Reviews of the last thing you saw

Batman Returns (1992)

A curious thing is how much this recalls Edward Scissorhands in the design and the score. Another curious thing is that while it may be a terrible Batman movie, it's a great Batman villain movie.

Highlights: Danny DeVito may be the ultimate incarnation of the Penguin, but he's still no match for Michelle Pfeiffer's Selina Kyle/Catwoman. Profoundly sexy and whose morals are delightfully ambiguous, it's one of the best anti-hero performances I've ever seen. The production design and art direction are both visual feasts, as nearly every Burton film of this period is.

Not quite so strong: I have no idea what Christopher Walken is doing in this movie. The character of Max Shreck fails to make much of an impression, as the film starts out having him be a puppet master of sorts but doesn't really know what to do with him after the 40-minute mark. It also creates a balance issue of who is the prominent lead of this movie: Batman, Catwoman, or The Penguin. And honestly, I don't know if the film even knows.

Mid-way: Michael Keaton is good but not nearly as strong as the previous film, while Danny Elfman's score at times seems like a knock-off of Edward Scissorhands (especially when he incorporates the choirs, so distinctive of that film). Tim Burton seems half-way interested in directing this movie; I would never argue that this is a studio-mandated film (it's far too dark for that), but it feels less personal than his work on Edward Scissorhands. It's not as good as the 1989 Batman or Edward Scissorhands, but I'd still much rather watch it than, say, The Nightmare Before Christmas or the dreadful Alice.

7/10, but a high 7/10. More presence of Batman and less of Shreck would have booted it up to an 8.

Big Eyes is one that I haven't gotten around to yet. There's about 5 or 6 of his films after Ed Wood I still have yet to get to.

I saw Miss Peregrine in theaters, and thought it was mildly enjoyable if uneven. I'm not really sure where Burton's career is headed at this point, or if he even knows.

I try to watch Edward Scissorhands every couple of years, if only for Elfman's masterpiece of a score.

Epic: Quite correct, and what a very bad idea.

Hello, William, nice to be here!  Thanks for making it possible.  

I saw CARS 3 Tuesday and time permitting will see it again today (Thursday, June 22).   I was running late for the film I intended to see and slipped into the multiplex showing this Pixar/Disney movie instead (Shhh!).  The 300-seat theater was about fifteen pecent full for a pre-Noon showing on the last day before the City of Chicago and many surrounding suburbs broke for the summer.  Families predominated, but there were a few childless couples and one or two unattached, like me. 

I liked CARS 3 very much.  The chief conceit of the CARS cast in this animated series is that all the "actors" consist of vehicles instead of people, giving wide range for anthropomorphism of classic Hollywood types like the middle American, the sinister high-tech interloper, the good ol' girl, the grizzled good ol' boys (here pickup trucks) and so on.  The central character, "Lightning McQueen" (voice of Owen Wilson) is a red, ca. 1995 Camaro and remains dedicated to finding success in a rapidly changing world.  

In my opinion, animation was first-rate and employs the kind of virtual camera shots we'd expect to see in a live-action fiction movie set largely at NASCAR-type racetracks, here called "Piston Cup," an obvious pun on the feeder-league "Winston Cup." The allegory by pun continues with an aerial "shot" of a Goodyear-looking blimp called "Lightyear," an in-joke toward Buzz Lightyear of Disney's TOY STORY franchise. Good-guy Lightning's foe is a black Corvette, "Storm," who uses highly derived computer statistics like drag coefficient and other such esoteric physics to predict himself a 96.8 percent chance of win over McQueen and the rest of the pack.  Yes, that's it:  POWERBALL inside of an all-American, can-do ROCKY theme.  But as the plot develops (and here I can't go into too great detail for fear of introducing spoilers), a foil emerges, a bright yellow Cruze two-door named "Cruz" (the allegories in this movie are often literal, but then six-year-olds ARE a part of the series' demographics).  

Yet there was a subtler wit at work too, most notably the way actual NASCAR racetracks are spoofed in an attempt to give local color to the plot.  I'm a product of the Central Highlands of the Appalachians Mountains, and I recognized visual satires of such racetracks ancient and modern as Rocky Mount, Martinsville, Bristol (TN), and those flatland tracks on the circuit that reach larger crowds, such as Darlington and Daytona.  I am not so sure about the racetracks set in Southwestern U.S. deserts, but all in all it was a great way to provide a "down home" feeling for Americans and subtly display our country's great and varied landscapes to overseas moviegoers.  

Probably the most annoying feature of the movie to this reviewer was the over-emphasis given to the Chevrolet marque of recent cars, particularly the racers.  Only very old cars or trucks like the 1950s GMC pick-up or the original Chrysler 300 (mid-Fifties) deviated from this.  McQueen, as I said, is a Camaro; his antagonist is a Corvette, the newcomer is a Chevy Cruze which in real life never went above a four-cylinder engine that I know of  (too small an engine compartment for a six- or eight-cylinder).  I didn't necessarily expect to see Toyotas or Nissans, though they have become fairly evident on the NASCAR circuit over the past twenty or so years.   I did expect to see modern Chrysler vehicles like the 300 or Fords like the Mustang, but did not.  Perhaps I am picking nits over a cartoon, but after all the "S" in NASCAR stands for "Stock" (as in production models whose bodies still form the basis of sanctioned circuit racing).  All all-Chevy cast of racers seems an unusual limitation on the American cars that smacked of "product placement" even if it isn't.  

I do not run out and see every feature-length cartoon, far from it.  But I will say that this genial, all-American satire, despite legions of talking cars and trucks, was in many ways more realistic than the most recent "Fast and Furious" movie, (F8 of the Furious), that had American and Cuban racers tearing up central Havana with their super-nitrogen-boosted cars -- an impromptu race, in no sense a "LeMans" type planned race.  In Havana.  CARS 3 continues the "Lightning McQueen" saga in a way that I found emjoyable, if a bit trite, and with a good mix of comedy and drama.  To learn more, see the movie!  This feature itself clocks in at 1:29; theatrical presentations are preceded by a typically wordless Pixar 'toon about a bully of a boy who gets more than he expected when he tries to raid the lost-and-found box at his elementary school.  

I have no desire to see anything in theaters right now. Yes, this is in spite of the fact that the Transformers movies are guilty pleasures of mine, I have no desire whatsoever to see The Last Knight.

Same goes for The Mummy 2017, or Cars 3. And I think they all have similar problems, even if Cars 3 is objectively the least offensive of the bunch. I can probably through in Pirates of the Caribbean 5 in the mix as well even though I never particularly enjoyed these movies in the first place (at least the first Cars film was visually appealing and was a relatively harmless "meh"). Rough Night is another R-rated comedy that actively tries to be like Bridesmaids (which, especially when combined with the fact that it's a Sony picture makes it automatically disqualified from consideration). And 47 Meters Down seems to revolve around two people who end up dying because they decided to do something unbelievably stupid (and anybody familiar with my views on the Amazon forums can probably understand that I have, with rare exceptions, zero tolerance for stupidity in general, both in film and in real life--especially in film).

Sad to say that, ugh, Captain Underpants looks more appealing compared to these excuses for film. At least it doesn't have much, if any, toilet humor in it.

I'm probably going to see The Mummy over the weekend, although I doubt if it will have the pure fun of the Stephen Sommers reboot with Brendan Fraser. There are at least four distinct mummy traditions. First, the original from the 1932, the main points being the mummy resurrected by the Scroll Of Thoth, finding a reincarnation of his lost love, and trying to kill her and resurrect her as a living mummy. The Sommers reboot followed that. Then there is the 1940s series with Kharis guarding the tomb of Ananka, the high priests of Karnak, tana leaves, and the modern female character exciting the lustful attention of the high priest. The Hammer series followed this story line. The third is a series of films based on Bram Stoker's The Jewel Of Seven Stars, about the resurrection of an evil queen. The first of these was Blood From The Mummy's Tomb, from Hammer; there have been about 5 versions before the current Tom Cruise outing, which is based on Stoker's novel. And, of course, there is the Mexican Wrestling Woman Against The Aztec Mummy. I'm curious about this so-called Dark Universe notion. It doesn't seem like a great idea, but hey, let's wait and see.

Anyone here up for a quick review of the new WONDER WOMAN? There have been so many at other sites already.