batman returns (1992)

your analysts forsee growth at 1% per annum. that's not growth. that's a mild swelling.

"power surplus"? bruce, shame on you.

not even in office yet, and already an enemies list!

give the constitution a rest. it's christmas.

selena, about that christmas getaway we planned? i'll be going alone. dr shaw says i need to be my own person and not an appendage.

not complete amnesia. i remember sister mary margaret puking in church and betsy saying it was morning sickness. and the time i forgot to wear my underpants to school. the name of the boy who noticed was ricky friedburg. he's dead now.

-- now, to get the mayor recalled, we must have a catalyst.

-- "you're doing great, mayor cobblepot." "your table is ready, mayor cobblepot." "i need you, oswald! i need you now! that's the biggest parasol i've ever seen!"

-- an incident, like the gulf of tonkin. or the reichstag fire!

she let me go! i think because i reasoned with her, girl-to-girl.

seems like every woman you try to save ends up dead or deeply resentful. maybe you should retire.

not a lot of reflective surfaces down in the sewer

I like the bit where he scratch mixes with a cd

god yes this movie is amazing. that whole origin catwoman sequence is totally classic.

this thread prompted me to look up who it was who wrote the script for Batman Returns, I hadn't realised it was the same guy who wrote Heathers. His wikipedia page has this rather oddly captioned photo at the top:

http://i.imgur.com/UhwZSYQ.png

I've never seen this! Is it better than the first one?

yep

it's great on all levels

could do without the circus gang, vincent schiavelli or no -- too many shots of them wreaking choreographed havoc to calliope music. otherwise it's a lot like a verhoeven movie. love michael murphy's total uncharisma as the world's most impotent mayor, responding to a crime wave by haranguing crowds of ~40 about the christmas spirit while a department store runs the city.

used to be in the this-is-great-but-devito-is-a-problem school but it's hard to look away from his plot now: bloodless corporate power making a grab for the state via a shambling, drooling, cackling monster (he boasts about groping aides) everyone takes a liking to anyway while michael murphy looks helpless and resigned. also anything w walken's char's blank son "chip" is v funny to me and when walken says, of his evil plot to steal everybody's power, "this is my legacy -- it's what i leave behind -- for chip" i think u see real evil as it operates in the world in a way u do not in the nolanverse

be advised tho that the "action" is pretty much front-to-back terrible

any army of penguins with rockets strapped to their backs goes a long way to making up for that tho

+ the radar that goes quack instead of ping

i have never seen this movie

haven't seen this in ages and the only thing i really remember is being scared to death of the penguin as a kid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoSfp3KGwzw

i like the gothic circus vibe, at the time it was pretty singular. steampunk was barely a thing, the closest thing was the end of Beetlejuice when he briefly turns into a carnival. i love Pee Wee Herman's cameo as his stodgy Victorian father and dug the nods to Lynch/Elephant Man ("I am not an animal!") and thought the whole horror film origin story was well done. it felt very much up Burton's alley. Devito is the perfect casting, and he's really chewing the grotesque scenery here in a way not seen again until Always Sunny. him and Shrek both are the kind of show-not-tell power-hungry villains they don't seem to write anymore. the Catwoman origin was pretty incredible. her being pushed out the window was a really violent moment that was way more effective than the Joker falling into a vat of acid. i love the whole sequence where she trashes her apartment, it was all very riot girl. overall i don't really mind the poorly shot action as they tend to use blocking straight out of a comic, the effect is more about a series of images.

saw it as a kid and only later upon rewatching was i kind of shocked about how much sexual innuendo they put into this mainstream sequel about fuzzy penguins. the scene where Catwoman and Penguin first meet is hilarious on multiple levels.

this scene stayed in my mind indelibly. sad penguins, the blood in the water...

https://youtu.be/UcaPMGGla4o

http://i0.wp.com/www.tor.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BRHellHere.jpg

besides heathers the screenwriter mercilessly captioned above did demolition man, also v quotable imo (do you really long for chaos and disharmony?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL3PgFBXioU

shot of keaton brooding in dark wayne manor interior at beginning of this (before batsignal amazingly shines directly into window) looks p much like mush on youtube but i have been to target's $6 bluray rack and i can tell you it is actually gorgeous

(lol not that shot tho, the wide one of the whole room)

http://basementrejects.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/batman-returns-1992-movie-max-schreck-fortune-teller-costume-christopher-walken-review.jpg

The "Batman Returns" videogame for SNES/Atari Lynx was dope too.

i liked this essay in the believer from a couple years ago:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/201403/?read=review_burton

That's a decent essay, but it seems he's just parroting the received wisdom here:

Is it also, as so many critics were quick to proclaim upon the film’s 1992 release, really a perversion of Bob Kane’s beloved detective? Hardly: contra Christian Bale’s gravel-throated monologues in the more recent Dark Knight trilogy, Kane’s Batman was always a cartoon character capable of violence. It was the family-friendly Adam West television show that betrayed Kane’s vision, lacing the image of Batman with quirky catchphrases and synthesized onomatopoeia—pow!—in a way that ensured that most people would associate Batman with drawn-on eyebrows and delusional flow-chart detective work for the next thirty years.

It's a common myth that the Adam West version ruined the "real", grim Batman of the comics, but of course he had become more colourful and less violent in the comics many years before the TV series. A lot of Golden Age superhero comics were pretty violent and the heroes were killing the bad guys with no remorse, Batman wasn't really an exception to that. But it didn't take long before the comic was toned down, and Robin debuted in Detective Comics only a year after Batman.

In the Silver Age Batman was just as goofy as all other DC comics. This famous story, for example, was published in 1957, years before the TV series:

http://www.comicbookbrain.com/_imagery/2014-07-01/detective-comics-241-cover-moldoff.jpg

The whole idea of returning Batman to his "true" self that had been ruined by the TV series was just an excuse used to justify the making the character more dark and violent when superhero comic standards were changing. The Rainbow Batman was the Batman for decades, so he isn't any less "true" than the grim & gritty version. Thankfully in the more recent years Batman writers like Grant Morrison have acknowledged this.

"true" self thoughts by tuomas

And of course, "Bob Kane's vision" was really more due to Bill Finger, who came up with most of the stuff we associate with Batman, nicely illustrated here:

http://orig12.deviantart.net/01e9/f/2014/122/b/0/the_creation_of_vintage_batman_by_paulromanmartinez-d7gu6o4.jpg

batman returns, the movie about batman returning, is a great movie

nobody really cares about bob kane

no way, bob kane's story is fascinating - a poor-to-middling artist with limited imagination, but a talented self-promoter and total shithead who took credit for and got rich off the work of others. it's the american dream!

Batman Returns was really prophetic w the whole celebrity populist politician who outwardly detests people, brags about groping voters, and attacks the press. here the evil qualities are split off into a literal troll, but Penguin + Shrek is pretty close to what we got in 2016. we even have Shrek's clueless son in here indicating a family lineage of crooked business magnates.

"Max Shreck" redirects here. It is not to be confused with Max Schreck.

do you really long for chaos and disharmony?

No need to make a de-hurtful retraction.

lol oops i meant Shreck not Shrek!

"She tries to blackmail me, I'll push her out a higher window!"

cold!

https://media.giphy.com/media/E2b0IrC9zAx2g/giphy.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/whVdCc5DC2F6U/giphy.gif

Michelle Pfeiffer is wonderful in this thing and should've been Oscar-nominated for it instead of for Love Field.

Batman Returns was really prophetic w the whole celebrity populist politician who outwardly detests people, brags about groping voters, and attacks the press. here the evil qualities are split off into a literal troll, but Penguin + Shrek is pretty close to what we got in 2016. we even have Shrek's clueless son in here indicating a family lineage of crooked business magnates.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, 24 November 2016 14:48 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this

this has got to stop

stop thinking about historical pop culture as it relates to current culture?

i mean shit if we can't relate art to what is going on in life then what is the point

he even has a tower w his last name spelled out in big gold letters.

massive lols at rainbow batman

damn i thought i knew this movie backwards but this thread really makes me want to rewatch it. objective achieved i guess

From that Believer piece:

By comparison, Christopher Nolan’s far more successful Dark Knight movies are not cartoonish at all

hmm

no way, bob kane's story is fascinating - a poor-to-middling artist with limited imagination, but a talented self-promoter and total shithead who took credit for and got rich off the work of others. it's the american dream!

And didn't he then go on to spend years doing awful, very serious paintings of clowns?

There's a story about that...

http://arecomicsevengood.tumblr.com/post/70488289183/bob-had-gotten-to-the-point-where-he-never-drew

Ha, that's brilliant. I love Arnold Drake.

Reminds me of Tim Burton saying he was watching in awe of Bob Kane and Stan Lee talking together at the Batman premiere. Seems hilarious now but Burton was never really a comics fan and to be fair, Stan Lee did put in a lot more work into comics than Kane.

What's Stan Lee got to do with Batman, though?

guess he made up a story that he created batman so he could get a ticket to the premiere

I wonder if any other comics guys were at the premiere? I think Bendis was at the Spiderman premiere. Don't know if this is a regular thing.

haha, i remember an old interview w/ tim burton where he lamented that he'd never been able to read any comics because he could never figure out what order any of the panels were supposed to be read in

that bob kane clown story is a perfect joke

catskills comics sitting around in a deli like "you ever do no, it's the guy who paints the clowns?"

This was my favorite Batman movie until a high school friend sent me this: (originally from the NYT, but it's not archived there) https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1320&dat=19920707&id=tUtWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WeoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1284,2131409

"Batman Returns" is not anti-Semitic. But [detailed and complete anti-Semitic reading of Batman Returns]

agree that the basket+plague obv clearly mark the penguin as a moses or anti-moses. maybe the movie is being irresponsible w this stuff. would say that these allusions are part of the movie's strange (+auteurist rite) sympathetic vibe towards the penguin but i guess the answer would be, well sure we're welcome to the high aesthetic pleasure of semi-sympathy w the monster before he is ritually defeated, like in merchant of venice, that doesn't meaningfully change the text, idk, maybe.

*die hard is my favorite christmas movie voice* batman returns is my favorite christmas movie