Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

When The Last Jedi came out two years ago, I observed of its theme (but for whatever reason did not say so in my review) that it seemed to be the story of “looking for hope in Alderaan places.” The film had been a tale of failures, of misplaced hope and crushing defeats, but it also ended up reaffirming that the Resistance’s true hope lay in the princess of Alderaan and her brother in exile, and the legacy they were building for the next generation. In the follow-up, The Rise of Skywalker, that legacy comes to bear in unexpected ways, crowd-pleasing and recontextualizing for an emotionally successful finale to this Sequel Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga writ large.

(As ever, there won’t be spoilers here; even the major reveal, divulged in the film’s opening crawl, is a sacred mystery in this review.)

After narrowly escaping The Last Jedi with their lives, agents of the Resistance are on the run from the First Order, gathering what few allies they can find in a galaxy that’s given up. While Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) marshals the forces of the First Order, Rey, Finn, and Poe (Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac) head into the unknown in search of a way to prevent the complete obliteration of the Resistance, meeting new friends and old while Rey decides, once and for all, what her destiny will be.

So much exhausting ink is being spilled about whether or not The Rise of Skywalker “betrays” The Last Jedi by walking back or diminishing certain aspects of the film, whether or not this film “ruins” Star Wars or if returning director J.J. Abrams hates predecessor Rian Johnson. All of this is to say that no one hates Star Wars more than Star Wars fans, especially that vexing vocal minority monopolizing internet chatter. In the case of The Rise of Skywalker, I found myself strongly reminded of Return of the Jedi, itself a capper to a trilogy and an ostensible end to a story. Both films play it a little safer than their edgier forebearers, but both make up for that decrease in originality by dialing up the emotional resonance. Where Return of the Jedi reunited its heroic trinity for one last mission, Rise of Skywalker gives us Rey, Finn, and Poe properly together for the first time, having kept them apart for much of the preceding two films. It’s a real joy to see these three side by side, and their interactions carry the weight of all the adventures we didn’t get to see between films.

Critics have lamented the way the film is perhaps overfilled with setpieces, characters, and side quests, to which I have to say, I hope they enjoyed their first Star Wars film – because this is a franchise that has always been overfull of bits, fodder for imagination and tie-in media alike. True, Rise of Skywalker begins with its foot on the gas and never quite lets up, but as the third film in a trilogy there’s not a lot of time for much else, especially when the stakes are as dire as they are here. In fact, however, there’s a beat near the end of the second act where the plot does slow down, and it’s one of the most emotionally resonant corners of the film.

I was disappointed to find my audience so quiet during the film because there are a number of moments where you want to pump your fists and cheer. (The biggest laugh seemed to be who gets the line, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”) Perhaps audiences have been down this road so many times since 2015 – where, recall, the Milennium Falcon’s appearance got a big cheer – but suffice it to say I was charmed and cheered by more than a few sequences, including, and this is not a spoiler, a silent cameo from the Maestro himself, John Williams. Speaking of Williams, it’s his grand finale, too, and there are only so many ways to praise a man with more than 50 Academy Award nominations; he’s got an impressive body of work on which to draw, and he does so in ways that are breathtaking. I sense, however, that J.J. Abrams is still less comfortable with an orchestral score than Rian Johnson was, so I’m eager to see the film again after getting more familiar with the score (which remains, incidentally, my favorite component of any Star Wars material, period).

In the way that Return of the Jedi was an ending that gestured at a beginning, Rise of Skywalker is the final act in a nine-piece story, with plenty of space for what happens next, but it’s also acutely aware that there are things it needs to resolve. Leavened with the usual amount of space nonsense – which I love – the film cobbles macguffins together to get us to a sequence that orbits around Chekhov’s gun while wrapping up one of the Sequel Trilogy’s most potent emotional questions, and my only complaint is that it does so in a way that makes me want a whole movie or two of just thatcomponent. But taken as part three of three (and I feel I must be terribly vague here) the impossibility of continuation is perhaps for the best, as it needs first to resolve an entire arc, not establish a new one. That’s what the toys are for, folks.

As with nearly any film, there are moments I would have done differently. I’d have liked to see a few returning faces have a few more scenes, but there isn’t really anything to trim to make room for that. (In a post-Endgame world, though, I’d have been up for a three-hour space opera!) But in a world where toxic fandom demands that a piece of art conform to every single expectation, where the villains of the story are the ones who insist on rewriting history to accede to their vision for the galaxy, I find it’s much healthier to review the film we actually got instead of the one I might have made. And the Rise of Skywalker before us is pretty swell.

Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi violence and action.” Directed by J.J. Abrams. Written by Chris Terrio, J.J. Abrams, Derek Connolly, and Colin Trevorrow. Starring Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, and Anthony Daniels. (And a few more!)

Joker (2019)

I wasn’t going to review Joker. As you can probably tell from the infrequent updates here, I’ve been taking a little hiatus from movie reviews to recharge, focusing on other creative projects while waiting for the right film to spark up my reviewing energies again. But I can’t get Joker out of my head – nor, it seems, are media outlets interested in letting this movie just get away. On the one hand, you’ve got ardent comics fans who are beating the drum and hard for this movie; on the other, you’ve got the media at large trying distressingly to will into existence a mass shooting in this film’s name. Then again, the movie seems to anticipate and decry the media’s bloodthirsty and misguided reaction… all of which makes me wonder how certain I am that as movies go Joker is, well, just fine.

Joker is part Batman prequel, part Taxi Driver remake, leavened with The King of Comedy and flame-broiled by an incendiary performance courtesy of Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix stars as Arthur Fleck, a sad clown-for-hire with a bevy of psychological problems and a handful of pills whose prescriptions are about to run out. He’s the caregiver for his addled mother (Frances Conroy); he’s carrying a torch for Sophie (Zazie Beetz) down the hall; and he never misses a late-night episode of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). But Gotham City circa the 1980s is a pressure cooker of decadence and madness, and it’s about to boil over.

But is it? And is he? Or did he…? One of the central tenets of The Joker is that he’s an inscrutable cipher, a man without an identity or an origin. “If I’m going to have a past,” Joker says in Moore & Bolland’s Killing Joke, “I prefer it to be multiple choice!” (Bolland gets a “special thanks” credit, and if Moore didn’t hate movie adaptations he probably would have, too.) Without giving away too much of the game in Joker, director Todd Phillips is very careful to intimate (and at one point outright declare) that Arthur Fleck is an unreliable narrator. For any of my grievances about the film, I have to give Phillips a strong pat on the back for circumventing the certainty that would have run this film counter to The Joker’s innate unknowability; indeed, the one moment where Phillips baldly explains that a thing we saw happen did, in fact, not happen is one of the film’s major missteps, assuming the audience is not clever enough to understand that what Arthur sees isn’t always what’s real.

Joker has been surrounded and very nearly drowned in a morass of “hot takes” and cultural extrapolations that wonder if the film is “bad for society” or “dangerous.” And the truth of the matter is, Joker is nowhere near dynamic enough to merit such extensive commentary. It is, in a word, fine, elevated by Phoenix’s bravura performance as the man who would be clown prince. Phoenix is stratospheric as Arthur Fleck, manic depressive and skeletal with a painful persistent laugh that nags at him like a hiccup. Wholly void of mirth, Arthur’s laugh is, like its owner, a shell of humanity, an empty imitation of glee. He’s trying to fit in, trying to find joy, but the world beats him down again and again. It is in this sense that Joker is a kind of four-color Taxi Driver, and if you’ve seen the preceding film you’ve seen much of what makes this Joker tick. (Perhaps I would have loved Joker if I didn’t already love Scorsese.)

The comparison to Taxi Driver explains and simultaneously deflates the hogwash claim that the movie is sympathetic to the kind of lunacy the media has feared this film will inspire because – and this is key – presentation is not sanction. Or, as Mark Kermode so eloquently puts it, “He’s not sympathetic; he’s pitiful.” It would take a very special and deliberate misreading of the film to find unchallenged sympathy for The Joker in this film. Again, Phillips is quite deliberate about deflating Arthur’s own notions about himself, about unbalancing the audience just when it thinks it understands him. In that sense it’s a surprisingly smart and nuanced film, coming from the director of the hilarious but hardly erudite Hangover, whose sequels were the very definition of diminishing returns. 

In another sense, though, the film is brutally one-note, single-minded in its relentless bleak worldview. Its gags (if one can call them that) are telegraphed loud and clear, with all the subtlety of an oncoming train. This brutal directness works to the film’s advantage in a climactic third-act sequence, which works like a perfectly tense setpiece, though the film doesn’t quite build to the scene in a unified manner. Throughout the film, everything is terrible, no one is trustworthy, and hope – so key to what I love about comics and the superhero genre – is nowhere to be found. Batman, too, is just out of reach, though the sidelong glances Phillips throws his way are among the more interesting pivots from conventional mythology, interesting precisely (though perhaps only) because they are pivots. In a genre that is constantly imperiled by sameness, persistently in danger of being “note-d” to death by bonebrained studio heads, I’ll always be a champion of the peculiar, of the different, of the unique, though I find I can’t quite muster up the enthusiasm for Joker in the same way that I did and continue to do for Batman v Superman. Where the latter is positively bursting with ideas, doomed like Icarus never to see its full potential met, Joker contains only about one or two – intriguing ideas, no doubt, but hardly enough to merit the vociferous condemnation of those who haven’t even seen the film.

Ultimately, I think Joker ends up as a cipher, a bit like its titular character. It means what you bring to it, and it doesn’t quite challenge any of those notions – except, I maintain, that we are meant to sympathize with Arthur Fleck. In true noir fashion, every scene is told from Arthur’s perspective, so even in those moments where you might feel sympathy, you must recognize that it’s because the story has been filtered through a teller who is (perhaps willfully) unstable. If you want to read this as an “eat the rich” Occupy fable or a prayer for mental health care or an argument on one or the other side of the gun debate, Joker gives you a coil of rope but doesn’t commit enough to hang you with it. Put another way, Joker is only ever really dedicated to showcasing Joaquin Phoenix’s idiosyncratic madman, and in that regard it’s the only place where the film unapologetically succeeds. 

Anyone who has a passing familiarity with my review style and my tastes in pop culture should know that I would love nothing more than to love this movie. I should probably see it again to make sure I’m confident in my take on the movie, but I’m not in a particular rush to see it again. It was fine.

Joker is rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images.” Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, and Brett Cullen.

Monday at the Movies - July 1, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and there have been a good number of summer blockbusters since. So, let’s do this one more time.

Shazam! (2019) – DC has had a rocky road to a shared universe, never quite managing to find its crowdpleasing niche until solo outings for, of all people, Wonder Woman and Aquaman. With Shazam! DC is starting to recognize that its characters fare best when handled in standalone adventures that play to the characters’ strengths. Here, it’s Billy Batson (Asher Angel) with a chip on his shoulder, learning that family is where you find it, while his magical-heroic alter ego (Zachary Levi) plays out a superpowered take on Big and fending off attacks from the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s quite fun and a fine double-feature with, ahem, the other Captain Marvel this spring, and director David F. Sandberg does a keen job straddling the line between the boisterous antics of Shazam and the genuinely scary menace of Mark Strong’s Dr. Sivana, striking a notable balance between competing tones in a demi-franchise that has drawn audience derision for seldom transcending the dire. (As for this filmgoer, why can’t we have both?) You know that I think Batman v Superman remains the gold standard for DC’s latest efforts, but Shazam! is roughly the third winner in a row for DC (because the less said about Frankenstein’s Justice League, the better). And for those who haven’t seen it yet, it’s truly remarkable that a third-act development wasn’t spoiled in the marketing – even though the comics-initiated among us anticipated it coming in a sequel or two, it was great fun to see the film play with its family dynamic in a bold and inventive way.

Avengers: Endgame (2019) – How do you review a masterpiece in 250 words? (You’d need, perhaps, 3,000 to do it justice.) Make no mistake, true believers – Endgame is an impossible film that shouldn’t work at all but manages to work perhaps the best of any Marvel movie at what it sets out to do. Here’s a three-hour film with no baggy weight that manages to tie together 21 preceding films while doing something new; its greatest-hits nostalgia tour is baked seamlessly into the narrative, but it advances the Marvel Cinematic Universe by leaps and bounds while setting a daunting precedent for whatever comes next. The movie is chock-full of things that, even if I spoiled them, you wouldn’t believe me, as when the film hard-180s within its first fifteen minutes by breaking a cardinal rule of superhero epics and then manages to deal with that game-changing plot point with enviable aplomb, both having its cake and eating it too. Recency bias is still pretty strong with this one, so I’m not quite ready to say if it’s the best of the 22 MCU movies just yet (Winter Soldier remains a perfect movie). But I think it’s handily the best of the four Avengers movies for its audacious scope, unreasonable challenge, and entirely confident triumph. How a three-hour film leaves you wanting more is beyond me, so hats off to Anthony and Joe Russo for turning in what very well might be Marvel’s finest hour(s). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and if you’re anything like the two audiences with whom I saw this one, you’ll be outright sobbing in equal parts sorrow and jubilation. “Part of the journey is the end,” indeed, though I’ll expect you haven’t heard the last from me on Endgame.

Dark Phoenix (2019) – I said it with Venom, and I’ll say it with Dark Phoenix – this movie is fine. It’s a perfectly serviceable X-Men film, and since it’s ostensibly the last one for a while, some of its more compulsory plot beats can be forgiven. In the title role, Sophie Turner slays it as Jean Grey, and Hans Zimmer turns in a great score that sounds like Dark Knight had a baby with Interstellar. It’s probably not as epic as the source material (which, nerd confession time, I’m only just getting around to reading), and the villains led by Jessica Chastain are the very definition of undercooked. More noticeable, Magneto is really only there because it’s the last X-movie from Fox (though his best line, from the trailer, is sadly omitted – “You didn’t come here looking for answers. You came here looking for permission”). But there’s something to be said about the way this movie shows the X-Men at their peak, emphasizing their family dynamics. The film’s action, too, is pretty cool, especially that climactic train sequence. Most importantly, it’s light-years better than The Last Stand. So maybe the X-Men didn’t go out on their highest note (which is, I believe, still X2: X-Men United?), but it’s a perfectly fine capper to twenty years of X-movies, and it seals off this iteration just in time for the MCU to adopt the mutants into their new home. In short, it does just about what you’d expect an X-Men movie to do, and it does it better than some of its predecessors without feeling too much like a retread of familiar ground.

Men in Black: International (2019) – Mark Kermode took the word right out of my mouth when he said that the latest Men in Black film is “perfunctory.” The premise of an MiB reboot with Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson (late of Thor: Ragnarok), with Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson on either side of the pond, practically sells itself, and indeed it seems the film was sold primarily on the chemistry between its two leads. What the movie is lacking, however, is precisely character because its protagonists are sadly underwritten, its villains are maddeningly vague, and its structure is bizarrely shambolic as it careens from setpiece to setpiece. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t need a Men in Black film to be Shakespearean in its plotting, but I do prefer that it make a modicum of sense without leaning on attitude as a special effect. (Though if it does, the ever-watchable Tessa Thompson is ILM-levels of sassy.) It feels as though the studio is rolling the franchise out on a lunch tray, as if to say, “Want some more of this?” And in that respect the possibility is about as tantalizing as mystery meat casserole – perfectly edible, but hardly anyone’s first choice. Several times throughout the film, I found myself wishing I were watching the original Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones vehicle. International gestures at an intriguing sideways take on the central conceit, but man oh Manischewitz did the script need another pass to make it anything but generic and forgettable.

Toy Story 4 (2019) – “Did we need a fourth one of these?” I asked myself when Toy Story 4 was announced. Hadn’t Toy Story 3 been a perfect capper to a perfect trilogy? (This has to be the last one, though, right?) And yet, as they usually do, Pixar found a way to surprise me, with 4 tying up 3’s loose end with the absence of Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Bo ends up being only one of the core ideas in 4, including also Woody (Tom Hanks) and his struggle to fit in with new kid Bonnie, while the playroom crowd grapples with the creation of Forky (Tony Hale), Bonnie’s new toy molded from garbage. I think your mileage on this film will depend very much on how much you indulge the movie’s central premise that there’s another story to be wrung from this universe; I myself was sold fairly quickly, particularly with the way Forky – omnipresent in marketing and toy aisles – allows the film to do something quite unique while giving us a fascinating angle into Woody’s psyche. And yes, 4 is well and truly Woody’s show, even more than Toy Story 2 was. It’s a bit of a shame, because we love all the other toys so very much, but it’s very challenging to imagine, for example, what more Rex or Mister Pricklepants could have done in the movie. It’s a thoughtful and engaging romp through the standard Toy Story plot – toys get separated and find their way back together after meeting shady toys and new friends like Duke Caboom (Keanu “Yes He Canada” Reeves) – but it’s as emotional and essential as the preceding installments. 

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This was fun; we should do this again some time...

Captain Marvel (2019)

Twenty-one movies in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes winning look effortless. As its original crop of Avengers begins to rotate out (so we assume), Marvel’s been marching toward Avengers: Endgame with the dually unenviable tasks of wrapping up a decade’s worth of stories while seeding another decade’s. With Captain Marvel, the franchise tries so many new things that it’s a wonder the film seems so comfortable, with its star Brie Larson feeling right at home as the hero who’s always already been woven into the Marvel tapestry.

Circa 1995, the Kree warrior Vers (Larson) crashlands on Earth, where she’s met by rising SHIELD agent Nicholas Fury (a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson). Fury is understandably baffled by her stories of intergalactic war and an invading army of Skrull shapeshifters, but it’s Vers who finds herself jumbled by impossible memories of a life on earth. As her commanding officer (Jude Law) sets out to rescue his protégé, the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) searches earth for a device that will turn the tide in his peoples’ war against the Kree.

It used to be that the phrase “comic booky” was thrown around derisively, to cast the aspersion that a film emulated the gaudiest, most puerile impulses of the medium. Now, however, I’m comfortable saying that Captain Marvel is the best kind of “comic booky” movie, in the sense that it packs in an expansive mythology, replete with nods forward and backward to the MCU’s continuity (Djimon Hounsou and Lee Pace reprise – or is it preprise? – their roles as Korath and Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s also delightfully comic booky in its use of the cinematic screen as a comics frame, with visual images overlapping and echoing in a way that reminds me of how well Zack Snyder mastered the technique in Watchmen; directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck manage to communicate almost exclusively visually, as in the myriad ways they use, for example, the color of blood to indicate chronology, revelation, and memory. 

Moreover, Captain Marvel is exceedingly comic booky for its willingness to reinvent what came before. I won’t spoil any of the film’s big twists, but suffice it to say that the movie’s Captain Marvel does not have the same secret origin as she does in the comics, largely because the comics are as tangled, refracted, and impenetrable as the stereotypes portend. In streamlining and refashioning, though, this Captain Marvel’s origin echoes all the versions from the comics and repurposes the story into something new and potent, something that works for this character and for the trajectory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With its mid-90s setting, the film does fascinating work fitting into this long-running story, particularly with young agents Nick Fury and Phil Coulson.

But the film is rightfully Brie Larson’s, and she is far and away dynamite as the woman who would be Captain Marvel. Her performance is being compared to Gal Gadot’s in Wonder Woman or to Chadwick Boseman’s in Black Panther, but I think she’s much closer to Chris Evans in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – coming into herself with ease and a grin, effortlessly comfortable with herself and her friends even as her world is changing seismically around her. She’s funny, she’s confident, and she’s able to sell the trust and intimacy that comes with the kind of deep friendship she forms with Fury and others. It’s the kind of performance that can carry a franchise quite readily, and I for one am ready for Captain Marvel 2 (Kree Boogaloo?).

Special shout-out section: Samuel L. Jackson is a blast as a young Nick Fury. We get to see shades of the hardline Director Fury, but his youth and inexperience lets some of the Sam Jackson charm trickle in, and we never tire of seeing him cozy up with Goose the cat. Ben Mendelsohn is buckets of fun as Talos, who’s got more personality than a lot of unmemorable Marvel villains; Mendelsohn’s play with accents and his dexterous hand at manipulating his Skrull prosthetics make me hope that if/when the Skrulls do return, Mendelsohn will pop back into the MCU. Finally, much has been made of the fact that Pinar Toprak is the MCU’s first female composer, and she turns in a pretty exciting score. The music has often been a sticking point for Marvel, who are usually criticized for bland forgettable scores, but I’ve loved most of them and hope to hear more from Toprak in the future. Like Larson, she fits right in.

The Winter Soldier remains the gold standard for me, but Captain Marvel continues very nicely the easy-winning streak of debut films like Doctor Strange and Black Panther. It’s a movie with plenty of surprises, for newcomers and true believers alike, and it clicks into place with the delicate precision of the best comic book “retcons,” asking us to look back at the past and wonder if it really happened the way we think it did. At one point in the credits, we’re promised “Captain Marvel will return” – though where precisely, I shan’t spoil – as if we had any doubt that Marvel’s latest gamble would have a long-running payoff. Marvel has been on a real winning streak, and for a character whose namesake is, in a way, the very studio that’s introducing her, Captain Marvel is another success.

Captain Marvel is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive language.” Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, and Meg LeFauve. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Roy Thomas, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David López. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg, and Jude Law.

The Top 10 Batman Animated Episodes (As Written by Paul Dini)

If there’s one thing on which we can agree after two years and more than one hundred episodes (beyond the indomitable, indispensable powers of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill), it’s that Paul Dini was the show’s finest writer. As I said back in July, Dini is “arguably the show’s greatest writer, a man who fully understands Batman and his world, who can craft tales therein unlike nearly anyone else.” As master of his craft, Dini deserves his own Top 10, and with a new crop of episodes under our belt, it’s time to see how this shakes out.

Just like the preceding reprises, this list reproduces the July 2018 text where relevant, adding TNBA episodes where appropriate; removed from the immediacy of watching these episodes, commentary addenda will appear in blue. With that said, on with the show!

The Worst 10 Batman Animated Episodes

A reminder of the words of Anton Ego: “We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.” As good as Batman: The Animated Series and its follow-up The New Batman Adventures could be, they had a commensurate propensity to disappoint. I had initially struggled to come up with ten bad episodes, settling for eight bad ones with a forgettable flop and a two-thirds bad episode. Now, however, I’m proud to say I’ve gotten ten worst-of-the-worst.

Just like last week’s “Top 10” redux, this list reproduces the July 2018 text where relevant, adding TNBA episodes where appropriate; removed from the immediacy of watching these episodes, commentary addenda will appear in blue. With that said, on with the show!

Remember, nobody’s perfect.

The Top 10 Batman Animated Episodes (Not Written by Paul Dini)

It seems hard to believe that it’s been more than two years since we began this journey through Batman: The Animated Series and its follow-up The New Batman Adventures. Back in July 2018, after eighty-five episodes of BtAS, I took time out to rest and re-view, sorting episodes together into “Best” and “Worst” lists, giving writer Paul Dini his own special list in recognition of his standalone achievements in the field of Gotham narrative.

Now, at the end of the road, it’s time to check in with those lists one more time to see how twenty-four episodes of TNBA changes the calculus of the rankings. In the interest of being definitive, this list reproduces the July 2018 text where relevant, adding TNBA episodes where appropriate; removed from the immediacy of watching these episodes, commentary addenda will appear in blue. With that said, on with the show!

Cold Pursuit (2019)

With variable returns beginning from Taken, the indisputably finest of the genre, Liam Neeson has become Hollywood’s go-to for grizzled revenge thrillers. While Cold Pursuit has been marketed as the next high-concept riff on an old classic – Liam Neeson kills people with a snowplow, the posters promise – the end result is something closer to Fargo than Taken, more dark comedy than dark night of the soul, though Neeson seems not to know it.

Neeson stars as Nels Coxman, snowplow driver and citizen of the year in Kehoe, Colorado. When his son turns up dead of a heroin overdose, Nels senses a darker truth and sets out for revenge on the drug dealers who killed his boy, working his way to the Viking (Tom Bateman) at the top of the distribution ladder.

In my journey toward avoiding trailers altogether (I’ve worked my way up to ignoring the “final trailers,” often riddled with spoilers), I admit I never saw a promo for Cold Pursuit and only knew of its existence because of early posters that showed Liam Neeson dragging a body past a snowplow. “I’m in,” I said confidently, but now that I’ve come out of the theater, I’m not exactly sure what I had gotten into in the first place. Cold Pursuit is an odd movie with a meticulously tuned sense of what is funny, what is conventional, and what constitutes finality. “What the hell was that movie?” I asked when the credits rolled, and I genuinely don’t know what to make of it. I enjoyed it, certainly, and got a fair dose of thrills from Neeson’s ability to turn mundane vengeance into Shakespearean violence. But at the same time I felt myself being recalibrated over the course of the movie, aghast at an early gag about morgue equipment but gradually realizing that the whole film finds humor in offbeat interruptions, as in a gag of magnifying returns where the names of the deceased appear as title cards. 

The film continues a surprising number of subplots, many of which overwhelm Neeson’s by the end of the film, and it’s in these side stories that the film stretches its dark comedic wings. When the film’s focus is on Nels Coxman and his drive for revenge, it’s a mostly straight action thriller; Liam finds a baddie, interrogates him with varying degrees of roughness, and executes him with brutal precision. Elsewhere in the film, though, mobsters struggle with fantasy football drafts, quarrel over who’s on body disposal duty, and take to the ski slopes because they were “born to fly.” One senses that Neeson was starring in one film – and perhaps the finest joke of all is that he is deadly serious in ways the rest of the film steadfastly refuses to be, that Neeson persisted in Taken form when the film called for Fargo. 

Cold Pursuit is director Hans Petter Moland’s American debut, remaking his Norwegian film, and perhaps the Scandinavian sensibility that gave us The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (famously marketed as the “feel-bad Christmas movie” for American audiences) is to blame for this mad experiment in tonal shifts. It’s certainly not conventional American fare and can catch a moviegoer off-guard if they, like yours truly, enter a theater unaware. And yet, as a moviegoer increasingly aware of his own idiosyncratic sensibilities, there is something undeniably appealing about a director throwing caution to the wind and making a film that only he could have made. One could imagine a version of this film from the Taken crowd that would have been exactly what I expected, for better or for worse. So in that sense, Cold Pursuit earns my respect for giving me something I didn’t expect but ended up liking all the same.

Cold Pursuit is rated R for “strong violence, drug material, and some language including sexual references.” Directed by Hans Petter Moland. Written by Frank Baldwin. Based on the film Kraftidioten by Hans Petter Moland. Starring Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, Tom Bateman, Emmy Rossum, William Forsythe, Domenick Lombardozzi, John Doman, and Tom Jackson.

Monday at the Movies - February 4, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a two-parter, and long-time readers of the blog will know that I always think this sort of thing shouldn’t happen. For the record, this ought to be one movie, but if it’s going to be two, it’s probably best not to space them out too far; an hour’s intermission did the trick for me.

The Death of Superman (2018) – Famously killed off because the writers wanted to delay his wedding to Lois Lane, Superman perished in the comics in 1992, and The Death of Superman has persisted with surprising vigor for a story that goosed sales and was ultimately reversed within a year. DC’s animated stable trotted out this story in 2007 with mixed success, but this time the animators give scripting duties to noted comics scribe Peter J. Tomasi, who does a much better job adapting the comics slugfest into a narrative with real heart as Superman (Jerry O’Connell) wrestles with divulging his identity to Lois Lane (Rebecca Romijn), even as the beast called Doomsday begins to tear its way toward Metropolis for their fateful showdown. The film’s highlight is obviously the brawl promised by its title, and the action choreography is quite successful. The first half of the film is a little talky, though it hits all the right character beats and sows interesting seeds for the sequel. In a sense, The Death of Superman succeeds where The Killing Joke failed by devising an opening act that feeds into the emotional heart of the story rather than wasting time and defaming its characters. Here the emotional center is relocated onto Lois and Clark’s relationship, which gets added weight as the inevitable, eponymous death approaches. It’s hard to imagine this film working as well for someone who isn’t already a big fan of Superman, but Tomasi does a very good job at capturing the spirit and the scope of those early 1990s Superman comics, with a deep bench of supporting characters (remember Bibbo?) and a very of-its-moment approach to the Lois and Clark dynamic. But it’s sweet (with an adorable reference to the “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?” from Superman) and touching, even if it feels a bit overlong at times.

Reign of the Supermen (2019) – As the second half of the story, Reign of the Supermen is a lot more frenetic, with a good deal more plotting and easily half a dozen characters to explore. Where Death kept the focus tight, feeling protracted when it wouldn’t expand, Reign feels overfull, with barely any downtime. I knew the film was off to breakneck speed when its earliest scenes swiftly bring together the four Supermen in a clash of wills and fists, something the comics eased into over the course of about six months of storytelling. Surprisingly, though, Reign adheres to the comics story with remarkable allegiance; granted, major changes are made (Mongul doesn’t appear, but you can probably guess which hulking alien dictator replaces him), but screenwriters Tim Sheridan and Jim Krieg follow the broad strokes with the devotion of someone who’s read the book a hundred times. They also draw in a wide net from comics continuity at large, bringing in the 2003 retcon that Superboy has a helping of Lex Luthor’s DNA holding his clone body together. In Superman’s absence, the voice cast steps up their game; Rainn Wilson acquits himself better here as Lex Luthor than he did in Death, where he sounded too much like Dwight Schrute. Among the four Supermen, Cameron Monaghan is the standout as the brash Superboy, but Cress Williams is a fine Steel, and Patrick Fabian channels all his Better Call Saul superiority as the Cyborg Superman. Reign also does well to draw on the internal continuity of these DC animated films, linking its storyline as far back as Justice League: War and setting up a few future developments in a tantalizing post-credits sequence (Death had four, but Reign makes its singular stinger count). As much as DC’s live-action films have buckled under the weight of studio interference, it’s refreshing to see a Justice League film that isn’t pulled in a dozen different directions; indeed, you’ll be surprised how large the League looms in Reign, but it’s all in service of a pretty strong Superman story.

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

Superman: The Animated Series - "The Demon Reborn"

“Old age, Superman – it truly is a shipwreck. One that I have survived more times than I can remember.”

An art exhibit in Metropolis attracts an army of ninja attackers, who steal a peculiar staff fabled to have mystical healing powers. Batman arrives to help Superman apprehend the ninja, who are working for his old flame Talia (Olivia Hussey). Talia wants the staff to help her ailing father Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner), but Ra’s needs Superman for the final stages of his plan, which will make Batman’s foe more dangerous than ever.

“The Demon Reborn” is a peculiar episode because of its bifurcated identity. Where “Knight Time” did a very good job bringing Superman into Gotham, the attempt to bring Batman into Metropolis is somewhat more overpowering. The character Superman feels very out of place in an episode that wants so desperately to be another Batman episode, revisiting one of his greatest foes in a plot that doesn’t have much use for Superman other than as a demi-MacGuffin for the al Ghul clan to chase. Lois Lane, too, gets the short end of the stick, though she has a charming scene with Batman that builds on their unconventional relationship from “World’s Finest.” It’s a fun moment in which both characters reckon with their strange past and muse on their impossible future – a conversation that’s only possible in this incarnation of the DC Universe, where Lois fell in love with Bruce Wayne but fled from the Batman. (“She likes Bruce Wayne and she likes Superman. It’s the other two guys she’s not crazy about.” / “Too bad we can't mix and match.”)

As a capper to more than two years of reviews, then, “The Demon Reborn” makes the case one last time for Batman as a genre-proof dynamo, able to airdrop into any type of story without any seams. Superman seems out of sorts in a mystical story like this one, and he’s ill-matched for the threat Ra’s poses because all Superman can do is politely accommodate Ra’s and his villainous monologue until it’s time to break free. Superman is vulnerable to magic, yes, but that always seemed to me to be a way to justify putting two divergent cosmologies together. Morality plays, colossal threats, iconic battles of good vs. evil, interrogations of the notion of America – these better suit Superman than an immortal man with a magic stick. (And conversely, Ra’s al Ghul deserves better, I think, than trying to steal Superman’s strength for no particular reason.) In the moments when Batman is doing his detective work, the episode is firing on all cylinders; oddly enough, it’s the Superman parts that drag – though perhaps I’d feel differently if I had just watched the 50 preceding episodes of Superman: The Animated Series.

It’s hard to imagine that Batman: The Animated Series marked the first time that Ra’s al Ghul had been adapted from the comics, but he had a character-defining portrayal there, with David Warner as the irreplaceable voice in my head. We can think of “The Demon Reborn” as the capper to the fine Ra’s episodes – “The Demon’s Quest,” “Avatar,” and “Showdown.” Indeed, in the latter we saw (through a Jonah Hex flashback darkly) Ra’s al Ghul beginning to reflect on his long life and his many regrets, and we see that painful legacy here, with the ecoterrorist’s body failing him as the Lazarus Pits have begun to lose their luster. We also see, for the first time, Ra’s demonstrating some degree of compassion for his daughter; all too often, Talia was treated like a devoted disciple and not a true member of his family. She’s been abandoned, beaten, manipulated, and literally thrown at Batman, but at least here she gets a modicum of respect from her father, who abandons his assault on Superman to save her. (The icky, bizarre conclusion to their strange relationship would come in an episode of Batman Beyond, penned by no less than Paul Dini himself.)

“The Demon Reborn” is in a weird liminal space where it’s not quite a Superman episode, but not quite a Batman one, either. It’s a terrible note on which to end a review series because of the way it resolutely resists finality; when Superman suggests that he and Batman work together more often, Kevin Conroy is given the unsettlingly glib line, “Yeah, right.” Of course, they would work together on a regular basis in the Justice League animated series beginning in 2001, but moreover it’s odd to hear a surfer bro’s response from the mouth of a grim avenger. Conroy sells it, of course, but I wonder if he’d have done better with a terse “We’ll see.” It’s not quite my Batman, not quite my Superman, and not even quite my Ra’s al Ghul – but even so, it’s not quite terrible. It’s silly and fun, and perhaps that’s all we need to ask from a show like this one.

Original Air Date: September 18, 1999

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner) and Talia al Ghul (Olivia Hussey)

Next episode: Once more, we come to the end of a series. Next time we’re together, we’ll begin revisiting the best and worst of the Batman animated project.

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

Monday at the Movies - January 28, 2019

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two films wildly different in tone and yet unmistakably British in their sensibilities.

The Death of Stalin (2018) – Few people can make me laugh as hard as Armando Iannucci, he whose British series The Thick of It can’t be enjoyed on a single viewing because you’ll miss half the jokes while splitting your sides at its creative profanity and monumentally madcap antics. After Iannucci ravaged the mundanely moronic ("All roads lead to Munich") in the lead-up to the Iraq War in Thick of It’s spinoff film In the Loop, he turns his satirical eye to the Soviet Union in the wake of Josef Stalin’s death and finds the Communist Party in chaos, beginning with the puddle of urine in which the party leader’s corpse is found. The cast is as unpredictable as the punchlines – we now live, folks, in a world where Steve Buscemi plays Nikita Khrushchev (and yes, Virginia, there is a “bury you” joke). Meanwhile we’ve got Jeffrey Tambor as the melancholy Georgy Malenkov, ill-suited to the leadership role he inherits; noted Shakespearean Simon Russell Beale as the oily Lavrentiy Beria of the secret police; and Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, all too eager to lead his army into open revolt. It’s a cast of all-stars (including Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough as Stalin’s children), but the biggest draw is the film’s pitch-black humor, depicting Stalin’s worst atrocities as something akin to a Karl Marx Brothers film. There are moments when one is not quite sure whether to laugh or recoil in horror, as when an executioner just gives up halfway down his line of victims, but Iannucci is quite successful at capturing the ambient paranoia that comes from not knowing who to trust in a totalitarian regime – and the absurdity when a brood of vipers is forced to try to trust one another.

Paddington 2 (2017) – With the benefit of hindsight, Paddington 2 might well be one of the best films of 2017. A film like this has no right to be as charming, intricately constructed, or genuinely emotional as Paddington 2 manages to be. Now that the well-mannered Paddington (Ben Whishaw) has taken up residence in London, he goes in search of a birthday present for his Aunt Lucy, only to find the perfect pop-up book out of his price range. After a series of odd jobs, Paddington is framed for the theft of the book, landing unceremoniously in a Victorian-era prison where he befriends the entire population – including prison cook Knuckles McGinty (Brendan Gleeson) – through the powers of civility and marmalade. Paddington 2 is even better than its predecessor, somehow more earnest now that it’s dispensed with the need to explain how and why an affable bear is living with ordinary people. Instead the filmscape is opened up to boundless adventures where Paddington’s relentless cheeriness persists, undaunted by his circumstances. Whether he’s shoved into the role of accidental barber or whether he finds himself teaching a prison how to make orange jam, Paddington is so endearing that it’s almost a personal offense when something unfortunate befalls him; “how dare they,” I said aloud at one point, “how dare the filmmakers do this to such a nice bear!” For all the antics and charm that the film possesses – really, I cannot overstate just how charming this movie is – it has an astonishing emotional depth rooted in Paddington’s love for his Aunt Lucy, and the film’s final moments are guaranteed to get you teary-eyed in a way that I thought only Pixar had been able to capture with computer-generated characters.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” Stay tuned for Wednesday’s final Batman animated review!

Superman: The Animated Series - "Knight Time"

“All this sneaking around isn’t exactly my style.”

Superman (Tim Daly) busts up a classic Roxy Rocket heist in Metropolis when he discovers that Batman has gone missing. With crime up in Gotham, Superman offers his help to a reluctant Robin, impersonating Batman in the interim until the Dark Knight can be found. Suspecting mind control, Robin and a disguised Superman scour the city for the Mad Hatter but find Bane, who’s elated to have another chance to break the Batman.

Just in case I never get around to full reviews of Superman: The Animated Series, I should say up front that this is probably my favorite of the show’s 54 episodes – discounting, of course, the three-parter “World’s Finest,” strung together as The Batman/Superman Movie. No slight to Superman, who had plenty of good episodes of his own (“Livewire,” “Mxyzpixilated,” and “Apokolips... Now!” come to mind), but it should come as no surprise that this Bat-fan was tickled pink to see Metropolis and Gotham meet once again. And while some Batman/Superman crossovers get bogged down in the philosophical differences between the two superheroes, occasionally erring on the side of the impossibility of cooperation, “Knight Time” is unapologetic in reveling in the exuberant fun of mixing the two worlds together.

Batman’s absence is the narrative catalyst, forcing Superman to investigate, but the episode is particularly inspired in the moments when Superman disguises himself as Batman, mastering Kevin Conroy’s voice through “precise muscle control” but completely missing the boat on posture, demeanor, and his own invincibility. It’s a comedy of errors, but the joke wisely never targets either hero, acknowledging instead the inherent absurdity of the situation and the irreplaceability of Batman. The episode even sneaks in a clever meta-gag about the darker tone of The New Batman Adventures when Robin notes that a video from Bruce Wayne has to be a forgery because “he’s smiling.” It’s an interesting sideways glance at Gotham, where one man’s disappearance sends an entire city into chaos; the police are stymied by a dangerous uptick in violent crime, while every villain known to man collaborates on a dystopian plot to conquer the city.

Despite its pitch-perfect portrayal of its titanic protagonist, the strength of the Batman animated shows was always its deep bench of villains, and “Knight Time” really packs them in. Even aside from the trio of villains plotting to dominate Gotham – Bane, Mad Hatter, and the criminally underused Riddler – we get appearances from Roxy Rocket and the Penguin, both of whom get compelling face-time with Superman. Roxy is, as ever, flirtatious, but it’s Penguin who gets what might be the best scene of the episode, facing down a Batman who’s suddenly able to kick a table across a room (even if Bat-Superman needs a little nudging from Robin to amp up the aggression). 

“Knight Time” remembers, of course, that it’s a Superman show, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome in Gotham simply because it’d be fun to do so. The reveal of the episode – that Bruce Wayne’s disappearance has been engineered by Brainiac, who needs his considerable resources to build a rocket – fits right in with how Superman: The Animated Series reimagined Brainiac. And it’s always a delight to hear Corey Burton, who was positively iconic in the role of a dispassionate computer willing to sacrifice an entire world to preserve its knowledge. Like its bat-eared predecessor, StAS had a tendency to knock it out of the park on voice casting (shout-out to casting director Andrea Romano); like Mark Hamill as The Joker, Clancy Brown is to this day getting work as Lex Luthor, while Gilbert Gottfried and Dana Delaney really captured something quintessential about Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lois Lane, respectively. But Corey Burton’s clipped precision as Brainiac is dollars-to-donuts in that legendary status, and he’s a rival befitting Tim Daly’s note-perfect boy scout Superman.

“Knight Time” is an interesting coda to these animated Batman reviews because it’s an episode that celebrates the best of Batman’s 109 episodes – its madcap characters, its funhouse mirror of a setting, and its flexible accommodation of nearly any conceivable plot. It’s both a return (of sorts) to Gotham and a fun frolic through a new setting for Superman. And it’s a fine example of the best kinds of episodes the DC Animated Universe could churn out, the kind of candy you eat every so often without getting bored of it. It feels mildly sacrilegious to say, but “Knight Time” is probably the episode of StAS I’ve watched the most; it’s in a league with the best of Batman.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1998

Writer: Robert Goodman

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: Brainiac (Corey Burton), Bane (Henry Silva), Roxy Rocket (Charity James), The Penguin (Paul Williams), The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Demon Reborn,” in which Superman meets one of Batman’s exes.

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

Glass (2019)

I was an early believer on Unbreakable – I can still vividly recall the ads in comic books of the time heralding the fact that Alex Ross had created artwork for the DVD release. In that sense, I have always already been the perfectly calibrated audience for Shyamalan’s fascination with superheroes; I’ve been in the trenches of fandom with him this whole time, and I’ve come back to Unbreakable from time to time as I get older and deeper into the genre. Even as Shyamalan’s career has met with less than stellar reception, most of us have wondered when he’d do a sequel to his one superhero movie, especially as the genre became billion-dollar business.

No one expected him to backdoor his way into the terrain through his split-personality abduction horror film Split – spoilers, it’s a sequel to Unbreakable – but if that’s the way we get to Glass, so be it. It’s been nineteen years (much ado is made within the film itself) as David Dunn (Bruce Willis) continues to do the superhero thing, with his vigilante eyes set on serial killer Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy). Meanwhile, Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) languishes in a mental institution under the care of Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), who believes that “Mister Glass” suffers from psychotic delusions.

As much as I felt weirdly cheated by the fact that Split was a covert sequel to Unbreakable, a misplaced and almost perfunctory twist, there’s an undeniable frisson of delight in seeing Willis, McAvoy, and Jackson on screen together, as if you can hear Shyamalan giggling from behind the camera, “Can you believe they let me get away with this?” And despite the crossover factor being markedly less ambitious than, say, Avengers: Infinity War, Glass manages to scratch that same itch, especially when all three are together. (Shyamalan’s cameo, in which he appears to claim that at least three of his cameos have all been the same man, is perhaps a bridge too far, but even there we find something mildly admirable in his overreach.)

To repeat what I said above, I had an acute sense during Glass that it was a movie designed to target my specific brand of fandom – my intense devotion to the genre and the way it helps us imagine and re-envision ourselves as the heroes we need. It stars three actors who I adore, turning in varying levels of exquisite performance. Willis continues, admittedly, to phone it in a bit, but as David Dunn I have the sense that Willis doesn’t actively resent being in the film (as was apparent in, for one, Cop Out). David has always been a more contemplative, quiet hero type, so it’s fine that Willis leaves the flashier performances to the film’s antagonists – itself a kind of genre-based decision. McAvoy was riveting in Split, but in Glass he revs up his performance by transitioning between personalities without the aid of costume changes. Far and away, though, as the title presages, the film belongs to the magisterial talents of Samuel L. Jackson, who gleefully carves the scenery and boxes up the rest to take home for later. Delivering impassioned monologues with eyes gleaming with fiery madness, Jackson is equally compelling in the moments when he’s not talking, as we try to divine what’s going on behind his silence. At home in both a hospital gown and his more ostentatious purple leather suit, Mister Glass is the kind of villain on which a franchise can properly be hung.

At the same time, and as much as I found myself digging the mythopoetic jazz Shyamalan is laying down with the genre, I understand entirely that the film isn’t for everyone, that Glass’s mixed-to-negative reviews are not quite unfair. As superhero films go, this is one of the talkier ones, and its genre deconstruction isn’t perhaps as revelatory as Shyamalan hopes (though it might have been nineteen years ago). Moreover, Shyamalan’s proclivity for “twists” in his storytelling stacks up in the film’s third act, with nearly as many false endings as the third Lord of the Rings movie, and though not all of these twists land with the mind-blowing effect of The Sixth Sense’s final developments, Shyamalan ultimately arrives at a place where I felt – if not accepting – at least understanding what he had tried to accomplish. Despite the broad ambitions of its morality play, the film’s scale is exceedingly intimate, but in those moments Shyamalan displays that he has lost none of his dexterity with miniature moments of terror, of the bumps-in-the-night scares on which he made his name with The Sixth Sense and Signs (which I recall, on the strengths of its sound mixing alone, being immensely terrifying in a dark room). 

If The Visit was Shyamalan’s low-budget back-to-basics return, with Split edging his way toward his earlier successes, it’s hard not to hope that Glass marks a sort of new beginning for a man whose career langured in critical limbo and popular dismissal. While this may not be the sort of superhero film for everyone, its methodical deliberateness is exactly my cup of tea and a useful counterprogramming if you’re feeling a bit worn by the blockbusters of the genre. Glass is so delightfully idiosyncratic that it’s all too easy to be swept along by the steady, purposeful drive of the story.

Glass is rated PG-13 for “violence including some bloody images, thematic elements, and language.” Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, Anya Taylor-Joy, Sarah Paulson, Spencer Treat Clark, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Lost Episode"

“Yowza, yowza, ladies and germs! Let’s have a big Land O’ Laffs welcome for your pal and his – Batman! Hee hee! I’m delighted to see you made it this far, but then I knew those other losers couldn’t put you out of action... at least, not like I can. Ah hahahaha!”

After apprehending Poison Ivy during a bank robbery, Batman discovers that his foes have all banded together to run the Dark Knight through a gauntlet. The Riddler has captured Commissioner Gordon, while The Joker and Harley Quinn are holding Robin hostage at (where else?) an abandoned amusement park. As Batman races to free his friends, he learns that he’s heading for a confrontation with the architect of this insidious plot.

The Adventures of Batman & Robin debuted on Sega CD in July 1995. While the game existed in several different versions released across various platforms (a Super Nintendo version loosely adapted episodes like “What Is Reality?”), the Sega version has gone down in the annals of fandom as a “lost episode.” It resurfaced on the Internet a few years back but got a signal boost when Mark Hamill tweeted about its existence in December 2018. As a “lost episode,” this collection of video game cutscenes is remarkable for uniting the voice cast from Batman: The Animated Series in a story written by the show’s top scribes, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. That’s an impressive assembly of talent for a forgotten video game on an obsolete gaming system.

“The Lost Episode” is not, however, a lost treasure or even a missing link. It’s by definition a little choppy, since the playable levels – all driving, by the way, with Batman never exiting the Batmobile for any gameplay – have all been extracted and frankensteined together in this seventeen-minute compilation. But despite making for unconventional viewing, there’s actually a good deal to like in here, leading some (Hamill included) to lament that it wasn’t included in some form on any of the DVD sets. The cutscenes play like a “greatest hits” compilation, with each villain getting a new variation on a classic gimmick. They’re familiar premises but new riffs, almost like hearing Eric Clapton’s acoustic version of “Layla” for the first time. Poison Ivy debuts a new plant monster, while Riddler devises a scheme to prove his own mental and technological superiority; Joker orchestrates a carnival gone mad, and Clayface morphs and smashes like no other. Best of all, it’s all our favorite voices, including Arleen Sorkin as a giddy Harley Quinn.

There are two surprises in “The Lost Episode,” both of which make it an interesting change of pace from the standard BTAS fare. The first of these is the violence, which is not particularly graphic but is certainly shocking in comparison to the tamer material that reminds us that BTAS was, first and foremost, a show aimed at kids. Verboten by the television censors were guns, drugs, breaking glass, alcohol, smoking, nudity, child endangerment, religion, and strangulation – all of which Bruce Timm infamously sketched into one Batman image. (Also off-limits were vampires and most depictions of blood.) Unfettered by the censors, though, “The Lost Episode” includes a shockingly protracted sequence in which Batman takes a fire axe to Poison Ivy’s plant-based beastie. Batman’s face is splashed with green goo before the scene warps into a riff on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” all splinters and shadows as Batman dismembers the creature. After 100+ episodes of network standards, “The Lost Episode” feels a little edgier – not necessarily for the worse, but definitely enough to give even a seasoned viewer a moment’s pause.

The second big surprise is the master villain – the final boss, if you will. And it’s spoiler warning time, because I can’t talk about the twist without talking about the double twist. At first, it seems that the true mastermind of the plot is Rupert Thorne (John Vernon), and I observed aloud, “Well, that’s disappointing.” Though Vernon is delightfully smarmy as crime boss Thorne, he’s hardly the archrival Batman – or a videogame – deserves. But “The Lost Episode” does an unexpected about-face when it’s revealed that, actually, Clayface is masquerading as Thorne to unite Batman’s rogues against him. It’s a bit of an intellectual stretch for Clayface to become a criminal mastermind, but it’s a fun change of pace and would seem to lend itself to a nifty boss fight – if the game weren’t comprised exclusively of driving and flying levels. (Clayface meets a classic “haven’t seen the last of him” fiery end when his plane is shot down over the Gotham River.)

All told, “The Lost Episode” is a strange bird, an odd viewing experience that does not quite yield the concealed greatness its mysterious name implies, but it’s just shy of required for any fan of Batman: The Animated Series. If nothing else, it’s seventeen “new” minutes of Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and the rest of the gang. After twenty-four hit-or-miss episodes of The New Batman Adventures, “The Lost Episode” is that rare treat which reteams Bruce Timm and Paul Dini for as authentic an experience as you can get. If nothing else, it’s a fine auguring of future, better Bat-games likeBatman: Vengeance and the Arkham series, both of which would continue to reteam Conroy and Hamill in the roles they defined (with the latter scripted by Dini).

Original Release Date: July 1995

Writers: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm

Director: Bruce Timm

Villains: Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), The Riddler (John Glover), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), The Joker (Mark Hamill), and Clayface (Ron Perlman)

Next episode: There are no more episodes! Stay tuned, though, for two more bonus reviews before we revisit the Top and Bottom 10 episodes. Up next, “Knight Time,” in which Bruce Wayne treats himself to an impromptu vacation.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Judgment Day"

“May heaven have mercy on your souls, Two-Face – both of them.”

Gotham’s new vigilante, The Judge (Malachi Throne), takes a harder line on crime when he violently attacks The Penguin. Egged on by corrupt city councilman J. Carroll Corcoran (Steven Weber), The Judge works his way down a list of Gotham’s most wanted. While Two-Face (Richard Moll) scrambles to avoid facing the vigilante’s death sentence, Batman discovers that something far worse than a murderer lurks beneath The Judge’s robes. (Note: I’ll have to spoil the reveal below to discuss this episode fully.)

It’s a strange position to review “Judgment Day” as a series finale. It was the last episode produced but not the last one to air – that honor belongs to the masterful “Mad Love.” I’ve never been clear on how quickly the creators had to change course, though in Vulture’s oral history Bruce Timm suggests a fairly quick turnaround between The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond. (In that same history, Paul Dini notes, “we could have gone another two or three years on just Batman stories alone, because we also liked where we were taking the relationships.” If only!) So it seems partially fair to treat “Judgment Day” like a series finale, but we also have to acknowledge that it was more of a full stop than a proper conclusion.

As a finale, “Judgment Day” ties a bow on one of the animated programs’ longest running arcs – the fragile sanity of Harvey Dent, who debuted in the show’s fifth episode before the series’s first two-part episode depicted his fall from grace in an accident that scarred him physically and shattered him mentally. It’s both perplexing and fitting, then, that this episode introduces a third personality – that of The Judge – to accompany Harvey Dent and Two-Face (the erstwhile “Big Bad Harv”). Giving Two-Face a third personality is perhaps a bridge too far for a villain so obsessed with doubles and duality, but it compounds the tragedy of Harvey Dent and doubles-down, so to speak, on this Batman’s first and perhaps only great failure. Batman’s concluding monologue, reminiscent of a similar closing speech from Psycho, is perhaps a little too pat in explaining the narrative twist, and another pass might have helped draw out the long connection Batman and Two-Face, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, have shared.

When Councilman Corcoran volunteers to help The Judge, he does so by observing, “I figure if Gordon can have his hero, why can’t I have mine?” This comparison is a fascinating one, and it’s something that, in another world, might have made for an excellent two-parter or even a season-long subplot. Positing The Judge – and, by extension, Two-Face – as Batman’s dark opposite number raises fascinating questions about which lines are important for Gotham’s vigilantes to draw, and the fact that only Corcoran notices is a bit disappointing. Along the same vein, The New Batman Adventures has prided itself on deepening the Bat-bench with Nightwing, a new Robin, and an expanded role for Batgirl, yet none of the Bat-family appears, save for a brief Alfred cameo. Batman himself doesn’t appear for nearly seven minutes while The Judge makes the rounds with Gotham’s villains. It’s a treat, to be sure, to see many of these foes again, even if Killer Croc isn’t voiced by Aron Kincaid, or if The Riddler is relegated to a news clip in his only non-hallucination appearance on TNBA. But one can’t help but feel this episode might have been fuller had someone other than Batman had a word about The Judge – especially Tim Drake, on whom Two-Face had a rather significant impact back in “Sins of the Father.”

On one point of order, “Judgment Day” is a striking series finale because of the way it invokes one of the animated project’s finest hours. Between his swooping robes, booming voice, and operatic score, it cannot be an accident that The Judge is extremely evocative of The Phantasm, the eponymous antagonist of Batman’s first and best animated film – to say nothing of the fact that Alan Burnett wrote both this episode and Phantasm’s story. Harley Quinn certainly looms largest among the pantheon of original animated creations, but there has always been something primal about The Phantasm, who never quite made the jump to the comics the way Harley did. (The Phantasm would resurface in an episode of Justice League Unlimited and a few Batman Beyond comics; when I met the writer of those comics, he speculated that the rights might have been handled differently at the time since Phantasm was released theatrically.) Nevertheless, The Phantasm has become a kind of hypostatic metaphor for the entire Batman animated project – an example of its fine visual flair, its ingenious creative writing, and its gut-level “cool” factor. 

Moreover, The Phantasm represents the key conceit that Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures always kept in mind: no matter how relentlessly cool his villains might be, Batman is the star of his own show, and every well-crafted story has to feed into exploring his specific psyche, his need for justice, and the personal connection he shares with his enemies –many of whom he may have had an accidental hand in creating. It’s also always been about the belief that one man can make a difference, that the city is a better place for this one figure standing between it and total lawlessness. We see it with The Phantasm, with Simon Trent and the redemption of his soul, even with Harley Quinn and her loony halfhearted reforms. And we see it with Harvey Dent, on whom Batman has never given up. This episode works very well as a thematic sequel to “Second Chance,” in which Harvey Dent found himself abducted by a Two-Face unwilling to accept that his better half might genuinely express contrition for his crimes. Back then, I wrote words that sum up my overall sense of the Batman animated project, words on which it may be wise to end:

We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.

Original Air Date: October 31, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Alan Burnett

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: The Judge (Malachi Throne), Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Lost Episode,” in which everything old is new again.

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

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

We like to say that “the geeks have won.” It’s a victory that’s been called more often than Barbara Stanwyck’s bedside telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number, but each time it feels like geekdom has achieved the unthinkable – be it the smash debut of The Avengers or introducing comics-accurate oddballs like King Shark and Professor Pyg on primetime. In 2018, the geeks won by having a banner year, with three animated superhero films alongside major showings by their live-action counterparts. However you slice it, we can have a productive argument about whether the cartoon with a Spider-Pig was actually the best one – a true win for the geeks.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (finally) introduces Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) to the big screen as Brooklyn’s new friendly neighborhood Spider-Man after a spider bite puts him in a league with his universe’s Peter Parker (Chris Pine). I say “his” universe, for Brooklyn becomes host to a coterie of spider-people after The Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) tears a hole in the fabric of space-time with a particle accelerator experiment. Joining Miles are a shlubbier Spidey (Jake Johnson), Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld), the black-and-white Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage), and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham (John Mulaney) – all in search of a way home.

I’ve said in the past that Batman is the greatest fictional character because of his chameleonic ability to accommodate whatever his audience needs – he can be the paragon of camp, the apex gargoyle, a space-age dark knight, or a kid-friendly crusader. When I say that, however, I’m usually not thinking of Spider-Man, for whose comparable metamorphoses Spider-Verse makes a compelling argument. Spider-Verse posits a veritable spider-prism (kids next door, rocker chicks, tough-guy gangsters, wise-cracking pigs, and more), each of whom accesses the central truth of Spider-Man – that with great power, there must also come great responsibility. You can’t run away, you can’t turn your back; your family and your friendly neighborhood are counting on you. For all his myriad forms, it’s hard to imagine Batman in a film like this one, teamwork having never been his strong suit. (Singular dislocation suits Batman better than prismatic conjunction; cf. Batman Ninja, Batman Beyond, etc.)

It’s equally hard to imagine that Spider-Verse works as well as it does. Its irreverent approach to storytelling, layering origin stories in a gag that never loses its comedic punch, helps the viewer navigate fifty years of convoluted chronology with deft precision. (Its comics counterpart, 2014’s Spider-Verse crossover, is comparably impenetrable.) Make no mistake, though; for all its spider-people, Spider-Verse is well and truly Miles’s film, a full origin story for the newest Spider-Man (who debuted in 2011). Here Miles is quite a character, engaging and relatable because of his eminent humanity; he’s shy but gifted, funny and earnest. What’s more, there comes a moment in the film where you’d almost rather he not become Spider-Man because of how well we like Miles and the unique story being told with him; it almost seems a shame to put him in a costume and give him a fairly recognizable super-action narrative. But the exceedingly clever script finds a way to weave that hero’s journey into the story already in progress (including a few, ahem, touching callbacks).

Of course, so much of the film’s success owes to its lanky animation style, delicately exaggerated in the best Tex Avery tradition. The slightly jerky movements and modest design tweaks help divorce Spider-Verse from strict representation and move it into a realm where it feels like anything can happen, where any abstract incursion fits right in (cf. Spider-Ham). Animation naturally unfetters a filmmaker’s aspirations in the way that a comic book page renders all things possible beyond constraints of budget. That’s not to say that Spider-Verse is cheap (its budget has been reported at $90 million), but it’s hard to imagine a live-action film capturing all the peculiar quirks of this world, to say nothing of its technicolor climax or the characters that almost need to belong to an animated world (again, Spider-Ham, but also the monochromatic Spider-Man Noir). I knew I was in for a visual treat even from the trailers, but nothing can really prepare a moviegoer for the first appearance of the massive Kingpin – whose sheer mass cannot be understated. Even this, though, is essential character work; Kingpin’s colossal bulk distorts gravity around him, in the way that his particle accelerator tampers with the laws of physics in order to pull in the objects of his plot (no spoilers, but the script is smart to make Kingpin three-dimensional, giving him a full and possibly legitimate reason for risking the fate of the universe).

As dark as the film can be, wading into heavy subplots about betrayal, disappointment, and loss, Spider-Verse is exuberantly, boundlessly fun. I can’t, for example, point at someone or touch their shoulder without thinking of particular jokes in the film and guffawing my webs off. But the film also tickles my specific devotion to superheroes for its relentless optimism. Yes, the situation is dire, with cataclysmic consequences, but here’s a kid from Brooklyn who stands at the center of this massive web with the power to save everyone, and all he needs to do is figure himself out. What’s more, he has a loving family and a network of friends to help him through difficult times; no matter how isolated he feels, Miles Morales is never alone. Reducing him to “the black Spider-Man” doesn’t do justice to the depth of this character or the ways he advances and perpetuates the legend of Spider-Man without the guilt or baggage of Peter Parker.

I’m not ready to wade into the battlefields of “who did it better?” just yet. (As I get older, I’m losing patience with these pithy ‘hot takes’ that end more conversations than they start.) The geeks have well and truly won when we can have Black Panther and Spider-Verse, when we get a long-overdue Incredibles 2 alongside them and Avengers: Infinity War, to say nothing of Aquaman, Venom, Deadpool 2, and Ant-Man and the Wasp. (Phew!) It’s an embarrassment of riches, not unlike the spider-cornucopia presented in Spider-Verse, with something for everyone and everything adding up to a romping good time. Best of all, Spider-Verse got me to dust off my Marvel Unlimited subscription and queue up a slate of spider-comics to read. That’s how the geeks win.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is rated PG for “frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements, and mild language.” Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Brian Michael Bendis, Sara Pichelli, and Dan Slott. Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, John Mulaney, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber, and Chris Pine.