AFTERTHOUGHTS (98)
EMPIRE’S! 50! GREATEST! COMIC! BOOK! CHARACTERS! [4 of 5]
THE BATMAN EDITION


With Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight just around the corner, we see the Bat take the #2 spot, and his archnemesis, the Clown Prince of Crime, take #8…


8 Joker (aka Jack Napier)
The greatest comic book villain ever, and as versatile a character as his nemesis, the Batman.
The Joker has been a merry prankster of crime (poisoning all the fish in Gotham Bay so they sport his literally trademarked grin, then suing fishmongers for copyright infringement) and a gleefully sadistic bastard (responsible for permanently crippling Batgirl and temporarily killing at least one Robin), and always done his best to get under the ultra-grim Batman’s skin by taunting him with sick jokes.


There’s a sense that Joker is the only one of the rogues’ gallery Bruce Wayne really hates—many comics (eg: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, Michael Green and Denys Cowan’s Lovers & Madmen) revolve around Batman and the Joker as opposites or mirror images.
The original look of the character was based on Conrad Veidt’s fixed grin in the silent picture The Man Who Laughs.
FIRST APPEARED IN BATMAN # 1 (1940)
CREATED BY BILL FINGER AND JERRY ROBINSON


2 Batman (aka: Bruce Wayne, The Dark Knight, The Caped Crusader)
It’s a fair bet that when Bob Kane came up with the idea for a billionaire playboy who, by night, dressed up like a bat and fought crime, he had no idea where it would lead.
Almost seventy years later, and we’re jumping up and down—with good reason—about another Batman film, while The Caped Crusader (or Dark Knight, whichever you prefer) remains one of the most famous and iconic comic book characters of them all.
What is the appeal of the Batman? Well, he’s undeniably cool, for one thing. Visually striking, for another.
There’s a wish fulfillment thing going on there, too—unlike most heroes, Batman has no powers and relies only on his wits, cunning, and hard work to hone his body and fitness.
He’s got a great rogues’ gallery.

And he’s been exposed more on TV and in film than any other hero, which helps keep him in the public eye.
And, of course, the character has been through so many iterations over the years, from camp crusader to Frank Miller’s very, very dark knight, that there’s a Batman for everyone.
FIRST APPEARED IN DETECTIVE COMICS #27 (1939)
CREATED BY BOB KANE AND BILL FINGER

The above write-ups are from Empire’s list.
For more on the above characters, just click on their names; the entire list will be accessible from there.

Wrapping up in Part 5—Afterthoughts (99)—we note some characters from DC’s Superman franchise.

Parting shot: A review of Nolan’s Batman Begins (as well as a review of The Prestige) can be found in the Archive.

(Images courtesy of cinematical.com [Christian Bale and Heath Ledger as Batman and the Joker]; about.com [the Joker]; dccomics.com [Batman, art by Matt Wagner]; and impawards.com [The Dark Knight OS’s, designs by Intralink Film Graphic Design].)

THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR (2)

TIM BURTON in
“THE BEST OF BURTON (In the Shadows of Mainstream Cinema)”

"Tim's kind of an interesting, eccentric sort-- although I don't know him too well as a person. He's the kind of guy you could talk to for three hours and still not know what he's all about. I think Tim is an intrinsically shy person, very closed, and won't open up to a stranger."
-- Bob Kane, creator of Batman (1992)

To a devoted film fanatic, the name "Tim Burton" evokes a very specific mood and atmosphere: the baroque finery of the gothic; the agony and ecstasy of the deviant; the elegance and beauty of the dark and sinister—all distilled through the mind of a Goth Peter Pan who happens to be an ex-Disney animator.
Taking a look at his body of work, it quickly becomes clear that the best of Burton's films display a strong underpinning of absurdist humor, which cohabits well with the often dark surroundings; a quirky sensibility that can be both ghoulishly macabre and hilarious at the same time. And though Burton stumbled with the lamentably horrid Planet of the Apes, he returned to the dark fairy tale whimsy of his earlier work with the moving Big Fish, which helped pave the way for his take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the stop-motion animated feature, Corpse Bride (co-directed with Mike Johnson), and the upcoming (and long-long-long awaited) film adaptation of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

It is in the light of this latest collaboration with his cinematic alter-ego, Johnny Depp, that this article looks back to view, through a looking-glass darkly, the best of Tim Burton's ouvre.

1) Edward Scissorhands (1990): a loving, moving paean to the life of the outsider, Johnny Depp's unfinished, leather-clad Pinnochio is every single one of us, incomplete and fractured, merely looking for someplace where we can belong

2) Batman/Batman Returns (1989/1992): quite possibly the most subversive of all the superhero movies made thus far; in what is, ostensibly, PG-13 kiddie fare, Burton injects strains of insanity, disfigurement, child abuse and abduction, attempted infanticide, and duality. Aided and abetted by scripts filled to the brim with zingy one-liners and double entendres, Burton targets dead-on, what Batman is all about: sex and psychology

3) Ed Wood (1994): based on the true-to-life story of the man responsible for what is largely considered the worst film ever made (Plan 9 from Outer Space), Ed Wood is another moving tribute, this time, to the misunderstood artist, the low-brow visionary whose self-belief serves as armor against the banal mundanity of life and society; with an Oscar-recognized performance by Martin Landau (as washed-up horror icon Bela Lugosi)

4) Big Fish (2003): the winsome, Technicolor fantasia of this adaptation of the Daniel Wallace novel is a brilliant return to Burton’s brand of moving, magical film making; the often tumultuous relationship of fathers and sons is explored within the context of a tale about stories and storytellers, with the ultimate postmodern turn of the storyteller becoming his own story in the end

Truth to tell, nearly all of Burton's films are worth seeing (the exception being Planet of the Apes), though Sleepy Hollow is pure eye candy with a rather lame and predictable script topped by a Scooby Doo ending.
(And lest anyone go up in arms over my choices, The Nightmare Before Christmas was based on a story by Burton, and produced by him, but directed by Henry Selick, who went on to direct the equally interesting James and the Giant Peach, and the underappreciated Monkeybone, as well as providing stop motion animation for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and who is currently wrapping up the film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Since Nightmare wasn't directed by Burton, it was ineligible for the list.)

So, for those of you who prefer walking the darker shadows of mainstream cinema, hearken to the works of Tim Burton, who, at his best, understands the universal truths that lie hidden in childhood bogeymen and fairy tales, and who, with a curious, innocent optimism, invites us to tread the twisted and tangled paths of the haunted forests of our own less-than-perfect existences.
And in so doing, in telling his quirky, fractured tales, he is, perhaps, opening up to millions of strangers worldwide, in the best way he knows how.

(The above article is a revised version of its identically-titled predecessor.)

(Tim Burton image courtesy of façade.com; Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, and Big Fish OS’s courtesy of impawards.com; Ed Wood DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

reVIEW (17)
BATMAN BEGINS

With The Dark Knight currently filming and set for a 2008 release, I thought I’d take this one out of deep freeze.

Since the turn of the millennium, DC Comics has had a nearly null presence in the multiplexes, while their long-time four-color competition, Marvel, following its surprise hit in 1998 in Blade, has littered the pop culture consciousness with X-Men and Spider-Men, Hulks and Daredevils. And while DC attempted to rise to the challenge with last year’s Catwoman and this year’s Constantine, neither were what one would classify as excellent cinema.
Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins changes all that.

It’s been 15 years since Tim Burton’s hit, Batman, and 8 since the florid, gaudy explosion of Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin (which effectively killed the Bat franchise), and Nolan has managed to bring us the first Batman film that really and truly is, about the Batman.
Whereas past Bat films have had the tendency to play up the eccentricities of the Dark Knight’s bizarre villains, casting recognizable, A-list Hollywood names to further that agenda, Begins’ sights are firmly set on the tortured psyche of Bruce Wayne, on the dynamics of his guilt and fear, so thoroughly intertwined in the tragic murder of his parents in front of his little boy eyes.
Excellent choice, Christian Bale, to essay the Dark Knight this time out. The young actor’s physicality, intensity, and commitment (he quickly bounced back from the emaciated insomniac he played in the ultimately disappointing El Maquinista to get into shape for Begins) serve him well, as we see Wayne from more dimensions and angles than we’d previously been allowed access to. What we have is the most substantial, and thus, most credible Bruce Wayne/Batman thus far. It was, after all, Bale’s intent to give the definitive performance of the character(s), and in this, he has succeeded admirably.

Of course, even the best actor can crash and burn if the script and the director are inept. Thankfully, that isn’t the case here.
Sharing co-writing credit with David Goyer (who also penned the scripts for the Blade films, as well as Dark City), Nolan delivers a film that is decidedly more complex—emotionally and psychologically—than past Bat films, and one that clearly has more adult sensibilities. For all their dark subversiveness, Tim Burton’s Bat films had a quirky streak of humor running through them; Nolan’s Begins is far less cartoony, more grounded in the reality of the character, and the seedy, corrupt milieu of Gotham City.

Presented as a tightly-packed, urban sprawl, this Gotham is no less the nightmare of a city than the gothic noir metropolis in Burton’s films (as realized by the late Anton Furst in Batman, and Bo Welch in Batman Returns). Here, Gotham is a city where hope lies bleeding in the filthy gutter, where criminals like Tom Wilkinson’s Carmine Falcone flood the streets with drugs, line their pockets with politicians, judges, and cops, and profit from the misery of the masses. The kind of city whose hero would be a creature of shadow, treading the fine line between justice and vengeance; a hero who isn’t scared of collateral damage (though I had hoped that as Bruce Wayne, he’d have paid for all the property damage the Batmobile caused), a hero whose greatest weapon is fear.
Ideal then, that the film not only feature the villain Scarecrow (28 Days Later’s Cillian Murphy, who was actually on the shortlist to play Batman before Bale drove off with the cape and cowl), who uses a chemical to amplify his victims’ phobias, but that the story focus on Bruce Wayne’s fears as well, not simply of bats, but of the possibility of failing in his dead father’s eyes.
There hasn’t been a comic book film with this much thematic cohesion—of story, plot, and action—since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (for my money, still better than the sequel).

With material of this integrity already in hand, Nolan takes the further step of surrounding the lead star with heavy-hitting thespians like Wilkinson, Gary Oldman (as Sgt. Jim Gordon, one of the few good cops left in Gotham), Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox, Wayne’s personal Q), Liam Neeson (as Ducard, Wayne’s Miyagi), and Michael Caine (as Alfred, Wayne’s Man Friday). In fact, there’s enough Oscar mojo here for younger cast members Bale, Murphy, and Katie Holmes (as Wayne’s childhood friend/love interest, Rachel Dawes) to get their own gold statuettes through osmosis.

Thus, with the leathery flap of a bat’s wings, and the sturm und drang theatricality of the operatic undertones of Bob Kane’s 66-year-old Dark Knight, DC Comics has snatched silver screen glory back.
And with Bryan Singer’s eagerly-awaited Superman Returns set to take flight on June 30, 2006, DC looks to be seriously flexing its celluloid muscles, something that should give even the mighty Marvel pause.

(Batman Begins OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

(The above review was previously published in 2005 under the title, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Bat?”)