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.

Spoiler Alert

I think this episode was worth the wait– it gave us possibly the most important reveal of the season so far: an exact date in a flash-forward!!! The flash-forwards have driven me crazy all season because the writers have been careful not to let us know when they happen or in what order. As I’ve speculated previously, the first one (with Jack at the end of last season) is probably one of the last to actually happen chronologically and I figured Sayid’s, where it’s revealed that he is an assassin working for Ben, was probably one of the first. Ben’s flash-forwards confirm this as we’re finally told he meets Sayid in October of 2005. If you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll know that the events happening on the island in the present are December 2004 or the first week of January in 2005 (it was almost Christmas according to a calendar on the boat in “The Constant” four episodes ago). Which means Ben finds Sayid in Iraq about ten months after the current events.

I was thrown way off base by Kate’s flash-forward earlier in the season, which depicted what looked like a two-year old Aaron who she was raising as her own. There’s no way to know yet if those events happen before or after this week’s flash-forward but I always assumed it couldn’t be too long after the Oceanic Six got off the island because she was going to trial. But considering the legal system and how long things can get strung out, maybe ten months or more isn’t too far fetched. And maybe I was wrong about Aaron– maybe he was only supposed to be about one year old and I was off on the age.

This is important because I was right the first time. At the beginning of the season, I predicted that this season would depict the events leading up to the Oceanic Six getting off the island and that by the end of the season, the present would catch up with the future. But after the confusion with Aaron, I decided I was wrong and expected it to take the rest of the series for that to happen. If Sayid had time to find Nadia, marry her, and then have to bury her all within ten months, we have to assume that the Six will be getting off the island very, very soon. There’s only five episodes left in the season and taking a look at an episode guide, I discovered that the last three of the season are called “There’s No Place Like Home” Parts 1, 2, and 3. Will those episodes get the Six off and then fill in all the blanks about the flash-forwards? Or will they get the Six off and take their time off-island, leading up to the flash-forwards? And then next season, how much time will the show focus off-island in the present? Finally, is that title a double-meaning? I expect Jack and Hurley will try to convince the others that they need to get back to the island after all of their talk in the flash-forwards about how they “weren’t supposed to leave.” I wonder if the show will take its time in doing this or if that ultimately is how that three-parter will go, getting the Six off and then some of them back on the island all this season.

Personally, I think a whole season about characters simultaneously on and off island would be a really fun change. It might be interesting to see that for a while to take the place of flashbacks and flash-forwards– everything in the present but in a lot of different places. Or maybe that’s a little too Heroes…

I would assume that Ben’s threat to kill Whitmore’s daughter Penny is supposed to tell us that she’s the one that was next on Ben’s list at the end of “The Economist.” I didn’t call this– I really expected it to be one of the Six. Still, I’m glad it’s someone we know and have had some reason to care about. I’m still wondering what happens to Desmond– he’s not one of the Six but he’s on the boat. Does he killed before the others get off the island? I thought perhaps he does get off and he just isn’t considered one of the Oceanic Six because he wasn’t on the plane, but that theory is killed by the fact that Aaron is one of the Six but he wasn’t technically an Oceanic passenger. And yes, I realize Ben gets off the island, but it’s obviously not publicized.

And I’m going to have a heart attack if we don’t figure out who was in the casket Jack went to see at the end of last season pretty soon. I would have expected more clues by this episode.

Anyone else think Ben was lying about getting off the island with Desmond’s boat? It’s pretty well established that if you try to get off with a boat you’ll just go in circles (i.e. Michael’s raft in first season). I think Ben has had a way off this entire time– maybe another submarine no one knows about or something (just what exactly is in his secret room?) But as quick as he was to let himself get captured by Jack at the end of last season, and to be held captive by Locke lately, it’s obvious he has a lot up his sleeve and I can’t imagine that sub was his only means of escape.

Ben can control the smoke monster. Or at least summon it. I’m glad to know that because it means he hasn’t been blowing smoke (no pun intended) every time he’s claimed he has all the answers Locke has been searching for. He really does have some understanding of all these mysteries, though I think even he isn’t completely informed. Now I want to go back and see if there’s any clues in previous episodes that Ben may have been responsible whenever the smoke monster attacked people.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan