Bat-May: Batman Forever (1995)

In an interesting way, Batman Forever was foundational for me. It was the first Batman film I had seen in theaters and, in 1995, must have been among the first films I saw in theaters. (I was bitten in 1994 with The Lion King.) I had the poster on my wall, the action figures in my toybox, and the comic book adaptation in my collection. I lived and breathed it. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

Time’s gone on, and it hasn’t been kind to Joel Schumacher, who picked up the directorial reins from Tim Burton and put his own avant-garde camp stamp on the franchise. For many years, fans used Schumacher as a punching bag to defend their own aggressively macho, insistently grown-up takes on Batman. Whatever Batman is, the argument went (and I admit I was in that crowd for many years), Batman Forever wasn’t it. Now that I’m older and wiser, I know that Batman can be everything at once – the genius of the character is that he is at once immutable and simultaneously infinitely adaptable. He fits into any genre, and still he persists. And I’m pleased to see that the fans are coming around to this perspective with Batman Forever, which has undergone a kind of cult reclamation such that cries of “Release the Snyder Cut” have, now fulfilled, been followed by “Release the Schumacher Cut,” which promises a longer and darker version of Forever.

 

Only I don’t know that it’s necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll happily watch a three-hour Batman Forever, but I’m not convinced that it’s what Schumacher wanted. My sense of Batman Forever is that Schumacher intended to update the Batman ’66 format with an inflection of the Tim Burton aesthetic, and on that count – even if I don’t love it – I have to admit he made exactly the movie he set out to make. It’s silly, it’s daft, and it’s over-the-top, but it’s also got an undercurrent of psychological complexity that gets lost in the static of Schumacher bashing.

 

Val Kilmer dons the cape and cowl as a Bruce Wayne haunted by the death of his parents and what he sees as a disturbing reprise when acrobat Dick Grayson (Chris O’Donnell) is orphaned by Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones). While Bruce attempts to dissuade his newfound ward from vengeance, Batman is facing a new adversary in the form of The Riddler (Jim Carrey), secretly a disgruntled employee of WayneTech who has developed a mind-control device.

 

Batman Forever begins, rather unfortunately, with a joke that falls very flat. Alfred (the stalwart Michael Gough) offers Batman dinner before his nightly vigil; after a strangely long pause, Batman says, in a reedy squawk, “I’ll get drive-thru.” It’s perhaps an effective table setting – we’re in for a Batman that’s cornier and more prone to one-liners, even if they don’t always work – but I suppose it’s also an indicator of how much worse the film could have been if every scene had this tone, if nothing was taken seriously. It’s also an unfortunate opener because it sells Val Kilmer short; neither the voice nor the mannerisms are quite right in this first scene, but Kilmer gets it right almost immediately thereafter. His Bruce Wayne is psychologically broken, emotionally dead, but he embodies a key interpretative theory of the character – that Bruce Wayne cannot be both happy and Batman. Instead, Kilmer finds a cold middle ground, which might read as disaffected – but isn’t that what the Bruce Wayne persona should be? Isn’t Bruce an airheaded satire on the notion of a billionaire playboy?

 

The only times we start to see the real Bruce Wayne – the damaged orphan boy, stunted by his parents’ murder – is in his scenes with psychologist and lover Dr. Chase Meridian, which is honestly one of the all-time great fictional names ever. Now raise your hand if you’d forgotten that Nicole Kidman was in a Batman film. (I myself forget every so often.) Her performance vamps a little bit – nowhere near what Uma Thurman would do in Batman & Robin two years later – but Kidman is pretty effective as a Jungian femme fatale. Though the film is a bit condescending with her inability to decide whether she loves Batman or Bruce Wayne, this motif of duality plays into the film’s larger investment in Bruce Wayne’s fractured psyche. Michael Keaton’s Batman recognized the disconnect between his own romantic fulfillment and his vow to avenge his parents; Chase Meridian helps Bruce to draw out the fact that he is utterly incapable of functioning as a human being while fighting crime as Batman.

 

Indeed, Bruce Wayne is fundamentally unable to connect with his new ward, Dick Grayson, until he unites his own twin personas, ultimately accepting the young lad as his crimefighting partner, Robin. I have no idea how old this incarnation of Dick Grayson is supposed to be; he must be under 18, for Bruce to take him in as a foster father, but Chris O’Donnell plays him like a brash mid-20s, and there’s something in that performance that doesn’t quite work. He’s hot-headed like the second comics Robin, Jason Todd, and his Dick Grayson has a dated youthful edge that perhaps hasn’t aged well. (The contemporaneous animated series took a similar tack with Robin, but it seemed to work better there.) It might be the weakest performance in the film, because it’s not quite dialed into what this film needs of a Robin; his mood swings and impetuous plans to murder Two-Face never really connect with the audience.

 

Then we come to the villains. I have long maintained that the fundamental problem with Batman Forever is that both Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey are playing their characters as though they were Jack Nicholson’s Joker. I stand by this claim, because it certainly explains what keeps these performances from being truly faithful to the comics, but there are some nuances to draw out. It’s been widely reported that Jones and Carrey didn’t get along during filming, especially because Jones reportedly hated Carrey, telling him at one point, “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” (True or not, has there been a more Tommy Lee Jones sentence than that?) Though to that point, I would have to ask Jones what he made of his own performance, because it is prancing buffoonery at its finest – again, precisely what the film needs of him, but it is a far cry from the more grounded Harvey Dent given us by Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight. But the cleverness of joining Bruce Wayne’s bifurcated psyche to a plot involving Two-Face is genius, and one wishes the screenplay had borne that out a little more directly. One also wishes that Jones had played his Two-Face a little more seriously; unlike Kilmer, whose first scene is a dud, Jones’s first scene is note-perfect as he monologues to a hostage bank guard about the universal fairness of luck.

As for Jim Carrey’s Riddler, it is a Jim Carrey performance from the mid-90s, largely indistinguishable from the rest (costuming aside). It’s that same manic oscillation, bounding and mugging. There’s a hearty helping of Nicholson in there somewhere, but the performance is perhaps more properly an amalgam of Frank Gorshin and Max Headroom – which may indeed be the Rosetta Stone for Carrey’s whole career. Carrey’s Riddler is overdone, his riddles aren’t great, but at least his chemistry with Two-Face is commendable, particularly if the off-set animosity was as feverish as it seems. His Riddler is gleefully vain, too, applied more to his appearance than to his genius, and there’s something in his envy of Bruce Wayne that gets echoed in Sam Rockwell’s begrudging RDJ-worship in Iron Man 2. These days, though, I’m particularly intrigued to see what Paul Dano brings to the role in The Batman, with his Zodiac-killer take wildly distinct from the gleeful tricksters we’ve seen thus far.

 

Batman Forever is filled with performances and setpieces that are watchable for their spectacle, and I practically inhaled a bowl of popcorn during the film’s bombastic first act. It’s an energy that never really lets up, but the script is full of things that happen only because the movie needs them to happen. Two-Face has no master plan, striving only to kill Batman in a disconnected string of death traps (more shades of Batman ’66), while the Riddler’s mind-control plot is both too outlandish and much too easy to foil. One can easily see why a seven-year-old Cinema King would have been enamored of this cartoon come to life, but there is a kernel of something greater in here that keeps the adult coming back – occasionally against my better judgment, but compelled all the same. There is something very savvy about Batman Forever, and one wishes the film had leaned harder into that aspect of the story rather than the neon pop-art comic book come to life (which was, after all, what Schumacher intended). Perhaps there ought to be a Schumacher Cut, after all.

 

Batman Forever is rated PG-13 for “strong stylized action.” Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, and Akiva Goldsman. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, and Chris O’Donnell.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Monday at the Movies - September 22, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.”  We won’t pretend that today’s review has anything to do with birthdays or coincidences of the calendar – rather, here’s a movie watched and reviewed in the past week (you know, just like this feature used to be).

The Truman Show (1998) – Half Philip K. Dick and half Plato’s allegory of the cave, Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a prescient critique of reality television (a full two years before Survivor) with a strong dose of existential philosophy and a little Christian creation theory for good measure.  Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, who unwittingly stars in a reality show orbiting entirely around him.  In short, he’s the only genuine thing in the simulacrum of Seahaven; think Leave It to Beaver meets Big Brother.  While his whole life is being directed by television auteur Christof (a smartly understated Ed Harris), Truman discovers holes in his own reality as he wonders why he can’t leave town and whether he’s the center of the universe.  Carrey, at the time known mostly for his broad strokes comedy in Ace Ventura and The Mask, delivers a more restrained performance here; there are a few flashes of slapstick and the facial clowning which made Carrey famous, but by and large the film is more cerebral than that and explores the character’s psyche quite well, in a frankly brilliant screenplay by Andrew Niccol.  Indeed, this is a very smart film, and it never panders to the audience by overexplaining the high concept; in the hands of a lesser crew, the interview sequence with Christof would have been overladen with exposition, but instead The Truman Show uses it to explore some of the implications of this particular reality program, rendering Christof not as a mustache-twirling villain but as an antagonist with a high emphasis on aesthetics over ethics.  Eventually the film addresses a key existential theme – the necessity of choice in freedom – and the film’s conclusion subverts our expectations by denying us a key confrontation but leaves us with the only ending this story could have.  The Truman Show comes highly recommended, both as casual entertainment and as thought experiment.

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

Monday at the Movies - March 24, 2014

Welcome to another edition of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a less than unfortunate flick.

Lemony Snickey’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) – Midway through my recent binge-reading (can this be a thing?) of the thirteen books in the series, I stepped aside for a few hours with the film, which loosely adapts the first three books (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, and The Wide Window).  The film and its source material find the Baudelaire orphans (Emily Browning as inventive Violet, Liam Aiken as bookish Klaus, and their baby sister Sunny) bounced from guardian to guardian after their parents perish in a fire.  The first guardian, Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), turns out to be a cad of many costumes; the third, Aunt Josephine (Meryl Streep) is a paranoid whackadoo ruled by her fears.  In between is the kind herpetologist Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), a character who gets far too little screen time in contrast to his zanier counterparts.  The elephant in the room is Carrey; he’s at his best when he’s restrained (as in The Truman Show), but here his penchant for plasticity plays well with the character’s own fondness for disguises.  Each disguise Count Olaf dons is transparent, but it’s fun to see Carrey step behind Olaf’s theatricality and inhabit these alternate takes on the character (i.e., the meek Stephano or the gruff Captain Sham).  The three Baudelaires are mostly fine, though the film curiously steps away from Violet’s distinctive hair ribbon and Klaus’s definitive glasses.  But one of the most fun bits in the film is what I’ve always held as the cinephile’s true delight – a cast of celebrity cameos, including Streep and Connolly, of course, but also Timothy Spall, Craig Ferguson, and Dustin Hoffman doing his best Stan Lee impression.  Ultimately, the film feels a lot like a Tim Burton film – the best way, I suppose, to describe Snicket’s distinctive prose voice – but as a Burton fan and an admirer of the books, Lemony Snicket’s was engaging enough.  If only the film told us who Beatrice was!

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

Kick-Ass 2 (2013)

I was a big fan of Matthew Vaughn’s film Kick-Ass, even going so far as to believe (even if I didn’t admit it in my own review) that it improved on the Millar/Romita, Jr. comic book in many ways.  Jeff Wadlow’s Kick-Ass 2, however, misses the bar set by both its filmic and comic predecessors, never failing outright but ending up as a disappointing break from real life.

After kickstarting the real-world superhero trend, Dave “Kick-Ass” Lizewski (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) joins a team of superheroes – Justice Forever – while trying to convince his fellow hero Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) to suit up once more to help protect their city.  Hit-Girl is no more, though; instead, Mindy Macready is trying to make a normal life for herself as a high school freshman.  Meanwhile, Chris D’Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the supervillain formerly known as Red Mist, rebrands himself in a quest to avenge his father and kill Kick-Ass.

Sometime before arriving in theaters, Kick-Ass 2 dropped its subtitle “Balls to the Wall,” and after viewing the film itself it isn’t hard to see why.  That subtitle promises a relentless go-for-broke mentality which strives to top the already-exuberant first film, but what you actually get with Kick-Ass 2 is a tennis match of tonal inconsistencies, volleying between grim-n-gritty and Frat Pack humor, between dark comedy and unironic maudlin melodrama.  Any one of these might have made for a decent film, but the movie’s confusion about its own tone leads to a film that distances more than diverts its audience.  Matthew Vaughn managed to pull off the tonal shifts in Kick-Ass, but it seems Wadlow isn’t as deft a filmmaker.

A quick word about the source material:  Kick-Ass 2, by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., is stomach-churning, revoltingly violent, and that’s entirely the point.  Millar’s work on Kick-Ass 2 is uncompromising in a way that makes most readers uncomfortable (his unsettling comments equating rape with decapitation notwithstanding), but again it’s not purposeless.  By softening many of the more brutal beats from the comic book, the film ends up feeling like it’s continually undercutting itself.  Case in point:  Chris D’Amico, reduced from a genuinely evil monster to a lame attempt at comic relief whose villainous pursuits are impossible to take seriously because of his nasal whines and myriad impotencies. It’s a shame; Mintz-Plasse pulls off a few great moments of real darkness, but it’s like the editors spliced in a whole other feature alongside the one where McLovin plays the villain.

Moretz still steals the show as the foul-mouthed juvenile vigilante Hit-Girl, her purple wig and one-liners bespeaking her inbred passion for the superhero game, but there’s something just a little bit off about her performance.  Maybe it’s that she’s noticeably aged from the pint-sized terror of the first film, maybe it’s the film’s clumsy attempt to shoehorn her into a Mean Girls subplot (which works better in the comic book without resorting to icky hormones and projectile vomiting), or maybe it’s just that her heart doesn’t seem as into the project as it did; ditto for Johnson-Taylor, who’s almost the very definition of phoning it in, even when his character is supposed to be devastated.

Indeed, the only actor in the film who doesn’t seem bored or confused is Jim Carrey, in a surprisingly fun turn as Colonel Stars and Stripes, Justice Forever’s ostensible chairman.  I didn’t recognize Carrey in the early trailers, and that level of immersion in the character persists in his small role here.  You’ll want more of the Colonel from the film, in part because he’s the only consistent character in the film and in part because he lives up to the film’s attempt at a motto:  “Try to have fun; otherwise, what’s the point?” 

But the biggest problem with the film isn’t the violence that led Carrey to disavow the film in public (though some of the CGI effects need disowning).  In the final analysis, Kick-Ass 2 just doesn’t work because it doesn’t allow itself to go for broke.  Instead, it holds back and undercuts itself at every turn until all that’s left standing is an unengaging experience that just doesn’t kick as much ass as it needs to.  Never thought I’d say this, but this film really needs Nicolas Cage (a shining light in the first, conspicuously absent here).

Kick-Ass 2 is rated R for “strong violence, pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and brief nudity.”  This film is as violent as the first one, blood sprays and amputations abounding.  There are plenty of F-, C-, and other bombs dropped by the characters (including one in his own name), two prostitutes are seen topless for a few seconds, and other characters talk about sexual acts in vulgar and unflinching detail.  Please don’t do what the people sitting a few rows behind me did: leave your three-year-old at home.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

I finally sat down to watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for three reasons: I'd run out of "must-see" movies, I personally know people who love this movie, and it's landing at the top of many "Best of 2000-2009" lists. And after seeing the movie, I can't fathom why people are saying this is the best film of the last decade.

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm not being glib. I'm not deliberately trying to be antagonistic by penning a negative review of one of the most critically-acclaimed movies of my lifetime. I wanted to like Eternal Sunshine. I really did, and I tried my darndest to do so. But in the final analysis, I switched off my television, took the DVD out of the player, and shrugged, "Meh."

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind represents the latest in an unintentional series of "boy-meets-girl" movies here at The Cinema King. Here, the boy is Joel (Jim Carrey), and the girl is Clementine (Kate Winslet with a "you won't believe she's British" voice). Following a nasty break-up, the two separately elect to undergo a memory erasure procedure pioneered by Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (an underused Tom Wilkinson). Though Clementine accepts the ignorance-is-bliss philosophy offered by Mierzwiak and his team (which includes Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood), Joel begins to regret his decision midway through the procedure as he struggles to remember his time, however bitter, with Clementine.

Aside from the imaginative premise of memory erasure and the inventive ways that director Michel Gondry devises to depict the practice, the film is disappointingly formulaic but without any effort put into making the formula believable. I didn't detect very much chemistry between Joel and Clementine; indeed, it seems as though all they do is goof around before making each other miserable. Consequently, the film's basic throughline - Joel's quest not to forget Clementine - is shallow and uninspiring. Simply put, the only reason to root for these characters is because we're told to. Clementine is mildly endearing - thank the always-divine Winslet for that - though she barely develops beyond the "manic pixie dream girl" trope. Carrey develops even less; he mopes lethargically through the movie without the convincing ennui that JGL employed in (500) Days of Summer. The supporting cast is decent, though they float through the movie with little to do beyond advance the plot; Wood's character shows creepy promise, but it's as though Kaufman & Co. didn't quite know what to do with him. Disappointment ensues.

The other major grievance I have against Eternal Sunshine is that it's brutally slow-paced, and when all your characters are extremely depressed without providing any reason for us to sympathize with them this can be a painful experience. Combine this with the predictability quotient exhibited by this movie, and the only reason I finished the movie was because I'm just that kind of a guy.

But I guess I can see why so many people love this movie. It's innocuous, and it's uncomplicated; it's got neat visual effects, a narrative spine (albeit a misued one), and a hopeful ending that affirms an optimism in the human condition. But for a #1 movie of the last ten years, I need a little more than marshmallow fluff. I need something incisive and at least slightly subversive, a movie that either tells me something I didn't know or tells me something that feels like the truth - not a Hollywood version of the truth. (An uncompromised ending apparently suggested that patients of the memory-loss program were bound to repeat their mistakes and need the procedure several times; this might have been more intriguing and would have at least made the film feel inventive and not just lethargically and slavishly optimistic.) So for some this may be a divine movie, but for me it's just plain disappointing. But that's the point of reviews; I'm leaning toward The Departed being the best movie of the last ten years, but maybe Eternal Sunshine fans find it deplorable. Fine.

Let me conclude by clarifying that I don't think that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a terrible movie. It's not; it's certainly no Next. It may not be great, but moreover it's just not "to my liking," nor can I explain why so many people are saying it was the best film of the last ten years. Now I almost have to write my own list.
The MPAA rated Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind R "for language, some drug and sexual content." F-bombs get dropped, there's some mild nuzzling/cuddling, all the girls end up in their underwear at some point in the movie, and a few characters smoke mariijuana. Language aside, this probably could have been a hard PG-13 if the filmmakers had aimed for it.