The New Batman Adventures - "The Demon Within"

“Gone, gone, the form of man / Rise the demon, Etrigan!”

A branding iron at auction in Gotham City draws fiercely competitive bids from occult expert Jason Blood (Billy Zane) and the impish witch boy Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith). It’s Bruce Wayne who places the winning bid as a “professional courtesy” to Blood, who Tim Drake is flabbergasted to learn is an ageless wizard who shares a body with Merlin’s personal paladin, Etrigan the Demon. Etrigan escapes when Klarion’s familiar, the were-cat Teekl, steals the iron, and Batman and Robin have a real hellraiser on their hands.

I have a hard time remaining objective about this episode because it was one of my earliest forays into the mad world of Jack Kirby, whose boundless imagination never took a holiday. Even after revolutionizing the “Marvel method” with Stan Lee, after formulating the Fourth World Saga practically single-handedly (and conjuring its god of evil, Darkseid), Kirby continued to churn out new and amazingly original creations like Etrigan and Klarion; the legend tells that workhorse Kirby fashioned Etrigan within the span of a lunch hour, and I believe it. There’s something immediate and dreamlike about Etrigan’s origin, summoned by Merlin to guard Camelot while bonded to a knight, wandering immortal as a god.

Put another way, I’m a real sucker for a Kirby creation, and so I’m not especially perturbed that Batman and Robin essentially become guest stars in their own show when Etrigan and Klarion come to Gotham. (See also Superman: The Animated Series, whose best episodes were the ones involving Darkseid and Kirby’s New Gods.) I’ll also argue that these dark magic characters fit quite nicely into the red-skied ethos of the redesigned Gotham. The implication that Batman already knows Etrigan makes perfect sense, extending his sense of the occult from the training we glimpsed in “Zatanna,” and this episode finally finds a good use for Robin, pitting him as the perpetually amazed sidekick entering a daft world already in progress. Indeed, this episode makes perhaps the greatest use of Robin’s diminutive stature, juxtaposing him with both the slender Klarion and the mammoth bulk of Etrigan.

In the case of The Demon, casting director Andrea Romano hit a home run when she cast Billy Zane as both Jason Blood and Etrigan. As ever, Zane brings a perfectly calibrated performance, flirting with the realm of camp when his Demon speaks in rhyme but also knowing exactly how much gravel to use to differentiate the two voices. We believe his exasperation with Klarion, and we can hear the wink in his voice as he alludes to his past in a conversation with Robin. And in the moments when he speaks the incantation to unleash Etrigan, we can almost see the forceful showiness of a Jack Kirby close-up, replete with bolded lettering and that distinctive “Kirby krackle.” It’s the kind of performance that is just fun to hear, not too far removed from Kevin Conroy’s own distinctive dulcets. This is usually the part of the review where I say it’s a shame we didn’t get more Etrigan, but I’m not sure how much more could have been done with the character while still maintaining this as a Batman show.

In fact, I almost wonder – as we approach the end of The New Batman Adventures, were the writers making a soft pitch for the show to become reinvented as a “Brave and the Bold” team-up series? After this episode, we’ve only got six to go, and two of them can be considered less at Batman episodes proper and more as team-up standalones; over on Superman, meanwhile, the showrunners gave backdoor pilots to Green Lantern, Aquaman, and The Flash (among others). Those of us in the know recall that we did get a team-up show – named, incidentally, Batman: The Brave and the Bold – and with next week’s wink-and-a-nod to a kinder, gentler Batman, perhaps this sort of episode was a necessary course-correction away from the friendless, emotionless, unfeeling Batman of whom we’ve seen all too much on TNBA – even if his friends are literal demons.

Original Air Date: May 9, 1998

Writer: Stan Berkowitz

Director: Atsuko Tanaka

Villain: Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith)

Next episode: “Legends of the Dark Knight,” in which there’s no wrong way to read a Batman.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Old Wounds"

“He was so upset he couldn’t even talk about it. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that. What is it between you two?”

Robin finally asks Nightwing (Loren Lester) why he parted ways with Batman. Though the former Boy Wonder is reluctant to share, he tells his successor about the night Batman went too far, leading to a few confessions with Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong) and a confrontation with The Joker (Mark Hamill) where tensions boiled over.

Although the Batman animated project has largely eschewed long narrative arcs and dense continuity callbacks, “Old Wounds” is maybe the closest the show ever came to addressing its own internal mythology in an episode that promises a major revelation to answer the long-running question of why Nightwing gave up the mantle of Robin. I have very strong memories of this storyline – not as its animated instantiation but as the five-issue tie-in comic book miniseries, The Batman Adventures: The Lost Years, which preceded the episode. I remember that series fondly for its deliberate introspection, getting inside Dick Grayson’s head and tracing his path to a new identity.

Perhaps “Old Wounds” would have benefited from the breathing room that a two-parter would have given it, because the episode moves so briskly through its events that everything seems rushed and a little thin. This is an important story, maybe the second most significant one The New Batman Adventures would ever tell (in four weeks, “Mad Love” makes the case for being the most significant). The way it’s handled, though, seems perfunctory – Batman was a jerk, and Robin had enough – and it doesn’t quite gel with the healthy and positive relationship these characters had in The Animated Series. I’m reticent to pull a “book did it better” with this review, but The Lost Years took two issues to divorce Robin from Batman, establishing the conflict between Bruce’s increasing prickliness and Dick’s bristling under his mentor’s wing. “Old Wounds” distills that pattern down to an incident or two, giving us the acute feeling that we’re being rushed past important backstory. When Barbara says that “It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that,” the problem is that itwas the first time the audience saw Dick like that.

Another drum I hate to beat – but once more feel the unfortunate need to strike – is that the episode gets into very strange territory when it accidentally implies that Barbara Gordon transferred her attraction to Dick Grayson onto Bruce Wayne after the former left Gotham. You can’t say I’m reading into this because of what we’ve seen from the show thus far, and you equally can’t ignore the fact that this episode includes promising sequences of Dick and Babs on a dinner date, followed by a later scene in which he visits her apartment while she’s wearing her other nightwear. I say promising because it’s an age-appropriate gesture to the long history these two share in the comics, building on light continuity with the Sub-Zero movie that preceded the redesign. But the relationship is scrapped as quickly as it’s acknowledged, ending after Batgirl reveals her identity to Dick Grayson, in a scene that uncomfortably reads like Dick thinks Babs is cheating on him with Bruce.

The revelation that Batman has always already known that Barbara Gordon is Batgirl is a clever one (though The Lost Years included sequences of Batman’s process of deduction, noting how Barbara’s tennis moves matched Batgirl’s fighting style), and his compassionate admission takes some of the sting out of the fact that he’s generally an emotionless bastard for most of this episode (and the redesign writ large). Indeed, that whole sequence in the Batcave is note-perfect, from Barbara’s crimefighting gusto to Alfred’s confession that “Yes, I admit it, I am Batman.” It’s a glimpse at a perfectly functional Bat-family, but the rest of the episode, though, does not live up to the promise of that setpiece. Nor, unfortunately, can a single episode sustain the weight of anticipation that’s been building since The New Batman Adventures began.

Original Air Date: October 3, 1998

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: The Joker (Mark Hamill)

Next episode: “The Demon Within,” in which a witch boy and a demon demolish a bakery. 

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Animal Act"

“We got enough yahoos running around this city without having to deal with Yogi and Boo Boo, too.”

A routine evening on patrol turns into a topsy-turvy night of misrule when Batman, Robin, and Nightwing catch a gorilla climbing a radio tower and stealing some gadgetry. Amazingly, Nightwing recognizes the gorilla from his days at Haley’s Circus. Dick Grayson refuses to believe that the gorilla’s trainer, Miranda Kane (Jane Wiedlin), could be behind the theft, but Batman’s hackles are raised when a set of bears robs a warehouse. Yet despite this episode being set in Gotham City, no one notices the strange clown lurking at the periphery.

Contrary to what my synopsis would have you believe – spoiler warning – it’s not The Joker at fault in this episode. (Kudos for that about-face, at least.) It is, in fact, The Mad Hatter, making his full TNBA debut after a cameo in “Over the Edge.” Hewing closer to Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the literary Mad Hatter, the redesign gives us a shorter Jervis Tetch, more gnome than man; wisely, Roddy McDowall remains on hand, his dulcet tones providing the requisite lilting madness for a plot that is appropriately off-kilter. 

“Animal Act” is not, however, a worthy use of the Mad Hatter, even more so than “The Worry Men,” in which even Batman was disappointed at the pure greed of the Hatter’s motives. Here the Hatter is once again after money, but his cockamamie scheme involves manipulating his human mind-control technology to allow him to conquer the animal brain. Why he’s taken this additional step is beyond me, and the episode is disappointingly uninterested in why Tetch has changed his modus operandi for such an underwhelming use of his talents. 

This episode also fails to make full use of the connection to Dick Grayson’s past. (For a better version of this idea, within the last decade, comics scribe Kyle Higgins made masterful use of Nightwing’s ties to his circus past.) For a show that hasn’t quite known what to make of Nightwing, a dive into his history can give the character a better grounding in his new identity. One could imagine this episode as a spiritual sequel to “Robin’s Reckoning,” which gave us a good look at Dick Grayson as a circus orphan with a surrogate family of sorts. Seeing any of that family might have tickled the nostalgia keys. Instead, we get a generic bevy of circus types, including the circus’s ostensible new management. (Ph.D. sidebar – Miranda Kane is obviously named for Batman co-creator Bob Kane, but Miranda is the daughter of magician Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, just as this Miranda is the daughter of the circus’s last animal trainers. Circus as magic?)

All told, “Animal Act” is relatively uninspiring yet almost entirely inoffensive. It’s not a catastrophe on the order of “Critters,” but it never soars as much as it ought to. We’ll have to wait until next week to learn more about how the first Robin became Nightwing, but I’d hoped that this episode (which, also like “Worry Men,” I barely remembered) would humanize the character a little bit. Instead, it further entrenches the notion that Nightwing is a humorless cynic, jaded by his time with Batman and unable to carry on a conversation without gritting his teeth lest he strangle his former mentor. “Just following a pattern of obsessive behavior instilled on me at an early age,” he deadpans, and I can’t help but wonder why the lively Loren Lester was allowed (or encouraged) to restrict himself to a monotone for much of his tenure as Nightwing. If anything, Nightwing should continue to be a light in the darkness, especially as he departs Batman’s orbit. You’d think there ought to be more levity in a show where the Dynamic Duo fights trained bears, but there isn’t a whole lot of it to be found in “Animal Act” – or indeed, regrettably, in much of The New Batman Adventures at large.

Original Air Date: September 26, 1998 

Writer: Hilary J. Bader

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall)

Next episode: “Old Wounds,” in which we finally learn what broke up the band.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Cult of the Cat"

“Wait a minute. Cat worship? Theft? Those guys should be praying to me.”

Another night, another heist, but this one runs Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) afoul of a murderous cult intent on retrieving the statue she filched. After their leader Thomas Blake (Scott Cleverdon) gives orders to kill, Catwoman throws herself into Batman’s arms, but when she discovers that the cult worships all things feline, Catwoman begins to wonder whether there’s another angle to this job. 

This is how Catwoman’s animated tenure ends – with neither a whimper nor a bang, but a fizzle. Aside from episodes like “The Terrible Trio,” the most painful tragedy is that the show has seldom known quite what to do with Catwoman. At her best, she’s been a flirtatious foil for Batman, weaving uncomplicated schemes and snagging her share of shiny-shinies. However, the preponderance of Catwoman episodes have fixated on her namesake, pitting her against cats with the flu, lion-adjacent terrorists, and literal cat people. Throughout it all, I’ve been over here shouting, “Why? Why?”

As Catwoman’s swan song, “Cult of the Cat” is somewhere in the middle. It still has a weird obsession with making the story about cats, but it does a halfway decent job of presenting Catwoman as straddling the line between hero and criminal, using her powers of seduction to trick Batman into helping her. In those moments, this episode is flat-out great – the sequence of her in the Batmobile, slowly doling out information until Batman agrees to help save her life, is vintage Selina Kyle. Even Batman remarks on how frequently he falls for her dangerous ruses when he deadpans, “I might have been knocked out twice tonight, but I still have my long-term memory.”

The bulk of the episode, however, orbits around Thomas Blake and the titular cult, which is shockingly underdeveloped for an episode bearing Paul Dini’s name. (As a “story” credit, Dini’s contribution probably wasn’t enormous; I imagine he was called on to flesh out Catwoman’s role, since it veers close to his take in “Catwalk.”) We don’t really know what the cult wants, what its endgame is, or what its operations look like – only that its intent is murderous and its wild genetic experiments have yielded a monstrous cat-creature in a feeding pit. On this count – and I never thought I’d say this – the writers might have done well to resurrect Emile Dorian from “Tyger, Tyger,” whose mad science and feline fixation would have fed well into this episode’s underdeveloped cult leader. (Sidebar: the gag seems to be that Thomas Blake is the name of Catman in the comics, though this episode does that character absolutely no favors.)

“Cult of the Cat” continues the uninspiring bent of The New Batman Adventures toward action sequences. An opener that reminds one of From Russia With Love’s beginning shows some promise, but a protracted car chase and a dull gladiator pit sequence drag on and lost this viewer with some rapidity. I don’t have strong memories of watching this episode when it first aired, and indeed even on this rewatch I had trouble distinguishing it from “You Scratch My Back” less than three months ago; I kept waiting for Nightwing to show up, forgetting I’d already watched that episode. Worst of all, it sounds like Kevin Conroy had a head cold during this episode, depriving us of what has consistently been one of the show’s greatest joys. It’s not a terrible episode – it is at best passably, passively watchable – but it is also not especially memorable.

Original Air Date: September 18, 1998 

Writers: Paul Dini and Stan Berkowitz

Director: Butch Lukic

Villains: Catwoman (Adrienne Barbeau) and Thomas Blake (Scott Cleverdon) 

Next episode: “Animal Act,” in which Nightwing wrassles a gorilla in a trenchcoat.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

Take Two Tuesday: Tomorrowland (2015) ...or, Put a Pin in It

2015 does not sound like that long ago, but three years feels like an eternity. I have distinct memories of seeing Tomorrowland in the theaters, and objectively it feels like only yesterday, even though the calendar tells me it was more than 1,200 days. Time flies, it seems, whether you’re having fun or whether you’re hurtling toward dystopia. The world seems like a grimmer place than it did three years ago, which is really saying something because I think we all recognize that the sky has been falling for some time now.

I’ve had a lot going on in my life of late, spending a lot of unpleasant time in my own head, and it feels like I hit a crisis point a few weeks ago. It was perhaps, then, appropriate that I came back to Tomorrowland at exactly the moment I needed it. When I reviewed it in 2015, you’ll recall that I was of two minds about it. “Tomorrowland is an important film,” I wrote, “playing to some of my political/aesthetic predispositions, but it’s not as good as it ought to be.” I was cynical about the film’s attempt to kickstart an imaginative revolution, frustrated that the film hadn’t delivered on its utopian promise. I wanted to goto Tomorrowland, and I expected the film to take me there.

Reader, I missed the point. Put another way, I had spent far too long asking, “Wasn’t the future wonderful?” without realizing that I should have been asking, “Won’t the future be wonderful?” (Light spoilers follow.)

In a way, Tomorrowland has never really left me. As a lifelong visitor to Walt Disney World, it’s around every corner of my memory, a direct right turn off Main Street in the Magic Kingdom. I’ve listened to the Michael Giacchino score more times than I can count; iTunes tells me I’ve listened to one track, “Pin-Ultimate Experience,” a whopping 113 times (which makes it #59 on my Top 100 Most Played list), and it’s almost certainly my favorite Giacchino score. A few months back, I finally read the tie-in prequel novel, largely because it includes a comic book, and I’ve continued to study Brad Bird’s career with great interest, most recently with Incredibles 2. And I bought the Blu-Ray about six months ago, knowing that I’d never fully dislodged the film, and noodled around the special features until finally plunking down a few hours last week to rewatch the film.

There is a great big beautiful tomorrow animated short on the Blu-Ray, “The Origins of Plus Ultra,” that was originally intended to be the film’s opener. I understand it was cut for reasons of pacing and because it reveals some of the film’s mythology a little too early (Clooney covers some of it at the top of the third act, in Paris). But it does queue up the film such that I find it difficult to imagine the film without it, because the short prepares the audience for the central question of the film – “What happened to human endeavor? Aren’t we better than this?”

Tomorrowland is an intervention film, no doubt about it, but I think critics mistook Bird’s frustration for mere crankiness, and I share his frustration. Our world seems paradoxically broken, with one crowd shouting that the world’s problems don’t exist, and the other insisting that the problems aren’t fixable. Then there’s Casey Newton (Britt Robertson) in the middle, amazed that no one has thought to ask how to save the future. There’s something endearing about Casey’s deadpan naiveté, about her complete disbelief that no one has considered pursuing a solution. Bird has stacked the deck, no question; you get to do that when you’re writing an allegory. But there is something so inspiring when Casey’s relentless optimism forestalls the apocalypse, if only for a few seconds – a jarring moment of hope for fallen cynic Frank Walker (George Clooney). The way the film stops on this beat is downright chilling, and it’s a credit to Bird that the film doesn’t need to overexplain what’s just happened; a pause on a ticking clock is enough for a thinking audience to understand that Casey is, quite literally, our last hope. And yes, I am a sucker for films that talk about how to save humanity from its fallen state (cf. Batman v Superman).

The film remains a little bit clunky, with an occasional exposition dump like the ones co-writer Damon Lindelof employed on Lost, but there is here a simultaneous charm to them. “Now I finally answer your question, you’re gonna interrupt me?” Walker interjects, at which time I realized that the mythology of the film was all just window dressing for Bird’s real message – that there is no time to waste, that the future is now, and that someone has to step up and build it. It’s as if Brad Bird is shaking the collective audience by the shoulders and imploring us, “Get off your ass and build Tomorrowland!”

There’s a wonderful line in another Bird film – Ratatouille, one of my all-time favorites – in which a critic discards his pessimism upon realizing, “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” It’s this message that infects the film’s final moments, in which the next generation of prime movers is recruited. Many of them come from humble beginnings, yes, but if Casey believes in them, we’re in good hands. I realized only now that the film’s framing device, narrated by Walker and Casey, isn’t a screenwriting cheat. It’s a fully integrated part of the story because the entire film is the advertisement on the pin. When Casey touches the pin in what is undoubtedly the film’s best, most breathtaking sequence, she sees the promise of Tomorrowland; the next set of pins, then, will essentially show the film Tomorrowland and take its beholders to that promised land. In this way, the film teaches us how to read it; we are, all of us, the next Casey Newtons.

It’s a scary position, but it’s a promising one. It’s a hopeful one, and heavens, do we need it. I no longer think the film is a failure – I think its success will be measured by what we do with it. As a piece of fiction, the film is a bit unwieldy, as the ambition of its ideas perhaps surpasses what you can reasonably accomplish in a two-hour Disney movie, but I’ll always take a movie of ideas over a movie of mere spectacle. Bird has denied that his work is influenced by Ayn Rand (the director doth protest too much, methinks), but both are creators whose stories are life-support machines for philosophies; Bird is more optimistic than Rand, but he shares her notion that the creators of the world cannot be shackled by conventional wisdom, that they must be allowed to save the world. “I was designed to find dreamers,” the animatronic Athena (an underrated Raffey Cassidy) declares, and I think Bird senses a kinship with her. Athena oddly becomes the heart of the film – oddly, because she has no heart – but then that’s the way of most science fiction. She’s the one who dispenses the pins, and she points the way for the dreamers, but she can’t take us to Tomorrowland without our help.

On second watch, I think I’m ready to go so far as to say that Tomorrowland is a Personal Canon film. Remember that the idea of the Personal Canon was always that these were movies that helped explain me to the world, and I think so much of what I believe about politics and art is in Tomorrowland. It’s the reason why I sought out an orange T pin (the Chevrolet giveaway, not the unreasonable facsimile) even after having a lukewarm reaction to the film; it’s the reason I can’t stop listening to the Giacchino score. I wanted to possess the film’s ideas in some tangible remnant. Maybe I couldn’t have exactly the film I expected, but I could distill that ideal into a few symbols – a circular enamel promise of tomorrow and a majestic swooping score that flies as lofty as our aspirations. 

Tomorrowland is a film that looks at me and asks me to get out of my rut and help save the world by doing the things I am uniquely qualified to do. It’s a film that makes me laugh and makes me cry; it’s a film that has high philosophical debates and spectacular explosions. It’s got nods to Star Wars and Disney World and the promise of a bright future. It’s a movie that needs to be seen because it’s an idea that needs to be heard. I’m so glad to have given the film another chance, because Tomorrowland asks me to give myself a second chance, too.

Monday at the Movies - November 5, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two magnetic idiosyncratic performances.

My Dinner with Hervé (2018) – This HBO biopic has been something of a passion project for Peter Dinklage, so I’m glad to see him cash in that Game of Thrones check and do something that fascinates him. Dinklage is indisputably commanding as Hervé Villechaize, best known for his work in The Man with the Golden Gun and Fantasy Island. Jamie Dornan co-stars as journalist Danny Tate, assigned to a puff piece on Hervé before it turns into an all-night confessional bender. The cast is rounded out by some heavy hitters: Andy Garcia as a pretty unflattering Ricardo Montalbán, David Straithairn as Hervé’s long suffering agent, and Oona Chaplin as Tate’s ex, lost to him before his days of sobriety. As biopics go, this one is fairly by-the-numbers, leavened with the added pathos of Villechaize’s increasingly debilitating dwarfism. The central attraction for My Dinner is Dinklage’s masterful performance; though he does not quite physically resemble the distinctive Hervé Villechaize, he has his voice down pat, capturing the curious nasal way that Villechaize’s French accent crept into his performances. Moreover, Dinklage has an earnest sympathy for Villechaize, which overrides the issue of physical resemblance and gives his performance something of the weight of Tyrion Lannister’s confession speech from Game of Thrones. It is enough as an acting showcase and should earn Dinklage his fair share of awards on his gift of impersonation alone, but it is not, I think, a gamechanger in the genre nor a film that needs much revisiting unless one, suffering aphasia, forgets what a talent Dinklage is.

Phantom Thread (2017) – Here, on the other hand, is a film that I know I need to see again. The latest collaboration between director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis follows the life of cranky fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), caught in a bizarre triangle between his unwed sister Cyril (Lesley Manville, simmering), guardian of the fashion house, and muse Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), who begins to upset the established order in the House of Woodcock. That’s all I’ll say by way of summary, because the marketing only prepared me for a film about an uptight fashion designer whose life changes when he falls in love, and I can safely say that that description barely scratches the icebergian surface of what Anderson is up to in this film. In the way that There Will Be Blood was “about” an oil man but only barely, and The Master was “about” Scientology and huffing Lysol, Phantom Thread is more about the idiosyncrasies that power Woodcock and his petulant reactions as those habits are challenged. But it’s also about Alma, and Cyril, in ways I did not expect. I suppose I had anticipated a more demure outing from Anderson and Day-Lewis, in his ostensible swan song, but that was a fool’s bargain; both are in rare form, collaborating on a puzzle of a script and setting loose its peculiar questions on an unsuspecting audience. As ever, Anderson is invested in process, lovingly photographing the intricacies of sewing and the careful preparation of mushrooms, suggesting that perhaps he too is as demanding of his art as Woodcock is of his own life. I think the best of Anderson’s work takes so many turns that demand a second viewing just to sort it all out, but I’m equally looking forward to reveling in the quiet menace of a Day-Lewis stare, the withering retorts clipped by Manville, and the quiet ferocity of Krieps in the kitchen.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” If it sounds like Phantom Thread might be a candidate for a “Take Two Tuesday,” you may not be far off the mark. Indeed, “Take Two” returns tomorrow, but for a 2015 film. We’ll see you then!