J.D. Hansel

Batman

Batman Returns Review

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MINOR SPOILERS

A few years ago, I was browsing through channels to find something to watch while doing laundry when I put on a marathon of Batman movies on some cable channel, just so I could educate myself about the hero.  It included Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman Begins, and possibly one or two more, but this was before I cared about watching movies properly, so I didn’t make sure I’d seen each one of them all the way through.  I caught a significant portion of Batman Begins and most if not all of Batman Forever, but since I was occupied with some chores at the time, I wasn’t really paying much attention.  Batman Returns stuck out to me though.  I think I came in somewhere in the middle and checked out somewhere near the end, but I really liked the idea of a superhero and a villain falling in love out of costume and not knowing what to do once they figured out each other’s secret identity (all in a public place where they can’t fight, no less).  While this dramatic device may be the film’s greatest contribution to cinema, and it’s probably the most brilliant aspect of the film (if not of the franchise), I think there’s a lot more where that came from throughout the film.

This movie is probably one of the greatest sequels of all time because it doesn’t feel the need to repeat everything from the first film, nor does it just try to take everything to a much bigger scale like many sequels do – it just plays to the strengths and dynamics of a different set of characters.  True, the idea of the villain tricking “the people” into thinking the hero has turned on them is now a somewhat common sequel trope, but like most of the tropes in the movie, it’s all handled very well.  It helps that Danny DeVito is a practically perfect Penguin, and the rest of the cast is spot-on as well, making for a Gotham City that’s very much . . . itself.  I think that’s what I like about this movie – it loves being what it is, so it goes to the extreme.  Tim Burton also takes his style to an extreme here, showing his ability to capture the eerie quality of simple things, bring the maximum amount of “creepy” out of any scary things, find the beauty in fakeness, carefully integrate models with full-size sets, and light Batman perfectly.  What’s particularly impressive is how a movie filled with so much gray manages to retain warmth, theatricality, and a striking amount of vivid color, making for one of the best aesthetics any film has ever had and possibly surpassing its predecessor in its visual style.

While its ending is a little underwhelming for me and Burton’s pacing is typically slow, most of my problems with the film are mere nitpicks – in the end, this is what a Batman movie is supposed to feel like.  One thing that I think the film could use a little bit more of, however, is camp.  The movie certainly engages in over-the-top theatricality and a little silliness, but I think the Batman I best understand is Adam West’s.  Part of why the news of his passing has been harder for me to take than that of most other recent celebrity deaths is that I know we’ll never have another actor who can play a superhero in a way that makes you take him seriously when he needs to be taken seriously while also keeping him incredibly light, fun, silly, and jaunty.  Maybe we’ll never get another movie that captures the theatricality of Gotham the way the West, Burton, and Schumacher productions did either, but they’ve all been really inspirational to me.  I’ve always considered Spider-Man/Peter Parker to be the hero with whom I best relate, but it’s Batman productions like this one that fill me with excitement and enthusiasm for becoming a filmmaker, and for that I’m very thankful.

The Dark Knight Review

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I hate giving this film a positive review.  I really do hate to do it.  This film is just so gray and so obsessed with realism, whereas I like my Batman with color and camp.  This film more or less sums up everything I don’t like about DC’s current films – it’s all the top ways to ruin a superhero movie for J. D. Hansel all rolled into one package.  Every time I think the movie is finally starting to move towards the end, it takes another turn and goes off towards a different climax than I expected, drawing out the film as much as possible.  I know we’re all supposed to love this movie, or at the very least we’re supposed to love this version of The Joker, but even him I found irritating – he just never stopped talking with that annoying voice and dialect.  To put it simply, the version of Batman presented here is relentless in its efforts to make me take a grown man in a bat costume fighting a silly clown entirely seriously, and I just have to ask, why so serious?

Now, all of these complaints are issues I pretty much knew I would have with the film before I saw it, so my expectations were low to begin with, but there’s one thing that’s made me feel the need to give it credit: the screenplay.  Not everything about the writing tickles my fancy – I’ve already mentioned how lengthy and convoluted it seems – but this is to be expected since gritty action just isn’t my genre.  What I do know is that a good movie uses its first few minutes to build up “hype” for the rest of the film, and this film does just that, with an opening that is, again, not my cup of tea in terms of style, but still fun, captivating, and well-executed.  More importantly, I had no idea just how many quotes that are commonly used in pop culture – even used by me – come from this movie.  Watching The Dark Knight was, in this sense, like reading Shakespeare or The Bible because I kept learning more and more about where common phrases I take for granted (e.g. “Some people just want to watch the world burn”) originate.  For this reason, I’ll give it credit for bringing the superhero genre to a new level of classy, intelligent writing.

The LEGO Batman Movie Review

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SPOILER WARNING

This film’s strengths and weaknesses both pertain to the issue of “heart” in film.

If not for the fact that this is a spin-off of The LEGO Movie, the writers would have been free to simply fill the entire film with fun Batman jokes and absurd mix-ups and lunacy that only make sense in an animated comedy.  The LEGO Movie, however, has a lot of heart to it that tied the film together nicely and offered a solid foundation for its comedy.  I argue that LEGO Movie is probably one of the better examples of heart done well because, by that point in the movie, it feels needed and welcomed, as opposed to being forced down our throats at the very beginning like in other family films.  I often think back on an argument between Siskel and Ebert (which I explained in my Scrooged review) in which Gene Siskel said Back to the Future II should have stopped to take the time to add more heart.  I think this is a fairly stupid position to hold seeing as how a movie should really bring in heart at times when it is necessitated by (and it necessitates) the story, but unfortunately, The LEGO Batman Movie makes its heart-warming scenes feel almost out of place, even though they inform much of the story and supply the main character motivation.  Somewhere in the crazy, convoluted mess that was the writing process for this film – consisting of a grand total of five people getting screenwriting credits – the story kept getting reworked until the final result felt like certain scenes were in the script simply to satisfy a “kids movie checklist” of some sort, and most of the bullets on the list pertained to grabbing the heartstrings.  Since I watched this film in a theater filled with children, it was very easy to tell that these scenes simply did not succeed at grabbing the audience.

The rest of the movie, however, is filled with the best kind of heart: passion.  LEGO Batman is one of those films with the rare quality of feeling like a great fan project was given a Hollywood budget and free range.  The film may be loaded with fan-service and a little too dependent on the laughability of previous incarnations of Batman, but it just loves its world and its characters so much that the passion is infectious.  The beauty of the thing, of course, comes from the fact that this is a LEGO-based film, so it can do things with Batman that couldn’t work with the real Batman, and that couldn’t work with a parody, but work perfectly in the space in between.  After all, who doesn’t want to see the Dynamic Duo fight off the gremlins, the Joker recruit Godzilla, or freaking Voldemort casting spells in the Bat Cave?  In a Batman movie that audiences took somewhat seriously, this would enrage people, and in a YouTube parody, it wouldn’t have much power or meaning, but in this movie, it is both official and non-canon at once.  Consequently, the writers were able to put Batman against all of his greatest enemies at once at the start of the movie, making the audience wonder where on earth they could possibly go from there, and then live up to that question by raising the stakes to a level that we never knew could be part of the game.  The movie somehow managed to bring back so much classic Batman material dating back to the 1940s (including an obscure villain played by Vincent Price on the 1960s series) and bring in great new material (Batman vs. King Kong, a touching Batman/Joker bromance, etc.) without feeling overcrowded.

My one regret is that the theater didn’t have more excited, happy Batman fans in it to laugh with me.  Please see it with friends and have a good time.

Batman Begins Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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Most of the time when I review a movie on this website, I’m doing it because I hadn’t seen the film before.  “Upon Further Consideration…” is the series I use once in a blue moon when I feel like sharing my thoughts on a film I haven’t seen in a long while.

Since I talk too much about how I generally disapprove of what Christopher Nolan did with Batman, I thought it would be best for me to finally sit down and watch The Dark Knight all the way through – which I probably should have done before I started complaining about how it’s the film that’s ruined the theatrical beauty of cinema.  However, when I went to the library to pick up a copy of The Dark Knight, I realized that I was uncertain as to whether or not I had seen its predecessor, Batman Begins, also by Nolan.  For this reason, I picked up Batman Begins and watched that instead.  As I watched the film, I continued to be unsure as to whether or not I’d seen it before, because the beginning was very familiar, but I didn’t recognize much of what happened after Bruce went back to Gotham.  Since I knew the ending and seemed to recall various parts scattered throughout, I came to realize that I must have seen it before – or at least most of it – but it’s just a really forgettable film.

First of all, there’s that blasted visual style.  In this movie, it’s not quite as gray as I expected, instead focusing a lot on brown, but it seems the color scheme turns to the Nolan light-bluish-gray for Dark Knight, and finally to blackness for Dark Knight Rises, giving each film in the trio its own color.  It’s a neat way of doing it, but what it’s made me realize is that my conception of the “Nolanization of cinema” is not entirely accurate – while I had always assumed that Nolan’s grayed out Batman update was responsible for the rest of cinema turning gray, I know understand that this does not work out chronologically.  Batman Begins came out in 2005, and Dark Knight came out in 2008, while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released in 2004.  This means that I have been incorrect in accusing Nolan of leading to franchises getting retooled for the worse the way that the Potter franchise was, when in fact it was Azkaban that can be blamed for what Nolan did to Batman, and arguably Pan’s Labyrinth is another of the first main culprits.  For this reason it is no surprise that the movie is forgettable – it was just following a trend by adding grays and browns and killing the greatest hits of the color spectrum.  Some shots in the film, on the other hand, surprised me by looking very good, but these were interestingly the shots that very closely resembled Tim Burton’s first imagining of Gotham, and I must ask: what is the point of making a new visual style that looks its best only when it closely copies the old visual style?

Not only is it visually forgettable, but its characters are forgettable.  I really like Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, but that’s only because he’s Morgan Freeman, and there is nothing special about that character on paper – his only value is the actor who plays him.  The villains are threatening and mildly scary, but overall they lack some sort of villainous “it factor.”  I could see myself wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin, or any number of other DC villains, but not The Scarecrow, and certainly not whatever Liam Neeson’s character is supposed to be called.  Don’t even get me started on Katie Holmes’ portrayal of Rachel Dawes, which I mostly blame on the writing, but there is no excuse for how insufferably bland she is.  Dawes is a device, and one that I never cared about.  At all.  Part of the problem with Dawes is that she’s primarily designed to spew out cat-poster morality at are morally confused protagonist, which gets old and feels preachy.

This leads to one of the film’s greatest weaknesses: its moral confusion.  Never before have I seen a film that spends so much time exploring morality without having any coherence in moral philosophy by the end of the film.  One could argue that this just means the film is “complex” or “complicated,” but it doesn’t have an intelligent kind of incoherence at the end of the film, like what is presented just before the closing credits of Do the Right Thing.  Instead, it feels like listening to a sermon written by a child who just took different moral sayings he heard and threw them all together, without any clue what he was talking about.  Example: at the end of the film, Dawes kisses Bruce, but then says she can’t love him because he has become Batman, while she’s in love with the good man he was before he became Batman, but then she say’s she’s proud of what he’s done as Batman.  So . . . does she like his personality and behavior or not?!  What’s worse is that the film celebrates Bruce for having empathy when he saves Neeson from falling off the cliff in the first part of the film, even when the villains try to convince him that empathy is bad, but at the end of the film – after all this talk about how wrong it is for good people to do nothing – he decides he will not save Neeson from dying in the train.  It is now his choice to withhold his empathy and his goodness that is considered a positive trait, which makes the film give out more mixed signals than Dawes does.

I think it goes without saying that I think this movie is, in many respects, a train wreck.  Nolan tried to make the audience take Batman very seriously, but, ya know . . . HE’S A GUY IN A BAT COSTUME – it’s inevitably going to be either campy or awkward, so he should have had more fun with the character.  So, so much of this film just feels off, strange, flat, or inconsistent, and the film adds virtually nothing of value to what Burton had so perfectly established as the cinematic Batman in 1989.  Yet, in a way, it still feels like a Batman movie, and that makes it fun.  Not as fun as it could be, but fun.  It’s interesting and amusing enough to be enjoyable, so I think that, all things considered, it’s okay.  Not great – maybe not even good – but okay.  I’ll give it a good rating because I find it entertaining enough, but does this mean I’ll have to stop giving Nolan such a hard time?  Oh, wait – no it does not – I still have to watch The Dark Knight . . . .

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