a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by mknod
mknod  ·  3565 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why Tim Burton's Batman Is Still the Best - Esquire

I think the problem with Schumacher's Batman is that it's not just campy, it's campy AND the audience isn't being let in that they are in on the joke. So it feels insulting. But I totally understand his take too, it just wasn't executed well.

In the 1966 Batman, we see Batman doing ridiculous things, for example, this scenario:

But we laugh, and it's campy, and it's fun because we're IN on the joke.

In Batman and Robin, are we trying to be serious? Does Bruce Wayne really have a Batman line of credit? Why is Bane so stupid? Is this the same Uma Thompson who was in Pulp Fiction? What is happening?

It is funny how these conversations always lead into Shumacher's movies though.





Maphen  ·  3565 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Schumacher's movies are pretty much the elephant in the room for any Batman discussion.

And I totally agree with your criticism of Joel's movies. Tim Burton's get praise because they managed to toe the line between the "campy" and the "dark" sides of Batman. Schumacher's basically took a serious(ish) script, directed it in the campiest way possible, and tried to paint it black. Adam West's camp worked because none of it was serious. Christopher Nolan's worked because it was deathly serious. Tim Burton, I think, really got lucky. He managed to get the perfect one-in-a-million combination of the two, but he also had to sacrifice important parts of Batman's mythology to do it. Plus, Jack Nicholson's Joker can go from terrifying, to dancing around a museum with Prince playing perfectly. He nails the dichotomy of Joker's character. But Jim Carrey's Riddler and (ironically) Tommy Lee-Jone's Two-Face are just so uninteresting and so one-sided, that the attempt to draw the same parallel just doesn't work. And it's a shame Two-Face was wasted without any attempt to mine his fantastically powerful backstory.

Batman And Robin just felt, for me, like the precursor to Spiderman 3. It was hampered by too many unnecessary villains and taking the comedic portion of a rather serious movie way too over the top. And similarly, it wasted one of the best villains of the series with Bane, just how SP3 wasted Venom. And I swear Uma almost ruined her recently catapulted career with that shit.

EDIT: I also like to think of the entire ending sequence of Dark Knight Rises as an homage to "Somedays, you just can't get rid of a bomb"