Ladies and gentlemen, as per his idea my fellow blogger, Cap’n Logan, and I are teaming up for a series of blogs on the older bat-movies as a means of gearing up for the July 2008 release of The Dark Knight. We flipped a giant penny to see who would write first, and, in a crushing blow to the cave floor, I won.

Batman (1989)

VINCE’S TAKE:

Personally this is where it’s at for me in the five big screen appearances of good ol’ Batsie. I won’t deny the many flaws with this piece, but let’s take a look at what made this movie so much fun. The one thing that this film has that the others lack is a mysteriousness to the character Batman. None of the others have it for good reasons, but that’s what makes this one so special. Batman 2 – 3 can’t afford to have mystery because Batman was already established in the film continuity, and Batman Begins couldn’t possibly. The title of it explains that. I like the fact that ‘89 Batman isn’t his origin story. It lets me believe that the Batman is almost a force of nature: a dark avenger protecting the city as opposed to a rich playboy with a mad on for criminals. Michael Keaton’s performance was solid, and even though he didn’t vary much in his portrayal of either Bruce Wayne or Batman, they felt like two distinctly different people. We don’t see an in depth look at how he manages his double life because it’s so much more fun for him to be a mythic figure. Sure, he has to balance the love-interest, Vicki Vale’s, involvement, but other than that we’re not given much more.

Let’s face it guys, this movie was less about Batman, which I submit is a good thing, and more about the rise and fall of the Joker. The best thing about Jack Nicholson’s Joker is he actually seems to enjoy killing people. The Joker invites you into his world and gives you a tour of his wildly unstable house of cards. I still get chills from the scene in which the Joker discovers his deformity, smashes the mirror and exits while emitting the first spine tingling laugh of the feature. The Joker laugh appears in several different ways throughout, ranging from a deep belly Haw when he gets his way, to a breathless hiss when he makes a kill that he finds particularly amusing. With the Joker’s flamboyance contrasting the brooding hanging city of Gotham, this movie is among my favorite comic book adaptations.

CAP’N LOGAN’S TAKE:

I called this my favorite film of all time for a very long time. I’ve probably seen it over a hundred times spanning almost 20 years. It’s the first superhero film I remember and the one that really got me hooked into the world of comic books. Without Tim Burton’s Batman, I am absolutely positive I would have become a much different person. This film has both a visual style and a writing style that were unprecedented and have never been duplicated. I’ve always seen it as a work of art. It looks like an ’80s Batman comic– and yeah, for its day, it was dark. Vince is right about the brilliant ying/yang with the Joker and Batman on screen. Plus, there’s no beating that car! And great care is taken with every single line. Oh there are one-liners, but they’re very clever, unlike a lot of later comic book adaptations. I think other films have taken their writing cues from Batman but failed miserably in execution, even including later Batman films. Batman himself makes no silly jokes while fighting The Joker, and we expect these lines from Joker, but they’re all so witty we don’t mind. “Ever dance with the devil in the pale moon light?”, “There’s a bat in my belfry,” and “Where does he get those wonderful toys?” are among the most memorable and often quoted lines in cinema. No one is making fun of the film when they quote the Joker. And the fact that it’s widely considered one of Jack’s best performances is really, really saying something. Batman proved you can make a comic book into a movie and make people take you seriously.

Now, at the risk of tainting a masterpiece, let me point out a couple of the most glaring mistakes in case you’ve never noticed them. First, Vince says it’s better that it’s more about Joker than Batman because it keeps Batman more mysterious, more like a “force of nature.” Apparently he’s a force of nature that gets stuck in traffic. Alfred calls Bruce, saying “Miss Vale will be ten minutes late in meeting you at the museum.” Bruce says he’s not meeting her today. Obviously, something is wrong. He must suspect that Joker set this up. But Vicki sits there, waits for him for a good long time, Joker shows up, he terrorizes her, and Batman shows up at just the right moment. How long did it take him to get there?? He’s known where Vicki since the moment she said she would be late, i.e. she wasn’t even at the museum when he got this information! The other big one is the bell tower. The Batwing crashes into the church, Joker takes Vicki into the church, and calls his helicopter to pick him in five minutes… he then looks at how tall it is and says, “better make it ten.” It doesn’t look like he’s ever been here before or knew he was going to be. And he couldn’t have possibly planned where Batman was going to crash. But there’s a bunch of his henchmen waiting for them in the bell tower! How did they know to be there?

But the film is so entertaining that it’s hard to notice, even though there are a lot of other examples. It took me years to catch these. A lot of what Batman does doesn’t really make a lot of sense but we know so little about him that we don’t really question it on a first viewing– we can almost suspend our disbelief to buy it in this universe. I may not consider it the absolute best of the Batman films anymore, but it certainly is the most rewatchable, even over Begins.

Tags: Batman, batmobile, Dark Knight, DC, Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Movie, superheroes, Tim Burton

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Batman, Capt Logan, Movies, Vincent, comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.