I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.
This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.
“Coolio as Scarecrow! Ghost Joker! MADONNA AS HARLEY QUINN!!! AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!”
Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.
But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.
It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?
Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.
All kidding aside, I’ve seen nine of this legend’s movies and five of them are on my all time greatest list.*
I went in to this full of kindness and forgiveness in my heart.
I was prepared to embrace this movie like a loving father welcoming back the wayward prodigal. Of course this movie isn’t as bad as everyone says. Of course it’s really a delightfully camp romp. Of course the backlash was just a combination of toxic fanboy insecurity and subtle and not so subtle homophobia.
And this fucking movie turned and sank its fangs into me like a snake in a parable.
Yup. I was wrong. I dunno what I was thinking.
Conventional wisdom is always right and independant thoughts are weird and stupid.
Batman and Robin really is that goddamn bad.
I know, I know. Great to be back here on Planet Sensible. I don’t know why I ever fooled myself into thinking that this movie was So Bad it’s Good rather than regular old So Bad it’s Actually Bad. But rest assured, this is no Rocky Horror Picture Show. This movie is not fun, and it’s not even camp. It’s a grindingly cynical and mechanical attempt to be fun and camp and it fails utterly.
Alright, firstly I want to discuss a resolution that I’ve made. Like many movie critics (and after eleven years that still feels presumptuous to say, thank you imposter syndrome) I’ve noted that the CGI in Marvel’s recent output has been of inconsistent quality. This inevitably comes across as a criticism of the VFX artists who worked on these films, which is horribly unfair. As has become more and more clear in recent years, the problem is not with the artists but with Disney’s tendency to over-work their artists while micromanaging every visual aspect of their films to the point that the effects teams often have very little time to do their work to the standard they would ideally like. So, I’m no longer going to say “the CGI is shit” in these reviews. Instead I will say “the studio is shit”, just so we all know who’s really at fault here.
Will I have cause to make use of this new paradigm when reviewing Ant-Man 3?
Well, what totally planned and intentional synergy. It’s Pride month and just in time to talk about how Joel Schumacher made Batman gay.
“Made”. Sure.
Amongst many Bat-fans, the Schumacher Batman films are looked on as a dark age and I would argue that, much like the real dark ages, that’s entirely unfair.
Okay, mostly unfair.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Joel Schumacher is a better director than Tim Burton. Objectively, he’s not. Burton’s Batman films (Returnsin particular) are beautiful gothic wonderlands. Schumacher’s vision for Gotham, by contrast, is a grimy industrial hellscape inexplicably drenched in garish neon. It’s ugly and weird and gaudy and kinda cheap looking. But ask yourself, is that really such a bad artistic choice for a Batman movie?
In fact…I’m just going to say it, Joel Schumacher came closer to capturing the feel of Bronze Age Batman than just about any other live action director. Doesn’t mean his films are the best necessarily. But I think the man deserves more respect than he gets, i.e., any amount of respect.
Funny story. Back when my brother and I were doing our YouTube channel we had an impression-off where we had to pull random characters out of a hat.
I pulled “Charlie Kelly from It’s Alway Sunny in Philadelphia” which I had never seen before. However, my flustered confused, panicky, high-pitched rambling attempts managed somehow to translate into a near pitch perfect impression of a character I knew absolutely nothing about.
Somehow, despite neither reading, understanding or even particularly liking Batman, Tim Burton’s sensibilities as a director were such a perfect fit for the character that he created probably the most influential depiction that there has ever been.
And it was huge, a box-office, critical and merchandising golden god that conquered all before it. Now, Burton had not enjoyed his time directing that film, so Warner Brothers offered him the one thing no Hollywood director can refuse; pure uncut Grade A coc…I mean, COMPLETE CREATIVE CONTROL.
“Whatever you want, Timmy Baby, you got it. You want to rewrite the script, you rewrite the script. You want Jon Peters demoted to executive producer? We can have him killed if you want ha ha ha! (seriously though, we have ways…). You want Kim Basinger gone? Kim who? Never heard of her. JUST MAKE US ANOTHER BATMAN TIM. JUST DO IT AGAIN, FOR UNCLE WARNER.”
And he did do it again for Uncle Warner, and what he did remains probably the most divisive Batman movie of them all. You probably either love it or hate it, there’s very little inbetween.
Whatever your opinion, I think we can all agree: It’s a Tim Burton movie.
In fact I would argue that it is THE Tim Burton movie.
“Inexplicably popular” is a phrase that gets bandied around a lot. There’s plenty of books and movies and so on that achieve monumental success despite being, by any fair assessment, fucking terrible. But what about things that are inexplicably unpopular? What about those works that attract passionate, fiery loathing despite being very, very good indeed?
Because the Adam West Batman series is just the tops. It is genuinely one of the best tv comedies of its decade. It’s smart, it’s funky and it just captures the vibe of the sixties so well.
No, no, no. Not THOSE sixties. THESE sixties.
There, much better.
And yet, for the longest time it felt like the Adam West series was loved by everybody but Batman fans. And sure, having to listen to the millionth tired joke about “BIFF BAM KAPOW!” and shark repellant got real old, real fast, but that wasn’t the show’s fault.
Less forgivable was the frankly toxic level of vitriol that a subset of the Batman fandom had towards this show. Not quite Phantom Menace levels but close. And this rejection of everything that even vaguely resembled Batman ’66 was, I would argue, a big reason why the nineties in comics were so fucking try-hard and asinine, as the medium went through its angsty adolesence loudly proclaiming that comics are ACTUALLY REALLY DARK AND MATURE, MOM.
Thankfully, things seem to have turned a corner. As comics became mainstream and lost their stigma, the show has undergone a reappraisal as younger generations have discovered the series and realised that
No one wanted it this way. Marvel didn’t want to make a Black Panther without Chadwick Boseman, we the audience didn’t want a Black Panther movie without Chadwick Boseman and I certainly don’t want to give a bad review to a Black Panther movie without Chadwick Boseman.
His loss was first and foremost a human tragedy and if this movie succeeds at anything it’s in bringing across just the sheer, crushing grief of everyone involved in this. It’s not a fun time. It should not be a fun time.
Is it a good movie? I’m sorry, no it’s not.
But, it has good moments and I’ll be sure to highlight those.
It also has plenty of flaws and, well, I’ll be mentioning those too. But rest assured, I will feel like a complete asshole.
I keep doing this, y’know. This is like when I reviewed the Universal Dracula and Frankenstein, and just assumed that because they were both horror movies made in the thirties by the same studio they must be roughly equivalent in quality.
Not so, dear reader. Not so.
Now, The Batman, the first big screen outing of the caped crusader, was not a good film. Even looking past its use of yellowface and a stance on the internment of Japanese Americans that could charitably be called “a bit unwoke”, it was very much a movie serial of its time: cheap, poorly paced and of interest to the modern viewer mostly as a curiosity. But hot damn, compared to its sequel it is a masterpiece.
Take it from me, the gap in quality between The Batman (1943) and Batman and Robin (1949) is on par with that between The Batman (2022) and Batman and Robin (1997).
So much so, that I genuinely needed to resort to watching the Rifftrax version to even make it through the damn thing.
Before we begin, please take a look at these quotes:
“So one of the things that surprised me about this movie on re-watching was that it is much better than I remembered, or at the very least far more interesting. Thor exists in a much richer emotional universe than the two IronMan movies or Hulk.”
“Something that I don’t think gets talked about when it comes to [Thor 2] is just how gorgeous it is. Seriously, the art design in this is just jaw dropping, it is hands down the best looking picture in the MCU.”
“A thought occurred to me as I watched Thor and the Revengers speeding towards a giant wormhole called the devil’s anus while blasting spaceships with lasers while Mark Mothersbaugh’s awesome techno score rippled in the background: is this movie the greatest thing ever? Yes. Yes it is.”
“Wow” you might ask. “What pathetic, gushing, blinkered, Thor-fanboy said THAT?”
“Um, me” I reply.
“Oh. Well, this is awkward” you might answer.
“Yeah. Yeah, maybe think before you say something really hurtful” I sob.
Sorry, feeling a bit emotional today. I put those quotes above to give some context. If there’s an internet reviewer who’s been as unstintingly positive to the Thor series as me I am unfamiliar with their work. I have gone to bat for this series again and again. I made Thormy highest ranked of the Phase 1 origin movies. I made Ragnarok my number one movie of the entire MCU. I HAD NICE THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THE DARK WORLD.
So when I say that Love and Thunder is not only the worst Thor movie but the worst movie in this entire 30 film franchise, I hope you understand that this is a big deal. Something that I loved has betrayed me and left me angry, appalled and ready for revenge.
If you’ve spent any time reading about animé you will have come across the name “Osamu Tezuka”, almost certainly accompanied by the phrase “Godfather of animé/manga”. And that’s true, as far as it goes. Tezuka absolutely kickstarted post-war animé as a genre. But…it kinda feels like we’re missing something, doesn’t it? How exactly did we get from this:
To THIS:
Well to understand that we need to talk about the other godfather of manga and animé. For Osamu Tezuka created animé as a beautiful, innocent garden. But into that garden, there came a serpent. There came Go Nagai.
Hired as a writer and illustrator for Weekly Shonen Jump in 1968, Nagai became an instant cultural lightning rod and enfant terrible of manga with his series Harenchi Gakuen. An erotic comedy set in a school, the series attracted massive controversy in Japan (damn prudes!) with its boundary smashing depictions of nudity and sexuality in a comic ostensibly aimed at children (sometimes have a point!). Nagai’s entire career has been one long game of seeing what he can get away with. His work is categorised by coarse humour, extreme violence, body horror and a pessimism often bordering on nihilism.
“What’s nihilism?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Also, Nagai is notorious for a, shall we say, somewhat cavalier attitude to the ethics of depicting sexual assault against women. To put it another way, much of his work is rapier than a full orchestral production of Blurred Lines at the Global Fencing Championships. Shit. Gets. Messed. Up. And his influence cannot be overstated. If you’ve ever watched some disreputable animé late at night and found yourself wondering…why?
Go Nagai. Go Nagai is why.
Go Nagai is why so much of animé is so violent, so weirdly horny and frequently so goddamned awesome. It’s a…complex legacy, to be sure. And much of Nagai’s work is definitely not for me. But he also blazed a trail that was followed by many of the most important and respected creators in the medium, like Katsuhiro Otome and even (I would argue) Miyazaki.
Now, the most important part of Nagai’s oeuvre is the massive Devilman franchise, a constellation of manga, animé adaptations, remakes and spin-offs. There’s a lot of overlap and differences between the various iterations but it usually goes like this; Akira Fudo is an ordinary Japanese schoolkid who gets recruited (or sometimes just duped) by his childhood friend Ryo Asuka into a war to protect humankind from demons. In order to do this, Ryo has Akira become possessed by an ancient warrior demon named Amon to fight other demons. Akira then becomes a superhero named “Devilman” (pronounced “DEEEEEEVILMAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNN!!!!”). From there, the story usually proceeds through a few monster of the week episodes with certain series-standard demons appearing to get the ever-loving demonic shit kicked out of them before taking a sharp left turn with humanity becoming aware of the existence of demons whereupon things get fucking dark.
Very violent. Very horny. Not for everyone. Go Nagai.
Now, there have been several animé adaptations of the original 1972 manga. There was the ridiculously toned down seventies Toei series which was kinda like if The Human Centipede was remade as a Saturday Morning Cartoon about a bunch of people who change into a giant centipede to fight baddies through the power of friendship. Then there was the far more faithful (and pretty damn kickass) OVA in the eighties, a couple of other OVAs in the nineties and early aughts and finally the subject of today’s review Devilman Crybaby, a mini series created by Science SARU for Netflix. Now, one of the reasons I pushed this review back to Halloween (other than just to have a horror themed review for Halloween) was that I knew nothing about this franchise and had a suspicion I would need the extra prep time. And I’m glad I did. Devilman Crybaby was an absolute juggernaut when it was released, becoming one of the most watched and successful animé series in years with a rabid fanbase. The kind of thing you really need to research and read up on before you come out with something like “I watched it and I didn’t really care for it”.
unshavedmouse 