LET'S TALK ABOUT BATMAN

I want to discuss Batman movies. On a whim, (I live by my whims.) I bought the four original Batman movies: Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin.

This turned out to be an excellent idea, because:

1) I had not seen any of them before.

2) I could break my review into parts to help me catch up after lazing around  watching "Batman: Brave and the Bold" for the past few weeks.

I watch these show in marathon together. Imagine the inside of my brain IF YOU DARE.

So Consider this part 1 of a multi-part exploration of BATMAN. This week I want to talk about the first movie: Batman

There is one thing that consistently bothers me about Batman, and that is the endless attempts to give him a romantic interest. It just never works. Batman just has too many intimacy problems. You can have Alfred, 'cause he is sort of  a father figure, and Robin's ok, because he is a kid and sort of represents Batman's "crusade to save his ruined childhood" thing he's got going there. But you try to get him to be all sexy with a missus and it just falls flat.

And of course Batman has a girlfriend in this, and of course her role is pretty much just to get kidnapped by the Joker and have the shit kicked out of her.

 

looks painful.

 

All this is made hilarious by the fact that her alternate love interest is played by that guy who did "Assume the Position." Which made me instantly side with him the whole movie. Needless to say the story of how the girl you like slowly fell in love with Batman is not a happy one.

 

 She doesn't even tell him there is another man...or that it's Batman.

The Joker is always cool, and Burton made a good move deciding to start the series with him as the villain. Jack Nicholson is exceptionally creepy, which is saying something. Like Pennywise in It, I can sort of see what people are getting at with the "Clowns are freaky" thing.

 

However, not as scary as Tim Curry in drag.

 And MAN, does Jack rock this character. Voice, attitude, eviltude. Nicholson is pretty much the best Joker out there. Not really much more I can say on that front.

Yes, he's awesome, but we have people a lot more dead to talk about.

Next Time: BATMAN RETURNS!


AKA

HOW EMBARRASSINGLY HIDEOUS CAN WE MAKE DANNY DAVITO?

Answer: "Pretty Damn."

The Apartment AKA This is the Saddest Movie

Billy Wilder is a Fucking Genius.

and we love it

There I said it. Now I can skip singing his praises and get into reviewing his Movie The Apartment, which is a freaking cinematic Masterpiece. it was even turned into a musical called Promises, Promises, which was revived recently with Sean Hayes and Kristen Chenoweth.

Jack Lemmon you are not.

The Apartment is one of those movies that I have difficult talking sensibly about because I tend to get all emotionally whipped up and teary-eyed. It's like a Pixar film.

The flash back scene! Oh God get me a box of kleenex! DDDDD:

The Apartment is about Jack Lemmon being a doormat for everyone else's sexual conquests. This man loans out his apartment for other guys to have affairs in, all while taking the fall for the suspect noises and string of girls coming from the titular apartment.

No. Now where are my cleats?

The one fact that almost tips this over Some Like It Hot as my OMGFAVORITEMOVIEEVER is Shirley Maclaine. She spends ever second of this film being heart-breakingly charming and adorable. And of course Billy Wilder goes out of his way to turn her into a perfect wooby. 

Is she sad or petulant? I don't care, it's adorable!

 And this being a Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon, prepare yourself for suicide as a source of comedy! 

 Do The Suicide Charleston! :D

And ambivalent happy endings!

 "Shut Up and Deal." is the new "Shut up and kiss me"

 The fact is I LOVE being emotionally manipulated. I love having my heart ripped out in front of and trampled under the movie's spiked boot while I watch. I may just be a masochist. The best way for a movie to make me love it to to cause me pain, whether emotional or physical.

 I was good until that last scene D:

A Trifecta of Suck AKA Why The Asylum Is The Bees Knees

There are a few unarguable rules to the universe. "What Goes Up Must Come Down," "Every Action causes an Equal and Opposite Reaction" and "Taure Can't Walk Into A Movie Stop or F.Y.E Without Buying Something."

This go round I managed to limit myself to two selections from The Holy Bargain Bin. A great documentary on comic books called  Comic Book Confidential...

...And a triple-feature horror pack from a little studio called Asylum. Never heard of them? Oh you poor, poor soul. Allow me to educate you while there is still time.

The Asylum specializes in "Mockbuster" or blatant ripoffs of up-and-coming movies to ride on the hype machine. For example, Hollywood does this:

The Asylum does This:

And then my mother will then mistakenly buy instead of the Tom Cruise movie in order to frustrate me. Because seriously, I hate Tom Cruise and I want to punch Dakota Fanning in her cute fucking mouth.

However, my anger toward The Asylum at putting out movies straight to video in order to confuse old laidies who can't tell the difference between Transformers for $20 and Transmorphers for $3 out of the bargain rack has slowly subsided. Mostly because they stopped giving a damn.

OH SHIT. WAS THAT A T-REX? AND A STEAMPUNK IRON MAN SUIT? FUCK YOU RDJ, BAD CGI DRAGONS!

My pack movies included I Am OMEGA an I Am Legend ripoff with a martial artist you may recognize like you recognize some guy you had lunch with one time in elementary school, Monster an almost unwatchable Cloverfield clone, and a wonderfully bizarre piece of cinema called ALIEN VS HUNTER. I was in for a GREAT night.

 

So if you know what you're in for, and have a few bucks to blow (or a few of your friend's bucks. Or Netflix.) than I would actually recommend some of the newer Asylum films. They aren't good per say, but some of them are damn entertaining. I would even go so far to say that I'd take a few of them over the movie they are imitating.

And Hell, I am more excited about their Thor movie than the real one.

Awesome.

Casablanca AKA Holy Carp, There are Nazi in this movie!

Casablanca is one of those movies I must of avoided for YEARS because I have a distaste for most sappy romance. You could say they disagree with my constitution, and what could be worse than the supposed
'Greatest Romance Ever Told?"

 

    Are they going to kiss? Ewwwww...

So sometime in my senior year of high school I got stubborn. I WOULD watch this movie, even if it made me physically ill. The result surprised me.

This movie was GOOD.

And it had NAZIS.

This movie has been misrepresented for decades. This is not a movie about remembering an ill-fated romance, this a movie of a bitter man resigned to rot away in a hellhole filled with Nazis while the one love of his life comes back to exploit him one last time. Oh, and this one guy ESCAPES A CONCENTRATION CAMP.

 

Eat your heart out Great Escape.

It's sort of underplayed in the movie, but Victor Laszlo, the third wheel in our love tricycle, not only manages to break out of a Nazi concentration camp, but he also has been on the run for months, confounding his pursuers at every turn. This guy is a badass. And he has a hot wife.

Humphrey Bogart is on the other side of that gun.

Humphrey Bogart broke out as a romantic lead thanks in part to this movie. Before this he played thugs and hard-boiled detective types. (I'll get to The Maltese Falcon on a later date.) He spends about 70% of this movie brooding in badly-lite rooms drinking gin.

Information was carefully researched by a crack team of me.

Casablanca has the boon of co-starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. These guys are probably the best thing to ever happen to Film Noir. They appeared in about 8 films together, all of them Noir. Hell, they're only in this movie for a combined 5 minutes, they're never on screen together, Lorre dies about 10 minutes in and these two are STILL awesome. Of course I am notorious for watching any shitty movie if it has Peter Lorre in it.

 

This movie is pretty terrible, but this and Joe E. Brown doing cartwheels makes it worth it.

The city of Casablanca....well, sucks. It is full of tourists, Nazis, pickpockets, fugitives and rogue Peter Lorres.

He's a bartender. Among other things.

                        There is something between these two, I swear to God. Also, yes that is the invisible man.
 
I am not going to talk about the ending. You've probably seen it. Or a parody of it. It's a good ending.

I must have seen this scene a half dozen different ways by the time I was 9.

This movie has become one of my favorite moves ever. If it comes on TV, life stops. Everything can wait, Casablanca is on. Its amazing I can accomplish anything now that I have it on DVD.

 

Who needs college classes?