Movies Are Back! Thanks to 'The Batman'
#167: "The Batman," "Fresh," "Snatch," "Adaptation"
Edition 167:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: The Batman is here to save movies. Can giant blockbusters actually be good? Plus an awesome little streaming movie that just got released and two older streamers that are some of my all-time favs.. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” we finally get a longer look at the Ben Affleck-Ana De Armas erotic thriller and yeesh does it look spicy.
The Batman
The crazy thing about the wild success of The Batman, which has passed $300 million globally in its first full week of release and a crazy $164 million in the United States, is that it’s not even a superhero movie.
I don’t mean it’s not like a superhero movie. It’s literally not a superhero movie. There’s not a single superpower shown or even mentioned, and aside from the whole bat costume thing there’s nothing to be found here that would feel out of place in, say, a David Fincher movie.
Fincher is a good place to start because so much of this movie pays homage to Se7en (except if Brad Pitt’s detective had daddy issues and a billion dollar budget). This time around our caped crusader is basically just trying to solve a serial killer murder case, that’s all, providing perhaps the lowest stakes of any blockbuster movie in the past five years.
In this era where everything on the silver screen is bigger, louder and dumber, where narrative clarity is the north star and subtlety is a scarlet letter, perhaps it’s no surprise that critics have more or less roundly applauded director Matt Reeves for, at the very least, tricking audiences into turning out for an old school noir movie.
Maybe that’s the magic of the Batman, a character which has been adapted countless times and almost always been a success, including one of the most resonate pieces of pop culture in the entire 21st Century in The Dark Knight.
What this movie lacks in the spectacle and fun of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation it compensates for visually, achieving an astonishingly rendered Gotham City. The production design and lighting are breath-taking in nearly every scene, and the camera always seemed to be placed and moved far more creatively than it needed to be.
Comparisons to prestige crime movies doesn’t mean this isn’t a Batman story though. All those previous adaptations have created some pretty strict genre tropes at this point. You’ve got to have a worried Alfred, a cool batmobile, a romance with Cat Woman, a bat cave, a scene where Bruce Wayne flashes his money, all that stuff and, well, you’ve got to have The Joker — which the movie includes in a shamefully tacked on final scene.
All those tropes are pretty well-worn at this point, and at 2 hours 56 minutes the runtime is going to make even the most invested viewer painfully aware of the blockbuster mumbo jumbo.
But Reeves overcomes this with an overabundance of style. The dark, grimy streets are endlessly alluring, as are the characters that inhabit them. Colin Farrell is unrecognizable as The Penguin, cast here as a kind of capo to the mob boss played by an effortlessly cool John Turturro. His cool cannot even match a fraction of what Zoë Kravitz brought to the table as Cat Woman, and her chemistry with Robert Pattinson’s Batman more than makes up for the fact that the dark knight is written here as an aloof emo sadboy — complete with sadboy voice-over! Still, play those two opposite Paul Dano as The Riddler and you’ve got some real magic on your hands.
And though no one would categorize this movie as a thinker, it is beyond refreshing to see a big movie with some depth to its story and nuance to its characters. There is, shockingly in this era of safe blockbusters, some true risks being taken in the storytelling.
Without spoiling specifics, The Riddler’s plan is eerily close to radical far-right conspiracy theory activism that has played out in real life in this country in the past few years, calling to arms dozens of mass shooters in masks firing into crowds of civilians. It’s an image that’s so raw I found it more than a little disturbing, the reaction a true villain would generate and yet one I could hardly remember feeling from another movie in the past, certainly not a modern blockbuster.
The fact that The Batman told this kind of story on this kind of scale, and it became as successful as it is, is the kind of thing that can rewrite entire narratives about the movie industry.
Narratives are, after all, created by the convenient selection of facts.
So how’s this counter-narrative to spin against all those doom and gloom threads of the past few years: audiences are hungry to return to the communal experience of a movie theater now, whether it’s the dip in Covid cases or the easing of restrictions or general feelings of restlessness, or whatever reason.
Don’t believe me? Spider-Man: No Way Home made more money in the U.S. than pre-pandemic megahits like Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War. In February, mediocre movies like Jackass Forever put up $55M domestically, and then Uncharted went for $100M-plus.
Are these anyone’s favorite to-die-for movies, or do they just want to go to the movies? I think the latter, because a literal rom-com co-starring Channing Tatum and a dog made more money domestically ($40M) last month than Wonder Woman 1984 made last year.
And now The Batman.
Capital “M” Movies are back baby!
I remain incredibly optimistic about 2022 being a fantastic movie year. And what Reeves accomplished here both artistically and commercially, when I think about what Denis Villeneuve did with Dune or Todd Phillips did with Joker in the Before Times, gives me even a glimmer of hope for mature blockbusters in the future.
All thanks to you, Batman.
Something New
Fresh (Hulu): You’d have a hard time finding better corporate synergy than a movie on Hulu co-starring actors who are also stars of Hulu’s other hit TV shows: Sebastian Stan (“Pam & Tommy”) and Daisey Edgar-Jones (“Normal People”). But the pair are proving to be incredibly magnetic performers and to have the kind of chemistry, during a 40-minute introduction preceding the title sequence of this snappy rom-com-gone-wrong, that quickly earns a viewer’s allegiance. Edgar-Jones’ lovesick quarter-lifer is sick of dating until she falls head over heels for Stans’ mysterious yet charming doctor, ignoring red flags right up to the point where she takes a sip of her drink and begins to lose consciousness.
It’s my sincerest hope that nobody spoils for you what unravels over the next hour, because it’s insanity on the level of Get Out, dropping in social commentary on heteronormative dating norms the way Jordan Peele’s thriller did for racial strife. It finds humor in the absurdity of situations as often as tragedy, and manages to keep viewers on their toes with each new twist of plot. The story is mostly modest in ambition yet exceeds all expectation in its execution, which is turning out to be the perfect kind of streaming movie.
Something Old
Snatch (2000, Netflix): I’ve sung the praises of Guy Ritchie’s unique brand of cockney gangster movies throughout the years (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, RocknRolla, The Gentlemen), and finally got around to the last one I hadn’t seen this week. It turned out to be my favorite movie of his career — and that’s saying something.
Brad Pitt, Jason Statham and Benecio Del Toro headline the cast of usual Ritchie collaborators who make up the criminal underworld of late 90s London. It’s a convoluted mess of interconnected interests: British bookies, British mafia, Black British gangs, American smugglers, Russian hit men, supposedly Jewish jewelers and somewhat Irish gypsy nomads all fighting to obtain a stolen 87-karat diamond. The catch is, they’re all incompetent, which makes the whole story a cascade of hilarious failures topped only by the testosterone-filled trash talk. It’s one of those 1000-piece puzzles that somehow fits together in perfect harmony and thrills you every step along the way. I loved everything about this movie, from Pitt’s ridiculous accent to the funniest and least successful heist in movie history to Ritchie’s signature touch with character names like “Franky Four Fingers” to “Bullet-Tooth Tony.” On letterboxd, I gave it a rare 4.5 stars rating.
Something to Stream
Adaptation (HBO Max): The media blitz has started for next month’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, an adventure caper in which Nicolas Cage plays himself (in what’s being hyped as a return to stardom). People who don’t watch a lot of movies and think of Cage as the guy from National Treasure are shocked to find out just how many weird roles he’s taken over the years, to varying degrees of success (admittedly mostly bad).
It got me thinking about his best performance, which will always be in this Charlie Kaufman-written mind-bomb, where he plays two roles as twin brothers trying and failing to adapt a book into a movie. One of the brothers is Charlie Kaufman and the other is Donald Kaufman (who doesn’t exist), each who are polar opposites and display Cage’s crazy range. You won’t be able to untangle fact from fiction here, but you’ll have a hell of a time trying. It’s one of my favorite movies of the decade, full stop.
Trailer Watch: Deep Water
The teaser we got around the Super Bowl only whet the appetite for this Ben Affleck-Ana De Armas erotic thriller, coming to Hulu in just a couple of weeks. The full trailer makes the story look even more messed up than the teaser, and considering one of the co-writers is “Euphoria” showrunner Sam Levinson, I think it’s fair to assume we’re going to see some pretty wild stuff.
Considering Affleck has been making a string of movies recently that appear to be working through issues in his personal life, and considering the highly publicized IRL relationship between co-stars, this will provide plenty of fodder for conversation later this month. Hopefully it matches the chatter with quality.