed into a small Middle Eastern man to interact with the Maitlands and the Deetzes. Lydia was a minor character, with her six year old sister Cathy being the Deetz child able to see the Maitlands. Beetlejuice’s goal was to kill the Deetzs, rather than frighten them away, and included sequences where he mauled Cathy in the form of a rabid squirrel and tried to rape Lydia. Subsequent script rewrites turned the film into a comedy and toned down Beetlejuice’s character into the ghost of a wise cracking con-artist rather than a demon.

Perhaps a route to pursue for the sequel? 

And while Beetlejuice is most certainly a comedy, and arguably director Tim Burton’s best film, it is filled with plenty of true-life scares: goth teen poetry, modern furniture, bad art, spackled paint, polyester suits, small closets, living in Connecticut, etc.

The plot: the Barbara and Adam Maitland live an ideal life out in a quaint country home and then they die. The Deetzes, straight from New York, move in and disturb the peace, so the Maitlands call a bioexorcist, Beetlejuice, to spook the family out. 

Beetlejuice is a lesson in economy; every second bounces along for its compact 90 minutes with many great moments, such as the Netherworld waiting room scene and Calypso-spiked dinner party.  

Winona Ryder, with to-die-for bangs, as Lydia

The cast is sharp as well: young Winona Ryder (with to-die-for spiky bangs) as Lydia Deetz and Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara as her clueless and pretentious parents; Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin as the Maitlands (Baldwin at his most personable and harmless); plus Dick Cavett and Robert Goulet! But the film belongs to Michael Keaton as the title character, a centuries-spanning creep who put the ouch in louche. 

If you haven’t seen Beetlejuice, stop what you’re doing and watch it now. It’s that good. And, if you’re wondering what a comedy is doing in a series about horror films, get into the spirit of the season. We have Beetlejuice, after all, for all those great Halloween costume ideas. 

Horrortober: Beetlejuice (1988)

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Birdman or, The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance

Every once in a while, a film comes along that starkly divides critics and audiences. I usually take this as a sign that an artist has taken a chance and created something new. That is the case with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, a sprawling, thrilling film that, for better and worse, is one of the most fully realized personal visions to hit screens in years.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor famous for playing a superhero named Birdman in the 1990s, but who fell into relative obscurity after leaving the role following three highly successful Hollywood blockbusters. Now, he is attempting a comeback by staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. But the pressure of writing, directing, and producing the play with his own money is driving him slowly insane as opening night approaches. He starts to believe he has telekinetic powers that only manifest themselves when others aren’t around. And maybe he does — Birdman is not the kind of movie that gives you simple answers to the questions it poses.

The mixture of reality and fantasy extends past the screen, as there is no escaping the comparisons between Keaton, who went into semi-retirement on his ranch in Montana after capping a brilliant career in the 1980s with two Batman movies for director Tim Burton. I don’t know if Keaton, who is riveting in the film’s make-or-break role, thinks he can move things with his mind in real life, but I’m pretty sure Iñárritu does. The technical challenges he called on his cast and crew to overcome in this film rival the most complex in history. He and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who won an Oscar last year for his work on Gravity, take a page from Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook and stage the entire film as one continuous shot. Hitchcock did it in 1948’s Rope, which takes place almost entirely in one New York apartment. Similarly, all of Birdman happens in and around the historic St. James Theatre in Times Square, but digital technology has given Lubezki much more freedom of movement than Hitch enjoyed. The camera functions almost as another character in the film, swooping through corridors and spying on the players as they struggle through a parade of theatrical disasters.

and Michael Keaton in Birdman

A host of excellent actors revolve around Keaton, delivering uniformly awesome performances. Most surprising is comedian Zach Galifanakis as Jake, Thomson’s long suffering manager. Edward Norton turns in a wry, self-depreciating turn as Mike, a hotshot actor who is called in at the last minute to replace a crappy thespian whom Thomson may or may not have tried to kill with his telekinesis. Emma Stone is excellent as Sam, Thomson’s resentful, just-out-of-rehab daughter who is struggling to stay straight as she chafes at even the low level of control her father tries to impose on her.

Birdman works as a Noises Off-style backstage comedy, but it is just as much an essay on what the creative process looks like from the inside. Iñárritu tells as clear a story as he ever has in his career, but it’s clear that plot is a secondary consideration for the director. He enthusiastically pours ideas big and small onto the screen and doesn’t seem particularly concerned if all of them register with the audience or not. By making the bad guy Lindsay Duncan’s Tabitha, a snarling New York Times theater critic who promises to savage the play out of spite before she has even seen it, he is all but daring folks like me to criticize him. Several have taken him up on the dare, and now it’s my turn:

Can it with the false endings, Iñárritu. I counted three places where Birdman could have ended on a more satisfying note without sacrificing any of the power or themes that you spent so much time and energy conjuring. C’mon, Poltergeist was 30 years ago. Popular screenwriting books have made false endings fashionable again, but they have become a crutch that filmmakers lean on to avoid making the hardest choices. Pick an ending and go with it.

Wow. That felt refreshingly honest. Just like Birdman!

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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.