The Bat, The Cat and The Fat. Something happened between BATMAN and BATMAN RETURNS. The eighties had ended, George H.W. Bush ended his one-term presidency, CGI was invented, and director Tim Burton was so depressed about all these things that the tears in his eyes must’ve clouded his Dark Knight vision. Crooked businessman Max Shreck makes an underground freak, The … Read More
SUDDEN IMPACT
Dirty Sondra. A vigilante tracks a group of rapists, one by one mercilessly killing them in cold blood. But this time, it’s not “Dirty” Harry Callahan doing the killing – it’s his chick! Sondra Locke (Clint Eastwood’s real life living-in-sin partner) gets Dirty in SUDDEN IMPACT, as a rape victim on a vendetta against her rapists, who were not convicted … Read More
BATMAN FOREVER
From Dark Knight to Boogie Knight. After Tim Burton gave us the brooding BATMAN (1989) and the dark-yet-kinda-silly BATMAN RETURNS, he relinquished the director’s chair to Joel Schumacher, who promptly made Batman fruitier than Adam West. In BATMAN FOREVER, the third installment of the modern Batman legacy, Val Kilmer is the fruit bat whom we cannot be sure is hero … Read More
THE GAUNTLET
Bullets over Fraud Way. Clint Eastwood takes the bus to work. THE GAUNTLET is a ludicrous, riotous, guilty pleasure, Eastwood at the helm as director and star, doing all those outlandish things only Clint Eastwood can get away with in a Clint Eastwood Movie. Clint is Ben Shockley (cool name, huh?), a hard-drinking, unreliable Phoenix cop, who must escort “a … Read More
BATMAN
Part Noir, Part Comicbook, All Knight. Who knew MR. MOM could make such an awe-inspiring, vigilante crimefighter? With gadgets formulated from watching Martha Stewart, a cape hewn from a reconditioned wooby and an unsurpassed knowledge of daytime soaps, Michael Keaton squeezed his distinctive lip structure into that sacred cowl and surprised everyone to become the Sean Connery of Batmen. Arguably … Read More
BATMAN AND ROBIN
The Battiest of them all. Why does George Clooney waggle his head like that when he talks?… And how did he infiltrate Wayne Manor’s impenetrable security system – Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Gough) – to become the next Batman? I suppose Alfred – in seeing no less than three Batmen pass through his hallowed halls (Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney), simply puts it … Read More