Batman Movie Batdown Week 5 - Batman Forever

Well, here we go again.  "Batman Forever" returns from the deep to haunt me once more.  I actually reviewed this movie many years ago back on those strange high school afternoons when I had nothing better to do but write a blog even more amateur than this on the FFWiki.  Why did I write reviews of Batman movies on the FFWiki, an encyclopedia dedicated to a subject entirely unrelated to Batman?  That's an excellent question.  Moving on.

I could just come out here and start tearing 1995's "Batman Forever" a new much deeper hole in up its ass, but I don't really want to jump at this from that perspective.  "Batman Forever" is not a good movie, and even at that standard, it isn't a very admirable failure.  This was a movie made by a studio mostly to fill a room full of gold bars, nobody in the production actually seemed to have any particular passion or interest in Batman as a character or even in making this movie.  Rather, they wanted to sell toys.  Lots and lots of toys.  The results speak for themselves, its a far more lazy, loveless movie than the previous two live-action Batman movies.  It has the worst Batman performance of any movie, and a host of dozens of other problems.  However, I'm going to try to say that "Batman Forever" and even "Batman and Robin" are not entirely wretched movies.  They're bad, really bad, but they're a special kind of entertaining bad that's worth not merely dismissing out of hand.

The biggest problem, I think, that most people have with the Joel Schumacher Batman movies is that they're ridiculous and silly and cartoony, almost as if these movies were not made for the fans of gritty dark Batman and instead for kids.  "Made for kids" is not an excuse I'd usually buy for a movie like this, but as a kid, I loved "Batman Forever" and its sequel.  This was probably because my parents misplaced or hid my VHS copy of "Batman Returns" and for about seven years these were the only Batman movies I could watch at all.  I could just outright dismiss this movie altogether (like I did in my first review) and just call eight-year-old me a moron for liking this movie.  I'm pretty sure that eight-year-old me would just respond by throwing a Godzilla toy at my face and calling me a "giant moron times infinity", crushing my ego, and then he would sit right back down and continue watching it.  He's definitely seeing something in this movie that I'm not.

Yeah, "Batman Forever" isn't showing me what I think Batman should be, but that's one thing we need to accept:  there isn't one Batman.  There are tons of Batmans, playing up all kinds of tones and styles.  Batman doesn't need to just be the Frank Miller psychopath rolling on rooftops taking sadistic glee in beating up hoodlums, he can also be a 1930s adventure serial for boys about "the World's Greatest Detective", and he can be this:  a ridiculous colorful movie full of more flashing lights than substance.  On its own merits, "Batman Forever" is actually kinda entertaining.  Mostly because of Jim Carrey.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

UPDATE - I TOTALLY FORGOT:  I was joking about this months ago to my friends, but I never mentioned this in the review, though I meant to.  "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is actually a huge rip-off of a joke from "Party Down", in which the main character is offered a part in as Lincoln in the movie "Edgar Allan Poe: Vampire Hunter".  Somehow Seth Grahame-Smith managed to steal this idea and get a movie made, but sadly without Adam Scott as Lincoln.  If Adam was in this movie, I would have like this piece of shit.  Thanks to Red Letter Media for reminding me.  Now the real review can continue:

I'm going to have to be careful writing this review, because I could very easily let this disintegrate into a furious tirade at the most horrifically stupid movie I've seen all year.  Or worse, I could fall into my history nerd persona and nitpick all the historical problems of this movie.  I mean, you have Abraham Lincoln, fighting vampires, already this makes no sense on any level.  But I was okay with that, at least, you need to accept that one idea as part of the movie's premise.  However, Mary-Todd Lincoln isn't crazy?  Lincoln isn't depressive?  James Speed is Lincoln's BFF for some reason?  Screw you, movie!

Nothing about the premise of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" fits.  Abraham Lincoln was not a warrior, he was a lawyer, an intellectual statesman who believed strongly in an ordered society.  Nothing about Lincoln's achievements as a statesman, as a revolutionary who redefined what America stood for, as a civil rights figure, or as anything else had to do with being a kung-fu master fighting vampires.  And I guess that's the joke, that Lincoln is the last history figure who should be a superhero.  But "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is not a comedy.  The idea probably began as an ironic inversion of a beloved President's career and purpose in our national history, but at some point an idiot director got behind the project and decided that this needed to be a straight action movie.  You know, as if people actually want to see Lincoln fight the undead, as if that actually is a cool idea.  No surprise, its done by a barbarian named "Timur Bekmambetov", who recently produced "Apollo 18", that movie where the fictional Apollo 18 mission gets eaten by MOON ROCKS.  And while "Apollo 18" was just good cheesey fun, this is just wretchedly stupid.  All because somehow, "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is no way a comedy.

Actually, "Abraham Lincoln: STUPID Hunter" is a good cross-section of just about every movie trend these days that is terrible.  Twenty years from now "Vampire Hunter" is going to be a perfectly hilarious example of silly 2010s movie styles, as dated in that time as something like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3" is today.  The entire film has two colors:  blue and orange.  The action scenes stink of CG everywhere, and there is not a single attack, not one swing of an ax, that doesn't use gratuitous slow motion attacks.  Nothing seems real, the action is too over the top, its just stupid.  "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is the worst mess of a movie I've seen all year.  Stupid does not even begin to describe it, which is why I'll use that word twenty-one times in this review.

Batman Movie Batdown Week 4 - Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

"Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" is only film of dozens of Batman cartoon movies to actually receive a theatrical release, which qualifies it for consideration in the Batdown.  However, "Mask of the Phantasm" is such a wonderful movie that I would have bent the rules to get it in.  I like "SubZero", I think "Return of the Joker" is excellent, "The Batman vs. Dracula" is just... yeah, and I'm sure one of the three dozen DC animated straight-to-VHS/DVD films that get made every day about Batman is decent, even though I haven't seen all of them.  But this is "Mask of the Phantasm", this is a cut above.  A serious cut above, really.  Even after "The Dark Knight" set movie screens on fire in 2008, there are still people out there who maintain that "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" is the best Batman movie ever made.  And I can see why, I love the heck out of this movie.

"Batman: The Animated Series" first came on the Fox Kids Saturday morning cartoon block in September 1992, as a cartoon tie-in to that Tim Burton Batman movies, specifically "Batman Returns".  Usually cartoon tie-ins are, frankly, godawful, but there was something magical about that 90s "Batman" cartoon.  Just as a start, it was huge critical hit, being popular enough that it managed to hit Fox's Primetime slot, which is basically unheard of for a Saturday Morning Cartoon.  The only cartoons that have aired on a Primetime network slot are adult cartoons like "The Simpsons", and "Batman".  Yeah, "Batman" didn't last long in Primetime, but the point is worth making.  "Batman: The Animated Series" would last until 1995, then get revived in 1997 as "The New Batman Adventures"* on the now-defunct WB Network, in 1999 "The New Batman Adventures" led directly into "Batman Beyond", a sequel TV show featuring Bruce Wayne and his successor Terry McGinnis fighting crime IN THE FUTURE.  All this finally came to an in 2001, but by this point "Batman: The Animated Series" had spun-off an entire DC Animated Universe, which would continue to make shows and TV movies until 2006.  So when Kevin Conroy signed on to voice Batman in 1992, I really doubt he'd continue to be playing the same character in the same continuity for another fourteen years.  And godbless him, because these Batman cartoons are awesome.

"Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" was conceived as soon as Warner Bros saw how successful their "Batman" cartoon was doing on TV.  Originally it was designed to be just a straight-to-video short movie which would largely be a big episode of the TV show.  However, Warner Bros in a rare burst of genius from a major film studio, decided that "Batman" was so artistically relevant that it needed an entire theatrical release, and boosted the budget with a few million.  The movie was made in just a single year, which is very rare for animation, and was released on Christmas 1993... where it was a gigantic flop, not even recouping its six million dollar budget until home video.  I guess audiences were more interested in "Beethoven's 2nd".  Yeah, not all stories have a happy ending.  But anyway, even if 1993 audiences were full of Philistines, "Batman: Mask of the Phantasm" has proved them all wrong, making for an excellent movie.  Far better then "Beethoven's 2nd" at least.

Moonrise Kingdom

"Moonrise Kingdom" is the latest film by Wes Anderson, the quirky™ director of such films as "The Royal Tenebaums", "The Life Aquatic", and the - dare I say - fantastic, stop-motion film, "The Fantastic Mr. Fox".  Being a quirky™ director, Wes Anderson is obsessed with a bizarre detached style to his movies, to the point where you're never quite sure what you've seen and why it was made, but you always feel like a richer person for the experience.  This guy loves drab colors, monotone dialog, and quirky™ music choices.

 Now unlike many of my reviews here, I'm not going to act like I actually understand "Moonrise Kingdom", and that's fine.  There are a lot of movies I don't actually understand and still like, The Monkee's "Head", "The Last Circus", several Cronenberg movies, etc.  And really, if I could just automatically understand everything in life, I'd pretty much just give up on existence and evolve into a Boddhisatva.  That sounds dull to me, I'm glad for life's little mysteries, and I'm glad for the mysteries of film.  Perhaps Wes Anderson isn't saying anything at all with his quirkiness™, he could be a fraud like Terry Malice.  But there is a definitely a distinctive style here, Wes Anderson makes movies like nobody else.  And I think I know why.  Watching a Wes Anderson movie is like watching a film made by some artistic alien race.  They came to Earth, saw movies, realized immediately that this medium was exciting and they wanted to make their own movies.  Unfortunately, they aren't quite human, so what they create looks a lot like a regular human movie, but there's something clearly off.  Real people don't act like this, the film is shot wrong, the dialog is bizarre, and the colors are all-off.  But still, you gotta hand it to these foreign alien creatures, they sure made an interesting movie, even if your human brain cannot quite understand it.  Do you laugh, do you cry?  Its hard to decide.

So yeah, I'm saying that Wes Anderson is an alien.

Anyway, "Moonrise Kingdom" is a pretty clear example of a Wes Anderson movie.  Almost to the point of being a completely generic Wes Anderson movie, which is what a lot of the negative reviews have been saying.  But as for me, I usually enjoy a Wes Anderson movie, especially one features Edward Norton, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, and Tilda Swinton in quirky™ supporting roles.  The main couple is too socially awkward friendless preteens who run away from home and fall in love in the New England wilderness.  Then of course, since they ran away from home, their parents and guardians want them separated.  Its puppy love with a Wes Anderson flair, I guess you could even consider this a kid's movie if you ever wanted to expose children to a movie filled with such miserable adults and sexually awakening young adults.  Its Wes Anderson through and through, and thus, a rather beautiful movie.

Okami PS3 Trailer

A few weeks ago SE announced that "Final Fantasy III DS" would be ported over to the PSP, making "Final Fantasy III DS PSP" (try saying that title the fastest you can, its fun!).  They even included screenshots, and the game looks exactly the same.  No graphical upgrades at all.  So this release could only have two markets:  people who inexplicably do not own a DS and only a PSP, or idiots who buy the same game twice just out of blind fanboy stupidity.

So I bring this up because Capcom actually is doing something very similar.  They're porting one of the greatest video games ever made, "Okami" for the PS3, now calling it "Okami HD".  At first this might sound like a good idea, since "Okami" is a game that's about eight years old and could use a graphical upgrade right?  Actually no, trailer:

THIS LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME!  And I mean, utterly exactly the same.  Capcom even included a comparison between the PS3 and PS2 versions, which I'm going to have to call false advertising.  The PS2 version in this trailer appears to be filmed through a filter of max paper while a fog machine is going off while the game is being played on a dusty TV that hasn't been cleaned since the Clinton Administration.  Maybe if Capcom actually is confused enough to think "Okami" looks anything like that, they could escape my label of being "greedy liars too lazy to make "Okami 3" already".  But otherwise, they're greedy liars too lazy to make "Okami 3" already.