Batman: The Animated Series - "Read My Lips"

“You’ve had your share of odd opponents, sir, but this one does take the biscuit.”

A spree of successful robberies leads Batman to a new gang in Gotham. This gang, however, is led by Arnold Wesker – The Ventriloquist – and his gangster dummy Scarface (both voiced by George Dzundza). How can Batman stop a mobster who doesn’t know he’s a mobster? And who’s really in charge here?

Scarface and The Ventriloquist are relatively recent additions to the Batman canon, debuting in February 1988, but they’re pretty iconic for the simplicity of the concept – an evil ventriloquist who might be controlled by his dummy. (Sidebar: why haven’t we had a live-action Ventriloquist yet? Paging Colin Mochrie...) I know I took The Animated Series to task last week for its difficult handling of mental illness with Maxie Zeus, but with the Ventriloquist the waters are somewhat muddier, both here and in the comics, where it’s more overtly implied that Scarface is alive, carved from the gallows at Blackgate Penitentiary. This episode seems to fall on the side of mental illness, but there’s plenty of implication that the Ventriloquist is, to mix metaphors, pulling the strings. It’s that note of ambiguity that makes this episode worth revisiting.

Another real gem in “Read My Lips” is the casting of George Dzundza as both Ventriloquist and Scarface, one a sniveling coward and the other a gangster straight out of central casting. Dzundza would later take the role of Perry White on Superman: The Animated Series, which is really weird to hear when you know they’re all the same guy, but kudos to Andrea Romano, who chose the voice cast for BtAS, because she found a gem. Dzundza finds a distance between the two voices, sharp enough to tell the difference but near enough to recognize it’s the same person voicing both characters. The true mark of Dzundza’s power is that I still hear his Scarface in my head when I read the comics (to be fair, I still hear a lot of the voices from BtAS in my head – another feather in Andrea Romano’s cap).

As someone who watched a lot of those films at a formative period in his life, I really appreciated the way “Read My Lips” leans heavily into the gangster tropes, from the very name of Scarface to goons like Rhino, Mugsy, and Ratso appearing to have stepped out of the background of a 1930s James Cagney film. We’ve seen the polished gangsters of Rupert Thorne’s racket, and we’ve seen Gotham taken over by a better class of criminal (hat-tip to Heath Ledger’s Joker), but Scarface’s crew is a real throwback. The retro vibe of the episode puts Batman in a place where he has to rely on his wits more than his gadgets, though there’s a memorable bit with the Batcomputer which feels oddly reminiscent of Blade Runner. On the whole, though, this episode feels like it could have been a very good installment or two in the 1940s Batman serials.

It’s surprising to me that this is the sixty-fourth episode of the series (out of 85 or 109, depending on whether you count The New Batman Adventures), because I remember Scarface having such a looming presence over the show. Either my memory was leaning on his later episodes, or “Read My Lips” is a whopper of a debut, because it’s difficult to imagine that Scarface is wholly absent from the first half of the show. Just as Scarface is probably the best of Batman’s second-tier rogues, “Read My Lips” might not be a Top Ten episode, but it’s a strong contender for #11.

Original Air Date: May 10, 1993

Writers: Alan Burnett, Michael Reaves, and Joe R. Lansdale

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: The Ventriloquist and Scarface (George Dzundza)

Next episode: “The Worry Men,” in which Batman goes galumphing back.

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

Hostiles (2017)

Like Roman J. Israel, Esq. before it, I had no idea what to expect from Hostiles because I hadn’t encountered any marketing for it; I conducted a minimal amount of research before seeing it and determined that it was worth a look based on the strength of its leading man (Christian Bale) and director (Scott Cooper, of the Oscar-nominated Crazy Heart). And in both cases, the element of surprise worked in the film’s favor; I genuinely didn’t know what to expect from Hostiles, and I found myself compelled by the plot and its anchoring performances.

Christian Bale stars as Captain Joseph Blocker, an Army man nearing retirement in 1892. For his last mission, Blocker is assigned by President Harrison to escort the ailing Cheyenne chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi) and his family to Montana. Despite losing several of his men in battle with Yellow Hawk, Blocker heads north, where he and his troops meet Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose family was recently slaughtered by a Comanche raiding party.

I think Luke Skywalker gave the best review of Hostiles near the middle of The Last Jedi when he advised, “This is not going to go the way you think.” Despite the setup of its opening shots, Hostiles does not behave like a traditional revenge western; though there are certainly elements of that subgenre, it’s far from the film’s main focus, and the film approaches that plotline from an angle that ends up serving the film’s actual center – the absurd senselessness of violence motivated only by a history of racial prejudice, and the deep scars left by that violence. It’s to the film’s credit that this lesson is never overtly didactic, instead filtered through the character of Blocker, who begins the film clinging to the certainty of his prejudice, only gradually eliding the gap between himself and Yellow Hawk.

From behind one of the most expressive mustaches since Aaron Eckhart in Sully, Bale gives a riveting performance as only Bale could, presenting all the rage and self-doubt from behind the stoniest of exteriors; his whole body shaking at times, wracked with all the emotions he’s struggling to repress, Bale does amazing things with a furrowed brow or a bowed head. His scenes with Wes Studi (who, I must say, it’s good to see again) are commanding for their silence, in which we see Blocker struggle to understand, while Yellow Hawk struggles to communicate – two men so mired in the past that they are unable to imagine a better present. The gradual development of Blocker’s character feels organic, and the film’s final “twist” (in that it’s unexpected, not that it turns out he was dead all along or something) helps us understand more about how much the character has changed over the course of the film.

If there’s an aspect of the film that feels out of place, it’s Rosamund Pike, who is so radiant that it’s difficult to believe she could look that pulled together after suffering so much violence in 1892. She’s a far cry from the silliness of Haley Bennett in The Magnificent Seven, and she does get some plot moments that show her character to be underestimated by the men who spend the film trying to protect her. She’s also a nice counterpart to Blocker’s internal battle with his own prejudice, but by and large the film tends to treat her like a footnote to the main plot. Having seen what Pike can do with a meaty role like “Amazing” Amy in Gone Girl, it’s a bit of a letdown to see her utilized in such an underwhelming role, especially when the film orbits an undercooked romance plot that feels more perfunctory and inevitable than necessary. (And I think the film knows it, because that envelope is never really pushed.)

Hostiles ends up reckoning with a dark chapter in American history by attempting to imagine a rehabilitated future borne out of mutual understanding. The film tracks Blocker’s recognition that he possesses so many of the things he hates about Yellow Hawk, least of all being a basic common humanity, while Yellow Hawk struggles to make himself understood to his escorting captain and to himself. Measured when it needs to be and bursting with western-style action in several key shootouts and raids, Hostiles is a surprisingly engaging film, particularly for a moviegoer who has never been all that fond of westerns.

(Sidebar: High Noon is probably my favorite western – what’s yours?)

Hostiles is rated R for “strong violence and language.” Written and directed by Scott Cooper. Based on a manuscript by Donald E. Stewart. Starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike, and Wes Studi.

Batman: The Animated Series - "Fire From Olympus"

“Heracles bested 12 labors before I received him. And so it shall be with you, bat demon.”

After a police informant is apparently struck by lightning on a cloudless night, Batman follows the trail of a stolen energy weapon to the man responsible for shipping the device. However, Maxie Zeus (Steve Susskind) has been suffering delusions of godhood, believing himself to be the Greek deity that is his namesake. Mistaking Batman for his brother Hades, Maxie runs Batman through a gauntlet while plotting to rule Gotham from his Olympian tower.

Maxie Zeus is a bit of a pickle. As a villain, he opens up a lot of interesting territory for Batman, dropping him into Greek mythology in the way that Wonder Woman might be more comfortable. He brings that set of arresting iconography with him, and there’s probably a very good episode to be written in which he teams up with The Riddler in a heist involving the riddle of the Sphinx. However, this episode never fully wrestles with the very clear fact that Maxie Zeus is demonstrably mentally ill, and so a good deal of this episode involves Batman patiently accommodating this deluded goofball and couching his vigilante efforts under the umbrella of “helping” Maxie Zeus.

Look, as fantastic as Batman’s rogues gallery is – it’s arguably the best in comics (Spider-Man and Flash are distant runners-up) – it’s always gotten a little flak, and rightly so, for its unilateral equivalence between mental illness and pure evil. That is, The Joker is evil because he’s crazy; Two-Face becomes evil once he can’t manage his personality disorder; and Harley Quinn is only bad because she’s crazy enough to love The Joker. I’m certain that there’s a very interesting and much less thorny version of Maxie Zeus who’s not mentally ill, who knows he’s not a demigod but relishes the metaphor and the trappings of Olympus. That way, we’d have a Batman who’s not afraid to act, who doesn’t have to dance around his foe for twenty minutes until the baddie’s own hubris gets the better of him. Batman is gentler with Maxie than with his other foes, it’s true, but I never got the sense from this episode that Batman’s desire to “help” Maxie Zeus was anything more than a strategy to acquire the help of his assistant Clio (because of course she’s named after the muse of history).

Having said that, though, in the setpieces designed to keep Batman and Maxie Zeus apart, the writers Reeves-Stevens do come up with some very clever bits. The aforementioned gauntlet, Maxie Zeus’s riff on Greek myths of the hydra and the Erymanthian boar, work very well for Batman. It almost recalls the Maze of the Minotaur from “If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?” (probably why my mind went to a Riddler/Maxie Zeus team-up), in that it’s as much a test of Batman’s brains as his physical body. There’s a genuine sense of peril there, especially when Maxie implies there are eleven more terrible beasties behind each door. And of course, there’s a delightful frisson in the moments when the episode allows us to see the world as our villain sees it, as when he likens Batman to Hades, lord of the underworld. (I’ve always been a fan, incidentally, of the reading that the Justice League re-present the Greek pantheon: sun god Apollo reborn as Superman, underworldly Batman/Hades, Wonder Woman as the warrior Artemis, the mercurial Flash/Hermes, etc.) The episode smartly flips the script when Maxie arrives at Arkham and finds that even the incarcerated are familiar to him; we’ll forgive the way he confuses Greek and Roman mythology when he likens Two-Face to the Roman god Janus, because the rest of the sequence is such fun.

As I’ve said all along, even a B-list episode of Batman: The Animated Series is better than anything out there – case in point, I’ll even go so far as to put "The Underdwellers" against anything Teen Titans Go! has offered. This is Maxie Zeus’s one and only appearance in the DC Animated Universe (he’s made only infrequent appearances in the comics themselves), and while I couldn’t help but feel the episode could have been stronger, that’s not to say it’s a particularly poor showing. As a child, I found this episode cemented Maxie Zeus for me as a major adversary of Batman’s, and while I’ve discovered in my adulthood that that’s not quite accurate, I do confess there are a few things in “Fire From Olympus” that align with everything I love about Batman – his improbable action, his lofty tethers to mythology, and his existence in a universe populated with the most madcap of madmen.

Original Air Date: May 24, 1993

Writers: Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens

Director: Dan Riba

Villain: Maxie Zeus (Steve Susskind)

Next episode: “Read My Lips,” in which a glock of wood gets his gig greak.

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

Monday at the Movies - January 22, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” Remember when I thought Catwoman was the last superhero film I hadn’t seen? This week, it turns out there was another.

Steel (1997) – I’ll say this for Steel: while I don’t remember Catwoman inspiring any emotions beyond boredom and disgust, at least I had a smile on my face during Steel. Don’t get me wrong, this is an absolutely terrible film, but it crosses that threshold into watchable garbage that at least made me grin at how dumb it is. The film is nominally based on the DC Comics character Steel, who dons a metal suit after being inspired by Superman, but this iteration of Steel is more like if Iron Man were a discount Robocop with a hammer (don’t worry, Shaq doesn’t miss the opportunity to say “It’s hammer time”). Shaquille O’Neal is ludicrously cast as John Henry Irons, a military weapons genius who builds his own arsenal to protect the streets when a former soldier (Judd Nelson) goes rogue with John Henry’s designs. Shaq was clearly cast because of his great height, but neither his athletic nor acting prowesses are on display here. No fewer than four times, the film trots out a tired gag in which Shaq is supposed to be bad at free throws; perhaps worse, Shaq demonstrates tremendous difficulty with words longer than four syllables (it’s all over when he tries to say the word “capacitor”). Annabeth Gish appears in a surprisingly progressive supporting role as Sparks, a paralyzed Army vet who becomes Steel’s tech support, but then the film puts rocket launchers on her wheelchair. The action sequences are rubbish, largely because the crew couldn’t find a stuntman tall enough to stand in for Shaq, and the performances are comparably lackluster (Richard Roundtree shows up, and yes, there’s a “shaft” joke). Every once in a while, Steel is heroically stupid, which makes for an entertaining bit of relief in an otherwise mercilessly poor film.

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

Batman: The Animated Series - "His Silicon Soul"

“You cannot prevent the inevitable, Batman. H.A.R.D.A.C. is reborn, in the very image of the man who destroyed him!”

In a Gotham warehouse, a lost H.A.R.D.A.C. duplicant awakens, unaware that it is not actually Batman. The duplicant leaps into crimefighting action and retreats to Wayne Manor, where it begins to confront the truth of its robotic existence. Meanwhile, Batman becomes aware of the duplicant and seeks out Karl Rossum (William Sanderson), who has retreated from the failure of his H.A.R.D.A.C. experiment.

“His Silicon Soul” is the kind of episode that one might expect to have appeared instead in the tie-in comic The Batman Adventures (one of the better Bat-books, incidentally, in recent years). It’s a one-off sequel to an earlier episode, and that’s the kind of baton the comic book would have loved to pick up. Batman: The Animated Series has always done well building its own internal continuity, but a direct sequel like this one is a nice way for the series to revisit some of its finer hours. Recall that I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed “Heart of Steel,” and so I was all the more eager to revisit “His Silicon Soul.”

You have to get past the absurd hurdle of the episode’s basic conceit – there was another duplicant, unseen and unmentioned until now – before you can wrestle with the really interesting things in “His Silicon Soul.” It’s a bit of a thin justification for a sequel episode, since we never saw any indication that H.A.R.D.A.C. had tried or even wanted to duplicate Batman (let alone Bruce Wayne), and moreover it would seem that this duplicant is more advanced than those of “Heart of Steel,” which made very unconvincing substitutes. Here, though, we’re not dealing with mere animatronics; this duplicant truly believes itself to be the real Batman, and that premise allows the writers do some fascinating work that, for my money, entirely excuses anything that goes awry with this episode. Indeed, this case of mistaken cybernetic identity ends up getting us to the very core of Batman.

The duplicant Batman – voiced, I must say, expertly by Kevin Conroy with the aid of a slight metallic filter – finds itself caught between two seemingly contradictory sets of programming: H.A.R.D.A.C.’s decree to save Gotham by replacing it, and Batman’s steadfast refusal to kill. It’s one of the more philosophical episodes of the series, grappling with this central tenet of Batman that the series has otherwise largely left unspoken. (I recently read an interview with Conroy, in which he cited the show’s “stay alive groan,” which let audiences know that Batman hadn’t actually killed anyone.) But this is key to Batman’s notion of heroism; himself orphaned by a double homicide, Batman has vowed to find a better way, steadfastly refusing to find justice in the very act that took his parents from him. It’s deeply affecting, then, to see the duplicant realize that that’s a core of its own programming too, and to struggle against H.A.R.D.A.C.’s insistence that the real Batman be killed.

The episode is padded out with neat little moments, like Rossum’s retreat to an idyllic farm, or the duplicant Batman’s instinctive turn to Alfred when it realizes that something is amiss. How about the very fact that the duplicant Batman’s first impulse is to stop a gang of thieves? Writers Marty Isenberg and Robert Skir demonstrate that they understand the intrinsic nature of Batman by showing what happens to a blank robot when you download Batman into its mind. It fights crime. It turns to Alfred for help. It seeks out its father. And it never, ever kills. I had brushed off the “duplicant trilogy” for a long time, but I’ve come around to seeing how it ultimately accesses the foundation of Batman, tells a unique story in his world, and (if nothing else) gives us a real eyeball kick with the unforgettable image of the cyborg’s half-destroyed face – to say nothing of the fact that “His Silicon Soul” includes a moment when Batman swordfights with a cyborg wearing half his face. If moments like those are immature, I never want to grow up.

Original Air Date: November 20, 1992

Writers: Marty Isenberg & Robert N. Skir

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Villain: Duplicant Batman (Kevin Conroy) and H.A.R.D.A.C. (Jeff Bennett)

Next episode: “Fire From Olympus,” in which Zeus smites Gotham with a thunderbolt.

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

Monday at the Movies - January 15, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” The Cinema King had noted that Get Out was up for “Best Picture – Musical or Comedy” at the Golden Globes, and this week, he finds it to belong to neither genre.

Get Out (2017) – Jordan Peele’s directorial film debut has a much-hyped 99% on Rotten Tomatoes (you guessed it, Armond White is one of the naysayers), and while I have my own problems with that site’s aggregate approach to film ranking, in this instance I can only say, “I’m with them.” Daniel Kaluuya stars as Chris, a man visiting his girlfriend Rose (Alison Williams) and her parents (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener), when he discovers that the family’s black servants are acting strangely. Peele’s script manages to generate empathy for Chris and his mindset, and Kaluuya gives a first-rate performance in communicating all the unease, fear, and hesitation that Chris feels in this strange place. It’s not a musical or a comedy, though it is thickly satirical; without spoiling anything, the film leans into some strange plot elements that regardless manage to align with the story’s thematic concerns. I’m impressed that Peele has created a film that is very much of its moment but is also a highly successful genre outing in its own respect. My cynical hackles had been raised purely by the overwhelming number of people who said Get Out was one of the best movies of the year (last time I heard that claim, it was Mad Max: Fury Road, and we all remember how that turned out). But I found myself hypnotized by the film, unnerved in all the right places, and surprised that – in a world where we’re told that cultural divides are too deep and unbridgeable – a first-time writer/director effortlessly took me into Chris’s head and told a parable about how painful, violent, and condescending even the best intentions can be. Peele has said he’s mulling a sequel, and I have no idea how that’d play out, but I’ll be right there for it; I can only hope, however, that Lil Rel Howery’s TSA agent Rod can somehow team up with Michael Peña’s Luis from Ant-Man in a race to see who can be the more charming and helpful.

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

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Demon's Quest"

“I am he who is called Ra’s al Ghul.”
“The Demon’s Head. I thought you were only a legend.”
“I am quite real. And as I’m sure you realize by now, my reputation for resourcefulness is well-deserved.”

One rainy night at Gotham University, Robin is abducted from his dorm room by a masked figure. Batman looks for his apprentice but is instead found by Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner), who reveals that his daughter Talia (Helen Slater) has also been kidnapped – and moreover, that he has deduced Batman’s secret identity. Batman accompanies Ra’s al Ghul and his overzealous manservant Ubu to Calcutta on the trail of Robin’s captors, where Batman begins to learn of Ra’s al Ghul’s true designs for global extremism.

Back on “Off Balance,” I had teased that I have so very much to say about Ra’s al Ghul, and “The Demon’s Quest” is finally the place to have that conversation. I’ll make the claim that Ra’s al Ghul was the first great addition to the Batman canon in decades, introduced as he was in 1971, and I’ll go even further to say that even with that thirty-year handicap he still managed to become easily Batman’s second or third greatest adversary (depending, I grant you, on where you rank The Riddler). Ra’s poses both a physical and mental threat to Batman; Joker and Riddler require great cerebral effort of Batman – Riddler to outthink him, and Joker to wrap one’s head around thinking like him – but Ra’s can go toe to toe with Batman, as he does in the exceptional swordfighting scene, so iconic that Arrow poached it for its third season. The Demon’s Head is a criminal mastermind, with a vast network of perils, he’s more than a match for Batman both intellectually and physically, but he adds something new to the Bat-canon in that he doesn’t want to defeat Batman, not entirely – he wants Batman to be his heir, to marry his daughter Talia and embrace his vision of how to save the world. (And may we say, the ecoterrorism thing works better on Ra’s than it ever could on Catwoman.) Ra’s is, in fact, Batman’s complete opposite number – indescribably wealthy and influential, manically single-minded in his pursuit of his particular vision of justice, and unstoppable in every way; he even has a first-rate mask and cape to conceal his identity.

If Ra’s is the Professor Moriarty to Batman’s Sherlock Holmes, whose danger is concealed only by his immense dignity, Talia is the apex version of Catwoman, a woman hopelessly in love with Batman but equally impossible to reform, so obsessed is she with following her father’s vision. (I do wonder – when the comics revealed in 2000 that Catwoman was actually the daughter of mobster Carmine Falcone, were they trying to make her more similar to Talia?) In the comics, Talia would ultimately become the mother of Batman’s son Damian, but here she’s almost Tracy di Vicenzo from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the heiress to a criminal empire whose hand in marriage is the thing that brings father and lover together, in a conflict in which Talia is at one point quite literally a weapon, hurled at Batman. Though the original comics by Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams leaned heavily into the James Bond vibe, especially with Ra’s and his snowbound ski chalet, this two-part episode (scripted by O’Neil and Len Wein, two veritable titans) replaces the espionage with a more classical swashbuckling attitude. We get major Lawrence of Arabia overtones from the score, and the journey through Calcutta really recalls the better moments of the Indiana Jones franchise. Even the kiss at sunrise, which closes out the episode, feels like a classic moment from the golden age of Hollywood.

Indeed, there’s an overall classical atmosphere that pervades the whole episode. David Warner is absolutely perfect as Ra’s al Ghul, his clipped British accent giving the character a dismissive aristocratic air that nevertheless suggests he’s a man of intense culture and sophistication. As the very first adaptation of Ra’s al Ghul, Warner sets the gold standard for the character; Liam Neeson is quite close in Batman Begins, but Warner’s influence can be heard to this day. You believe every word he says, too, from his deduction of Batman’s identity to the revelation of his plot against earth’s population; we even buy that he’s a capable swordsman as he taunts Batman with every parry and thrust (though the silhouetted swordfighting with the Errol Flynn score doesn’t hurt).

Here’s the thing – I could transcribe every amazing thing that happens in this episode. I could talk about the inventive use of a precredits scene to establish the plot and set this episode apart. We could talk about the pitch-perfect beat where Batman puts his mask on – his true face – to talk to Ra’s al Ghul, or the moment when he takes his shirt off to completely devastate the plans of the Demon’s Head. We could joke about how Robin isn’t quite useful in this episode or marvel at how lush Batman’s suit looks when a dark gray cast eliminates the blue accents from his cape and cowl. But all of it falls under the rubric of O’Neil and Wein doing a bang-up job with the script, adapting the original issues almost frame for frame and crafting a mystery story which features some excellent detective work by Batman but also remembers to allow the audience to follow along and maybe solve the mystery with the world’s greatest detective.

“The Demon’s Quest” is such a good episode that I keep checking to make sure Paul Dini didn’t write it – the highest compliment one can pay an episode of this show. It’s one of the show’s finest hours, doing potent work to introduce a rogue to an audience who hadn’t seen him adapted before without forgetting to present an illegal amount of fun, adventure, and excitement.

Original Air Date: May 3-4, 1993

Writers: Dennis O’Neil and Len Wein

Director: Kevin Altieri

Villain: Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner)

Next episode: “His Silicon Soul,” in which a replicant returns.

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

Monday at the Movies - January 8, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, we inaugurate 2018 with its first movie reviews as we charge headlong into the seventh year of “Monday at the Movies.”

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) – I had real reservations about this film, the first of five in a prequel series to the beloved but occasionally laborious Harry Potter franchise. My misgivings ultimately proved unfounded, though it took me a year to surmount them; I found the film to be a self-contained narrative with a conclusion, and I found it to be immensely cheering. Returning to writerly duties, J.K. Rowling remembers to keep the whimsy in the wizard’s world with a clever and fun film to which a disservice is done when we brush it off as merely a prequel to Harry Potter. Eddie Redmayne stars as the wide-eyed Newt Scamander, whose bigger-on-the-inside briefcase full of magical creatures pops open in 1920s New York, drawing the attention of former Auror Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and biting a No-Maj (no-magic, played by Dan Fogler) on the neck. The film takes its time building a world – at once recognizable but simultaneously quite fresh in its exploration of wizards in America – and it’s to Rowling’s credit that I went from Hogwarts fatigue to genuine enthusiasm anew for the mythology. (I plied my moviegoing companion and tested her saintly patience for nearly forty minutes of exhausting detail about nifflers, no-majs, and school houses.) Moreover, the film contains at least one genuinely surprising turn, about which I am probably the last man in America not to have been spoiled. David Yates shows no signs that this is his fifth directorial outing in the Potterverse, bringing a renewed energy to the project and restoring that Spielbergian sense of awe. As someone who had previously regarded the prospect of Fantastic Beasts with cynical dread, I now say, roll on the sequel (The Crimes of Grindelwald, due in November).

Would You Rather (2012) – If the Marquis de Sade hosted a dinner party and invited the cast of Saw, it’d be something like this joyless film. Brittany Snow stars as a woman down on her luck and caring for her ailing brother; she accepts an offer to play a mysterious game on the promise of untold riches if she wins. Naturally, the invitation conceals the horrific nature of the game, a sadistic version of “would you rather.” I’ve seen this film lauded for its “restraint” within the torture porn genre, and it’s true that the film is surprisingly not gory for the number of violent acts that transpire, but it would seem that the restraint applied to Steffen Schlachtenhaufen’s script, which is the very definition of thin; everything in the film is designed solely to get bodies to the dinner table so that they can slice, electrocute, whip, and drown each other. The script sacrifices character and plot for easy scares and drops all its Chekhov’s guns for a tawdry Twilight Zone ending. If there’s any glee to be had in the film, it’s from Jeffrey Combs, who turns each line of dialogue into a fine slice of honey-baked ham as Shepard Lambrick, the game’s host, he of indeterminate wealth and profound amorality. As Lambrick’s son, Robin Lord Taylor turns up with a performance that anticipates his sociopathic Penguin on Gotham, but the film seems less interested in him as the runtime progresses. Only Combs seems to understand that he’s in a C-list horror film and elects to have the most fun possible, bathing (as Kenneth Branagh would put it) in a river of ham. By no means is this a good performance by technical standards, but it is a delight to watch in a film that is utter, utter dreck.

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

Batman: The Animated Series - "Blind as a Bat"

“Alfred, I’ve got to find some way to stop him. Sight or no sight.”

Wayne Enterprises unveils its latest innovation, a stealth helicopter nicknamed The Raven. The prototype’s nomenclature would seem to be tempting fate, as the equally avian Penguin (Paul Williams) steals the aircraft wholesale; in so doing, he triggers an explosion that temporarily blinds Bruce Wayne. Against medical advice, Batman develops a technology that hacks his own eyesight, risking permanent blindness in order to recover his weaponry and stop The Penguin.

Director Dan Riba has notably remarked of drafting this episode, “We kind of lost track of what the characters’ motivations were,” and this episode is a little all over the map on that count. It’s ultimately a decent episode, but there are some really baffling character choices, not the least of which is the revelation that Leslie Thompkins – the elderly and serene family physician – is something of a master welder. (The scene of her in enormous protective goggles is alone worth the price of admission.) It’s Bruce Wayne, though, who behaves strikingly out of character. For a man who has dedicated his life to a war on the very idea of guns, his company’s production of a giant floating firearm is more than a little unnerving. To Riba and company’s credit, there is the implication that Bruce has been metaphorically blind to his corporation’s activities, but it’s incredibly understated and easy to miss. (When the show crosses over with Superman, we’ll meet a Bruce Wayne who is adamantly opposed to weaponized tech, at the expense of a business deal with Lex Luthor.)

Batman also becomes the unwitting subject of physical comedy when he’s struck blind. The episode does some great things with the plot, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the garishly broad portrayal of Batman stumbling around, arms flailing wildly when his sight is lost; it’s a wonder Penguin manages to mount an assault without laughing off the farcical pantomime. Moreover, Batman’s cybernetic vision glitches throughout the episode, the fix for which is Batman repeatedly smacking himself in the back of the head, somewhere between “stupid, stupid” and “you got a bee on your hat.” Having said that, the visuals representing Batman’s blindness are pretty compelling, and the ways Batman compensates for his blindness prove once more why he’s the greatest crimefighter in the world. Even without his eyes, Batman lures his enemies into traps, mounts staggeringly successful offenses, and lands his Batplane mid-downspiral without injuring himself further.

The red-eyed Batman is an astonishing visual, and the metaphorical resonance of “blind as a bat” is ultimately quite successful on a number of levels, including his resolutely stubborn refusal to rest, even if it costs him his own health. It’s almost like the idea of Batman – a tech-savvy force of unstoppable justice – gets dialed up to eleven in this episode: essentially, Batman fights crime so hard that he almost gives himself brain damage. The Penguin too reaches his apex form in this episode; it’s his last major outing as a criminal before he’s rebranded as a semi-legitimate nightclub owner for the New Batman Adventures redesign, and the creators go for broke. They give Penguin a deliciously absurd aviator’s cap and amp up the bird fixation to the point where Penguin won’t tolerate so much as a pigeon pun from his henchmen. His wicked glee at Batman’s plight is met with a “Waugh Waugh” straight out of the Burgess Meredith playbook, taking this verbal tic to the Hamill-level of definitive. Paul Williams is clearly having the most fun possible with the role, and it’s his enthusiasm for the part that transcends most of the silly bits in this episode.

“Blind as a Bat” is, then, not the best episode of Batman: The Animated Series, populated as it is with a few head-scratchers. (Really, I can’t get over Leslie Thompkins with a blowtorch.) But the infectious fun of The Penguin, coupled with the strong use of a blind Batman, pushes this episode to becoming one of the better Penguin episodes. It’s a far cry from “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement,” at least, though I’d say it’s on a par with “Birds of a Feather” (sans, however, the trademark BtAS pathos).

We say au revoir, then, to one of Batman’s finer fowl foes, just in time for the arrival of arguably his other nemesis. The Joker may be no laughing matter, but this next guy is a real demon.

Original Air Date: February 22, 1993

Writers: Len Wein and Mike Underwood

Director: Dan Riba

Villain: The Penguin (Paul Williams)

Next episode: “The Demon’s Quest,” a two-parter which might very well be the best episode not written by Paul Dini.

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