Batman: The Animated Series - "Shadow of the Bat"

“Batgirl, I presume?”

Just when things were starting to look up for Gotham City, no sooner does Commissioner Gordon lock up Rupert Thorne than his deputy Gil Mason charges him with corruption and accepting bribes. Gordon’s locked up, and Batman takes to the streets as Matches Malone, an enforcer in search of a gang; meanwhile, Gordon’s daughter Barbara (Melissa Gilbert) finds herself in need of a bat and so becomes one herself – Batgirl – in order to clear her father’s name and save Gotham from the new mob filling the Thorne vacuum when Two-Face (Richard Moll) returns to Gotham.

Without question, the undisputed star of the episode is Barbara Gordon, and I’m glad to have met her well in advance of her caped-and-cowled debut. Between “Heart of Steel” (penned also by this episode’s writer, Brynne Stephens) and “I Am the Night,” Batman: The Animated Series played an abbreviated long game in introducing the commissioner’s daughter before she became Batgirl. Those episodes had established Barbara’s fearlessness and her detective skills, so this episode feels very much like a natural extension of the character we already know and recognize. There’s a sense of fate in the moments that Barbara becomes Batgirl, and Stephens crafts those moments with logic. Though Batgirl will appear in only one other episode of BtAS (the very last episode, in fact, appropriately entitled “Batgirl Returns”), she becomes a featured co-lead in The New Batman Adventures, where she really shines.

Here, though, it’s impressive how quickly Batgirl becomes an equal partner in Batman and Robin’s fight against crime. Though each crimefighter tries giving her the “it’s not that easy” talk, Batgirl frequently proves that she’s more than qualified to the task. She matches Robin deduction for deduction, and she stands shoulder to shoulder with Batman as mobsters open fire. Thank heavens we’ve come a long way from the casual misogyny of “The Cat and the Claw” (“Red Claw... a woman?!”) with a Batgirl who can hold her own – and against Two-Face, no less, who reenters the Gotham crime scene in a big way. In this two-parter, Two-Face orchestrates the downfall of Rupert Thorne and stages his coup for the top spot in Gotham’s underworld. For Batgirl, it’s a real baptism of fire, but at no point does the episode give us the notion that she’s unprepared for this. It’s only too bad the show doesn’t continue to pit her as a chief foil for Two-Face, because I imagine he’s stinging that a newcomer showed him up. As it is, though, future appearances of Two-Face focus more on his inner turmoil than any outer conflict.

I can’t oversell just how effective “Shadow of the Bat” is when it comes to establishing Batgirl as a new force for justice in Gotham. This episode contains a number of memorable setpieces and clever bits of detective work where Barbara proves herself formidable. She’s an expert tracker, a fine lip-reader, and a quick hand with a one-liner. In an unforgettable subway encounter, we watch her rebound from a rookie mistake to help save the day. But the episode also establishes a smaller bit of the canon when it presents Batman’s underworld alter ego Matches Malone – comics fans everywhere feel a thrill whenever that name is invoked, and so it’s a real treat to see Batman don a new and recognizable identity even as Barbara Gordon undergoes a similar metamorphosis.

For an episode called “Shadow of the Bat,” there’s a remarkable balance struck between Batgirl and Batman; neither feels upstaged, and yet neither is given short shrift. It’s an episode that feels of a piece with the series and yet feels fresh and original. Indeed, I’ll make the snap statement, absent a thorough pass of research, that Brynne Stephens is the most consistent writer on the show after the great Paul Dini. “Shadow of the Bat” is certainly a standout entry in The Animated Series.

Original Air Date: September 13-14, 1993

Writer: Brynne Stephens

Director: Frank Paur

Villain: Two-Face (Richard Moll)

Next episode: “Blind as a Bat,” in which Batman sees red.

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

Darkest Hour (2017)

When I saw Dunkirk back in July, I can safely say that at no point in the film did I think to myself, “This movie could use more Gary Oldman.” And yet, here we are, with Darkest Hour as the unintentional other half of Dunkirk, treating at length the only part of the event that Christopher Nolan didn’t recount in full – the homefront. There is probably a very intriguing “Dunkirk Saga” to be crafted from editing the films together, though I think Hollywood’s efforts would be better spent at giving us more films of Oldman as Winston Churchill.

Gary Oldman stars as Winston Churchill, appointed Prime Minster of the United Kingdom after the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) become untenable. Churchill, his wife Clemmie (Kristin Scott Thomas), and his secretary Elizabeth Layton (Lily James) move to 10 Downing Street to prepare for war – or peace – with Nazi Germany as it marches further into France.

It need not be said – for everyone already seems to be in unanimous agreement – that Gary Oldman gives a bravura performance as Churchill. Oldman’s name is being bandied about once more for an Oscar, to which I have to say it’d be about time. As Churchill, Oldman is (as ever) chameleonic, disappearing behind the jowls, the glasses, and the cigars in a performance that is not quite impersonation and certainly far from caricature, though it does resemble an uncanny impression in that Oldman is difficult to recognize in character. There’s something in the eyes, the voice, the stance, yes, but by and large it’s quite easy to disregard the artifice and believe we are watching Churchill himself. And while many times we clamor for a sequel because we want to know what happens next, I’m first in line for Darkest Hour II (“Dark Harder?”) because I want to spend more time in the company of a performance this fine.

The time frame of Darkest Hour is quite tight – less than a month – which is all the more astonishing when you consider what was asked of Churchill in those brisk days. To inherit an office diminished by one’s predecessor, and to be faced with several forms of political and military extinction, with little more than the English language as your principal weapon of defense... well, it’s not for nothing that Churchill’s wife at one point remarks that her husband has “the weight of the world on your shoulders.” A brief telephone call with Franklin D. Roosevelt might seem a moment for the Americans in the audience to feel involved, but it quickly becomes a reminder of how maddeningly unhelpful the isolationist America was at the time and how bitterly alone Churchill must have felt as he stared down the barrel of Hitler’s gun. “It’s late,” he breathes wearily, a sense of hopelessness edging into the film’s middle.

Director Joe Wright is perhaps still best known for directing the first-rate Atonement, so it comes as a slight shock that here too Wright takes the opportunity to revisit Dunkirk – recall, James McAvoy finds himself separated from Keira Knightley by the evacuation. Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan set his exploration of humanized hopelessness and fractured time at Dunkirk, but here Wright treats the event as the tipping point of a global conflagration, an Atlas-like burden which Churchill must shoulder with the full knowledge that the fate of the very world rests upon his response. But Wright is careful to keep his Churchill human, too; rather than err on the side of hagiography, Wright presents a Churchill wrestling with his doubts and willing to laugh at his faults, as when he initially mangles the “V for Victory” gesture.

At the heart of the film is a moment that shouldn’t work as well as it does. Having hung Chekhov’s gun on the wall when he mentions offhandedly he’s never ridden the subway, Churchill takes to the underground and mingles with the people. It feels initially like Screenwriting 101, setting Churchill amongst the proletariat, but the scene works so well that I didn’t want it to end. In that cramped subway car – and the film is, if nothing else, devoutly claustrophobic – Oldman imbues Churchill with such grace, humor, and candor that it’s not hard to believe a nation (indeed, a globe) was charmed by such a charismatic leader.

Darkest Hour is rated PG-13 “for some thematic material.” Directed by Joe Wright. Written by Anthony McCarten. Starring Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane, and Ben Mendelsohn.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Harley and Ivy"

“Cheer up, kid. You just need some lessons in good old female self-esteem. In other words, let’s play with the boys on our terms.”

After a falling-out with The Joker, Harley Quinn strikes out on her own to prove her criminal abilities. She sets her eyes on the theft of the Harlequin Diamond but runs afoul of Poison Ivy mid-heist. Realizing that two heads are better than one, Harley and Ivy team up, becoming the new scourges of the underworld as Batman and The Joker both try to stop them for very different reasons.

Insert the standard praise of Paul Dini here. You know that this Bat-fan believes Dini can do no wrong, and “Harley and Ivy” is one of the finest of his many fine episodes for its remarkable freshness. Dini takes Harley Quinn, already a newcomer to the world of the Bat, and does something even further unique with her by taking her out of Joker’s orbit and seeing what she can do when she’s on her own. This episode gives a full character portrait of Harley, mired as she is in an abusive relationship with The Joker and yet irresistibly drawn to his side. Dini wisely juxtaposes her with the avatar of femininity, the incarnation of Mother Earth herself, Poison Ivy, and it’s a match made in heaven. Opposites do attract: maternal/juvenile, aromantic/boy-crazy, scientific/instinctive, sultry/squeaky. Of late, Harley and Ivy have been posited as a romantic couple, but here Dini suggests Ivy as a kind of surrogate mother for Harley, who struggles against her urges to return to Joker’s side.

Some of the episode’s gender politics feel a bit on the nose, but I’d argue that the episode needs it when you’re dealing with someone as far gone as Harley. I don’t recall that the show has foregrounded the abusive qualities of the Harley and Joker “romance” (or, to put it another way, their mad love) to the degree that this episode does. Harley only leaves the gang when she’s forced out by The Joker, who doesn’t remember that she’s gone and expects her at the ready with his socks. Ivy lets us see the relationship with fresh eyes; blinded as we may have been by the visual gag of a harlequin sidekick and the vocal stylings of Arleen Sorkin, we might have missed that Joker is wholly incapable of love. And yet there remains a kind of “oh, you” incorrigibility about their fatal attraction, a romance that plays by the same rules as cartoon physics, where an anvil to the head only makes you see stars and where loving a madman leads only to an indistinguishable stay in Arkham (where, recall, the doors are literally not locked).

Batman: The Animated Series has done this strange yo-yo between two different kinds of episodes that barely feature Batman – the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Last week, “The Mechanic” showed us how dull a story can be without the Dark Knight as its anchor; this week, we see how madcap and magnetic the world can be when it spirals wildly from its bat-shaped center. Dini has long since proven himself the master of misrule, an expert hand at the till of insanity; no one writes The Joker like Dini does, but more importantly I’d say no one has ever written Harley Quinn with the pinprick precision and deft navigation that Dini did (at least, not without the character quickly descending into unaware self-parody). Dini strikes such divine equilibrium between his trio of villains that one could easily have forgotten that Batman’s even in this episode (confession: I myself forgot Batman has a running subplot of pursuit in this episode). I’ve said it in one form or another before, but it bears repeating – Paul Dini is one of a very short list of writers who could probably pen the greatest adventures of Gotham City without using Batman for so much as a minute. So densely populated with fascinating characters is this fantasy universe that Paul Dini could revel in it for months at a time without needing to draw on the narrative’s ostensible protagonist.

Batman does arrive, though, and order is restored, but it’s Harley who gets the last laugh when she proves herself wholly irrepressible, unburdened by the events of the narrative. We, however, in full control of our sanity, can’t help but remember what’s happened; we’re changed by it, and we’ll always look at Harley knowingly askance, wondering if she’ll ever wise up and drop her Punchinello paramour in favor of her poisonous playmate. “Harley and Ivy” is a real treat, the start of a thematic trilogy for Harley (with “Harlequinade” and “Harley’s Holiday,” “Mad Love” being a prequel), and it happens to be one of the best episodes of the entire show. Not bad for an episode that manages to pass the Bechdel test in the process.

Original Air Date: January 18, 1993

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), and The Joker (Mark Hamill)

Next episode: “Shadow of the Bat,” a two-parter in which the Bat-family grows by one.

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

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

No one, it seems, hates Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans. To be fair, we’ve been wronged by the franchise we profess to love – the much-maligned Prequel Trilogies are cumbersome and inelegant, and the less said about the “Holiday Special” the better – but I think by and large the fanbase has been spoiled by a profusion of content and thus has developed a very narrow view of what Star Wars ought to be. The Last Jedi, the eighth episode in a franchise that now also includes “Anthology Films,” flies in the face of that narrow vision of Star Wars and does something truly unique with the franchise while remaining (to borrow a phrase from its composer, John Williams) quintessentially Star Wars-ian.

(As ever, you can trust me to give you the spoiler-free treatment. Believe me when I tell you that the plot summary below is only half of the first act, but if you haven’t seen it and want to go in totally unspoiled, skip down to the last paragraph, and don’t listen to the soundtrack, because Williams is not shy about quoting identifiable cues.)

The Force having awakened in the previous film, The Last Jedi picks up moments later, as Rey (Daisy Ridley) encounters Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) in his self-imposed, grimly pessimistic exile. While Rey implores Luke to rejoin the galaxy and teach her the ways of the Force, Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) leads the Resistance in evacuating their D’Qar base; Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) butts heads with Vice Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern); and defector Finn (John Boyega) joins up with mechanic Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) to seek out a way to keep the First Order off their tail. And speaking of the film’s villains, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) is dispatched by the Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) to snuff out the Resistance, the Jedi Order, and his own demons.

The Last Jedi covers a lot of ground, and it’s been rightly compared to The Empire Strikes Back for its divergent plot structure. Where The Force Awakens was relentlessly linear and unilaterally focused on a tight narrative, The Last Jedi sprawls out on this galactic tapestry and gives us no shortage of plots to follow. Like in Empire, the plots splinter off and converge in unexpected ways, and the audience is never quite sure what’s going to happen. I’ve seen a lot of outlets that report the film doesn’t “play it safe” and “takes risks” with the franchise – there is a moment, about halfway through the film, at which point I realized I had no idea what was going to happen because something I’d taken for granted had changed completely. After that, I found myself trying to keep up with the film as it heroically outpaced my expectations. As we galloped into the third act, I found myself quite literally gasping for air; I’d forgotten to breathe, and it took an unexpected shock to jar me back to life.

There’s not a bad performance in the bunch, and to say more might encroach on the territory of spoilers. Daisy Ridley gives a fantastically driven performance as a woman who is finally running toward her destiny, while Adam Driver is magnetic as he wrestles with the legacies he’s being forced to inherit. Far and away, the film belongs to Mark Hamill, who’s given a meaty character arc once Rey holds out that lightsaber on the island of Ahch-To, but Carrie Fisher gives a hell of a swan song as General Leia, who looms over the film like the regal war hero we know her to be. Then there’s the trio of new faces, of whom Kelly Marie Tran is the most engaging and likely a new fan favorite as she presents a giddy new look at what it means to be a hero of the Resistance from the vantage point of the mechanic Rose Tico; Laura Dern and Benicio del Toro turn in compelling performances, too, and all three of them are examples of what Star Wars has done best – introduce us to slices of a character’s life and invite us to study further into that galaxy far, far away. For The Last Jedi is, like all of the Star Wars universe, a story about the personal stakes of good and evil, about a series of individual choices that add up to galactic mythology because every life is precious, every moment sacred, every interaction blessed by significance because each life exists in its own expanded universe of stories. (Rose has her own tie-in book; Holdo appears in an earlier novel about Leia; and del Toro’s DJ has his own comic book coming soon – crass consumerism it may be, but sign me up for the lot of it.)

By way of critique, I’ll say that there are a few moments in the movie that don’t quite feel like Star Wars to me – new abilities we see on display, new technologies, even incidental characters who feel as if they’ve been imported from another franchise. Where some have taken this with resentment, #NotMyStarWars, I’m in the camp where those plot devices feel like fresh angles on a franchise that had already recapped its greatest hits with The Force Awakens and, to an extent, Rogue One. The tone of the film does, however, occasionally flirt with the line between deflating comedy and moments of high drama; where Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 tripped headlong over its own shoes into a pratfall in its best effort to prevent us from engaging with an emotion beyond laughter, The Last Jedi uses these moments to show us that a person is never only one thing. Someone mired in the deepest depression can find an opportunity for levity; life-or-death stakes end up blinking when they stare us down and we shrug our shoulders as if to say, “Do your worst.”

Surprisingly, I didn’t cry at this one. I still get a little choked up at the reunion of Han and Leia in The Force Awakens – kudos to John Williams, who did nonpareil work there and who continues to live up to his own legend. (Thank goodness, by the way, the “Canto Bight” theme is on the soundtrack!) I did, however, feel a swell of admiration at a film that managed to defy my expectations and yet make a perfect amount of sense. There may have been a few things I would have done ever so slightly differently, but of what movie isn’t that true? At film’s end, I felt thrilled, breathless, captivated. Though it’s the longest entry in the franchise, I could have easily done another hour. We’ve got two years until the as-yet-untitled Episode IX, but director Rian Johnson has given us a lot to pore over, and I can’t wait to see it again. Moreover, my excitement for the future of the franchise is stratospheric, because this all could have gone horribly wrong. The galaxy is in good hands, and there’s room for hope.

The Last Jedi is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi action and violence.” Written and directed by Rian Johnson. Starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, and Benicio del Toro.

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Mechanic"

“It was a challenge of a lifetime. It took me six months to come up with the design specs alone.”

After a bumpy night in pursuit of The Penguin (Paul Williams), Batman and Robin take the Batmobile in for repairs. Their mechanic, Earl Cooper (Paul Winfield), owes Batman for saving his life, but Penguin imperils it when he deduces that Earl might be his conduit to rubbing out the Dark Knight once and for all.

“The Mechanic” is such a strange episode, not because it does anything outlandish or controversial, but because it takes Batman into the dense quotidian by focusing on the question no one was asking – “Who changes the tires on the Batmobile?” If you stop and think about Batman’s world too long (and believe me, I’ve done that), you start to ask questions about the practicality of the universe and how things really work, but I wouldn’t say it’s essential storytelling that we learn all about a figure like Earl Cooper, particularly because I think most people assume that Bat-maintenance falls under “other duties and responsibilities” in Alfred’s job description. Or that, y’know, Batman does it himself. But no, “The Mechanic” takes the subject very matter-of-factly, approaches it soberly, and ends up being largely forgettable when it’s never revisited by the show.

The character of Earl Cooper is a classic example of overcomplicating a simple answer to a question no one asked. It’s the kind of story that could work really well if it’s developed thoughtfully and adds a new layer to the Batman universe, but “The Mechanic” doesn’t seem interested in plumbing thematic depth. It’s just a very straightforward story about a mechanic who happens to work for Batman. This episode is competent, and it does what it needs to do, but it’s a little like doing a story about the janitor in whose closet Clark Kent changes into Superman. You’d expect that Earl Cooper might know who Batman is, but that’s never addressed; one could imagine a version of this story, as Christopher Nolan did, in which Lucius Fox fills this role and comes to learn something new about his billionaire employer.

The introduction of Batman’s mechanic exists almost exclusively to set up the main premise of the episode, in which The Penguin sabotages the Batmobile in order to remotely control the vehicle and steer Batman to a fiery demise. This sort of kooky gag has always worked well on this show, whose larger-than-life villains have been at their level best when they’re maniacally committed to a single peculiar scheme. (See, for example, “Joker’s Wild,” in which Joker’s casino heist has nothing to do with the contents of a hotel’s vault.) There’s nothing intrinsically Penguin about this episode, which has often been a cause for lament from me, but somehow this episode succeeds regardless in that respect. Then again, hadn’t we just seen that dastardly plot a year earlier in Batman Returns? It’s not the only reprise from that film, either; we get a reocurrence of Penguin’s rubber ducky sewer boat – which is specifically a Penguin feature, and which looks fantastic in this episode.

The fun and frankly awesome visual of the rubber ducky boat ends up sailing into a whirlpool, which doesn’t make any sense in the context of a sewer, which is maybe a more apt metaphor than the episode’s creators intended. At its core “The Mechanic” has a good idea or two, but the episode sails away from the show writ large. It features some campy good fun from The Penguin, but the truth of the matter is that Earl Cooper is actually kind of boring once you get past the fact that he’s the Batmobile’s mechanic. But if nothing else, this episode does remind us that when Batman rides a motorcycle, his helmet has built-in Bat-ears. Because of course it does.

Original Air Date: January 24, 1993

Writers: Laren Bright, Steve Perry, and Randy Rogel

Director: Kevin Altieri

Villain: The Penguin (Paul Williams)

Next episode: “Harley and Ivy,” in which a harlequin comes down with a bad case of poison ivy.

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

Monday at the Movies - December 11, 2017

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, I’m a year late to the Split party, but imagine how the rest of the audience felt when they wound up sixteen years late to the party. Caution: spoilers for Split do follow.

Split (2016) – M. Night Shyamalan is a figure of some controversy, the bulk of whose oeuvre Wikipedia aptly describes as “poorly received but sometimes financially successful.” Split was reviewed by many as the debut of late Shyamalan, a slight return to form and a turn toward a more prosperous cinematic career. Split is, to be fair, leaps and bounds better than much of Shyamalan’s recent work, but – in the words of Mark Kermode – “so is, y’know, slamming your hand in a car door.” Split features a rightly well-regarded performance by James McAvoy as Kevin, possessed as he is by 24 personalities, some of which drive him to abduct a trio of vulnerable teenage girls (Anya Taylor-Joy, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula) for sinister, mysterious purposes. The film is largely competent and even occasionally terrifying as the girls are menaced by McAvoy’s multiple personalities; McAvoy does a remarkable job creating personas recognizable by different distortions of the same face even before he speaks in a variety of intonations, and Shyamalan has found three actresses very effective at bearing the burden of the film’s horror. The film’s climax, though, felt a bit of a letdown as the plot quite literally runs away after making what might be a condescending interpretation of self-harm before pulling a Prometheus and deferring the story’s end for a future installment; the truth about Kevin is apparently revealed (though not much else is resolved, and even that’s up for a spot of interpretation).  But Shyamalan makes a bizarre decision when his final scene casts the entire film as a sequel to Unbreakable (2000). It’s a peculiar way to build a franchise, and indeed a third film – Glass – is evidently due in 2019 to unite the two disparate films, but it does feel that Shyamalan has traded an ending for a reminder of what might have been his last great film. Come for McAvoy’s compelling performance, but leave with a peculiar taste in your mouth as the film ends with a few bewildering creative calls. Having said that, though, I’m always up for more Unbreakable.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

Batman: The Animated Series - "Zatanna"

“Tonight, I can promise you a few surprises, a thrill or two along the way, and with luck, a happy ending.”

Stage magician Zatanna (Julie Brown) makes the Gotham Mint disappear, but when it reappears it’s $10 million light. Bruce Wayne, though, is sure she’s innocent, having trained with her father Zatara (Vincent Schiavelli) years ago. Zatanna, too, knows she’s been set up by skeptic/debunker Montague Kane (Michael York), so the two pair up to clear her name faster than you can say “abracadabra.”

Is it a coincidence that Paul Dini, who’s penned more Zatanna adventures than just about anyone, himself married a professional magician, Misty Lee? I’m going to plead the fifth on that one, but it’s intriguing that the first DC superhero guest star on Batman: The Animated Series is Zatanna, of all people. Over on Superman: The Animated Series, we see Aquaman, Green Lantern, and The Flash (warming up for the Justice League cartoon), but Batman played it a little more insular. Indeed, to my memory this might be the only such guest star until we get to The New Batman Adventures, when we see the likes of Supergirl and Etrigan the Demon pop up.

So, Dini’s fan-crush aside, why Zatanna? For one, she allows the show to remake “Night of the Ninja,” in that this episode links Bruce’s early training to his life as Batman, but it does so more effectively than “Ninja” because the flashback training comes in handy – Batman learned his escapistry from Zatara and uses it in this episode (and, as some have surmised, as directly as in “Be A Clown,” which prefigures his Houdini escape in Zatara’s training flashback). Zatanna also allows us to see Batman as human because there’s a playful flirtation here, posing her as a sort of Catwoman on the right side of the law. Zatanna allows us to imagine an end for Batman in which he lives happily ever after. It’s a shame that the show never circles back to her (and won’t until Justice League Unlimited), because there’s a real interesting chemistry between the two as Batman bristles against revealing his true identity to Zatanna.

In rewatching this episode, I was struck by the fact that Zatanna never performs any actual magic in this episode. That is, all of her magic is explained by sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors, or simple stagecraft. In the comics, Zatanna is a genuine practitioner of magic, but here she’s an illusionist who’s comfortable explaining her tricks to Batman (who, let’s be fair, had figured them out already). I’m sure this adjustment to her character was made to keep her fairly consistent with the BtAS universe, which largely steers away from the supernatural and unexplainable, but one wonders how much further Zatanna could have gone on this show had those artificial constraints not been placed. To wit, she’s a featured player in one of the best episodes of Justice League Unlimited, “This Little Piggy,” in which Batman needs her help after Wonder Woman is transformed into a pig. (Yes, that episode too was written by Paul Dini.) It’s a wildly entertaining romp through the unpredictable toybox that is the DC Universe, almost Batman by way of Bewitched, and it’s yet another reason why I wish we’d seen more of Zatanna.

Overall, though, the episode is expertly paced, drawing on a classic three-act structure. Michael York gets the rare opportunity to play two different villains; he’d been (Count) Vertigo a few episodes back, now he’s Montague Kane, a kind of Orson Welles circa F for Fake by way of Howard Hughes’s aviation obsession. He’s a pretty straightforward villain with an uncomplicated motive – profit – and that’s good, because it wouldn’t have made much sense to use a major villain like Two-Face, who would steal the spotlight from Zatanna. No, the episode is wise to keep the focus on Zatanna, her relationship to Batman, and the side of our hero’s quest she allows us to see. I always thought there was more to do with Zatanna and her father Zatara’s involvement in Bruce’s training – hat-tip to Vincent Schiavelli (a Batman Returns alumnus, no less), who gives a delightfully theatrical performance as the master magician. But then I’ve thought that about a lot of the show’s better episodes; like an expert showman, “Zatanna” leaves us wanting more, but we’ll have to wait until “This Little Piggy” for the encore – and boy is it a showstopper.

Original Air Date: February 2, 1993

Writer: Paul Dini

Directors: Dick Sebast and Dan Riba

Villain: Montague Kane (Michael York)

Next episode: “The Mechanic,” in which Batman Returns is reprised.

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

Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017)

Amid my evolution from a trailer addict to a moviegoer who’d almost rather not see a preview for fear of having the whole movie spoiled, along comes Roman J. Israel, Esq., for which I’d seen nary a poster, let alone a trailer. While I’ve been burned more than a few times by trailers that give away an entire plot, this film flew entirely under my radar – all the more surprising, given it stars Denzel “Best Actor” Washington and comes from writer/director Dan Gilroy (who kept me awake one night with that masterfully unnerving Nightcrawler). In hindsight, I’m very glad not to have encountered a trailer for the film – not just because I’ve since learned the trailer unflinchingly gives away all the surprises (honestly, avoid at all costs), but because I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from Roman J. Israel, Esq. and enjoyed it all the more for it.

Denzel Washington stars as the eponymous attorney, self-conscious and awkward despite being a sharp legal mind and a faded major player in the civil rights movement. After his partner takes ill, Roman J. Israel, Esq. finds he must navigate himself into an unfamiliar world, where the legal game is sharkier than ever (epitomized by Colin Farrell’s lean turn as George Pierce) and the social justice game has changed, which Roman learns when he seeks employment with activist Maya (Carmen Ejogo).

Denzel Washington’s performance in and as Roman J. Israel, Esq. is like a great big tree. Not because it’s wooden – far from it, Denzel turns in a nuanced and offbeat performance unlike anything I’ve seen from him and yet irresistibly compelling as we try to figure out what to make of a man like Roman. No, he’s like an enormous tree in that it’s difficult not to stand in amazement at him once you stumble upon this untrumpeted performance. Indeed, there are moments in the film when even the other actors seem to be quite taken by Denzel; the expressions on their faces seem to supplant their scripted dialogue with, “Holy socks, I’m in a scene with Denzel Washington!” Not that I blame them: it’s hard enough merely watching someone else in a scene alongside the perennially mesmerizing Denzel.

As he did in Nightcrawler, Gilroy presents a curious specimen, indisputably a product of his times, and puts him in situations where his moral fiber can be tested. Washington proves himself more than capable of handling a character as demanding as Roman, giving the character weight with which the audience must wrestle. When Roman makes difficult choices, it’s difficult to determine our allegiances because we see Roman as concretely human, entirely understandable and yet somewhat inscrutable. When characters tell Roman about his inspirational value and his legacy as an activist, we buy it, because Denzel wears the history of Roman Israel with as much grace and comfort as he does the character’s trademark afro. (Has an afro been as iconic since Pulp Fiction? You decide.) And in the film’s final moments, Denzel brings to astonishing life the tough choices Roman faces, makes a decision that seems at once bewildering and entirely consistent with his character, and then leaves the final judgment to us. Where it was perhaps easier to render a verdict in Nightcrawler, Roman J. Israel, Esq. ends up more prickly, gladly indigestible.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is a very strong character study, so I was both surprised and disappointed to see that the trailer cast its titular attorney as an irreverent, speak-his-mind throwback – which, don’t get me wrong, is certainly a part of his character, but it’s a reductionist view that looks only at one set of creative decisions. The film includes one of the most uncomfortable job interviews committed to film, imbued with such heartening pathos as Roman quite literally chokes on his own pride during a job interview and barely stammers his way through handing over a business card. Elsewhere we see the struggle between Roman’s code of conduct and the demands of the world in an encounter with a homeless man, throwing into question issues of perception and how stereotypes lead to false conclusions. Through it all, Denzel & Gilroy are careful to treat Roman with all his intricate layers rather than stack personality traits without understanding the core of the character.

One of the standout sequences of Roman J. Israel, Esq. takes its protagonist to the beach for a sequence which is entirely wordless, save for a moment when Roman orders a gourmet doughnut. It’s the sort of scene that, in nearly any other movie, would have been filler, designed to hawk a hit single on the soundtrack or pad out a runtime by trying to seem deep. But Denzel & Gilroy find ways to make the scene immensely potent, calling back to a throwaway one-liner and turning it into a turning point for the character. I can’t remember the last time a doughnut figured so pivotally into a film’s plot (think Forest Whitaker scarfing down evidence in Taken 3, but those were bagels), but then I can’t remember a film that snuck up on me like Roman J. Israel, Esq. did. I can’t remember the last time a command performance like Denzel’s singlehandedly elevated a movie that might otherwise have been lightly unmemorable and turned it into a late-season must-see. But then, I don’t know what else I could have expected from Denzel Washington.

Roman J. Israel, Esq. is rated PG-13 for “language and some violence.” Written and directed by Dan Gilroy. Starring Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, and Carmen Ejogo.