The Flash (2023)

It seemed like a bizarre twist of fate that I saw The Flash exactly ten years to the day after first seeing Man of Steel. (Save your ticket stubs, friends.) So much of The Flash revolves around a sideways retelling of the events of Man of Steel, while at the same time serving as the ostensible finale for the cinematic universe that began with Henry Cavill’s debut as Superman. For this reason – and so many more – it is a challenge to think of The Flash as its own thing, as a superhero movie unto itself. The Flash is by and large a fun time at the movies, but it is so nakedly corporate and so eager to shuffle another franchise off this cinematic coil – and consequently it is difficult for this fan in particular to celebrate and embrace it wholesale.
 
After the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) has unlocked the ability to travel backward in time. Hoping to exonerate his wrongfully-imprisoned father, Barry changes the past to prevent his mother’s murder – but in so doing, he creates a universe with no metahumans to stop the invasion of General Zod (Michael Shannon). With only the fiery Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), an aging Batman (Michael Keaton), and his own alternate universe doppelganger (Miller again), Barry must either save the present, restore the past, or lose the future.
 
At the center of whatever you make of The Flash is the cauldron of personal and legal challenges in which Ezra Miller is currently embroiled. A fine enough Flash in ZSJL – and a decent, if overly Spider-Man-esque, variation in the theatrical Justice League – Miller never presented as irreplaceable. And for Warner Bros. to pin their hopes on a film starring not one, but two Ezra Millers, while simultaneously claiming that Batgirl was unreleasable, seemed like such a curious choice. Here again, Miller is quite fun as both Barrys, giving suitably nuanced performances to differentiate the two, but it is equally hard to watch the film and not imagine a less problematic performer in the role.
 
As if to distract from the Miller of it all, the film brings in scores of old faces and a few new ones, too, and on that count I must concede it works. No matter what baggage you bring to the theater with you, there is an undeniable thrill from revisiting Stately Wayne Manor and seeing Michael Keaton fly a Batplane with Danny Elfman’s score thrumming in the background. Keaton has not lost a step as Batman, reinhabiting his idiosyncratic Bruce Wayne with ease. Meanwhile, the other returning Michael reprises his General Zod, albeit with little of the personality and narrative heft that Shannon brought to Man of Steel. It’s a treat to see his Zod again, but his performance feels a bit like someone bringing a favorite action figure out of the toybox and playing only the hits.
 
On the flip side, Sasha Calle’s Kara is scratching the surface of a very interesting take on the character, though she has far less to do than the trailers let on. Still, playing up her role as Superman’s older cousin and riffing on the Flashpoint comics, Calle makes a compelling case for being more than just one cast-off universe’s Supergirl. If the reports bear out the Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow film we’ve been promised, I’d say it’s worth giving Calle a fuller shot at the role.
 
And yet, hard as I tried to watch The Flash as its own one-off film about the Scarlet Speedster, it was so very difficult not to view the film as a kind of living funeral, an elegiac wake for an aborted cinematic universe that I’m going to miss so terribly much. For all that it tries to be a celebration of the DC film universe writ large, it was impossible – at least for me – not to feel an accompanying pang of sadness. This, for example, is likely the last time we’ll see Ben Affleck as Batman, and his performance is so touching, partly because it’s an absolutely wretched way to say goodbye, even while he wrings such effective pathos from the bare minimum that the script gives him to do. Ditto Miller, whose performance is nothing overly special until the final act, which gives us a powerful emotional climax that the film scarcely deserves. If this is indeed the final run for this Barry Allen, what a waste to leave just when things were getting interesting.
 
I made the mistake of watching the Flash scenes from Zack Snyder’s Justice League the night before seeing The Flash. It was a mistake because that iteration of the character was so fun and so fresh that I couldn’t wait for more Barry Allen. Those super-speed scenes looked crisp, and I still get a little emotional at Barry’s big “Make your own future. Make your own past” moment. By comparison, The Flash is lousy with muddled CGI (which director Andy Muschietti, bafflingly, insists is deliberate) and the loud-and-clear message is instead, “Stop living your past.” It’s advice that the film might well have taken, riddled as it is with cameos, callbacks, and references – only a few of which are actually well-used and not, frankly, ghoulish. 
 
At the end of the day, though, The Flash is entertaining enough. It’s fun enough. It’s fine. It’s not good enough to merit the extensive discourse around Ezra Miller’s employability. It’s not a great sendoff for the so-called Snyderverse. It’s not an auspicious beginning for the new James Gunn universe – if indeed that’s what The Flash would ever have been. And it’s not even a loving highlight reel for DC Universes gone by, dangling most of its shiny cameos like baubles on a Christmas tree. It’s junk food, albeit junk food that happens to star some of my favorite fictional characters. But if it’s going to leave my preferred interpretations of those characters lying face-down in a puddle, turning them into punchlines instead of paragons, this might just be where I jump off the cosmic treadmill.
 

The Flash is rated PG-13 for “sequences of violence and action, some strong language, and partial nudity.” Directed by Andy Muschietti. Written by Christina Hodson, John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Joby Harold. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Michael Shannon, Ron Livingston, Maribel Verdú, Kiersey Clemons, and Michael Keaton.

Bat-May: Batman Returns (1992)

I was four years old at the time, but I remember Batman Returns feeling like the most important movie ever made. I had an oversized “making of” book that I read practically to shreds. I studied the biography of Tim Burton, pored over the photographs and teasers for the plot. I could even name for you the producer of the film (Denise Di Novi, a wonderfully Gotham-esque name). I had the toys, the fast food cups. And yet, I have no memory of when I first saw the movie itself. In a way, that’s the best metaphor for a review of Batman Returns – chock-full of unforgettable bits and bobs and yet so unwaveringly strange that the whole gets lost amid the mad sum of its ludic parts.

Batman Returns is the story of three freaks – The Bat (Michael Keaton), The Cat (Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). After the events of the first film, Batman spends his nights waiting for action, silently anticipating the call to fight crime. Amid an invasion of circus clowns, The Penguin arrives from the sewers, pleading with Gotham for an opportunity to learn the truth about why his parents abandoned him. Meanwhile, exhausted secretary Selina Kyle is defenestrated and murdered by her boss (Christopher Walken), only to be reincarnated with nine lives, a feline fixation, and a Shakespearean desire for revenge.

 

Just like I can’t say when I first saw Batman Returns, I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it, but on this latest viewing I was largely unprepared for just how weird this movie gets. I have always maintained that the difference between Burton’s two Batman movies is that Batman is a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton movie (co‑)starring Batman. The difference is so apparent in this one; the Gotham sets are freakishly Burton, all odd angles and grim shadows, and Returns doubles-down on its predecessor’s premise that freaks beget freaks, with a brooding meditation on how these freaks find their place in a hostile society (they retreat, or they rebel).

 

In short, Batman Returns is so idiosyncratically Burton that it is impossible to imagine a major franchise film – a sequel, no less – surrendering so entirely to its auteur’s vision that the titular hero ends up being subsumed by the villains. (Today, the claim is usually the reverse, that the villains are largely indistinguishable when the movies are governed by the large personalities of franchise heroes. Can you name, for example, the three villains of the Iron Man franchise?) Indeed, Burton is much more fascinated by the monstrous Penguin and the sideways-feminist Catwoman (“I am Catwoman – hear me roar”), with Batman relegated to a largely supporting role in a film that is nominally his. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is heroic mainly in that he has sublimated his freakish impulses and wears a mask of normalcy, which Penguin is unable to do while Catwoman is entirely unwilling. In a standout sequence, Bruce and Selina attend a masked ball sans disguise, underscoring that their civilian identities are the costumes. (It’s an image that has been appropriated forever since, with a notable reprise in The Dark Knight Rises.) Penguin, meanwhile, crashes the party, as DeVito crashes the film itself, all shouts and gurgles, bile and bodysuits. 

 

It's clear, however, that Burton’s sympathies lie with the villains. The film begins with the birth of Oswald Cobblepot, ultimately cast into a river for his monstrous appearance; despite the fact that the infant Oswald is clearly dangerous, murdering and devouring the family cat, Burton manages to find pathos in this act of attempted filicide. Likewise, at film’s end, Burton stages Penguin’s final scene as high tragedy, with oversized penguins waddling in what appears to be an impromptu funeral procession. In much the same vein that Batman (1989) belonged to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Batman Returns is paced as if it’s Selina Kyle’s film. Selina gets a full origin story and ends up in a sort of inverted will-they-won’t-they, akin to Bruce’s arc with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) from Batman. Again, Burton feels more sympathy for Selina than he does for the curiously submissive Batman, evidenced by an elegiac sequence where Selina relives the trauma of her murder and proceeds to dismantle her entire apartment in a fugue of rage.

 

Putting it into plain English makes the film sound entirely normal, but I can’t undersell how bonkers this movie gets by adding a number of elements together. And these are all things that happen in the same movie: There’s an extended subplot about Penguin’s borderline-Trumpean bid for mayor, buoyed by Christopher Walken’s industrialist Max Shreck, who wants mayoral regime change to greenlight his construction of a power plant that will instead drain power from Gotham. (Shreck’s son, meanwhile, is played by Andrew Bryniarski, doing a transparently meatheaded Walken impression.) Circus clowns invade the edges of the frame, with Danny Elfman’s score veering carnivalesque at each turn. The whole thing is set at Christmas, casting a Burtonesque pall of sarcastic cheer over the affair. There are actual marching penguins, wearing rocket launchers, plotting to murder the children of Gotham. As delightfully strange as the movie is, one has the acutely nagging question during the whole film, “Warner Brothers was okay with this?!” (Spoilers for next week – they weren’t.)

 

I mentioned Danny Elfman, and he’s one of the main reasons this film succeeds. A good score can buoy any film, and while his Batman Returns score isn’t as bombastic or iconic as his work on Batman, it works really well by being dialed into exactly the movie Tim Burton wants to make. It’s traditionally superheroic when it needs to be (in those rare moments that Batman is doing hero work), but more often than not it’s playing in a strange realm of uncomfortable tragedy. His descending Penguin theme grows more and more militaristic, balanced as it is by the aforementioned carnival music. His Catwoman theme, on the other hand, plays like a tragic music box, swirling like his Edward Scissorhands work while highlighting the tragedy of Selina’s fall from innocence and her attempts to claw her way back toward peace.

 

Batman Returns is a film of beauty and of pain, in distinctly Burton ratios, but it is also a film almost as broadly painted as Batman ’66. Walken plays Max Shreck like a boogeyman, right down to the electrified hairdo, while DeVito’s Penguin is a thing of perverse revolting fascination, gruesome and grotesque in equal measure. Burbling black-green bile and groping every woman he finds, it is nearly impossible to find the tragic sympathy Burton feels for this grunting, snarling antagonist, who is handily the most revolting Batman foe ever committed to film. And yet, there is something expertly calibrated about Burton’s Gotham; as exquisitely eccentric as Burton’s vision may be, his Gotham seems very much of a piece with the comic book depiction. Gotham is a city of unending crime and corruption, of perpetual peril. Despite the mayor’s objections, a marauding gang of killer clowns seems to go hand-in-hand with Gotham City as a whole, particularly given the intimation that the clowns constitute a kind of haunting courtesy of Nicholson’s Joker. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation, where it’s unclear whether the comics birthed Burton or if Burton’s shadow warped the comics in his wake. (I’ll go out on a limb and venture the latter, though it’s equally Frank Miller’s fault.)

 

When I drew up the Personal Canon in 2016, there was no question that Batman belonged on it. That movie was nigh elemental in my love of superhero narratives. But Batman Returns was always the weird younger brother, the one who went away to art school and came back a changed man. I was never all the way comfortable with it, but neither could I relinquish it entirely. It’s always had a weird pull, especially as distinct from the twin day-glo Schumacher films; it was, before Christopher Nolan, what Batman movies ought to be.

 

Batman Returns is rated PG-13 for “brooding, dark violence.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken.

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!

Bat-May: Batman (1989)

I have so many fond memories of this movie that I scarcely know where to begin an objective review of Tim Burton’s Batman (affectionately dubbed Batman ’89 by a generation hoping – nay, longing – to distance it from an earlier era’s Batman ’66). I can’t recall with precision the first time I saw the film, but I can say with confidence that it was the very first DVD I owned, a gift from my father when the home video format was in its nascence. But when I first built my Personal Canon in 2016, it was a natural inclusion; I’ve loved this film for years, and it occurs to me that its peculiar bizarre nuttiness has really permeated my identity as a moviegoer.

Batman redefines the Dark Knight more than two decades after the go-go groovy incarnation embodied by Adam West and his Swinging Sixties interpretation. Here, Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is a brooding specter of unrelenting justice, a mystery to his city and to Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), who’s come to town to photograph Bruce’s vigilante alter ego, The Batman. While busting up criminal activity at Axis Chemicals, Batman inadvertently creates his greatest nemesis when Jack Napier emerges from a vat of acid as The Joker (Jack Nicholson), a self-described homicidal artist with murderous plans for Gotham City.

 

Batman is a film that is so iconic because of how quickly it dominated the cultural landscape. Much has been said and written about the cultural saturation of the film, how it changed the superhero genre and action films more broadly, how it reimagined how a blockbuster could perform at the box office. Nicholson’s Joker is both inextricable from the actor’s persona and yet wholly of a piece with the villain’s own flexible characterization; meanwhile, Keaton is to this day still proudly declaring, “I’m Batman.” While the comics had been taking Batman grim ’n’ gritty since the early 1970s (peaking in 1986 with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), Batman has the titanic reputation of being the movie that set the superhero genre down the straight and dour path.

 

This is not to say, however, that Batman isn’t a whole lot of fun. In my reviews of Batman: The Animated Series (and even The Killing Joke), I’ve consistently noticed how Mark Hamill’s Joker sets me giggling on a dime, but I’d forgotten that Nicholson’s Joker has the exact same effect. Nicholson’s strength comes from imbuing casual lines like “You’ll never believe what happened to me today” with deadpan sarcasm and repressed theatrical fire, to say nothing of how well that unique Joker look has aged, even on Blu-Ray. His wheezing laugh, too, so quintessential to any successful Joker, is a hoot, especially when it transforms into a fearless manic cackle, often looped over the following scenes, giving the sense that this movie is well and truly The Joker’s. Keaton’s great, too, a perhaps unexpected choice; in fact, he’s so good that we’ve all forgotten that there’s an extended sequence of Bruce Wayne in blue jeans, which feels more out-of-character than having Joker (spoilers) revealed to be the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne. But Nicholson doesn’t lean on his reputation; he earns top billing on the poster with a riveting performance that’s so markedly different from Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn two decades later.

 

The older I get, and even as the world begins to retreat from the notion that superhero comics are (or at least ought to be) strictly for kids, I give a lot of thought to why these characters have become a kind of religion for me. Why do I cling to these four-color figures? In the case of this film, I think part of the appeal was that Batman was, for me, one of the first grown-up movies I’d ever seen – or at least it was one of the first that felt grown-up. It was a movie that didn’t talk down to me, didn’t try to pretty up the world. It painted a picture of life as a horrific carnival, Gotham City as a funhouse reflection of what civilization ought to be. It felt larger than life, but simultaneously it seemed entirely within reach, more gothic than the bright colors of a comic book page and yet divorced enough from reality that I could access it without fear. And it was a movie that didn’t really look like anything else I’d seen; it was almost certainly my first Tim Burton film, and the way it manages to make the dated feel timeless gave the film a very specific stylized identity I couldn’t find elsewhere on the video shelf. (His next film, Edward Scissorhands, feels very much a period piece, an homage to 1950s Anytown, USA.)

 

Of course, any discussion of Batman has to acknowledge the exquisitely baroque score by Danny Elfman, which has become the gold-standard anthem for multiple generations of Bat-fans. (No matter what you thought of the theatrical cut of Justice League, you had to love hearing that theme once more. It just felt right, scoring Ben Affleck astride the Bat-Signal.) The Animated Series owes so much to Elfman, as does this film overall. I’ll even venture to say that Elfman’s score is a character in itself, serving the same inextricable role here that John Williams’s work does for Star Wars; put another way, this film doesn’t work without Elfman’s ostentatious gusto over the scenes. That Bat-theme, the playful Joker melodies – heck, even the zany zeitgeist of including Prince in a few key scenes – there’s a reason these tracks are seared into our brains (and it’s not just the Lego Batman games, which aired them on an obsessive loop). Elfman is doing career – and genre – defining work with Batman.

 

If you haven’t seen Batman in a while, it’s high time for another look. On this latest rewatch, I was quite surprised by Alfred’s subplot. If at all, Alfred’s role lives on in cultural memory for the moment when he escorts Vicki Vale into the Batcave, blowing Bruce Wayne’s secret identity. But it’s a moment that the film earns by continually seeding Alfred’s desire for Bruce to move on and find safety in an end to his nightly crusade – all of which, if it seems faintly familiar, seems to anticipate Michael Caine’s “I won’t bury you” plot from The Dark Knight Rises. Michael Gough is quiet and unflappably avuncular as Alfred, a pitch-perfect counterpart to the high mania of the film’s dueling leads, but his deep compassion is so key to the character often brushed off as Batman’s butler. 

 

I was also struck by the mystery atmosphere that pervades the film, which feels quite fresh nearly thirty years later. We’re so used to superhero films that walk us through the origin story as a matter of course. But here, Batman’s backstory is presented as something of a mystery; it’s The Joker who gets the straightforward origin, lending further credence to the notion that the film is as much (if not more) his as Batman’s. Of course, it’s hard to imagine any filmgoer who doesn’t know who Batman is and how he came to be (I’ve only met one such person in my life), but the film introduces the familiar story beats in an innovative story structure that doles it out slowly, with gravity. When we finally get to the shooting of the Waynes, it’s nightmarish and ethereal, a hazy encounter with trauma, and it’s presented as the final cue to understanding Bruce Wayne’s psyche.

 

On that count, I’m not sure that the film succeeds – nor, I think, does it want or need to do so. Burton is content to leave Bruce Wayne as a somewhat enigmatic freak, locked in a chicken-and-egg struggle with Jack Napier. Who created whom? Were it not for the film’s ironclad concrete conclusion, one might almost imagine Burton’s universe operating under the conditions suggested by Heath Ledger’s Joker in his final sequence: “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” With the news that Michael Keaton will be reprising his role in the Ezra Miller Flash film, at least half of that statement ended up applying. As for me, it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, so I’ll be returning to it forever.

 

Batman is rated PG-13. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Gough, and Jack Palance.

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!

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

“Spider-Man, Spider-Man,” the old song goes, “does whatever a spider can,” and lately it’s seemed that what a spider can do better than anyone is fumble and reboot himself twice in five years (yes, Andrew Garfield’s web-slinging debut was as recent as 2012). And while I eventually came around to liking The Amazing Spider-Man 2, it was still something of a mess, and what Spider-Man really needed was not his own immediate shared universe but rather a strong solo film, and on that front Spider-Man: Homecoming finally does what the franchise(s) hadn’t done since 2004.

Tom Holland reprises his role from Captain America: Civil War as Peter Parker, the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man who’s eager to get back into the Avengers fray but whose mentorship deal with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is proving to be something less than attentive. Desperate to prove himself to Iron Man, Spider-Man follows a trail of advanced weaponry used and sold by The Vulture (Michael Keaton). Amid all this, Peter has to find time to compete in academic decathlons with his friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and ask senior girl Liz (Laura Harrier) to the homecoming dance.

At the risk of sounding like a corporate shill – I’ve yet to receive that check from Marvel – one thing about Spider-Man: Homecoming that works exceptionally well is its existence in the shared universe. I’m not sure how well the movie scans for someone who hasn’t seen Civil War, and indeed the movie assumes (perhaps rightly) that everyone on the planet did see it, but it feels right to put Spider-Man into a world that is already so dense, with surprising connections to existing film events and to comics elements that hadn’t yet made their way to film. And then there is the indomitable force of Robert Downey Jr. himself, who has become synonymous with the Marvel brand and whose presence feels like a benediction over the film. And no, this isn’t Iron Man 4, much as the trailers might have led us to believe. It’s a proper Spider-Man film, with a tight focus on Spidey, his world, and how it all fits seamlessly into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

As Spider-Man, Holland continues to make the role his own. Sans the Maguire self-consciousness and the Garfield angst, Holland plays Peter Parker as a gawky kid penned in by an awkward high school existence, with the Spidey suit representing an outlet for all his irrepressible charm and desire to make a positive impact on the world. Most importantly, there’s no artifice in the distinction between Peter and Spider-Man; their goals are the same, their personality only differing by degrees. Most excitingly, Holland seems enthused by the role, so perhaps we’ll end the spiral of reboots and stick with him for a while.

As foolproof as the Marvel formula seems to be, their villains have been admittedly inconsistent. For every multilayered Loki, there’s a one-note Malekith or an aptly-named Abomination (and let’s be honest, unless you’re a superfan, you don’t even remember in which movies those characters appeared). Director Jon Watts does well to keep the scope of The Vulture’s plans local and intimate, with no aspirations to take over or destroy the world. Wisely, this insular approach allows the film to develop what Vulture’s real motivations are, and Michael Keaton (Batman to Birdman to bird-man) renders him with very relatable goals and evident humanity beneath his role as antagonist. Even without the added frisson of seeing Keaton in a comic book film once more, his performance is a real treat, never fully hammy but likewise never unaware of just how much fun he can have with a meaty role like this. Spider-Man has never faced The Vulture on-screen before, but better still, he’s never faced a villain like this one before. If his ilk is what we can expect from the Sony/Marvel détente, I’m eager to see what’s next.

There is just so much about Homecoming that is delightful, full of surprises and so many small careful touches like the deliciously amateurish student news segments or the way the film works in so many villains and Iron Man without feeling overfull. Unlike the Garfield films, which often operated under the assumption that the most interesting thing about Spider-Man was everything else around him, Spider-Man: Homecoming doesn’t rush to any big moments or overload itself with Easter eggs (there are enough of them to go around, though). Homecoming takes a core idea – Spider-Man wants to be something more than he is – and builds outward from there, keeping the subtitle as an omnipresent reminder that our protagonist is a high school sophomore on the cusp of immense life changes. The news that the Sony/Marvel partnership is considering their Spider-Man in terms of a five-film arc (of which this is the second) augurs well for characterization, which has been so important for our Marvel heroes. Spider-Man is not Iron Man, nor is he Captain America, and this film remembers that.

Put another way, the Homecoming sequel in 2019 (Spider-Man: Winter Formal?) cannot come soon enough. To those who had written off Spidey or gotten bored of him, Homecoming is a proper return to form for the wall-crawler, with a can’t-miss performance by Michael Keaton.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is rated PG-13 for “sci-fi action violence, some language, and brief suggestive comments.” Directed by Jon Watts. Written by Jonathan Goldstein, John Francis Daley, Jon Watts, Christopher Ford, Chris McKenna, and Erik Sommers. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Starring Tom Holland, Michael Keaton, Marisa Tomei, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Laura Harrier, Jon Favreau, and Robert Downey Jr.

The Founder (2016)

There’s a moment in The Founder when Michael Keaton preemptively apologizes for blasphemy before comparing McDonald’s to American institutions of church and state – crosses, flags, and golden arches. It’s a peculiar but apt metaphor, playing it far less safe than lumping burgers in with baseball and apple pie, but The Founder isn’t a biopic that plays it safe. It’s brisk and taut, slick as its salesman protagonist, but it’s also sobered and smartly self-aware. If nothing else, Keaton gives a must-see performance.

Michael Keaton stars as Ray Kroc, the ostensible (read: self-proclaimed) founder of McDonald’s, whose golden-arched fast food peppers the global landscape to this day. (Indeed, Thomas L. Friedman once noted the synchronicity between the end of global conflict and the prevalence of McDonald’s across nations.) The film is resolute in its depiction of Kroc as an opportunist driven by the brass ring he sees in the form of a franchised version of the burger stand built by Dick and Mac McDonald (Nick Offerman & John Carroll Lynch).

Maybe it’s the score by Carter Burwell, a frequent Coen Brothers collaborator, but this really felt like a Coen version of There Will Be Blood, a capitalist morality play set amid the playfully absurd backdrop of a burger joint. But unlike There Will Be Blood (which took itself deadly seriously, despite staging its climactic murder in a basement bowling alley) or a Coen product (which is always already silly), The Founder conducts itself with a knowing wink, aware of the moral/economic paradox it presents. McDonald’s feeds 1% of the world’s population each day, closing text declares, but Ray Kroc had to circumvent, then buy out, two innocuous restaurateurs to do it.

Yet, thankfully, The Founder does not stoop to preach against the big bad capitalist who bilked two well-intentioned yokels. There’s no scene where Kroc wrings his hands and soul before the camera and wails plaintively at what his schemes have cost him. Instead, Kroc is presented as hungry, driven, and shrewd, willing to breach contract for the sake of his vision – but, as the film notes, only when the other party of the contract lacks vision and willfully obstructs progress.

Kroc is presented, then, as a man who is entirely honest – perhaps not wholly in matters of business but always honest to and about himself. Keaton gives a master class in antiheroism; his Kroc is perpetually transparent about his motivations, his desires, and his intentions, and the film frequently poses the question of who’s at fault when one allows a wolf into a henhouse. Keaton is wolfish as Kroc, with that lean and hungry look with which Shakespeare fixed “yon Cassius” in Julius Caesar; his impish winks and raised eyebrows speak volumes in unflinching close-ups that revel in the character lines on his face. Closing archival footage reveals that Keaton has nailed down many of Kroc’s mannerisms and the unique cadence of his voice, a kind of nasal gravel that gives one the impression of a perpetually dynamic grinder. Keaton appears noir-style in nearly every scene, showing that same command of an audience’s attention that he displayed in Birdman, Spotlight, and yes, even The Other Guys.

It’s Keaton’s show, but Offerman and Lynch do yeoman’s work as the uncomplicated McDonalds who don’t much care for franchises or even a bankroll beyond what their modest location provides. There’s real pathos in Lynch’s face, while Offerman provides the vehement protests to Kroc’s plans, and the two provide a strong counterpoint to Keaton’s manic energy. They both have the look of someone straight out of 1954, but they have the chops to hold their own opposite Keaton.

In the film’s closing moments, Keaton gives the camera a short monologue and a look that communicates more than most actors pull off in an entire movie. I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s a look that stops shy of rendering a moral judgment on the whole film. It’s a look that asks, “Have I done the right thing?” It’s a look that represents everything the audience will be thinking as the film concludes. The Founder closes on precisely the right note, weighing the gravity of the story and allowing its star one last moment to shine. Between Keaton, Denzel, and Andrew Garfield, it’s anyone’s game for Best Actor this year.

The Founder is rated PG-13 for “brief strong language.” Directed by John Lee Hancock. Written by Robert Siegel. Starring Michael Keaton, Nick Offerman, John Carroll Lynch, Linda Cardellini, B.J. Novak, Patrick Wilson, and Laura Dern.

Spotlight (2015)

After the credits rolled on Spotlight, I turned to my moviegoing companion and murmured, “That is what I wanted Truth to be.” A few weeks back I took the Cate Blanchett/Robert Redford movie to task for “all the self-congratulation of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay but less of the snappy prose,” and I stand by those words because Spotlight shows us how it’s done, emblematic of everything a journalism film ought to be – taut, gripping, honest, and well-performed.

Spotlight is the horrifyingly true story of a team of Boston Globe reporters (among them Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams) and their editor (Liev Schreiber) who uncover mounting evidence of widespread child abuse in the Catholic Church. I invoke “horror” because of the dispiriting spiral of abuse the team uncovers, learning quickly that the story they’re working on encompasses as many as 87 priests and systemic attempts to cover up the scandal, which only begins to see light when a beleaguered attorney (Stanley Tucci) organizes a class-action suit against the Church.

The very first thing one notes about Spotlight – and indeed my principal motivation for seeing the film – is the impressive ensemble cast who are bound to be competing against each other when the Oscar nominations are announced next month. There’s not a face on the screen who doesn’t already carry a tremendous amount of screen presence from their previous work, and the only unfamiliar face – Brian d’Arcy James – pulls double-time to make up for the fact that he’s not immediately recognizable. The lot of them are doing award-caliber work with characters that are apparently quite close to their real-life counterparts. Keaton and Ruffalo are immensely compelling, particularly when the two butt heads on the story. The screen crackles when Keaton and McAdams go on interviews together, and it is as ever a delight to see Stanley Tucci in another idiosyncratic supporting role as the self-described only Armenian in Boston.

I had a critique formulating at about the midpoint in the film where I felt the characters weren’t clearly delineated enough, that their narrative places could be interchanged without much compromise to the narrative – that, in short, Spotlight was more about the telling of the story than the tellers. Which, to be fair, in a very real sense it is, but it’s also indicative of the slow-burn approach to the characters taken by director Tom McCarthy (he of Station Agent and an acting turn in Good Night and Good Luck, which feels of a piece with Spotlight). Rather than frontload the characterization, we find out more about the reporters’ motivations as the film unfolds. By the end of the film, and I confess this is a clever move, we’re left to reflect on the degree to which what we learn about the reporters influenced the way they pursued the story.

What surprised me about Spotlight was that there really was no “untold story” that the film exposes. It proceeds about how you’d expect – an investigation begins, details are uncovered, the story is published. (There’s one somewhat surprising historical curveball thrown into the mix, one that contextualizes the investigation in a very profound way, one that reminds you just how long ago all this happened.) What is remarkable is just how compelling this manages to be. And I’m returning to the Truth comparison because Spotlight manages its moral outrage without a sense of preachiness and without ever feeling baggy under the weight of its self-righteousness. Instead, its taut simplicity is its greatest strength, and its exemplary filmmaking ought be seen before the screenings fill up with post-Oscar bandwagoners.

Spotlight is rated R for “some language including sexual references.” The film contains in the neighborhood of 10 F-bombs and about twice as many scatological expletives. Though no abuse is ever depicted on screen, we do see survivors speaking frankly about the incidents and the emotional trauma thereafter.

Birdman (2014)

It’s no secret around here that superhero films are really my cup of tea, and I love a good bit of deconstruction as much as anyone.  And with the Oscar race nearing the starting line, I’m ready what the studios have left in the barrel for 2014 to see what they consider to have been the best saved for last.  Birdman is a combination of all three, familiar in some places but oddly unique in others – mostly mystifying but never anything less than riveting.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomas, a washed-up superhero actor who hung up his Birdman costume after three successful films twenty years ago.  In a bid for new relevance, Riggan is helming a Raymond Carver stage adaptation, a Broadway show with more obstacles before opening night – chief among them the interference of a thespian (Edward Norton) who takes himself far too seriously, the skepticism of his producer (Zach Galafianakis), and the backstage presence of his recently-rehabilitated daughter (Emma Stone).  All the while, Riggan seems to be haunted – or is that possessed? – by the voice of Birdman.

I’ll begin by echoing what nearly everyone has already said – the 87^th Oscar for Best Actor is really Michael Keaton’s to lose.  The apparent self-reflexivity of the role – Keaton left Batman after two films, amid creative differences and concerns of typecasting – had lured me to the theater, but it is by far the least interesting thing about the role, which says something about the staggering amount of depth Keaton brings to the part.  It’s weird that the last time I “saw” him was as Ken in Toy Story 3, a part which had already seemed so perfectly cast.

More interesting than the modest overlap between Riggan and Keaton’s career is the similar approaches to relevance.  Where Riggan wants to be admired once more, his whole arc in the film a bid to be taken seriously, there is no scent of that desperation in Keaton’s work.  Instead, any renewed relevance comes ipso facto from the fine performance.  Keaton, like the best comic actors, is able to walk the line between pathos and punchline; he can turn it on or off as needed but often finds more versatility in the gray areas.  Especially remarkable are the scenes where he and the other actors are rehearsing the play, the rapid-fire conversation toggling between the playscript and their own actor’s notes on the script.  These are brilliantly done, showcasing the number of levels on which Keaton can work, and they raise one of the film’s most significant themes – the blur between truth and performance.

I’ve always been aware of Alejandro González Iñárritu, but I’d never seen one of his movies before Birdman.  As it stands, this interrogation of performativity is absolutely fascinating, inviting comparisons with Black Swan, which similarly dealt with a performer’s questionable grasp on sanity at the key moment of her career.  Unlike Black Swan, though, Iñárritu has so many themes on his plate that the balanced attention he gives to all of them is a superpower in and of itself.  In the film’s two-hour runtime, Iñárritu tackles performance, love, respect, blockbusters, reinvention, social media, critique, and a handful of others.

This deft balance of the film does, however, leave me a bit perplexed in the sense that Birdman is such a full-bodied satire that I don’t fully know where we stand by the end of it.  Iñárritu is obviously not a fan of superhero blockbusters (Riggan complains that all the good actors are wearing capes), nor does he have any patience for the pretensions of the arthouse crowd (Norton’s technique-obsessed Mike Shiner, a spot-on caricature, is only real on stage).  Iñárritu dismisses lawyers, loathes anyone with a cell phone in front of their face (“Can’t you just have a real experience for once in your life?”), and isn’t too fond of art critics, either.  Birdman targets all of these to expose their absurdity, but the ground on which we’re left is a little shaky.

Many critics are falling over themselves to talk about the film’s apparent long-take filming, and while Iñárritu has clearly disciplined his cast to handle these scenes, I’m not too impressed by the overall longness of the takes because I’m certain there’s some digital fakery afoot.  It does, after a while, start to feel like a gimmick – Hitchcock did the same thing in Rope, and it called attention to itself there, too.  Fortunately, however, it’s not a gimmick that takes away from the film, just another neat thing Birdman does.  (Just setting the record straight – it was impressive when Hitchcock faced the challenge on film, but in a digital world, it’s nothing we didn’t see in Children of Men.)

I mentioned the film’s shotgun-style approach to satire, but I do think that ultimately what you make of the film depends entirely on its ending.  The “ambiguous final shot” is so pervasive these days that it’s almost to the point of a cliché, so I would be interested to know what others make of the film.  For me?  Without spoiling anything, I’m a subscriber to the “happy ending” interpretation, for all the science-fictional/superheroic implications that come with that.  Your destination may vary, but your mileage won’t – Birdman is a fabulous thought-provoking crowdpleaser.  I didn’t always know what to make of it, but it managed to feel compelling all the way through.

Birdman is rated R for “language throughout, some sexual content and brief violence.”  The film is littered with F-bombs and other adult language.  A man is seen nude from behind, and in another scene his costume reveals an (exaggerated) outline of his genitals.  There are about three bloody scenes (many involving fake blood for the stage) and a few hamfisted fistfights played for laughs.

Top 10 Christmas Season Movies - #6-5

This week, in anticipation of the Christmas season, we at The Cinema King would like to bring you more than just your usual share of recommendations.  So we present to you:  this week’s Top 10 list.  More specifically “The Top 10 Christmas Season Movies.”  Rather than fill the list with “obvious” choices of Christmas-y movies, there are a few “alternative” choices on the list – the overarching determining criterion is whether or not this is a movie that I will watch beginning to end, especially during (but not limited to) the Christmas season.

#6 – Batman Returns (1992)
Come on, you’re reading The Cinema King – you had to expect Batman at some point on this list.  I’ve commented elsewhere that Batman stories and Christmas go together like gingerbread cookies and eggnog, and Tim Burton’s second outing as the Bat-director plays that card to the hilt.  Burton’s Gotham remains gothic under a blanket of snow and all the tinsel of a major metropolis decked-out for the holidays.  Michael Keaton is back as Bruce Wayne; Batman’s enemies here are The Penguin and Catwoman, with Danny DeVito and Michelle Pfeiffer turning in iconic performances.  It’s never a bad time to watch a Batman film, and Batman Returns is one of the better Bat-movies – even if it’s more a Tim Burton movie where Batman plays a supporting role to a literal traveling carnival of freaks.  But watching Batman defend the lighting of Gotham’s Christmas tree ought to give anyone a dose of holiday cheer.

#5 – Die Hard (1988)
In many ways, Die Hard is a de facto choice for any tongue-in-cheek list of Christmas movies.  It’s so far from most films classically considered to be Christmas movies; it’s clearly a late-80s action movie starring Bruce Willis as the yippee-ki-yaying cop John McClane.  But there’s an element overlooked by most, what those in the know remember about this movie once December rolls around:  that office party that Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) and his gang raid?  It’s a Christmas Eve soiree, which accounts for how every cop in New York can surround the skyscraper when the heist goes down.  Add in John McClane’s classic “Ho Ho Ho” message he scrawls on the body of a thug wearing a Santa hat – you can bet that wasn’t on Gruber’s Christmas list.  At its core, though, Die Hard is just a great bit of fun, filled with classic action, clever dialogue, and enough Yuletide cheer to make even the grouchiest Grinch a little peppier.

Come back tomorrow for #4-3!

The Other Guys (2010)

Let's have a few more laughs and one more cop film before Depp Week kicks off. Here's the movie that dethroned Inception from its perch at the top of the box office. And while I'm certainly not going to suggest The Other Guys is the stronger film, it's got a lot of laughs, and it's a solid choice for a trip to the theater if you've already seen Inception (sorry, Cats and Dogs 2).

Writer/director Adam McKay continues his series of collaborations with Will Ferrell (a series which began with Anchorman and continued into fellow funny flicks Talladega Nights and Step Brothers, the latter two introducing John C. Reilly to the mix) here, with Ferrell as desk cop Allen Gamble. After the spots for "top cop" are made vacant at the precinct (thanks to clever surprising cameos by Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), Gamble and his partner Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg) find themselves in the running to fill the open celebrity shoes - much to the consternation of their stressed captain (Michael Keaton). Gamble and Hoitz find their big case when a scaffolding permit violation leads them to Gordon Gekko-esque David Ershon (Steve Coogan) and an investment scheme that's skimming money from... well, somebody.

It's been MUFMW [(Mostly) Unintentional Food Metaphor Weekend] here at The Cinema King, and so I'll keep it going by saying that The Other Guys is, like many of Adam McKay's other films, a root beer float: two things at once, both tasty and cohabiting without overpowering each other. We have the root beer of a comedy film here but the ice cream heart of a cop film. And if I can stretch the metaphor a little further, the comedy part (the root beer) runs out first; about halfway through, The Other Guys becomes more of a straightforward police movie (ice cream) without losing sight of the comedy roots that make the first half of the film a gutbuster. That's not to say that the second half is less funny; it's just more cop conscious. Perhaps the best example of this divide is Sam Jackson's presence in the early scenes of the film, providing some of the deepest laughs ("Did someone call 9-1-Holy s**t?") but exiting quickly, leaving the film to be something a little more earnestly police-centric.

Fortunately, all the performers are well-equipped to handle the switch. Though Ferrell is obviously more comfortable with the funny stuff, moments when Gamble grows serious are reminiscent of his stellar turn in Stranger Than Fiction, proving that he's a little better than Michael Cera at switching off the "goofy" setting. Wahlberg, conversely, is more at home as the cop, but he wisely draws on his role as Sgt. Dignam in Scorsese's The Departed (which, if you haven't seen it, is pretty much the greatest movie ever made) to create a compelling police character with a prominent funny bone. Though Coogan is finely restrained (a far cry from Tropic Thunder and Tristram Shandy), the master of comedic timing in the film is Michael Keaton, who's already earned high marks from me for his role as Ken in Toy Story 3; Keaton is fantastic as the exasperated Captain Gene, juggling punchlines about a bisexual DJ son at NYU and a side job as a manager at Bed Bath & Beyond without ever feeling forced. I'm not saying this is an entirely compelling character, but Keaton's delivery certainly prevents the character from feeling like a mere receptacle for outrageous subplot after outlandish character trait. (One final note - is it a rule that Eva Mendes can only appear in cop movies? She's plenty funny as Gamble's "plain" wife, but it's a little jarring that I've only tagged her name in posts about cop movies.)

I want to go back briefly and reexamine the root beer float claim. No, I'm not going to strain the metaphor any more (though you'll probably see the phrase come up several times more on this blog), but I do want to talk a little bit about how movies can be two things at once - and do that well; failure to do so is, after all, one of the most frequently recurring complaints on this blog. I claimed that Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers all do this; Anchorman begins as a slapstick frat pack flick but becomes a commentary on the battle of the sexes, Talladega Nights changes gears between egotistical satire and satire on the cult of celebrity, and Step Brothers lampoons conventional sibling rivalries before metamorphosing (or, as the phrase goes, taking the shape of a unicorn) into a thoughtful meditation on growing up. For some, this can be jarring, but I think McKay's screenplays do a decent job of handling the left-hand turns that I've come to expect - and appreciate - from his work. Kudos, then, Mr. McKay, for doing what I've often said might be impossible. Now if you can get Megan Fox to actually act, then we're in business.

Until then, just keep making funny movies; I'll be in the front row until my sides split.
The Other Guys is rated PG-13 "for crude and sexual content, language, violence and some drug material." I thought it was all pretty tame; there are a few lines between Ferrell and Mendes that push the envelope, and a few sexual jokes crop up, but the most omnipresent objectionable content is the coat of cocaine that envelops Ferrell's red Prius.

Toy Story 3 (2010)

I'm starting to feel a little bit old, particularly because I can remember vividly standing in line for Toy Story 2 with bated breath, dying to see my favorite toys (well, except for my Batman action figures) back in town.

That was eleven years ago. Here I am, all grown up - like Andy - in a transitional state of my life, with a third installment of the Toy Story franchise in theaters. I admit to some trepidation preceding my experience with the theatrical run, in part due to the historically low track record for threequels - which I feared might put a damper on what might otherwise have been a successful series of films from the folks over at Pixar.

Oh, ye of little faith. Toy Story 3 is everything a moviegoer - and a franchise fan - could want: a delightful and fulfilling follow-up, a fresh and fun film, and escapism at its effervescent peak.

The toys are indeed back in town, but not for long; owner Andy's off to college, and the fate of the toys is in flux. Sheriff Woody (voice of Tom Hanks) is the odds-on favorite to accompany Andy as he moves out, leaving Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the others - including cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack) and trusty steed Bullseye, Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris, respectively), piggy bank Hamm (John Ratzenberger), and dinosaur Rex (Wallace Shawn) - bound for the attic. A twist of fate, however, brings the toys first to the curb on garbage day and inevitably to be donated to Sunnyside Daycare. Though Sunnyside - and its feudal lord Lotso Huggin Bear (Ned Beatty) - welcome the toys with open arms, it seems all that glitters is indeed not gold, and perhaps there is no worse fate than being played with.

I've extensively praised the voice cast for both the first and second films, so suffice it to say that no one sleeps through their performance. Hanks is pitch-perfect overconfident as always, and Allen is exuberantly boisterous as ever. Rickles, of course, can do no wrong in my book, and I particularly loved the "Get a haircut" shoutout to his standup comedy routine. What's especially worthy of note in this one is the crop of new additions to the voice cast. Beatty is a knockout as Lotso, capturing the multifaceted nature of the character and even making us believe that he smells like strawberries. A new group of toys - belonging to a little girl named Bonnie, a near clone of Boo from Monsters, Inc. - is introduced here, and they're among the cuter ones of the bunch; lederhosen-garbed Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), triceratops Trixie (Kristen Schaal, late of Flight of the Conchords), and unicorn Buttercup (Jeff Garlin) are all fun and interesting characters worthy of their own spinquel (a word I think I coined, meaning a spin-off/sequel), though I could do without the one-dimensional (pun intended) Dolly (Bonnie Hunt). But my favorite new character here is Michael Keaton as Ken, Barbie's on/off boyfriend who embodies the "It is better to look good than to feel [or even be] good." Keaton, with his signature comedic timing, brings Ken entirely to life here, capturing all the narcissism and simplicity of what is essentially an accessory to a girl's toy (though he objects to all of the above).

Director Lee Unkrich takes the helm from John Lasseter for the third outing, though the transition is seamless. The screenplay is first-rate, opening new ground on a series I had assumed was closed. Where the first and the second films shared plot points, the third one stands on its own fairly well, opening itself to a new generation while keeping the diehard fans (the "Andyites," as Pixar refers to the audience who grew up with Andy) satisfied and smiling. I was particularly pleased with how generic the film felt, in the most positive sense of the word; nothing seemed forced, but rather the daycare plotline felt like the next logical step in the narrative trajectory of the franchise (in a way that the rejected "Buzz gets recalled" plotline did not). The film has plenty of surprises, even for a seasoned filmgoer; I had a similar experience with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, where characters in peril still put me on the edge of my seat even though I know the impending doom is an artificial threat. So kudos to Unkrich's team for making the certain destruction facing our characters actually seem threatening and not formulaic.

Kudos also for a great visual look to the film. With an attention to detail on minute features like Jessie's yarn hair and the mesh tutu worn by Bonnie, the effects are polished (representing Pixar at the top of their technical game), and the stylized look of the film has a sharp glow to it that is comforting on an unconscious level and attractive on a conscious one. The characters all have intricate designs that speak to their personalities, particularly with the new faces; I'm struck by the implicit irony in a lot of these characterizations, as with the dour-faced clown Chuckles and the lumbering Vader-esque Big Baby (who is perennially reliable for those uncomfortable "creeeeeeepy" laughs).

On one level, I feel silly writing about the technical merits and narrative accomplishments of the film; part of me wants to shout, "It's a kids' movie! Stop looking for opportunites to brandish some literary analysis!" But on another level, I'm conscious of the fact that this is a Pixar movie, made by people who absolutely love their job and put as much of their passion into the finished product as possible so that an audience can derive the greatest quantity of enjoyment from it. To overlook the minutiae bubbling beneath the surface, to decline the chance to open the veritable toy chest that is this film would be to do a disservice to the creators of the film. But it's also easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. I can get caught up, for example, in the myriad Star Wars references (there's a particularly pointed reference to the climax of Return of the Jedi, though not as direct as Toy Story 2's shout-out to The Empire Strikes Back) or in the quiet message delivered by Sid's cameo as a garbageman. But by doing that, though, I might forget that this is a movie that is first and foremost meant to be enjoyed.

To borrow a page from Ken's book, then, Toy Story 3 is simply "cool and groovy."
Aww, look - Toy Story 3 is rated G, but without any qualifying statements like "mild peril."