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.

A couple months ago, I Am Legend had a nice sentiment in its opening minutes, a giant teaser poster hanging in Time Square for a Batman/Superman World’s Finest movie. Just seeing the legendary S and bat symbols overlapping each other on the screen gave me goosebumps, I gotta admit. But it probably will never happen. Chris Nolan has gone on record to say he isn’t interested in doing a World’s Finest movie, and I’m not sure another director would want to tackle it. The World’s Finest movie, in fact, isn’t on my following list of great comic films that we’ll probably never get to see, because don’t want it to happen, at least not for a long while. The Batman from the Begins continuity is a reboot, something entirely different from the previous film versions, and much closer to the way he’s portrayed in current comic continuity. On the other hand, we’ve never seen a version of Superman that resembles the comic book version. The last Superman film continued (in my opinion, mistakingly) the original Christopher Reeve continuity that began in 1978. The studio would want it to be the current Batman and the current Superman. Brandon Routh’s Superman and Christian Bale’s Batman are in two entirely different veins, and to mix them would be like combining the Bruce Timm animated universe with Superfriends. Okay, it wouldn’t be that bad, but pretty awkward.

Popular well-made fan trailer– this would be the Batman/Superman film I’d want to see.

The following are 5 movies I’m sure will never get made, but represent some of the more complex stories and ambitious project possibilities, were any of these to become pitches a studio would consider.

THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN

Yeah, this will never happen. It was the highest grossing graphic novel of all time, it was the most complex story ever told in the Superman mythos, it introduced a lot of interesting characters that made the Superman universe a lot more fun to be in… and, oh yeah, they already tried to make this movie in the late 90s. Several times, in fact. Tim Burton was supposed to direct it, at one point. Nicholas Cage was slated to play Superman and finally bowed out after several scripts were rejected and a lot of money was spent with nothing ever going into production. Apparently it never happened because Kevin Smith and Tim Burton went to war over script issues. As I mentioned, now that the old movie continuity has been brought back to life and a sequel to Returns already planned (Superman Man of Steel) I’m afraid we may never see a Superman more like the comic version, much less the Death of/Reign of the Supermen film. Sure, the movies use some characters from the comics, but there are a lot of great villains they’ll probably never use. One script for the abandoned “Superman Lives” project I read once included Brainiac, and it looked pretty good. To never do powerhouses like Darkseid or Doomsday, villains that are more of a match than Lex Luthor ever has been in a film, is a shame. The cinematic possibilities for the Death of Superman film can’t be over-estimated; the fight with Doomsday, the mysterious appearance of the four impostors (especially Cyborg) and Superman’s resurrection. The Bruce Timm animated version is pretty good but I still ache when I think we’ll never see a live-action version.

One of the early sketches for Superman Lives.

NO MAN’S LAND

If you don’t know the background on this late 90s major Batman arc, Gotham suffered an earthquake in another arc called Cataclysm. It crippled the city and afterward, the government decided to evacuate the city, destroy the bridges, and let all the inmates at Arkham out. Gordon and a lot of the Gotham police stayed behind, knowing a lot of homeless and some stubborn people wouldn’t leave, regardless of there being no way to leave the island, no electricity and dangerous criminals running around. Gangs, many led by major villains, warred for territory, as did the GCPD, Batman and a few other caped crime fighters. It was dark, brutal, and very gripping. I recommend not only the graphic novels but the novelization, skillfully re-told by Greg Rucka.

I’d say out of everything on this list, this one could, someday, be in the realm of movie possibilities, assuming the Batman film franchise stays on the track it’s going and continues past three movies. The problem with doing NML in the Begins continuity is that you’d have to establish too many characters before hand. What made NML great, much like the Death of Superman, was a complicated plot with some great new characters (namely the new Batgirl) mixed in with a lot of great old ones. It would be like Batman meets disaster film meets organized crime film. If it ever happened, it would have to be completely re-thought unless it was another reboot, with Oracle, Huntress, Nightwing, and a whole bunch of villains, many of which have never appeared on the big screen.

SAM AND TWITCH

I know what you’re thinking. There already was a Spawn picture, in 1997. I know. And I’m still trying to forget about it. The problem was that it was approached like many other comic book films. It had a simple, cookie-cutter plot, two-dimensional characters (especially Martin Sheen’s Jason Wynn) a lot of cheesy one-liners and some abysmal set design. I won’t deny that, for the day, Hell looked pretty neat, as did Violator and the way Spawn’s cape and chains were animated. But it was a film made to look like a comic book, when it should have been a film that looked like a film but took it’s story cues from a comic book.

A few years back, I read that Todd McFarlaine would have liked to have made a movie more from the point of view of human characters, namely Sam and Twitch (who only appeared as cameos in the Spawn movie). Spawn and the battle of Heaven and Hell would mostly be in the background, with Sam and Twitch in the middle of it, investigating all of the supernatural things happening and getting in over their heads. Spawn wouldn’t even have a lot of dialog. But that’s a slower, more artsy movie than a studio would want to make, so it didn’t and will probably never happen. To make it right, it would need to look more like a horror movie and less like a comic book, so an R rating would be necessary to do it right. It wouldn’t be a non-stop action film. And it would certainly be more real to the viewer because Spawn isn’t exactly a character people can relate to. He’s dead, he’s a hell-spawn, he’s technically not even human anymore, and even though he has ties to Earth and human desires, he doesn’t really have human problems. Sam and Twitch are cops with opposite personalities– one’s a genius, sharp shooter, soft spoken, has a pretty wife and a family, and the other is a stereotypical fat cop who eats donuts and has no manners but is good at detective work and has a lot of heart. That’s a dynamic that would play out well on screen and would give it the slight, light comedy it would need.

MARVEL ZOMBIES

Marve’s doing a really good job with movies. There have been some duds. And three apparently isn’t Marvel’s number… but at least most of the firsts have been really good (Spider-Man, X-Men, Ghost Rider, etc). So it’s hard to say any Marvel movie will never get made because they just keep whipping them out. Even Avengers is supposed to happen once Iron Man and Captain America have both come to screen, so who knows? Might there be a Secret Wars film? Something resembling Maximum Carnage (but please, dear God, find a way to resurrect Venom)? I’d say the door is wide open.

But then, there’s Marvel Zombies, the mini-series that surprised everyone in its immense popularity. The premise is simple: every superpowered person on Earth gets turned into a zombie and they all need to eat human (or alien) flesh to survive. The plot is a little thicker than that, but not by much. Now there’s a second mini-series and even a crossover with Army of Darkness. How cool would a superhero zombie picture be? Imagine getting back every actor you could, good guys and bad guys, from previous Marvel films, and everyone who signed up, those would be the characters you’d use. Then you use the original characters’ back stories to inform the zombie versions, like they did in the mini-series, have a really scary but really funny script and just go to town! It’d be rated R, naturally, but Zombies is a little rough for the younger kids anyway. It’ll never happen, but it should– I think it would actually turn out a lot of viewers.

THE TICK

Patrick Warburton really needs to reprise this role. The live action series had 9 episodes and most people who have seen them and get that kind of humor agree that as far as sitcoms go, it was something special. If it had a moderate budget and Ben Edlund wrote and produced it, it would be fantastic. It deserves this treatment every bit as much as Firefly did (which spun-off big screen Serenity after being canceled at 13 episodes). I don’t think it would do as well at the box office as Serenity did, but if the DVD sales of the series are any indication, it wouldn’t do bad. This has been the decade for superhero movies, so if there was a good time to make The Tick movie, it’d be now. A big budget version would give the live action Tick a chance to fight villains, which happened rarely in the TV show since it was a sitcom on a short budget, possibly the kind you’d need CGI for like Chairface Chippendale. A film about Chairface trying to deface the moon would be keen.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan