Batman Returns- what did you think of it?

Oh, I noticed. I still can't help but throw in a plug for animated Batman wherever I can.

 

It is my favorite of the first 4 films. Underrated film.

 

Not a whole lot, but I was at several shoots for this.

The first was for the downtown LA shoots. Nic called me because she couldn't get satellite reception on the coach. She wanted to watch a fight so I got the call. It turned out there was nothing wrong with anything. Her problem was that she had the #1 parking spot and her view of the satellite was blocked by a building. I told her that if she backed the coach up about 25' she could get it.

That was out of the question. Apparently having the top spot was important to her so she decided to ask Tom to record the fight and bring it over to her after it was over. Problem solved.

Meanwhile, we were on the set and got permission to hang out as long as we wanted. This was pretty interesting. We mulled around while all the extras lined up and got their wardrobes together, and had a nice dinner with them. Several hours later they started shooting. The scene they were shooting was when Val Kilmer jumped out of a window and landed on the ground.

The jump was supposed to be from a high window, but alas he only jumped about 3 feet and the faked the rest. I guess what they needed was his landing. They had to make sure his cape looked right. It took them about 30 minutes from the time Val was out there until they got the first shot. Then everybody sat around for about an hour before they decided to shoot it again. After this they did the same thing again. To say this was boring was an understatement. Finally we decided it was time to go.

One thing that was pretty curious was that when Val came on to the set he was flanked by three guys holding large sheets of corrugated cardboard. They surrounded him wherever he went, as they didn't want anybody to take unauthorized photos. I assume this was because this was a city shot and they couldn't be sure who was around, though the immediate area was surely secure. I, and my helper, were apparently the only people on the set who were not part of the crew, which was pretty interesting.

A few weeks later I got another call from Nic, but this time I had to go to Long Beach as they were shooting inside the Spruce Goose dome. In this case I never was inside the dome, but I did get to meet Tommy Lee Jones who was mulling around outside the dressing rooms. Btw, Tom and Nic's coach was their dressing room. Tommy was all made up with makeup on one side of his face and he looked very strange. Knowing little about the Batman movies I had no idea why he was made up that way, but I did say "Nice makeup' to him. He chuckled and said, 'Yeah, right' almost as if he was not too happy about it.

I did see the movie, and noted that the downtown LA scene I saw made up less than a minute, but it took them the whole weekend to shoot. To be honest I didn't like much about the movie, but I did buy it on Laser Disc just because of my connection to it.

 

The Keaton Batman films are the only ones I'll watch.

 

You're talking about Batman Forever, not Batman Returns.

The nicest thing I can say about Batman Forever is that it is not Batman And Robin.

 

Whoops, sorry about that. I guess it shows how much I know about the Batman films.

 

That was an interesting read. No apologies necessary.

 

Yeah, it was not a good movie to me. I knew a guy who worked on the movie, and got to visit the set for a day when they were shooting the Penguin's lair (which on Stage 12 at Universal, the biggest studio tank in Hollywood). Part of the movie made no sense to me: The Penguin has attached a remote control box on the bottom of Batman's batmobile, which takes control and forces Batman to run over people, run through buildings, and cause mayhem on Gotham City's streets. Eventually, Batman realizes what was happening, punches a hole through the bottom of the car (!!!), finds the box, and rips it away and gets control of the car.

I argued with my friend that this makes no sense. "Batman has no superpowers!" I insisted. "He's just a guy in a suit! He doesn't have the strength to punch a hole through a wall of solid metal on the bottom of his car!" My friend chuckled and said, "but Marc, it's just a comic book movie! It doesn't have to make sense." I insisted that even comic books had to make sense -- to a point.

A year after the movie was made, I read the script and realized what the problem was: in the original script, the Batmobile is driving out of control when a circus kid on the sidewalk sees Batman in trouble, does an expert acrobatic move to leap onto the moving car, then lowers his body to the side so he can get into position to rip the control box off. And of course, the circus kid was Dick Grayson, later to be Robin. Tim Burton decided he didn't want to make a Batman & Robin movie, so that was dropped from the screenplay... and so that segment of the movie now made no sense.

There's some truth to this, but I think they're very well-made and enjoyable on a certain level. I also think the acting is very good throughout. But the most recent one had some lapses in logic so huge (Batman has his spine broken and recovers in a few weeks? Batman is thrown to the bottom of a pit somewhere in a middle-eastern country, but manages to escape back to the U.S. in a few days? Batman flies a helicopter carrying a nuclear device, but manages to dive out at the last second and survives?), it was very hard for me to buy into the story.

 

I enjoyed it very much.

 

Batman Returns is just horrendous, everything that worked in Burton's first Batman film falls completely and utterly flat in this one. Ugly, cheesy, boring and best forgotten.

 

I felt like Burton kept his offbeat style in perfect balance for the first one- he mainly kept his dark and twisted side reserved mainly for Nicholson's Joker and just a tiny bit for Keaton's Bruce Wayne, where it worked really well. It still had Burton's touches, but still spoke to the masses and remained mainstream.

For Batman Returns, it seems like everyone is twisted or psychotic. The performances and sets became more exaggerated; I just think he overdid everything.

 

That sums up my problem with the movie nicely.

 

I thought Michelle did very well. The lick scene gave me the chills; I had never scene her do a character that was clinically mad. Almost every scene of the two of them together was pretty good. DeVito's acting was over the top, the make up was over the top, just the whole Penguin character was poorly conceived.

 

I think the idea with the Penguin was to make him the most despicable, disgusting character they could (you know, for kids!).

 

Sorry, after hearing Mark Hamill and seeing Heath Ledger portray the Joker, having to suffer through Jack Nicholson* Jacking his way through the first Burton Batman movie automatically bumps Returns to the top of the admittedly small pile.

*love the guy but noooo, Joker he ain't.

 

Jack's Joker and Heath's Joker are Apples and Oranges to me. Both are completely different (and great) portrayals of the character.

I don't think either one is better than the other. I think they each work great in the "world" they were meant to be in.

 

Frankly I never understood putting Penguin in Returns to start with. The Catwoman(and Michelle Pheiffer) story should have been enough to carry the story.

 

Yeah, I agree.

I think that they thought adding one more villain would give people more of a reason to want to see the movie.

 

Yeah Catwoman's character is a fetish fest, while Penguin got silly fast.

Robin had been cut from two straight pictures. Burton didn't want him. Joker was supposed to kill his parents (the Flying Graysons)in the first film.

 

I prefer Adam West !

 

So a warped version of the Riddler?

 

And Nicole Kidman was smoking hot in it.

 

Ah, the days when she was attractive….

 

Funny but I've seen her in person quite a few times and to me she's not as attractive live as in films. She's very pale and freckly and very tall and thin, at least compared to me. When she was on SNL many years ago she looked pretty much like she did in person to me.

Btw, I did get to see her naked in the play she was in back in 1999. I had to fly to NYC to see it but it was well worth the effort.

 

That's why I made my comment here about how she looked in Batman Forever. She looked especially porcelain in that movie.