Zoe Kravitz – Memphis Flyer

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.

Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity is a story of obsession turned toxic. But it’s not just Rob Fleming’s obsession with discovering why all of his relationships have failed that’s toxic, it’s his relationship with music that’s unhealthy, too. Rob is the 30-something owner of Championship Vinyl, a record store in London, who famously asked, “Do I listen to sad music because I’m miserable or am I miserable because I listen to sad music?” Why not both?

The novel, which was a huge bestseller in England, is something of a founding document of the 1990s-2000s indie rock movement. Rob and his record store cohorts Dick and Berry are the quintessential Record Store Guys. They’ve weaponized their passions and aren’t afraid to tell you about it. The Top Five lists they competitively compile are a) a jumping off point for people looking to expand their musical tastes and b) a way to push away and put down the unhip.

Zoë Kravitz (left) and David H. Holmes in Championship Vinyl

High Fidelity got a classic movie adaptation by director Stephen Frears in 2000 starring John Cusack, in one of his best roles, as Rob. Jack Black, in his original breakout role, was Barry, the hyperactive music enthusiast who starts his own band (the exquisitely named Sonic Death Monkeys) and moves from professional consumer to semi-pro producer. Rob eventually follows a similar arc, starting a record label of his own to help break a promising young band. But Rob’s story is complicated by his on-again, off-again relationship with Laura, his more responsible better half. Yes, Rob grows, but like Prince in Purple Rain, he advances from “self-absorbed jerk” to “slightly less self-absorbed jerk.”

I’ll have to admit, when I heard that Hulu had adapted High Fidelity into a gender-swapped limited series, I thought, this is either going to kill or crash. First of all, record store (or should I say, music snob) culture ain’t what it used to be. Building the perfect mixtape from your hoard of vinyl records, cassette tapes, and CDs, which so obsessed Rob, has been replaced by assembling the perfect playlist in your streaming music service. Second, I always thought of Rob’s almost pathological fear of commitment as a particularly male trait. I’m certainly not reflexively against gender-swapped remakes (that wasn’t the 2016 Ghostbusters‘ biggest problem), but I wasn’t sure how this one was going to work.

The best decision the producers of the new High Fidelity made was casting Zoë Kravitz as Rob (short for Robyn). Kravitz, whose mother Lisa Bonet was one of John Cusack’s failed relationships in the 2000 film, manages to sell the parts of Rob’s personality that wouldn’t necessarily hold together on the page. She sometimes seems to be asking herself, “How would Natasha Lyonne play this scene?” (Lyonne actually directs episode 6, “Weird But Warm.”) Kravitz is, in real life, exceptionally beautiful. To play the unlucky-in-love Rob, she doesn’t ugly it up in the conventional way. Instead, she signals her lack of confidence with slouchy body language, and her over-it-all hipness with dismissing puffs of cigarette smoke.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Holmes, Kravitz

The supporting cast is vital for this story, and here too, the series delivers. David H. Holmes as Simon replaces the film’s Todd Louisio as Dick, the most mild-mannered member of the Championship Vinyl team. Simon is the character who benefits the most from the expanded format. The story of how he moves on from being one of Rob’s unfortunate boyfriends to coming to terms with his homosexuality is believable, funny, and a little poignant. Of course, since he’s an employee of Championship Vinyl, his first relationship with a guy is a slow-rolling catastrophe.

The Jack Black slot is taken by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who was so good as Lady Reed in Craig Brewer’s Dolemite Is My Name. Randolph plays Cherise, a person who, like Black, uses their bluster and cutting humor as both a shield and a bludgeon. This version of High Fidelity underutilizes both the character and Randolph’s charisma, but there are hints that she would play a bigger part if there’s a second season.

Stretching the story out has the paradoxical effect of minimizing the novel’s major storyline: Rob’s exceedingly ill-advised quest to track down all five of her major exes and ask them what went wrong. Instead, there’s much greater emphasis on Rob’s near-miss relationship with Mac (the regal-looking Kingsley Ben-Adir) and her dalliance with the normie Clyde (Jake Lacy), which blossoms despite her best efforts to self-sabotage. High Fidelity doesn’t just survive the transition from indie snobbery to poptimism, it unexpectedly thrives.

High Fidelity: Indie Rock Classic Gains New Life on the Small Screen