Batman: The films, the tv-shows, the animation. - Page 3

I'd also like to remind Keaton supporters that for most of BATMAN RETURNS, Bruce just sits around the batcave staring at a computer monitor with his weak chin in his hands. What a fascinating layered performance!

I give Kilmer credit for being one of the few Bruces who seem to enjoy being Batman.

Yeah, I don't like Batman Returns either. Whatever restraint Burton showed in Batman '89 was gone by Batman Returns, and he went completely up his ass with his fetishes. The movie suffers from it, for sure.

As evidenced by that goofy smiling moment he has with Chase on the roof.

I think Bale's Batman enjoys being Batman in a sick sort of way.

I think it's evident that Batman is the perfect, self-deceptive Nolan character that wasn't created by Christopher Nolan.

Leonard in Memento uses the "quest" for a "mystery killer" to avoid admitting that he's lost. Cobb uses his spinning top to avoid admitting that he's possibly lost touch with reality. Wayne uses (used) a "future" with Rachel to avoid admitting that he's possibly a violent, narcissistic psychopath. His deluded, can't see the forest from the trees belief that Rachel would actually want to be with him after all she'd learned is a perfect example of this, making Alfred's burning of the letter a pretty shady bit of business, regardless of the man's conscious motivations (part of the reason Caine is waaaaaay better than Gough).

Anyone ever read the Sam Hamm screenplay for the '89 film? It's much better than the film they ended up with. The scene with Bruce, Vikki and the Joker in her apartment led to a whole action set piece with Batman on a horse and Dick Grayson's parents being accidentally killed by the Joker. I also liked the ending bit where Batman is the one who starts laughing and the Joker is screaming, "That's not funny!" Something they eventually used in 'Mask of the Phantasm' if I remember correctly.

Of course, it's been awhile.

Agree completely. While TDK slips back into classic 'villains are more interesting than Batman' mode, people kind of forget that the main thing many people took away from their initial watch of Begins was just how interesting Bruce Wayne was than both the villains AND Batman. Begins has all sorts of issues (and fuck it so does TDK for that matter), but Bales portrayal of Bruce Wayne simply is not one of them.

Bruce in a ski mask on a horse, I'm pretty sure...

To me Batman and Batman Returns made better Tim Burton films than Batman films. I think it was Paul McCartney who said that while the plots don't make a lot of sense they have a great dreamlike quality to them that make them an exceptional cinematic experience, especially in the case of BR. I like the idea that Burton turned a Summer blockbuster film into a German expressionist. I really love the aesthetics to them as well.

I thought that was the part where Alfred shows up in a Rolls Royce and Bruce changes into his Batman gear in the back seat. But like I said, it's been more than a few years since I read it.

I remember Hamm's screenplay took a lot of inspiration from The Dark Knight Returns. Namely, there's a scene when Batman explains that the moon symbol on his chest is a target for criminals because he can't armor his head, and the aforementioned horseback riding scene.

But then there's the other half between him and Selina Kyle that gives more depth into his relationships with women than ANY of the films.

And Keaton is the only Bruce Wayne to get laid so there...

EDIT: There's some interesting videos of comic book writers, the filmmakers/actors and even Paul Dini talking about the different live-action actors and their interpretations of Bruce Wayne and Batman.

Michael Keaton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pN6bsTCzXw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IySXJcU7tho

Val Kilmer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvmi5Th_tV8

George Clooney
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDBEalHStgk

Batman Returns is one of my favorite super-hero films. One of the things that strikes me in the film is Batman's portrayal as a "professional". He's resourceful, intelligent, and always in control of the situation. The only time Batman shows any sort of vulnerability is when he puts his life in Catwoman's hands in the climax.

I don't have a problem at all with Burton's creative control of the film, because the best super-hero films are those that are heavily influenced by their creators. Compare Hellboy 2 and Batman Returns to the first Hellboy or X-Men. It's no contest.

Found this costume comparison pic and thought I'd share:

http://tasarim.alternaturk.org/dunden-bugune-batman/

The AV Club is going to start looking back at Batman: The Animated Series. Bring it on!

http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/tvshow/...ed-series,149/

Having just watched Batman Returns again for the first time in 15 years, I was amazed it was just as awful as Forever and Batman & Robin - minus the neon eye rape and bat-nipples....

Danny Elfman's score, with Micheal Keaton's preformance are what keeps it from totally veering into the 60's Batman territory; while Elliot Goldenthal's score goes full camp - excepting the main theme....

A wonderful realisation from BATMAN FOREVER - Bruce is happy to risk a rain of acid pouring down onto thousands of innocent Gothamite peons, but as soon as Two-Face threatens to blow up a coupla hundred wealthy types - "holy shit I'd better reveal my secret identity RIGHT NOW!"

Were you high when you realized this? I only ask because I can only imagine that your mind must have been opened up to another plane of reality where no man has gone before.

Quick thoughts on the Batmans:
Keaton:
Okay not expecting him to play Batman any way. I mean the guy is short and doesn't come off physically intimidating. That said, his performance is wonderful. He doesn't see the very stiff suit as a disadvantage, but turned it into a stoic haunting character that acted through his eyes. He does brooding well, but his Bruce Wayne doesn't seem to be trying too hard too hard to pull off the playboy status. His Batman voice though was amazing, and there was a difference.

Kilmer:
I actually thought that script issues aside, he had all the right qualities to be Batman and Bruce Wayne. His Batman seemed to be okay, and he does start to show some playboyish qualities. There was something off though, like he felt trapped in the role.

Clooney
He played himself. That said, it allows him to naturally play Bruce Wayne. That said, his Batman didn't even try to make an attempt to try to be intimidating. It took him sometime to mature as an actor, but a bad performance is bad.

Bale
He delves into the role and inhabits it. The thing is, he/the character knows the differentiation is essential for the character to avoid even remote thoughts of thinking Bruce and Batman are the same. So he takes everything to the extreme. His Bruce is fantastic in a playboyish mentality. His Batman though is interesting. I understand the reason his voice needs to sound like a monster, but it gets a little hard to understand. It really feels like he is on the verge of losing control as Batman (maybe done on purpose). That said, I hope they play on it that in the 3rd film and maybe he realizes his Batman needs to be even a more responsible symbol of hope and not a 1 man wrecking machine.

Maybe not excited, but his lisped pronunciation of "circus" might indicate that...


But in all seriousness, the Real Bruce Wayne isn't Batman. The Real Bruce Wayne is the one who sits on his sofa in the penthouse, staring down at his mask, revealing to Alfred his own pain and vulnerabilities. He's still the boy in the alley that witnessed his parents murder. He'll never shake that off.

Batman is the pent up rage that exists in him. A rage that he tries to control to do good.

No, I agree. Returns has two things going for it: its deep-polished look and Michelle Pfeiffer. But it's overindulgent, incoherent and mean-spirited otherwise.

Returns is a villain movie. Plain and simple. A freak show. I can enjoy it on those levels. But as a Batman movie it was pants.

Of course it's mean-spirited. The Penguin is a freak who was literally thrown away by his parents and forced to live his entire life in a sewer when he (as intimated in Batman's research) began abducting and murdering children who visited the circus. As has been said ad nauseum, Batman's villains are reflections of himself, in Batman Returns the Penguin is the wholesale monster side lashing out over an injustice done to him as a child.

What I've come to find interesting about the Penguin running for mayor subplot, and nevermind it being lifted from the 60's TV show, is that in BR, it farcically takes advantage of the inherent Batman/Penguin parallel by showing a monster on the cusp of being legitimized. There's only room for one legit monster in Gotham City, and so long as he isn't *really* a monster, then it's "okay".

I'm not going to go into it right now, but Catwoman fits in as a somewhat more sympathetic mirror to Wayne's pathology.

The film is well made, with far more engaging performances and story elements than anything, and I mean fucking anything in Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. So what if Tim Burton went all Burtony on it? I'd rather see a film directed by an engaged Tim Burton than one by a bored and completely reigned in Tim Burton.

Lastly, Batman Returns is not incoherent. Batman Forever and Batman & Robin are the two films in the franchise that are in search of a story they never find. I mean what the hell are those movies about? Nothing.

Backstory which, if I'm not mistaken, was concocted for the film. It's a drastic decision to present the Penguin as a bona-fide monster, soley so that we should feel sorry for him. That's the mean-spirited part-- not that those issues exist within the film, but that Burton presents them as a justification for spectacle and grotesquery without exploring the implications in any meaningful way. It's mean-spirited in the same way that, in Edward Scissorhands, the fact that the Vincent Price character died is inevitable but Burton keeps trying to manipulate our sympathies by adding flashbacks until we actually see him die. In slow motion.

BATMAN RETURNS is one of those films that I actually think would be lessened if it made logical sense. People take things way too literally these days.

In fact, more and more, it's looking to me like one of the best movies of the 90s.

What definition of meaningful are you working off of? Yes, the backstory was concocted for the film, so what? It's much better than what came before, allowing Burton to almost effortlessly imbue him with some psychological depth. Shit, in that sense he's better tailored to Batman than the Joker of the previous entry. He wears a union suit and a bib! He's a big, grotesque, violent infant.

The depth of the story is not so much in the script, but in Burton's carefully crafted visuals. Look at Catwoman, look at that suit, it doesn't serve any utilitarian function, but it tells a hell of a story about a woman who is completely broken into pieces by abuse and self-loathing. Even the design of her apartment is another link in the broken child chain of the film.
Embracing this insane other identity is the only she comes to believe that she can hold herself together.

Schumacher's Batman is all about toys, hard bodies, and dull as dishwater camp. Whatever excesses Burton exhibits in Batman Returns cannot, in any way, be considered as grotesquely uninspired and dismissive of its audience as what Schumacher handed in.

Exactly. I may disagree with you on Nolan's films and whatever else, but this is perfect.

I would say "label him with a convenient shorthand for psychological complexity."

I've opined before that Nicholson's Joker was much closer to the Penguin of the comics.

The two things I praised were the look of the film and Pfeiffer's performance. But again, the 'real' Catwoman is nobody's victim.

I mean, imagine if - as would happen in a normal movie - Batman cleared his name of the murder of the Ice Princess. It would be so much less unnerving and Kafkaesque. An anticlimax, even.

Which is another one of those nonsensical aspects of the film that McCartney just mentioned. Did he live his entire life in the sewers under Gotham? Was he raised by penguins in the arctic habitat of a zoo where the pool is supposedly contaminated by toxic by-product from one of Shrek's factories although it doesn't seem to negatively effect the penguins or anyone who falls into it, or did he grow up as a sideshow freak in a traveling circus that later became the Red Triangle Gang. Or all of the above.


I don't know. That's not a negative. I've gone back and forth on by opinion of Returns over the years. At this point I really enjoy and admire its darkly comical brand of lunacy.

I think you're far too enamored of the veneer slathered over that shitsickle known as Batman Returns....

So is The Killing Joke. It's still great, though.

I don't know about 'great'. Usually great films have a main character you can sympathize with...

Like "A Clockwork Orange"?

I said usually. I'm not that big of a fan of Clockwork though.

It's been about six or seven years since I last watched it, so my opinion is certainly not based on any onanistic admiration. My primary issue with the film is that Keaton is such a great actor that seeing him leashed for a chunk of the it (despite being thematically present) is really disappointing.

Other than that, I think the film should be lauded for daring to be such a weird fucking summer tentpole on the studio's dime. It's anything but harmless, banal summer entertainment, as evidenced by the special interest groups shitting a brick.

Okay, well then that leaves us with the idea that a great film should have a character the audience sympathizes with. This is incorrect. Besides, Catwoman is that character. Like Harvey Dent in TDK, she's the emotional center of the film, damaged by the forces around her, but never truly evil. Whether she works for you or not is a different thing than saying that there is no sympathetic character in the film.

Points taken - however, you should watch it again... Keaton is what holds the film together... Which was somewhat held by Kilmer, then totally lost by Clooney in
the following film...

The buffoonery that comes into play with Forever and Batman & Robin came out of this film....

I don't need to watch it again, my memory of the film is fine from watching it dozens of times over the years on VHS. The only reason I don't own it on DVD is because it fell under the category of one of those films I was so entirely familiar with that I felt like it was hardwired into my brain. No rush to pick it up.

Also, I don't really understand the use of the word buffonery in the context of these films and the universe they inhabit. The Joker fucking killed a dude with a joybuzzer and danced around to Prince music. There is nothing wrong with embracing the inherent silliness of Batman and related characters unless you do it in the most cynical and prosaic way possible, i.e., Schumacher.

I think the point was that the Burton films and the Schumacher films have more in common than most of us care to admit.

I really can take or leave Burton's Batman films. The 1989 Batman can still be entertaining but honestly Returns just leaves me cold. Honestly, the best Batman film released in 90's theaters: Mask of The Phantasm
Yeah, Kevin Conroy is still my boy.

Hammerhead, Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns do not even resemble the cinematic atrocities that are Batman Forever and Batman And Robin! Burton was a true visionary, before he got hit by, Johnny's...Depp charge. Tim Burton's Batman Films are still his best work. I would have loved to see, Tim Burton and Michael Keaton return for an additional Batman.

Point of Returns was that it would only take one of those Ledger Joker pushes to turn Batman into either Catwoman or The Penguin. In most ways, he already is them. Batman Returns is really about Batman vs himself, and does it better than Iron Man 2, which was ballsy enough to take the same route.

It's a villain movie, and yet the villains are actually ABOUT the hero. Exactly why I adore that film.

No, it leaves us with the idea that a great film should have a PROTAGONIST the audience sympathizes with. A great film and what encompasses a great film is entirely subjective. While Selina Kyle starts off as someone you could possibly sympathize with, she goes off the deep end maybe 15 to 20 minutes in. She's no longer that person. Yeah yeah, she has a couple of moments with Wayne. Whatever. She's not really much of a protagonist in the film though, because really... what's her goal? And the one character who is supposed to be the protagonist is barely there (Bruce Wayne).

That's cool and all. But it doesn't really reflect well on Bats now, does it? lol

None of the best Batman stories do. It's kinda what makes the character great.

You're still wrong. Patrick Bateman is the protagonist of American Psycho, and though it is not a great film, that has nothing to do with the protagonist (defined as the character with a goal that moves the story forward) being an unsympathetic, homicidal asshole.

And of course Selina Kyle is still that person, she's simply that person come apart. One of her last lines in the film is all about that. The Penguin is still the baby that got dumped by his parents, Batman is still the kid that saw his parents get blown away in front of him.

Not really the best example you could have used then. Patrick Bateman might be a homicidal asshole, but we're also with him in every frame. We get to know him. We get to worry about him falling apart. He also has many realizations on what he's becoming. The film really presents him as "just is". We even feel relief when the ending kicks in revealing maybe all the violence we've seen was just in his head and didn't actually happen. It also helps that the film is almost "not serious" in its approach, almost satirical. Which is one of the reasons why I like to watch Batman Returns, but not a reason why I find Batman Returns great.

Valid. But Selina Kyle isn't that interesting, at least to me. And while yes you could say that we should have predispositioned sympathy for Bats for the past we already know... Batman comes across as a complete ass in the film. Hell, take the scene where he saves Selena at the beginning of the movie. He stares at her while she makes awkward thanks to him, almost like "Yeah, I saved you, bitch. But really... Fuck you."

Selena at this point represents the helpless citizens of Gotham. What's Batman's crusade about again? Oh, I guess throwing dynamite on a big guy and smiling as he blows to pieces.

You have a very odd way of reading scenes. He saves her, invites her to take a little aggression out on her unconscious attacker, and then trails off when she awkwardly attempts to hold a conversation with him because one, he's got shit to do, and two, since when was Batman ever one for small talk? That scene is a total Batman moment. And yeah, he smiles after blowing up a dude, so what? From 1939-1941 Batman was anything but a fucking humanitarian, that's kind of the version that Burton is working with.

Also, no one in their right mind actually cared for Patrick Bateman, the film does not invite that, it asks you to observe him.

Edit: What's also great about that first meeting is that it's her first exposure to Batman, to the appeal of the mask and the violence and that, it's the first real setup for her becoming Catwoman. Burton caps it of wonderfully with her sort of cutely tazing the still unconscious Penguin minion, she shows her claws a bit.

You might be reading a little too much into him looking down at the thug and back to Selina.If Batman has shit to do he wouldn't waste his time staring at her for a minute.

Not the version of Batman I prefer, even if I laugh at the moment. It's not the Batman I would come to sympathize with. To each their own.

I'm not saying we come to like Patrick Bateman. But there's about as much of an emotional investment in him as there is watching a gangster movie. Ray Liotta was a piece of shit in Goodfellas, doesn't mean we didn't worry about his character (helicopter scene).