"Accomplishments"
In theaters: It's amazing how my apathy there was for The Batman in my particular nerd circle until it came out and started making converts. I get it, no comic book fan (of a certain age) wants ANOTHER dark and gloomy Batman. But let's look at what's on the same nerds' wish list that the movie DID give us... 1) A Batman movie that actually focuses on Batman and not the villain(s) du jour (too often, Batman is a cipher to allow name-brand actors to chew the scenery, but Batman has an actual arc in this one). 2) Batman as detective (the movie is cousin to something like Se7en or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). 3) A Batman who is more than a monster to the underworld and can actually be a force for good in Gotham (in other words, they sell you a dark Batman tale, but turn it into something else by the end). 4) A Batman who refuses to kill. 5) For nerds tired of the "Bat God", a Batman who gets hurt, gets outplayed, is on the back foot a lot of the time, is GROUNDED in some kind of reality (this is where I think The Batman beats The Dark Knight - long held as the gold standard and with a similar villain playing mind games - because TDK has that unfortunate third act with the clunky Daredevil vision, oh, and Batman in a tank, that's no Batmobile). That's five ways the movie is closer to the comics ideal (I do say ideal because Nolan and Snyder's dark Batman has infected DC Comics for too long a time). I'll throw in a 6th item from the wish list: NO RETELLING OF THE ORIGIN (and yet, it looms large) and Batman already active for a couple years. In terms of the Riddler, some might be put off by him being a demented torture porn artist, but they movie understands the core of the character - that he must challenge Batman intellectually - and connected to real-world conspiracy nuts and other dangerous elements (it's almost too close for comfort). I don't quite get the point of hiring Colin Farrell as the Penguin if he's gonna be this unrecognizable, but between him, Catwoman and Falcone, we have a Gotham that doesn't require origin stories. It also looks damn good, dark but not impenetrable, with great uses of light and shadow. I liked the music, though Batman's theme sounds too much like the Imperial March minus one note. Well, maybe that was on purpose. I might quibble with the anti-stealth costume, but this is a Batman who trades a heck of a lot on intimidation skills (the Batmobile as Christine!), so it works for the character. And that almost 3-hour run time? I personally didn't feel it. So while I won't pretend it's the most fun (or require it be anyone's favorite), it might just be the best Batman film ever made.
At home: Historically speaking, 1943's movie serial "The Batman" introduces some important elements to the lore, which were only then picked up by the comics. The "Bat's Cave" and skinny (helpful) Alfred both start here, and one could make the case that the seeds of Matches Malone are sown in Bruce's "street disguise" of Chuck White. (Batman branding crooks with a little bat sticker would only be taken up by the Snyderverse in more violent fashion, because of course it would.) So it's really too bad that the serial is so racist. I get replacing the planned-for Joker with a Japanese super-scientist and saboteur - it was 1943. But of course that character has to be played by a white actor doing a Mickey Rooney accent, and the narrator himself throws out racial slurs and commends a "wise government" for its internment camps policy. They even take a random swipe at Native Americans. Otherwise, it's a fair entertainment of this type. The big comic book stunts are rather front-loaded, with a lot of repetitive fisticuffs in the middle chapters, but they ARE there. Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft as Batman and Robin are reasonable square matinée heroes, even if the foppishness Wilson gives Bruce Wayne's public persona sometimes bleeds into the Bat. But then, this is a very human Batman who, to fulfill the needs of the format, is consistently chumped by henchmen and has to have his bacon saved by Robin, or sometimes blind luck. So it may just be a better Robin movie. A dangerous drinking game involves taking a shot every time the crooks insist they've killed Batman this time. We can only imagine what the serial would have been like with the Joker in there (I mean, why else put the villain's lair in a fun house? - though for the purposes of this, it's an anti-Japanese propaganda ride), but he would probably have met the Batman earlier and not stayed a shadowy master like Dr. Daka does. I think it'd be fair to say it would have made the serial better on all counts.
By 1949, Batman's iconography was well established, so the Batman and Robin serial made use of Commissioner Gordon (played by Plan 9 from Outer Space's Lyle Talbot), Vicki Vale, a more serious Alfred, the Bat-signal, and a more on-brand Batcave. No Batmobile though, and characters even notice Batman is driving Bruce Wayne's car... I dunno, a bat decal maybe? But it wouldn't help. Except for the less racist villain, it's exactly the same serial as the 1943 original, except cheaper and more boring. A shadowy villain, the Wizard (but nothing to do with the JSA foe) has his stupid henchmen try to get fuel for his mad science (in 1943 it was radium to work a death ray, in 1949, diamonds to work a remote control for all vehicles - it makes less and less sense as we go), including a family member of the love interest. Batman and Robin get into his lair at the end, with the only twist being that the Wizard's identity is kept a mystery with several red herrings throughout. It's longer and more padded (an awful lot of driving, flying and submarining around the same locations), and the stunts are much duller, never achieving any kind of comic book flavor. The acting is often wooden, with Robert Lowery's pretty ordinary Batman and Johnny Duncan's absolutely wooden Robin. Duncan alone is enough to make me pan the serial as he's neither youthful nor enthusiastic, his only Robin-like characteristic the fact that he's shorter than the leading man. He just looks like a hard-nosed stuntman to me. Even the costumes look worse in this one, but then the wardrobe generally feels ill-fitting even when it's just guys in suits. Is there something about the title "Batman and Robin" that predicates it should be terrible?
I've never been able to get past the first hour of 1997's Batman & Robin, until forcing myself to this week. It's just that everything looks like a plastic playset and I can't even begin to care about a story that looks and feels like about a dozen sketches spoofing comics. Or what the author - in this case, Joel Schumacher - THINKS comics are like, just color and dumb plots and bombastic language. But this hasn't anything to do with comics of any era, much less the late 90s, which extends to off-model villains like Mr. Freeze (whose loony-tunes persona clashes with his tragic backstory) and Bane (the mastermind who broke the Batman reduced to a grunting Frankenstein's Monster). I tried very hard to see it through a positive lens. Like, why are Batman '66 and Lego Batman acceptable, but this isn't? Well, for one thing, those films are FUNNY. This one comes off as if it's mocking its subject matter and so the joke falls flat. The disengaging sense of unreality extends to a wilful lack of understanding of how the real world works, whether we're talking about computers, diamonds, astronomy, physics, you name it. At odds with the pantomime is the subplot about Alfred's illness and it's just about the only good thing about the movie. Michael Gough has too much gravitas for this thing. Batman's impassioned plea for his life was the only true emotional moment, and Batgirl as Alfred's niece also strikes me as a better hero than the two leads (or less of a ham). Whatever weaknesses I found in Batman Forever, that's what Schumacher decided to double down on in B&R, and audiences quite correctly allowed it to kill the franchise.
Evidently ripping off Batman '66, Mexico's The Batwoman is more a mix of luchadore and beach movies, with the Creature from the Black Lagoon (Frankenstein remix) thrown in. And I'm there for it. Maura Monti is gorgeous as the Renaissance woman who spends half of her time fighting crime in a bikini and mask, dividing the other half between flirting with the boys and wrestling with the girls. In this adventure, she's up against a mad scientist who want to create a race of fish people. I'm not gonna pretend it's high art, but it IS fun. Though the action sequences tend to end on a limp note, the camera stays mobile and hides the cracks with visceral energy (that car chase, for example), and there's a lot of production value added by its Acapulco location and extensive underwater action. It's too bad it ends on such a stupid joke, so if I wanted to continue to respect Batwoman, I'd probably bail right after the Silver Age explanation.
When a superhero movie ignores its source material as much as Catwoman does, a thought that crosses your mind is whether it started life as a totally unrelated cat-powered character, but found itself attached to a better-known I.P. to get butts in seats. Not the case, however. Rather, Halle Berry's non-Selina Kyle Bast avatar owes its existence to several screw-ups during its stay in development hell, which might explain why Patience Phillips has an origin similar to Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman (it was meant as a Batman Returns spin-off), but not much else. It feels like an insult that this rare female-driven superhero movie (and somehow the highest-grossing until 2017's Wonder Woman, despite not even making its budget back) makes its star work on ad copy (a romcom staple) for an evil cosmetics company (Sharon Stone plays a villain who uses super-foundation to make herself superhuman!). MUST. BE. GIRLY! I'm not sure what's more embarrassing, Berry having to act like a cat, rubbing her face in catnip, etc., or that terrible S&M costume with a big helmet head. She looked cool in an earlier cat suit, but can't have her boyfriend recognize her haircut, I guess. The whole thing is shot like a music video, hiding the fact that Berry isn't doing her own action with obnoxiously frenetic editing, though usually, Catwoman's movements are covered by horrendous CG that made me yearn for Batman & Robin's inept wire work. So why IS it so off-model? I think Batman Begins was in the pipeline by this point and they wanted to put some distance between Nolan and Catwoman's Unspecified City.
Tsui Hark's Time and Tide is hard to get a handle on at first, one assumes because he cut a good hour out of Nicholas Tse's half of the story, but the story's not that complicated. It just moves quickly and rewards staying laser focused on the screen so as not to miss the details. Tse plays a cocky bartender who beds a patron who turns out to be a cop who becomes pregnant and doesn't want his help. He still tries to give it by doing bodyguard work and that puts him at odds with a new friend (Wu Bai), whose wife is also pregnant, but who has left his life as a cool-as-balls mercenary behind. Except the "Angels" arrive in Hong Kong and try to draw him back in, and it leads to violence. What director Tsui lacks in storytelling clarity, he makes up for in sheer energy, always experimenting with rough CG, freeze frames, crane shots, and more to keep the frame alive. Even if it were an incomprehensible hash (which I'd argue it isn't), it would still be worthwhile for the mid-film action sequence where the camera literally jumps out the window. After that, it feels like the movie is back on track and not suffering from excisions, as we move from action beat to action beat. Time and Tide is glossy and modern, very cool whatever else we think of it, and rather more literate than a lot of gunplay fare. At its core, it asks, can I change for the better? And that's a good question to ask oneself.
I'm not entirely familiar with Prince's Sign o’ the Times, but the filmed concert includes some older hits and already prefigures, I feel, the sound of the Batman original soundtrack. Prince easily moves from one musical style to the other, demonstrating his legendary mutability, and floods the stage with energy, sexual and otherwise. He also never neglects his band, giving everyone a showcase. It's not just about him, not at all. Most prominently, he's accompanied by drum goddess Sheila E. who has enormous screen presence and is having a lot of fun. The show's weak spot is Sheena Easton's guest appearance, where we cut from the stage performance to a lipsynced music video for "U Got the Look". It's jarring. More interesting is the use of music video characters in the stage show itself, providing a kind of loose narrative that give the songs context. I don't like it when stage shows reproduce the artist's videos, but this isn't that. I do find it odd that Prince ends the show on a devotional song given the content that came before (in particular the high sexual staging of certain numbers), but he's a musical chameleon throughout the show, so why not.
/1983: When I first saw Krull in theaters, I was 12 and was fascinated by it. Heck, I was fascinated with the trailer and that cool throwing star (calling it a glaive shows the writers know nothing about weaponry though). When I saw it on TV (admittedly with a dingy presentation) as an adult, I thought it was terrible. Watching it now, in context with other fantasy films of the era and in its proper format, I... kind of like it again. It's got big structural problems - there's a lot of assembling the crew (cod Lord of the Rings) and rarely is there an obstacle of note to Prince Colwyn's plans, so it's a little like watching a fantasy hero go to the mall - but the world-building isn't unpleasant. Star Wars riffs or not (and if you're doing that, a strong princess is a good one), mixing fantasy and space opera is an intriguing idea, and I grok those crazy organic sets. Among the cast assembled, the brigands are, in hindsight, a star-studded lot led by New Tricks' Alun Armstrong and including distinctive roles for Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltraine. I once thrilled to the effects, then bashed them publicly, but now I think they're uneven, sure, but mostly cool and interesting. Redeemed!
Also from that year: The Boxer's Omen, Fire and Ice
1984: If I had seen The NeverEnding Story as a kid, I would have been enthralled - that kid (Cocoon's Barret Oliver) is very relatable to young Siskoid (except skipping class, I would instead have a book open on my knee and keep glancing down). As an adult, I thought it was charming and it surprised me in a number of ways. The fantasy world, though imaginative and well-supported by animatronic creatures, is certainly in the mold of most fantasy films of the era, that's not it. But I thought for sure it was going to suck the kid into Fantasia and have him replace Atreyu (Noah Hathaway, Battlestar Galactica's Boxey). The way the "reader" is engaged is actually more clever and avoids a common trope of sword & sorcery novels (and of such fare as the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon), and the movie dares an additional meta-textual layer late in the game. It doesn't get away from the genre's picaresque elements, but it works surprisingly well given that the protagonist is on the outside looking in at a second protagonist. And fun theme song!
Also from that year: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Splash, Conan the Destroyer
1985: By all accounts, the theatrical cut of Ridley Scott's Legend is a trite mess, but I didn't fall head over heels for the Director's Cut either. Reading up on it, I agree with all of that cut's decisions, but it's not enough for me to care about this story, even if it cannot be argued that it looks terrific in comparison with other fantasy films of the era. Scott fills the screen with interest, whether vegetation, pollen, smoke, glitter, or movement, and there are no dodgy effects moments. In fact, the make-up effects are so good, the actors I wanted to see are impossible to recognize. How is the Lord of Darkness Tim Curry? Indeed why have Robert Picardo play a sea hag? What puts me at a distance, however, is the fairy tale psychology of the leads, which I understand intellectually, but am not particularly engaged by. Tom Cruise seems particularly awkward with the dialog as written, and I don't know if it's because of what became his screen persona, or if he and Mia Sara are just too "modern" to work in this context. The story shares many points with Krull, and is generally better from every perspective except one - fun. Nice to see the unicorn from Blade Runner again, though.
Also from that year: The Purple Rose of Cairo, Red Sonja, Teen Wolf, Return to Oz
1986: Though today's marketing prominently touts Chow Yun-Fat's participation in Golden Harvest's supernatural actioner, The Seventh Curse, he's barely in it. Rather, it stars Chin Siu-Ho as an action doctor who, a year before, was cursed by the evil high priest of Thailand's Worm Tribe and will die unless he does something about it. This thing's structure is unfortunately a mess, and Maggie Cheung, here in her "comic foil love interest" phase, plays an irritating would-be journalist with a knack for getting into trouble. Not that she's alone, as characters seem to routinely be captured even when they seemed to have the upper hand. So why watch it? The creature effects. I guarantee that though Alien(s) is evidently an inspiration for some of it, you'll see stuff you never have elsewhere. The demon baby, the skeleton warrior and the "alien" create a gory splash zone filled with bizarre visuals. Frankly, I wish it were weirder and would gladly jettison the rote comedy material at the top of the film.
Also from that year: Castle in the Sky, Big Trouble in Little China, Peggy Sue Got Married, Labyrinth, Highlander, The Golden Child
1987: What if the Goonies were involved in a Universal Monsters team-up? That's The Monster Squad in a nutshell. And it makes sense that such a team-up would work as a kids movie today. It's got some excellent gags, especially the way it sets up and handles each monster's demise (the mummy's is particularly fun), its weak link really being the dialog. This early Shane Black script (co-written with Creeps director Fred Dekker) features school yard homophobia and body shaming, as well as a nasty misogynistic steak that goes beyond the "girls have cooties" attitude of a 12-year-old's tree house. Otherwise, the dialog is fairly lackluster, so yeah, I'm jumping in my time machine to order another draft. Because it's really too bad that a light horror Amblin-style adventure movie like this is too cringe-worthy to show 2022's kids. Black and Dekker (I know, right?) should have aimed for timelessness.
Also from that year: The Princess Bride, Wings of Desire, Masters of the Universe
Books: Some of John McNamee's Pie Comics one and two pagers are collected in Goldilocks and the Infinite Bears, and he had me at hello because I have a thing for comedy routines about Goldilocks. I'm not kidding about that. I actually do. Doesn't even feel weird to admit it. Anyway, each strip is an amusing take on a fairy tale, folk tale, myth, Biblical story, fable, or pop culture character that drives the knife in deep and salts the wound in the final punchline panel. The art is simple (chunky stick figures), but colorful, evoking something like Adventure Time by way of Fractured Fairy Tales. Somehow, my one belly laugh was the one about the Chicken who crossed the road, but I thought the collection was generally clever. As somehow who, like McNamee, wrote and drew comic strips for school/college papers (just, without the latter talent), I always appreciate an efficient gag strip and I love the theme (come to think of it, my strips would fit in here as far as its topics go).
Role-playing: I was excited to play our GURPS Space (Shiftworld) campaign this week as the boys were real close to finding some answers as to what's up with these shifts! First, all the cinematic stuff - getting into a crashed hulk and securing a powerful (but kind of portable) graviton guarded by religious zealots. Because it's GURPS, I find my players continually paranoid about their Health points even with Cinematic safeguards in place, wanting to take restful detours and such, but they could be prodded into taking cinematic action. One such was ramping off a mountain of space junk with their four-wheeler to jump right into a large vent, and while they abandoned any attempt to talk their cooking 'bot into flying their ship while it was under attack by pirates, they did have fun getting the ship back from them, with explosive results. Hightailing it out of there while the whole graviton-suspended system spins out of control around them, they eventually get what they want - the coordinates to their parents' old lab in hyperspace... and the technical answers to many of their questions. Just what is happening to reality, why they have abilities others don't, and the recorded testimonies of their parents' own first shifts (or "dislocations"). And then Lupita shows up. Lupita was a sexy antagonist from the very beginning of the campaign (I guess 17 years ago now) and is currently leading those pirates AND working for arch-villain Jeremiah Dark. But she's no loyalist, so she thought the boys deserved a head's up that she and her men had come to steal the portable graviton currently on their ship, a match to the giant thing currently set to overload in the lab. Last piece of Dark's wishlist, and he's been rebuilding the lab near their hometown. Racing after Lupita back to the ships, they are distraught to see their ship scuttled and floating out of reach (Lupita too, her crew has cut her out of the deal for fraternizing with the enemy), and then the big graviton explodes, and there's a SHIFT! Sea spray hits them in the face as they watch their galleon get swallowed by the waves, with all hands apparently lost. Stranded on a desert island with the untrustworthy Lupita, what will they do? Goodbye GURPS Space! When next we play, it's going to be GURPS Swashbucklers!
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