The New Batman Adventures - "Cult of the Cat"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Original Air Date: September 18, 1998 

Writers: Paul Dini and Stan Berkowitz

Director: Butch Lukic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday at the Movies - November 5, 2018

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

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

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

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Critters"

“That’s a lot of bull.”

A year after a court order banned him from using experimental steroids on his livestock, Farmer Brown (Peter Breck) returns to Gotham with his daughter Emmylou (Dina Sherman) to unleash their latest breed of monsters. Waves of critters stomp their way through the city, with the Bat-family stumped as to their motives or how to defeat them.

“Critters” has a broad reputation as one of the worst episodes of the Batman animated project, and so I won’t bury the headline here – it’s in my bottom five. I don’t like it; it’s off-putting and uninspiring, weird for the sake of being weird, and its creators have proven themselves capable of better (Steve Gerber has a delightful range of absurdist comics to his name, while Joe R. Lansdale gave us “Perchance to Dream”). While I’ve said in the past that Batman’s greatest strength is that he is genre-bulletproof, this isn’t a story that serves him well, struggling to find a place for his skill set in a tale that feels in part like an unproduced episode of Batman ’66. 

Perhaps more appropriately, “Critters” feels more like an episode of Superman: The Animated Series, with oversized monsters inspired by Jack Kirby and an emphasis on fisticuffs over conventional detective work. At the risk of drawing a line in the sand, Superman always seemed to prioritize action over story, a natural extension when your main character’s big thing is punching stuff. I felt acutely that the show never quite captured the key fact that Superman’s greatest superpower is that he always knows what the right thing is, resorting instead to finding behemoths and baddies for him to devastate with his fists. (It got some things right, of course, Lex Luthor among them, but that’s perhaps a story for another review series.) Batman, on the other hand, always seemed to be about something other than the fighting – there was a purpose, a quest to be fulfilled, a metaphor to be made. “Critters,” on the other hand, is comparatively wordless, pausing instead for visual gags like an oversized bull crashing into a china shop (yes, yes, rimshot). We saw him fight a dinosaur last week, but this is precisely what I meant when I said, “It’s not the sort of wild flight of fancy that the show should have indulged too frequently.”

And as if to emphasize that Batman’s fallen headlong into the wrong episode, he spends a good deal of time flying – yes, flying – in what feels like a vaguely toyetic Bat-hang-glider. (Yes, I’ve checked, and yes Virginia, there was a “Knight Glider” action figure.) To make matters more disorienting, the episode’s third act sees Batman duke it out in Farmer Brown’s underground bunker, which isn’t of itself a locale ill-suited to our Dark Knight, but it’s a bunker that’s dolled up to look like a sunny Midwestern prairie, which is particularly unforgiving toward the two-dimensional redesign of Batman and his Bat-family. They pass for perfect amid a red night sky, but in the stark (artificial) daylight they’re not especially robust.

If there’s one saving grace in the episode, it’s that the writers know exactly how preposterous the premise can be, and they run headlong toward that territory. If you had any doubts about the episode’s sincerity, the moment when a talking goat delivers a ransom message (with the stipulation, “No Baaaaaaa-tman”) to Commissioner Gordon ought to assuage those jangled nerves. But for the moment when we see our storytellers have their fingers crossed behind their backs, it comes entirely too late, long after the episode lost me. And the conclusion of “Critters” makes the fatal error of reminding me of “Tyger, Tyger,” another mad science-gone-wrong episode with a lackluster villain, except this one is empirically dull and never even gives Kevin Conroy a slice of poetry to recite.

Original Air Date: September 18, 1998

Writers: Steve Gerber and Joe R. Lansdale

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: Farmer Brown (Peter Breck) and Emmylou Brown (Dina Sherman)

Next episode: “Cult of the Cat,” in which the show hits 100 and closes the catflap.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Mean Seasons"

“Another season, another reason... for making trouble.”

Meet the Calendar Girl (Sela Ward), who debuts a new festive outfit every time she abducts a top Gotham citizen, leaving behind a torn page from a calendar. It’s Batgirl who pieces together the pattern – that Calendar Girl is Page Monroe, a model whose contracts ran out once she turned thirty. With Calendar Girl collecting the hostages she blames for her downfall, Batman and Batgirl have to guess her next move before the abductions become murders.

“Mean Seasons” is a quick one-and-done, a gender flip of a comics villain (Calendar Man) that ends up being lightly topical in the same vein as “Torch Song” a few weeks ago. Calendar Man began life as a sort of joke character, wearing an oversized calendar and theming his crimes around various holidays; over time, the character has gotten much more sinister, dropping the theatricality and becoming a contemplative Hannibal Lecter type (cf. The Long Halloween and the Arkham videogames). Calendar Girl, on the other hand, is less menacing and more mentally ill, believing herself to be disfigured by her age.

Calendar Girl is particularly relevant today of all days, considering that Jamie Lee Curtis just this weekend posted the biggest movie opening with a female lead over 55 with her Halloween reboot/sequel, an important (and belated) defiance of this episode’s position that the entertainment industries unfairly discriminate on the basis of age. It puts “Mean Seasons” in an odd dialogue, too, with “Baby-Doll” as an episode that covers a pretty obvious point about show business on a cartoon that has no real business exploring that particular topic, and it makes me wonder how Calendar Girl and Baby-Doll might have fared in a team-up (a Harley and Ivy for the red carpet crowd?). Sidebar: why might so many of the also-ran animated Bat-villains have fared better with Baby-Doll than on their own?

I say it’s odd terrain for this episode to tread because of the curious way it bends Batman himself to accommodate the plot. First, the episode establishes Batman as a casual misogynist – he observes passingly, “Pretty girl,” before Batgirl gives him a note-perfect clapback. In doing so, however, she opens the question of just how old Batman is supposed to be: “Don’t you mean woman? She was your age when she made that commercial, Bat Boy.” But if Monroe was forced out of the industry at thirty, she had to be younger in the commercial, which means Batman himself can’t be older than thirty. It’s a silly argument to begin to have – Grant Morrison has handwaved the question by saying Batman is (currently) 79 – but it’s a sign of the episode’s slipping engagement and needless focus that I had time to be distracted by this issue. Recall, however, that Batman is far from misogyny – he is, as we learned in “The Cat and the Claw,” “an equal opportunity crimefighter.”

But “Mean Seasons” does two things really well, one of which is to give Batgirl a pivotal scene as a detective. Where “The Ultimate Thrill” presupposed Batman’s detective skill as a matter of course, we get to see Batgirl do the hard work of trolling through the Bat-computer (speaking of whom, remember the good old days when Batman would spend long hours clicking through evidence?). It’s a neat wink to Barbara Gordon’s legacy as Oracle, DC’s hacker guru for most of my life (itself a fun update on her background as a library scientist), and it gives her something better to do than flirt with Bruce Wayne.

Finally, the other thing “Mean Seasons” has going for it is that it finds a way for a dinosaur to attack Batman and Batgirl (is Robin still on this show?). It’s an action setpiece that would probably be more at home over on Superman: The Animated Series, with the main villain stepping away from the plot in order to let this sequence play out, but there is something undeniably cool about seeing the two Bats take on a (robot) dinosaur and use their wits to defeat it. It’s not the sort of wild flight of fancy that the show should have indulged too frequently, but it’s a great primal treat for those of us who had a wide assortment in our own toyboxes.

Original Air Date: May 4, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Hilary J. Bader

Director: Hiroyuki Aoyama

Villain: Calendar Girl (Sela Ward)

Next episode: “Critters,” in which we see if this really is the worst episode of the DCAU.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Over the Edge"

“Ten minutes on Barbara’s computer told me everything. Like a fool, I allowed you to run wild on your private crusade. A psychotic misfit playing masked hero. Now I’ve paid for it with Barbara’s life.”

Not since the likes of “Perchance to Dream” have I had to toss up a spoiler warning this big, but “Over the Edge” is one of the greatest episodes of The New Batman Adventures and indeed of the entire Batman animated project because of how fearlessly Paul Dini breaks all the rules and yet manages to put all the toys back without feeling like a cop-out. It’s an episode akin to a long chain of dominoes, toppling over in logical succession but with profoundly destructive influence.

This episode starts with a bang as Commissioner Gordon pursues Batman and Robin through the Batcave, firing a hail of bullets after them. He calls for their surrender, revealing that he knows their secret identities. All of Gotham has turned against the Dark Knight, and Batman recounts to Nightwing how it all went wrong, beginning on a night when the Scarecrow broke loose, haunted Gotham – and killed Batgirl.

And yet, it’s all a dream, the ultimate fake-out ending when it’s revealed that the entire episode has been one long nightmare inside Batgirl’s mind as she exorcises Scarecrow’s fear toxin from her body. This is an imaginary story, Alan Moore might say, but aren’t they all? In the hands of any writer less talented, it’d feel like an insult, a waste of an episode, but Dini takes the opportunity to say something new and otherwise impossible about the Bat-mythos and the family relationships that hold it together. Where The New Batman Adventures has struggled to give us a non-dysfunctional Bat-family, leave it to Paul Dini to give us a story of two fathers – Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne – both blaming themselves (and both blaming Batman, too) for Barbara Gordon’s demise. If you’re anything like me, and you care more about Batman than most real people, this episode is a real tearjerker because of how tangible Dini makes the family dynamics feel.

It’s heart-wrenchingly believable to imagine that Barbara’s death would drive her father to investigate, finally, Batman’s secret identity, and that furthermore his rage would lead him to try to destroy his one-time friend. Bruce’s sad defense, that “the only way I could hold on to my sanity was to take matters into my own hands,” is a moment of pure pathos until Gordon replies bitterly, “That makes us even.” It’s a sobering reminder that the real power of the Batman myth is that it’s the story of one man’s efforts to heal himself by healing others, by expelling any internalized grief and manifesting it into something productive; without that impulse to save, we get something like this episode’s Gordon, a sad shell of a man who wants to eradicate his own loss by exploding it out onto others. (There’s a third father in play, of course – Alfred Pennyworth, who sacrifices his freedom to ensure that his charges can escape the police. The episode doesn’t dwell on him, for Dini is careful not to overplay this moment of quiet, selfless heroism, but his inclusion is not accidental.)

And because it’s a Paul Dini episode, the man jams as many villains as he can into the plot – six, by my count, including new redesigns for Riddler, Mad Hatter, and Bane. The talk show appearance of four villains protesting Batman’s unfair vigilantism is classic Dini, head-scratchingly funny and yet entirely plausible that this blend of nutcases would find this avenue of deluded self-justification. “We were helpless, lost souls crying out for understanding,” laments the Mad Hatter as Harley Quinn sobs about the nightmares she endures because of Batman. The idea of a television audience sympathetic to the villains isn’t quite new to Batman – Frank Miller did it in The Dark Knight Returns twelve years earlier – but its execution here is quintessential Dini humor. While the Scarecrow’s appearance in this episode is fairly brief, it’s Bane who emerges as a figure of pure terror, first a warped weapon of Gordon’s fractured psyche before revealing himself as the self-serving mastermind brute from the source material. He works better here than he did in his debut because he’s allowed to serve his own goals, even in spite of working as a gun for hire, a mercenary in the service of Gordon’s pain.

It’s an episode littered with heartbreak and grief, in big moments and small. The beat where a broken Gordon, dangling from the GCPD rooftop, bites back tears and accepts Batman’s hand is a quiet emotional scorcher, but the episode’s most powerful moment comes in the real world, when Barbara tries to admit her secret identity to her father (having already received the tacit permission of her Bat-father). I just want to quote the Commissioner’s response, because it’s damned beautiful, aided by the underrated Bob Hastings in the role that will always be the voice I hear in my head when I read a Gordon story:

Sweetheart, you’re capable of making your own decisions. You don’t need me to approve or even acknowledge them. And in this case, I can’t. All you need to know is I love you. All of you. (kiss) And that is all I have to say on the subject.

The whole episode, we learn, is borne out of Barbara’s deep-rooted fear that her secrets will destroy her families, so this quiet revelation – that Gordon both knows about her alter ego and is protecting them both by not admitting it – is a masterclass in concise writing, resolving the episode’s central conflict for maximum emotional effect. Again, Dini has found a way to take an imaginary story and give its revelations significant weight in the “real” world of the story. Moreover, he manages to craft an episode in which the bad guys, despite being largely imaginary, nevertheless do not win; the fears that crippled Barbara prove both unfounded and insufficient. Both her fathers are always already on her side, wanting what’s best for her despite any jeopardy it might create for them. It’s a love much stronger than whatever romantic relationship The New Batman Adventures has been trying to generate between Bruce and Barbara, and as a result it’s one of the best episodes of what has been an odd and uneven run.

Original Air Date: May 23, 1998

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Yuichiro Yano

Villains: The Scarecrow (Jeff Bennett) and Bane (Henry Silva)

Next episode: “Mean Seasons,” in which Gotham doesn’t love its little calendar girl.

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

First Man (2018)

At the risk of opening myself up to relitigating 2016, it was the year Damien Chazelle demanded I take him seriously with La La Land, a beautiful film which I perhaps overhastily dubbed “best of 2016” (though then-runner-up Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has only risen in my estimations). He had physically rattled me with Whiplash, one of the only movies to leave me visibly shaking, but La La Land was something else entirely, revelatory and emotional, resonant and instant Personal Canon material. With First Man, a movie at once quite different and yet of a piece with his oeuvre, Damien Chazelle three-peats and earns himself a spot on my “worth a look” list.

Ryan Gosling stars as Neil Armstrong, the aforementioned “first man” on the moon in this biopic that begins with his application to NASA and culminates (spoilers?) with his walk on the moon. Claire Foy co-stars as his wife Janet, the emotional center of the film amid her husband’s obdurate refusal to acknowledge that his missions are increasingly dangerous.

As a true story, First Man is quite different from Whiplash and La La Land, and though it continues Chazelle’s exploration of the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness, it puts the audience in the interesting position of knowing that Neil Armstrong does indeed succeed; we didn’t know if Andrew, Mia, or Sebastian would achieve their goals, which added a tension to those stories (and a heartbreak if the costs ever outweighed the results). With First Man, we know where this is going, which lets Chazelle and screenwriter Josh Singer flip the script and examine the emotional toll of this achievement and the grave uncertainty that leads up to it. Here Foy is particularly riveting, playing opposite a veritable cipher in the form of Gosling; where Gosling bottles up every emotion he has, Foy proves unable – or more likely, unwilling – to curb those feelings when they are killing her. Gosling, meanwhile, plays the portrait of restraint, single-minded focus with a twitchy flinch at the prospect of facing his fears. 

Also returning from La La Land is Justin Hurwitz on score duties, and I have to say it does show. There’s something about the way Hurwitz organizes a melody and a musical refrain that recalls the sweeping score of 2016’s top musical. New to Hurwitz’s repertoire is the theremin, underappreciated and right at home in a science-fiction movie (this being, of course, nonfiction); invoking the score from The Day the Earth Stood Still is never a bad idea, and hearing the theremin build up to the moon landing sequence proves highly effective. 

Equally (and perhaps more) successful is the way the film drops out most of the audio during the moon landing. There’s been much ballyhoo about “needing” to see the film in IMAX, and I’ll certainly agree that it’s a standout feature when the aspect ratio opens up and the film goes dead silent – I’ve never seen a theater audience that respectful of silence. Emphasizing that the only things on the moon with Neil are what he brings up with him, the score focuses on a swirling martial beat, John Barry by way of Hans Zimmer (or is it the other way around?), before ceding to the majesty of the lunar surface. It’s a breathtaking sequence, worth the price of admission even in spite of the fact that we know he’s going to stick the landing – Hurwitz and Chazelle give a real powerhouse of a moment.

The film ends on a much quieter note – I won’t spoil it, because the film does go beyond the moon landing just a bit. The silent closing sequence is tremendously powerful, even after the bombastic scope of the moon; it’s a potent scene between two performers who should earn Oscar nominations on those facial expressions alone. Whiplash left me shaken, and La La Land left me sobbing; First Man is somewhere closer to the latter end of the spectrum, but softer, less painful by far. It’s a poetic conclusion to a movie with a surprising emotional core, but then Chazelle has hit me with more than his fair share of sentimental sucker punches. Three in a row, at least, guarantees I’ll be in attendance for whatever he tries next.

First Man is rated PG-13 for “some thematic content involving peril, and brief strong language.” Directed by Damien Chazelle. Written by Josh Singer. Based on the book by James R. Hansen. Starring Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Jason Clarke, Kyle Chandler, and Ciaran Hinds.

The New Batman Adventures - "The Ultimate Thrill"

“I know he lives for the chase, and I was the best he ever had.”

A new thief in Gotham makes her mark after a daring zeppelin robbery and an airborne getaway. Batman recognizes Roxy Rocket (Charity James) as adrenaline junkie stuntwoman Roxanne Sutton. Recognizing that Roxy will need a fence for her ill-gotten gains – but not knowing she’s in cahoots with The Penguin (Paul Williams), Batman and Batgirl take to the streets, while Roxy hits the skies.

Roxy Rocket is a curious addition to the Bat-mythos because of her winding entry into the material. She began life in a Paul Dini/Bruce Timm issue of the tie-in comic The Batman Adventures (a series I can’t recommend enough) before wending her way onto The New Batman Adventures four years later. And though neither Dini nor Timm has a direct credited hand in this episode, “The Ultimate Thrill” has Timm written all over it. The image of Roxy enthusiastically straddling a transparently phallic rocket is a particularly Timm brand of cheesecake, leavened with a dose of Dave Stevens’s postwar pin-up style. Indeed, as Batman episodes go, this one is comparatively oversexed, right down to Roxy’s downright orgasmic reaction to the possibility of sudden death in a game of chicken with Batman.

With the above proviso, then, as the first “new” villain created “for” The New Batman Adventures, Roxy Rocket is a pretty fun addition to the catalog, and it’s a shame the comics haven’t drawn on her more. As something of a cinema buff myself, it’s no surprise that I found Roxy’s showbiz background highly engaging, and I immediately wondered what might happen if she had worked on one of Matt Hagen’s movies before the accident that made him Clayface. Moreover, the idea that she’s motivated by an addiction to adrenaline is something of a novel concept for a Bat-villain, who are generally driven by the fact that they’re plain-and-simple nuts. She’s Harley Quinn without the delusion, Poison Ivy with a sense of humor, and Baby-Doll without the burden of trauma. Best of all, she’s fun, which is sadly not a word I’ve used much in the frequently dour New Batman Adventures. 

This episode also finds a niche for Penguin to fill. Despite appearing in several episodes as an ostensibly aboveboard nightclub owner, he’s always had a whiff of incorrigibility about him. Here, we see in full his continued devotion to a life of crime as a discreet fence for Roxy’s stolen goods. Paul Williams shines as Penguin, maintaining his aristocratic air even as he ogles the jewels – and their thief, dubbing her a “felonious falcon” before asking if she’s “ever been pursued by a bird of prey.” And the interrogation sequence between Penguin and Batman is solid gold, treating the Bat as an unstoppable creature of the night while Penguin braces himself against the limitations of due process. It’s the kind of scene that illustrates why Penguin works better when he’s pretending to be legitimate – so Batman has someone to throw around a room until he gets the information he needs.

This episode feels a lot like a throwback to The Animated Series because of its direct and self-contained nature, but it’s also a key moment when Batman doesn’t rely on any other members of the Bat-family. Aside from a payphone call from Batgirl, Batman’s riding solo, up to and including the moment when he instantly recognizes Roxy as Roxanne Sutton and rattles off her backstory as a matter of course; it’s either lazy writing or quintessential Batman to have all this information right at his fingertips. (No, it’s definitely the latter.) For as much as the show fumbles the relationships within the Bat-family – Nightwing and Robin are needlessly angsty, while Batgirl is uncomfortably flirtatious with her ersatz father figure – it recognizes that Batman is a polished crime-fighting machine who, despite needing a family to keep him human, works most efficiently on his own. (It’s perhaps not a coincidence that, between my two Top Ten lists, only three episodes involved Robin.) Roxy, meanwhile, represents a temptation to stray on the dark side, to join her in a romantically charged game of cat-and-mouse; unfortunately for her, this Bat’s already chasing a Cat.

Original Air Date: September 14, 1998

Writer: Hilary J. Bader

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: Roxy Rocket (Charity James) and The Penguin (Paul Williams)

Next episode: “Over the Edge,” in which a bat falls, and life is but a dream.

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

Venom (2018)

I’ll not bury the lead here: guys, Venom is fine. It’s a movie about Tom Hardy and his relationship with his weird voice, personified by a giant blob monster that wants to make as much of a mess as he can. The movie is clunky and basic, but it knows that it’s not going to change the world. Even though it feels at times overlong, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Put another way, it’s fun enough that I don’t begrudge it the $6 I paid to see it.

Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, an investigative reporter with a chip on his shoulder. Assigned to a puff piece on one-percenter Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), Eddie discovers that Drake’s Life Foundation is preying on vulnerable members of society for shady experimental tests. One such test involves Drake’s acquisition of several symbiotes, gooey space aliens that bond with other lifeforms – and soon one bonds with Eddie, transforming him into the hulking Venom.

The principal thing to get out of the way is that this isn’t a Spider-Man film, and that’s upset a lot of people. But here’s my hot take – I don’t think that Spider-Man would actually fix anything that’s wrong with the film, and anyone who thinks otherwise is actually still sore over the third act of Spider-Man 3 eleven (yes, eleven) years ago. The trouble with putting Spider-Man and Venom in a movie together is that it’s a lot of ground to cover; you’ve got to do Spider-Man’s black costume, Spidey ditching the suit, and Eddie Brock becoming Venom first as a villain before somewhat reforming. But wait, you say, this is why God (or Stan Lee) invented a shared universe, to make this story over the course of a few films! To which I reply, yes, but who has the patience to see that story again, only this time spread out across several years? No, better to try something new, and since superheroes are our modern mythology it’s perfectly fine to reinterpret them every once in a while and try something new.

The first act, as I mentioned above, is somewhat heavyhanded. It’s full of characters who speak their motivation rather than show us, with a villain who’s only evil because he’s evil and rich. Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams, who’s all but admitted she turned up for the paycheck, has very little to do as Brock’s fiancée, a kind of obligatory character who reminds one of the narratively inert love interests from late-90s Batman movies. Indeed, her most interesting scene is quickly brushed aside, in a way that feels very much like the film saying, “No, no, a final setpiece is no place for a lady.” In that vein, the film sweats at each turn in the story, baldly showing the effort needed to pivot from one plotline to the next. Once the film establishes what Drake is up to, for example, it quickly swerves by having one character explain that, actually, never mind, what’s he’s really doing is something more sinister, which requires a bigger setpiece to resolve.

The seams on the film are so readily apparent that it’s a marvel the film works at all. However, what it stitches together is actually quite interesting, governed by the most watchably peculiar performance from Tom Hardy whose dialogue, in a rare departure for Hardy, is rather easy to understand. Hardy makes the peculiar choice to play Eddie Brock like a folksy huckster of a reporter, distracted and fidgety; his Venom voice, on the other hand, is classic Hardy, all snarls and grunts with more digital filter than a Daft Punk greatest hits album. This dichotomy, with Hardy playing both to his strength and at once wildly against type, is riveting, and while most of the movie seems to be phoning it in, Hardy is singlehandedly making the best case for more movies in a Venom Cinematic Universe.

So too is a wildly optimistic mid-credits sequence – optimistic in its swing-for-the-bleachers bid for a sequel co-starring a real surprise. No spoilers, but it’s a moment that led at least one man in my audience to holler incredulously, “Wait, is that [name redacted]?!” But it’s emblematic of the movie writ large – nuts and silly and a little ill-advised, but wholly confident and earnest in a way that I think resonated with $80 million or so worth of moviegoers this weekend. It’s a throwback to a simpler era of comic book movies, which ended without the necessity of a sequel to build the narrative world. Even the Eminem track that plays over the credits, written especially for this movie, feels like a relic of a bygone era. But I won’t deny that the clunky first act reminded me a lot of the equally unwieldy first act of Ant-Man, which ended up being a sleeper hit. I won’t say that Venom is as objectively good as Ant-Man, and I can’t say that I’m in a terrific hurry to see it again, but it’s at least as fun as a pint-sized Ant-Man.

Venom is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for language.” Directed by Ruben Fleischer. Written by Jeff Pinkner, Scott Rosenberg, and Kelly Marcel. Based on the Marvel Comics by Todd McFarlane and David Michelinie. Starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams, Riz Ahmed, Scott Haze, Reid Scott, and Jenny Slate.

The New Batman Adventures - "Torch Song"

“Hey, you’re the expert on burning people, you little tramp. And if you think I’m going to step aside like one of your pretty boys—”

Bruce Wayne is in the front row of a Cassidy concert when the singer (Karla DeVito) is attacked by her jilted pyrotechnician Garfield Lynns (Mark Rolston). Lynns’s obsession runs deep, driving him into pyromania as Gotham’s latest rogue, Firefly. Batman and Batgirl shadow Cassidy, fearing that her old flame will turn up the heat on his pursuit.

For those playing the home game, this is the tenth episode of twenty-four on The New Batman Adventures, but it’s only the first time that the show has introduced a new villain from the comics, instead revisiting familiar faces from Batman: The Animated Series. (Next week, we’ll meet a villain created, mostly, for the show. Stay tuned!) I’ve lost count, however, on the different iterations of Firefly that have existed since his debut in 1952; Wikipedia tells me three, but that seems low, even just considering his variable appearances in video games and television shows. Indeed, I’d hazard an unsubstantiated guess that Firefly has had more costume changes than most other Bat-rogues (aside, perhaps, from Two-Face, who can rock a mean half-tartan when he needs). 

Here, Firefly has a pretty slick look, encased in silver with giant red bug-eyes. With his sleek wings sweeping behind his back and a subtle antenna atop his head, he almost looks like a twisted inversion of Batman – which is always good territory for a villain to inhabit. In fact, can we take a moment to acknowledge how good this episode looks overall? As much as fans tend to dunk on TNBA for its stripped-down animation style, this is one of the better episodes, visually speaking; it’s set almost entirely at night, so the blacks and reds really pop. What’s more, the fire sequences are pretty intense, often stripping away the colors to give everything a sepia tone, giving Batman a real otherworldly appearance (another Bat-plus). Finally, we also get a new Batsuit, a flame-retardant black number that looks so crisply toyetic that I’d swear I had this in my box of action figures. (Merchandise spotlight: It seems, however, that one was made only recently.)

In terms of the narrative, I was more than a little surprised at how topical this episode is. I was struck, recall, at the vaguely Trumpean analogues in “Lock-Up” (the last time, incidentally, the show debuted a villain into its repertoire), but here Firefly presents as the poster villain for the #MeToo era, a hulking he-man who won’t take “no” for an answer, treats women as objects to be ogled and possessed, and will pursue Cassidy even if it means quite literally burning the entire city to the ground. He is weirdly fixated on the way she dresses and alternates manically between wanting to kill her and trying to abduct her. He’s not a foaming caricature, but this episode manages to take a costume that is slightly derpy and turn it into something rather terrifying when we consider the motives and mindset of the man inside the suit.

However, “Torch Song” shoots itself in the foot by – and I know I sound like a broken record here – weaving in what appears to be romantic jealousy leavened in the relationship between Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon. Perhaps this is just a natural outgrowth of living in a post-Killing Joke world, but there’s something less than innocent in the moments Bruce and Barbara share at the concert, where she’s almost put out that he’s with another woman – and where he seems to long to be with her instead. (Never mind his condescending “Good girl!” when Batgirl initially saves Cassidy.) And if you think I’m reading too much into this, consider the moment when Bruce asks Barbara, in an unnecessarily flirtatious line-reading from Kevin Conroy, “What are you doing tonight?” Barbara fobs it off with a rather clever reference to Pinky and the Brain – “Same thing we do every night, Pinky” – but I can’t be the only one in the room who reads their dynamic duet as something shellacked over with amorous intent. It makes me want to vomit.

I’m also unclear why the episode ends with a sadistic epilogue that seems to punish Cassidy, of all people. In a coda that feels largely plagiarized from Stephen King’s Misery (or, at least, the Rob Reiner film version from 1990), we see that Cassidy is unable to carry on with a normal life because her encounters with Firefly have virtually crippled her with pyrophobia. As compelling as the episode’s rejection of toxic masculinity began, it’s a bizarre (if sadly plausible) finale to see the woman bearing the sole emotional pain of the story. One could imagine instead the grim irony of learning that Firefly has been covered in burn scars, or that he’s fixated by a flickering candle just out of reach. Or maybe he teams up with Killer Moth and the two of them just fly into a giant light bulb. Put another way, of all the people on whom the episode could have the last laugh, why choose the victim?

I’m relitigating, however, two of about twenty minutes in an otherwise solid episode. Just when it seemed that the show was satisfied to retread its own content, revisiting ground it had already paved, “Torch Song” is a different kind of return to form – a classical story introducing a new villain with a believable (if broadly unsympathetic) motivation. It’s a good opportunity for the animators to strut their stuff, and – romance aside – it continues the good trend of Batman and Batgirl as mature crime-fighting partners. We could ask for little more from a solid middle-of-the-road episode.

Original Air Date: June 13, 1998

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: Firefly (Mark Rolston)

Next episode: “The Ultimate Thrill,” in which it’s neither a bird nor a plane, but she is a new Bat-villain.

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