Legion (2017)

Between weekly looks at Batman: The Animated Series and the occasional voyage into the realm of Marvel’s Netflix offerings, I may have to get around to rebranding myself – with all this television floating about, can I really call myself “The Cinema King” anymore? Then again, when television is as cinematic as Legion – eight episodes, closer to a miniseries or just a serialized long film – do those distinctions really matter?

Legion stars Dan Stevens as David Haller, a troubled young man who’s either the most powerful mutant in the world or a psychologically troubled lifer at Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital. David’s world is rocked when he meets Sydney Barrett (Rachel Keller), a new patient at Clockworks with a pathological aversion to being touched. When things go awry at Clockworks, David starts seeing things that might not be there; his best friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) appears when she shouldn’t, while David is dogged by painful childhood memories, competing agencies who fear his capabilities, and a morbidly obese demon with yellow eyes.

Legion is the sort of show that’s difficult to summarize because it changes tracks so quickly that the boundaries of a spoiler are almost imperceptible. For example, and without spoiling too much, one character dies partway through the first episode but continues to appear regardless, even remarking on the peculiarity of life after death. Legion is riddled with this sort of thing, head-scratchers that turn the screen into an irresistible magnet. Each episode contains at least two moments where everything you thought you knew about the show changes, prompting questions like, “Wait, why is he the coffee machine?” and “Was he always the deep-sea diver?” (Yes, actual questions I asked during the show.)

Legion is among the most visually stylized shows in recent memory, and it exploits that to its full advantage. The temptation now is to watch television with a phone in hand or while doing some menial task, but Legion is a different beast altogether. Long sequences play out with no dialogue, scored by some of the most inventive music on TV, courtesy of composer Jeff Russo – including an impromptu dance number set to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and one very memorable sequence from Episode 7, staged like a silent film, replete with dialogue cards, set to an electronic version of Ravel’s “Boléro.” The music plays into the wild unpredictability of the show, and – along with the nightmares – it’ll stick with you after the show ends.

For as brief as the show is, it’s got an impressively sized cast who get a striking amount of material. Stevens is fascinating as the unreliable protagonist, who’s never quite in control of himself or his rapidly evolving environment. Keller is sweet and mysterious, and she has a genuine chemistry with Stevens. Bill Irwin and Amber Midthunder are ones to watch as Cary & Kerry (about whom I really can’t say anything else), while Jemaine Clement is his quirky compelling self as an icy beat poet with a slipping grasp of the English language.

Far and away, though, it’s Aubrey Plaza who hogties the show, absconds with it, and then brings it back around to show you all the madcap things she’s done with it – and thank God for this, because after the one-two punch of Dirty Grandpa and Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates, I had just about given up on the actress who was perennially my second favorite character on Parks & Recreation (though, to be fair, she was the closest thing to a bright spot in those dismal, dismal movies). It’s become the stuff of television legend now to remark upon the fact that the role of Lenny Busker was originally written for a man, though Plaza insisted the role not be altered once she was cast, and yet it is impossible to imagine a man making this part work because Plaza’s offbeat gender-bent presence adds still one more dimension of existential uncertainty to the show. As Lenny, Plaza is Janet Snakehole by way of Inception, a wolf in Beetlejuice’s clothing with a penchant for delivering, baldly straight-faced, immortal lines like, “Unhand the reptile, space captain!” And if we could talk plainly about the show, I’d tell you so many more delightful things about Plaza’s performance, but the real delight of her act is that you’re never quite sure what to expect from her, and as David’s grasp on reality begins to falter (which is to say, within the first few minutes of the pilot), you can’t be certain what – if anything – is real.

Legion is gripping in a way that most television shows struggle to manage; Westworld aside, I can’t remember a show debuting this strongly. (Even Game of Thrones took a few episodes to really get going.) And for those who feel a slight creep of superhero overload, a numbing disappointment that maybe-just-maybe we’ve seen everything the genre has to offer, Legion rejects that premise out of hand and then proceeds to destabilize your faith in the very language in which you proposed that premise. Better still, though, Legion never leaves its audience in the dust (at least, not for very long) and instead patiently unfolds the answers to the mysteries it postulates in a way that never feels compulsory. Aside from a post-credits sequence, this first season of Legion manages to address very nearly all its central questions and wrap things up in a way that feels both satisfying and enticing; put another way, I didn’t need the slightly gimmicky cliffhanger after the credits to guarantee my attendance for a second season.

Legion is rated TV-MA for “language, sexuality, and violence.” Created by Noah Hawley. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Dan Stevens, Rachel Keller, Aubrey Plaza, Bill Irwin, Jeremie Harris, Amber Midthunder, Katie Aselton, Mackenzie Gray, with Jean Smart and Jemaine Clement.

10 @ a Time - Batman v Superman, Part 2

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Part Two: Road to Nairomi

Welcome to the second installment of “10 @ a Time: Batman v Superman.” Last week we talked about how the opening ten minutes established the film’s operatic tone and the necessity of seeing the murder of the Waynes one more time. Having met Batman, it’s time to check in with Superman to see how he’s conducted himself in the intervening eighteen months since Man of Steel.

[For those playing the home game, we’re looking at the “Ultimate Edition” home video release; for today’s 10@T installment, we’re looking from 0:10:07 to 0:19:55.]

"Among the fishes, a whale!"

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Laughing Fish"

“They’re finny and funny and oh so delish / They’re joyful and jolly Jokerfish!”

The Joker’s latest scheme unfolds when a trawler brings in a catch of fish bearing the Clown Prince of Crime’s patented grin, which The Joker promptly attempts to copyright. But when he’s told that copyrights don’t apply to natural resources, his fury knows no bounds, and Batman has to protect a string of patent agents until Joker can be found.

Any time you see an episode written by Paul Dini and/or directed by Bruce Timm, it’s usually a pretty safe bet that you’re in for a winner, and “The Laughing Fish” does not disappoint. In fact, it’s a little tough to review “The Laughing Fish” without just throwing my hands up and saying, “Great job, guys.” This episode is engagingly scripted, and the direction is on point for a fast-paced episode. Some of the best episodes of Batman: The Animated Series leave you wanting more, perhaps with the hope that they’d been two-part episodes, but that’s certainly true of “The Laughing Fish” – I could watch an entire season revolving around The Joker’s giddy absence of logic and Batman’s struggle to keep up.

Dini’s script, as in the best they do, draws on classic comics, including some of Joker’s most memorable appearances. There’s “The Laughing Fish” itself (an Englehart/Rogers classic that every Bat-fan needs to read and own), the climactic shark tank from “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” (by O’Neill and Adams, the team that would give us Ra’s al Ghul), and even a plot structure from Joker’s first appearance way back in Batman #1, in which he threatened his victims on television before murdering them, daring Batman to stop him first. If that sounds ticklingly familiar, it’s the skeleton of Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, as well. The Joker is at his terrifying best when he’s working from a playbook that makes sense only to himself. As ever, Mark Hamill is definitive as the sinister jester, with his infectious laugh and spot-on mannerisms proving just why this particular ghoul is Batman’s greatest adversary. (I have yet to watch a Joker episode where that laugh doesn’t carry over to my own giggles of glee. It was, you may recall, the first good thing about The Killing Joke.)

And then there’s Harley Quinn, and for this to be only her second episode, it’s remarkable how fully-formed she is. In “Joker’s Favor,” she was something of a visual gag, a harlequin-themed henchgirl with a New Jersey accent straight out of Goodfellas; here, though, she’s alternately head-over-heels in love with her “Mistah J” while also being the only one in the plot to call him out for his mad deviance. “You’re really sick, you know that, boss?” she asks after becoming the involuntary punchline to one of The Joker’s sadistic gags. The Joker’s henchmen have always been more than a little expendable, often finding themselves on the wrong end of their boss’s oversized handguns, but Harley’s already the only one who stands up to him, even if she’s by his side at the end of the day. Last episode was a spotlight on Robin and how he makes Batman a stronger character, and we can think of Harley as serving a comparable function for The Joker, clarifying his grim nature with her bubbly persona.

One of the surprise delights of going back through BtAS, which I’ve done more times than I can count, is seeing what a treat Harvey Bullock can be. Maybe it’s just seeing what Donal Logue has done with the character over on Gotham ("What's altruism?!"), but I’m hyper-attuned to how this show portrays Bullock as a gruff but capable figure with a moral shade of gray that gets the job done by any means necessary while repudiating Batman for the same. He’s a gently incompetent cop for whom we nevertheless end up rooting, and kudos to Robert Costanzo for giving Bullock an emotional center even when he snarls his preferred nickname, “Bats.”

“The Laughing Fish” is pretty airtight as episodes go, and it’s a wonderful case study for how this show has treated The Joker (and indeed most of its villains in their stronger appearances). It’s an episode that only works with The Joker because of how daftly bonkers it is, yet for all its absurdism it never loses that sense of weight that the best episodes contain. In short, it continues to cement Dini’s rightful place as one of the top Bat-scribes of the last twenty-five years.

Original Air Date: January 10, 1993

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Bruce Timm

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)

Next episode: “Night of the Ninja,” in which the thing I never liked about Daredevil comes to Gotham.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Dunkirk (2017)

For a while there, Dunkirk ruined more than a few movies for me. The trailer for this movie, particularly the seven-minute IMAX preview, is so good that every time I saw it, I thought to myself, “Well, forget this movie. I want to see more of Dunkirk!” Thank heavens it’s finally here, so I can get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and thank heavens it was worth the wait because it shall come as no surprise that this Christopher Nolan disciple found much to love in the master’s latest work.

Dunkirk is the true story of the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk, France, in the midst of World War II, told across three intersecting narratives – the land evacuation (starring Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles, and Kenneth Branagh), the civilian boats recruited to aid the effort (starring Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy), and the air cover provided by British fighter pilots (starring Tom Hardy).

With Interstellar in 2014, Nolan drew more than his fair share of comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – including from myself when I said that Interstellar “combin[ed] Kubrick’s science-fictional aesthetics with Nolan’s knack for tight and highly personal storytelling.” Surprisingly, though, Dunkirk also feels a bit like 2001, with its trio of timelines looking at what it means – and takes – to be human in a time of crisis, but Nolan out-Kubricks Kubrick by intermingling the timelines (one week, one day, and one hour) and playing them off against each other in a cerebral way that takes for granted an audience’s ability to keep up. For those of us who didn’t need navigational charts for Inception and Interstellar, Dunkirk is similarly smart, though it is less self-reflexively clever than past Nolan ventures; where Inception had occasional bouts of exposition and Interstellar made the MacGuffin of time travel a function of the plot, Dunkirk proceeds with its narrative play as a matter of course, again cycling back to the classic Nolan theme of the subjective experience of the time and the way we form communities around common goals.

Nolan veterans like Tom Hardy (playing to type as an unintelligible masked man) and Cillian Murphy (playing against type as a shell-shocked soldier) turn up and do the good work we expect of them, while Nolan newcomers like Kenneth Branagh and Mark Rylance – the closest we get to expositional figures – appear as sobering reminders of the moral challenge presented by Dunkirk, gifted actors prepared for the subtle challenges of their sophisticated roles. Dunkirk is largely, however, fleshed out by fresh and nameless faces who don’t have long and recognizable filmic pedigrees like their named counterparts, but there is something even more humanizing about a nameless sea of evacuees, and these actors are remarkable for their abilities, like Keaton or Chaplin, to evoke a range of emotions in largely silent stretches of the film.

In this way, too, Dunkirk evokes 2001 with its extended, silent, balletic scenes of aerial combat, of divebombing and running along the beach. 2001 began and ended sans dialogue, and there are similarly few conversations in Dunkirk, opportunities for Nolan and his performers to show off their command of the visual language of film. And again Dunkirk steps beyond 2001 with a dynamite score by Hans Zimmer; 2001 included the “Blue Danube Waltz” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” but by and large didn’t carry the auditory weight that Dunkirk does. Like Inception before it, Dunkirk succeeds largely on the shoulders of Zimmer’s score, which is masterfully, unrelentingly, elegiacally tense.

“Unrelenting” is probably the best word for Dunkirk. From its first scene, the film grabs the audience by the shoulders and demands attention until the film is over. There are moments when that ending seems to come sooner than expected – even without noting that the film is, at 1:46, much shorter than most Nolan fare – doubtless mirroring the false hopes given throughout the Dunkirk evacuation, but Nolan’s actual finale grounds the film in a surprising way, a kind of echo of Inception’s last-frame fakeout but with more heart than Nolan is often acknowledged as having. It is an affirmation of Nolan’s continued status as a master filmmaker and – and I do not throw this word around lightly – a true genius.

Dunkirk is rated PG-13 for “intense war experience and some language.” Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Based on a true story. Starring Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard, Barry Keoghan, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Mark Rylance, Cillian Murphy, Kenneth Branagh, and Tom Hardy.

10 @ a Time - Batman v Superman, Part 1

Welcome to the first installment of “10 @ a Time,” our weekly look at films which demand far more attention than the usual review is able to give. Here you’ll see films that are particularly dense, thoughtful, demanding: films I love and therefore feel the need to work through to grasp them fully. Sometimes they’ll be movies we all know and love, movies upon which we agree and in which we can revel; other times they’ll be movies that didn’t get a fair shake the first time around. And who knows? Maybe, just maybe, they’ll be stringent disassemblies, dissections, and disparagements.

For our first run of “10 @ a Time,” we’re throwing back all the way to March 2016. The country was facing a divisive election and a divided populace, I had just submitted a full draft of my dissertation on (what else?) comic book superheroes, and Arrow was still terrible. Then came the movie we’ll be studying for the next four months – Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

I’ve reviewed the film twice, once upon its theatrical premiere and again on the occasion of its “Ultimate Edition” director’s cut release. It became the first film of 2016 to make it onto the Personal Canon, and I’ve seen it at least a half dozen times in the last six months. Each time I watch it, I’m compelled to review it anew – in short, I have so much more to say about these movies that one or two reviews can’t hope to contain it all. And so, “10 @ a Time” was born.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Robin's Reckoning"

“Master Dick, try not to be too critical. I’m certain whatever his reasons, Master Bruce has your best interests in mind.”

When Batman sidelines Robin from the war on crime, the Boy Wonder (Loren Lester) discovers it’s because their latest criminal quarry is Tony Zucco, the racketeer responsible for the death of Dick Grayson’s parents. Robin defies his mentor’s orders, while flashbacks reveal how it was that Dick Grayson came to be the ward, later sidekick, of Bruce Wayne and Batman.

I’ve been gently ribbed for being something of a sucker when it comes to emotional stories, often getting “choked up” at touching moments in stories that might otherwise not seem to deserve them. As I was watching “Robin’s Reckoning,” I felt that tightness in my throat a few times, and I wondered if maybe there might be something psychologically wrong with me. Then I read that Batman: The Animated Series producer Bruce Timm has also gotten emotional over this two-part episode, and so I don’t feel quite so silly.

The truth is that “Robin’s Reckoning” is such an emotionally heady episode because it tackles the reason why Robin is an essential part of the Batman mythos. While I’ll contend that the episodes of BtAS without Robin tend to be on the whole more engaging and more my speed, Robin adds an invaluable element to the story of Batman in that Robin has suffered the exact same loss that created Batman but responds to it completely differently. He’s an opportunity for Batman to live vicariously through the childhood he never had, and he’s a tangible way for Batman to prevent someone else from falling into the darkness like he did. Everything Batman does in these two episodes, he does to protect Robin from loss. In short, Bruce Wayne becomes the father he lost in order to protect the son he never got to be.

When I was younger, I lamented the fact that there wasn’t a “real” villain in this episode; Tony Zucco is paranoid and suitably loathsome, but he’s not exactly Two-Face material. Now that I’m older, though, I understand that Zucco is almost ancillary to the plot; the idea isn’t that Robin ought to have a personal vendetta against a singular villain (though the next animated Robin would – in fact, against Two-Face) but rather that Robin has the capacity to catch his parents’ killer. And while the mythology usually puts Joe Chill in the alley the night the Waynes were murdered, I’ve always found it more compelling to think that Batman never knew who killed his parents, that he never caught their murderer, that his neverending quest was inspired in part by its un-resolvability. (At least, that’s the version BtAS seems to endorse.) Robin, on the other hand, needs that chance to heal his soul, so the story isn’t about Zucco so much as it’s about Robin’s ability to move forward, to put that chapter of his life to a close and run headlong into his destiny as the Boy Wonder with a sense of reconciliation.

“Robin’s Reckoning” does a first-rate job of grappling with those ideas, introducing Robin’s backstory alongside a new rift that opens up between mentor and sidekick, and the simultaneous resolution of both at the climax is pretty inspired screenwriting. That painful reminder that Batman, too, was born in a moment of loss strikes a brutal blow for Robin, and voice actor Loren Lester does probably the best work of his Bat-career in these episodes (though the moment when he calls Alfred “man” seems woefully dated). Lester is very good at putting a youthful spark into Robin’s voice, but he’s equally potent in these dramatic beats.

Much as I like the solo adventures of Batman, “Robin’s Reckoning” is a powerful reminder that Batman is strongest when he is not alone, a lesson that Robin too learns. All told, this is such a good episode that I wish it might have been a three-parter, so that we might have seen flashbacks involving Robin’s first days on the job, perhaps even glimpsing that famous candlelight oath he swore deep in the bowels of the Batcave. The episode is so faithful to the source material elsewhere – including a construction site opener that simply must be a nod to the original comic, in which Robin confronted Zucco on a skyscraper’s skeleton – that it’s surprising the oath isn’t the final image of the episode.

As it stands, despite the slight peculiarity of this ostensible origin story coming after more than one Robin episode, “Robin’s Reckoning” is really just dynamite storytelling. It is – and readers of this review series know this is not faint praise – Robin’s “Heart of Ice,” another great episode in a string of uninterrupted favorites. (Spoilers: next week isn’t the end of the streak, either!)

Original Air Date: February 7-14, 1993

Writer: Randy Rogel

Director: Dick Sebast

Villain: Tony Zucco (Thomas F. Wilson)

Next episode: “The Laughing Fish,” in which The Joker goes pescatarian.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)

In War of the Planet of the Apes, the special effects are so good that even the characters themselves have to comment on them. “Look at your eyes,” Woody Harrelson’s Colonel says from behind polished sunglasses to the ape leader Caesar; “Almost human.” Where most films go for either exceptional storytelling or digital animation of the first order, War for the Planet of the Apes manages to juggle both.

Caesar (Serkis) and his ape clan are recovering from the attack of the humans in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes when The Colonel (Harrelson) arrives with his sights on killing Caesar to save the planet from the apes. Filled with bloodlust at the sneak attack, Caesar sends his apes away and pursues The Colonel in search of vengeance.

As the third film (whether it’s the last in the franchise seems to be a subject of some debate, though franchises never really die these days), War does seem to be the best of the bunch in terms of narrative craft and technical dexterity. The storytelling in the first half of the film recalls Wall-E, with long nonverbal sequences that nevertheless advance the story and the characterization. Of course, this is to say nothing of the success of the computer animation itself, which brings the apes to life in a way that is frankly astonishing. While there might be some cognitive dissonance in knowing that these are rendered by computer, there are disproportionately more moments where that edifice fades altogether, and the simian characters are as human as the ones played by live actors. One must acknowledge, however, the human performers like Harrelson, who do equally pivotal work in performing opposite characters that are not actually there, going a long way to selling the conceit to the audience.

Where the first two films had gone for an epic scope, showing the state of the world degenerating toward the dystopia glimpsed in the 1968 original film, War does well to restrict itself to a singularly personal narrative. Early in the film, Caesar strikes off on his own, allowing the film to breathe without the burden of cross-cutting between plotlines. And while some filmgoers might find these scenes unpleasantly protracted, there’s a certain delight in seeing the film play out at its own pace, particularly as it toys with themes left dangling from the last film. Indeed, I greatly appreciated the way this film wrestles with the violent resolution to the Koba plotline, which rightly continues to haunt Caesar. It’s that sort of attention to detail that makes this film seem more thoughtful; I recall, for example, thinking that Dawn had very little connective tissue to Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but this one feels properly of a piece with its predecessors, revisiting both Koba from Dawn and the simian flu from Rise.

Gratefully, however, this film diverges from its predecessors by dint of its utopian vision. Rather than continue to amble toward the dystopia of the Charlton Heston original, War instead imagines a happier ending for the shifting paradigm of men and apes. The Colonel’s fear, that men will become cattle on a planet of apes, was seen in 1968, with Heston’s ability to speak alarming his ape captors, but these apes are different; the particularly affective scenes between orangutan Maurice (named for Maurice Evans, he of Dr. Zaius fame) and the mute human girl Nova (get it?) go a long way to imagining a better world, particularly when contrasted with the internecine and self-perpetuating violence the humans enact on the apes and on themselves.

If there is a fourth film, fair enough, though it’ll take a bit of thread-pulling to get us closer to the 1968 Planet of the Apes. If this is the last, however, it’s a fitting conclusion to the trilogy, framing Caesar as part Noah, part Moses, surviving a great flood and leading his people closer to a promised land. And if we get a spin-off, can it please be the story of Bad Ape, the scene-stealing simian?

War for the Planet of the Apes is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, thematic elements, and some disturbing images.” Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Mark Bomback and Matt Reeves. Starring Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Amiah Miller, and Terry Notary.

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy"

“Where iron horses go to rot / And children toot their horns a lot / A damsel’s pleas will come to naught.”

A charitable delivery of bearer bonds is intercepted in Gotham City, with the robbery bearing all the hallmarks of Josiah Wormwood (Bud Cort), alias “The Interrogator.” Batman attempts to find Wormwood by squeezing one of his known associates, Baron Waclaw Josek (John Rhys-Davies), but after being humiliated by the vigilante Jozek takes out a contract of his own, hiring Wormwood to steal Batman’s cape and cowl.

“The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy” is another great episode! (See, I told you the good stuff was still coming.) The storytelling is tight, scripted by comics scribe Elliot S. Maggin, and it’s always a good sign when Batman: The Animated Series goes back to the comic book well because it’s evident that the crew have a healthy respect for the source material. The effect of reverence is compounded by the fact that Maggin is adapting his own story, an event that’ll be repeated down the line in another first-rate episode when Dennis O’Neil is charged with introducing Ra’s al Ghul into the animated universe. Here, Maggin delivers what comics fans call a “one-and-done,” a self-contained story that exists in a shared universe but restricts itself to its own proceedings.

Although as much as I would have liked to see more of Josiah Wormwood and his death traps (or heard more of John Rhys Davies in any capacity), I can’t say that Wormwood accomplishes anything that The Riddler won’t later prove capable of achieving. We’re about ten episodes away from Riddler’s debut proper, but Wormwood’s modus operandi seems less about demonstrating how smart he is and more about inviting his prey into a carefully orchestrated mousetrap designed to extract information – or, as is the case in this episode, valuable goods. As for Josek, I love the way that he’s emblematic of this seedy underbelly always already at work in Gotham City; it’s delightful Batman lore to think that at any given moment there’s a goon Batman hasn’t arrested purely so he can squeeze him later.

If you thought that the twist to the episode would be that it’s all a plot by the Mad Hatter, that was last episode! You’d be forgiven for thinking, though, that Jervis Tetch and his enormous teeth might turn up, since stealing Batman’s cowl does reek of a Mad Hatter scheme. (Sidebar: there’s a fantastic issue of Superman Adventures in which the Mad Hatter kidnaps Bruce Wayne and threatens to kill him on television if Batman doesn’t surrender his cowl; Batgirl enlists Superman to help untangle this conundrum.) But no, I won’t spoil the real twist. I will say that the episode bears rewatching once you know the twist, because it lets Maggin really show off how deftly he concealed the narrative trickery, precisely into which baited trap the viewer falls without even realizing it.

It’s also worth noting that this is the first episode in which the Bat-signal appears (if we don’t count the improvised Bat-signal in “Joker’s Favor”), kind of surprising given that this is the 31st episode of the series. It’s even a minor plot point, with Batman remarking on Gordon’s “new toy.” I don’t recall if the Bat-signal ever played a major role in an episode – unlike in the Gotham Central comic, in which one character worked at the GCPD solely to turn on the signal – but it’s such an iconic part of the Bat-mythology that it makes the show feel that much more comfortable, and it’s handled with noteworthy dexterity such that its arrival actually feels important.

“The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy” is a solid Batman episode without too many of the classic Bat-bells and –whistles but with a tightly crafted story that gives us Batman at his level best. I’m sorry that this is Maggin’s only episode, though true believers (or whatever the DC equivalent would be) are directed to his seminal “Must There Be a Superman?” from Superman #247, either of his Superman novels from 1978-1981, or the fact that he created Lexcorp, leaving a major mark on that corner of the DC Universe.

Original Air Date: October 14, 1992

Writer: Elliot S. Maggin

Director: Frank Paur

Villains: Josiah Wormwood (Bud Cort) and Baron Waclaw Jozek (John Rhys-Davies)

Next episode: “Robin’s Reckoning,” a two-parter that sheds some light on the Boy Wonder.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

“Spider-Man, Spider-Man,” the old song goes, “does whatever a spider can,” and lately it’s seemed that what a spider can do better than anyone is fumble and reboot himself twice in five years (yes, Andrew Garfield’s web-slinging debut was as recent as 2012). And while I eventually came around to liking The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it was still something of a mess, and what Spider-Man really needed was not his own immediate shared universe but rather a strong solo film, and on that front Spider-Man: Homecoming finally does what the franchise(s) hadn’t done since 2004.

Tom Holland reprises his role from Captain America: Civil War as Peter Parker, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man who’s eager to get back into the Avengers fray but whose mentorship deal with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is proving to be something less than attentive. Desperate to prove himself to Iron Man, Spider-Man follows a trail of advanced weaponry used and sold by The Vulture (Michael Keaton). Amid all this, Peter has to find time to compete in academic decathlons with his friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and ask senior girl Liz (Laura Harrier) to the homecoming dance.

At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill – I’ve yet to receive that check from Marvel – one thing about Spider-Man: Homecoming that works exceptionally well is its existence in the shared universe. I’m not sure how well the movie scans for someone who hasn’t seen Civil War, and indeed the movie assumes (perhaps rightly) that everyone on the planet did see it, but it feels right to put Spider-Man into a world that is already so dense, with surprising connections to existing film events and to comics elements that hadn’t yet made their way to film. And then there is the indomitable force of Robert Downey Jr. himself, who has become synonymous with the Marvel brand and whose presence feels like a benediction over the film. And no, this isn’t Iron Man 4, much as the trailers might have led us to believe. It’s a proper Spider-Man film, with a tight focus on Spidey, his world, and how it all fits seamlessly into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As Spider-Man, Holland continues to make the role his own. Sans the Maguire self-consciousness and the Garfield angst, Holland plays Peter Parker as a gawky kid penned in by an awkward high school existence, with the Spidey suit representing an outlet for all his irrepressible charm and desire to make a positive impact on the world. Most importantly, there’s no artifice in the distinction between Peter and Spider-Man; their goals are the same, their personality only differing by degrees. Most excitingly, Holland seems enthused by the role, so perhaps we’ll end the spiral of reboots and stick with him for a while.

As foolproof as the Marvel formula seems to be, their villains have been admittedly inconsistent. For every multilayered Loki, there’s a one-note Malekith or an aptly-named Abomination (and let’s be honest, unless you’re a superfan, you don’t even remember in which movies those characters appeared). Director Jon Watts does well to keep the scope of The Vulture’s plans local and intimate, with no aspirations to take over or destroy the world. Wisely, this insular approach allows the film to develop what Vulture’s real motivations are, and Michael Keaton (Batman to Birdman to bird-man) renders him with very relatable goals and evident humanity beneath his role as antagonist. Even without the added frisson of seeing Keaton in a comic book film once more, his performance is a real treat, never fully hammy but likewise never unaware of just how much fun he can have with a meaty role like this. Spider-Man has never faced The Vulture on-screen before, but better still, he’s never faced a villain like this one before. If his ilk is what we can expect from the Sony/Marvel détente, I’m eager to see what’s next.

There is just so much about Homecoming that is delightful, full of surprises and so many small careful touches like the deliciously amateurish student news segments or the way the film works in so many villains and Iron Man without feeling overfull. Unlike the Garfield films, which often operated under the assumption that the most interesting thing about Spider-Man was everything else around him, Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn’t rush to any big moments or overload itself with Easter eggs (there are enough of them to go around, though). Homecoming takes a core idea – Spider-Man wants to be something more than he is – and builds outward from there, keeping the subtitle as an omnipresent reminder that our protagonist is a high school sophomore on the cusp of immense life changes. The news that the Sony/Marvel partnership is considering their Spider-Man in terms of a five-film arc (of which this is the second) augurs well for characterization, which has been so important for our Marvel heroes. Spider-Man is not Iron Man, nor is he Captain America, and this film remembers that.

Put another way, the Homecoming sequel in 2019 (Spider-Man: Winter Formal?) cannot come soon enough. To those who had written off Spidey or gotten bored of him, Homecoming is a proper return to form for the wall-crawler, with a can’t-miss performance by Michael Keaton.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence, some language, and brief suggestive comments.” Directed by Jon Watts. Written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, and Erik Sommers. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Laura Harrier, Jon Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Perchance to Dream"

“My life is a dream, Alfred! The best dream anyone ever had.”

After a routine night on patrol, Bruce Wayne awakens to a new day, into a world where he isn’t Batman, he’s due to marry Selina Kyle, and his parents are still alive. Bruce can’t put his finger on it, but something is wrong. Is it the fault of the Batman, or has Bruce Wayne fallen into a delusion?

I’ll begin by saying that this episode is on record as Kevin Conroy’s favorite, and when Batman himself tells you it’s worth a look, that’s really saying something. We could joke about this being his favorite because he gets the most to do – he voices no fewer than four characters (Batman, Bruce Wayne, Other Batman, and Thomas Wayne) with aplomb – but the truth is that this is a dynamite Batman story. Indeed, it might be the show’s best episode not written by Paul Dini. It touches something of the character’s core, it’s emotionally potent, and it’s a pretty good mystery. For that reason, I’m going to throw up a big overall spoiler warning for the rest of this review, because it’s very difficult to talk about this episode without taking stock of the whole story.

Edgar Allan Poe concluded a poem of the same name with the couplet “Is all that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?” and it’s a great line that would have fit in neatly with this episode – perhaps at the end, had the writers opted not to use the “stuff that dreams are made of” refrain from Shakespeare by way of Bogart. (But don’t mistake me – it’s a great use of that line!) The episode forms its own mystery which is, in a sense, unsolvable, with the only clues being that we know Bruce Wayne is Batman and that we know Bruce Wayne can read. It’s the latter that tips off our protagonist, who memorably intones to Batman, “Reading is a function of the right side of the brain, while dreams come from the left side. It’s impossible to read something in a dream!” Whether or not that’s scientifically valid is moot (and, I suspect, somewhat difficult to test), but it’s a clever way to work with the notion that Batman is the world’s greatest detective. It’s also fun to catch that a jewelry store in the background of a few shots has “Alxjyziv” on its storefront.

You’d be forgiven, on that beat of illegibility, for thinking that Mr. Mxyzptlk might be responsible for Batman’s latest predicament. In truth, though, you don’t have to look all that far into the show’s back catalogue – just two episodes, to “Mad as a Hatter.” Yes, it’s Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, who’s found a way to turn his mind-controlling technology into a dreamscape for his hated enemy. And yet there’s something psychologically tragic and at once perplexingly compassionate about the Mad Hatter’s scheme, because he’s not trying to kill Batman. “I was willing to give you whatever life you wanted... just to keep you out of mine!” I’d lamented the way that Tetch was “more pathetic than sympathetic” in his debut episode, but he comes back strong, particularly for an episode in which he barely appears. There’s something oddly noble about an enemy whose endgame is to dispose of the hero by giving him everything he wants, especially considering that nothing would have stopped the Mad Hatter from killing Batman once he slipped the dream machine onto his head.

As before, the actual fight with the Hatter doesn’t last very long; Batman hopelessly outmatches him. The real battle, though, takes place a little bit earlier, in which Bruce Wayne confronts Batman at the clocktower. The battle for Bruce Wayne’s mind is also a battle for Batman’s soul, suggesting that Bruce’s happy normalcy and his role as Batman are mutually exclusive. Ultimately, it’s the detective that wins out; though he finally has his parents by his side, Bruce Wayne cannot stomach living in a world he knows is wrong, and he’s willing to stake his life on it.

The winning streak continues; “Perchance to Dream” is a knockout episode, tightly crafted and alternately mysterious and touching. It truly is one of the best, perhaps even more so once you know the ending and can really appreciate the lure of the dream world.

Original Air Date: October 19, 1992

Writers: Joe R. Lansdale, Laren Bright, and Michael Reaves

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villains: The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall)

Next episode: “The Cape and Cowl Conspiracy,” in which The Mad Hatter shockingly does not appear.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Baby Driver (2017)

Poor Edgar Wright – he’s made his first film since The World’s End in 2013, and all anyone wants to talk about is why he famously walked away from 2015’s Ant-Man. Never mind that Baby Driver is in a sense the anti-Ant-Man, a sharp, original, standalone action flick with nary an Avenger in sight (though Jon Bernthal, soon to grace Netflix in a Punisher series, does turn up for the film’s first heist), or that star Ansel Elgort is a kind of anti-Paul Rudd, terse-lipped and fairly fresh to audiences who sat out young-adult fare like The Fault in Our Stars or Divergent. For my money, Baby Driver is the anti-Fury Road, an automotive action film that gets the audience to care about the characters and their world without once repeating a trick from its arsenal amid a series of high-octane, motor-revving driving sequences.

Ansel Elgort stars as the eponymous Baby, a getaway driver in the employ of heist meister Doc (Kevin Spacey), who’s teeing up the trademark “one last job” for Baby. Baby has driven for bank robbers with the unlikely names of Buddy and Darling (Jon Hamm and Eiza González) and for manic muggers like Bats (Jamie Foxx), but his true passion is his music – piped through his iPod and a standout soundtrack – and his girl, waitress Debora (Lily James).

Baby Driver starts out with a bang-up bank robbery, the particulars of which are never seen; Wright instead focuses his cinematic eye on Baby grooving to his tunes and scoping out the landscape before throwing the car into gear and speeding away to the tune of “Bellbottoms” by the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a clever approach to the scene, which most other directors would have set inside the bank, but Wright wisely takes this moment to introduce us to our protagonist, his methods and movements, before opening up his cinematic toolbox and showing us just what he can do with a barrage of edits, practical driving effects, and some first-rate sound design. It’s an opener that aligns us both with Baby and with Wright; having seen the ample capabilities of both, the audience is primed to care about what they do next.

Wright has always been a master of characterization; Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz created exceptionally memorable characters (aided, I grant you, by the superfluously talented Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though I didn’t much care for it, had a cast of strange rangers that I’ve had difficulty forgetting altogether. The good work continues in Baby Driver, with each “debut” giving us a very clear sense of who the character is and how they’ll fit into the larger world of the story. The exception, though, is Debora, who’s put into a kind of trope role of the pretty love interest until she takes a more active role in the film’s third act; I’d love to see Wright make a film that passes the Bechdel Test, for one, because it’s just about the only thing missing from Baby Driver.

One thing that isn’t lacking in Baby Driver is surprise and the visceral charge that goes with it. The screenplay takes a few unexpected turns, such that my plot summary above only scratches the surface of the places Baby Driver goes. Like the sharpest scripts, Baby Driver winds its pieces back together at the end in surprising ways, resurrecting plot elements long forgotten in order to throw the conclusion into sharper relief, and as we might have come to expect from Wright, lines of dialogue recur and accrue meaning, even if it’s just a sly wink to the audience as characters catch up to the references.

I watch a lot of movies; I tend to like a good deal of them, and I’m perhaps too forgiving of ones too close to my heart. As much as I loved Guardians, Vol. 2 and Wonder Woman, Baby Driver is probably the first must-see movie of the summer by sheer dint of its originality; a superhero movie is almost always kin to every other superhero movie, but Baby Driver feels fresher by being unfettered of any genre conventions. Like La La Land, which toyed with the conventions of a musical romance but never allied fully with that genre, Baby Driver orbits the heist/crime film but inflects it with all sorts of other things for a unique and exhilarating experience. The true mark of a film’s success is the reaction it provokes in an audience, and Baby Driver had me gasping, chuckling, and breathless.

Baby Driver is rated R for “violence and language throughout.” Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Starring Ansel Elgort, Lily James, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Eiza González, and Kevin Spacey.