shoop and what's wrong with The Dark Knight

Actually, the title's a bit of a tease, because what's wrong with The Dark Knight can be summed up pretty quickly--it was too long and too loud. Although I'll have a little more to say about The Dark Knight later, this is really about what's wrong with comic book movies in general. And, as was the case most of the time, my Dad had it right.

In this case, what Dad was right about was the 1989 Batman with Michael Keaton and some weird music by Prince. "There was no 'pow' or 'bang' or 'sock,'" Dad noted, and his complaint was perfect. You see, for our family, and for a lot of people my age or a little older I suspect, Batman meant the TV show with Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin, and a slew of celebrities as guest villains--most notably, Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, Cesar Romaro as the Joker, and Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. The heroes intoned heroic platitudes with the straightest of faces, while the villains were free to indulge in the sort of hamminess usually reserved for Christmas pantomimes. As for the "pow," "bang," and "sock," you could count on those when the caped crusaders fought the villains' henchmen--each punch accompanied by a gloriously colorful comic book graphic. The show taught the world what "camp" meant, and it lasted a couple of seasons--as long as such giddy foolishness could last, I think--and even more importantly, it was meant to last some 26 minutes of TV time each week.

Now in 1989, Tim Burton had a novel idea, and it was enough to make a trailer that was really impressive. If you're of a certain age, you probably remember Michael Keaton in the bat suit grabbing a villain and saying, "I'm Batman" with about 50 layers of bad-ass cool. (Years later, I realized that was more a triumph of sound recording and editing, but it still rocked.) Burton's novel idea: what if you took Batman absolutely seriously? Unfortunately, the answer is, you can't. You can see it in Burton's first Batman, the one with Jack Nicholson's Joker, and in his sequel with Danny DeVito's Penguin and, most memorably, Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman. And that's who you remember, the villains with their weird deformities, wacky colors, and what-the-hell attitude toward their own evil. Burton's first Batman was something of a mess, with Keaton trying to be on the cool end of "real," and Nicholson multiplying the TV show by 10--but it's "real" and "serious," so the Joker dies at the end. In the sequel, Batman pretty much made an appearance--the villains had completely taken over.

Joel Shumacher gets a lot of flack for what he did to the Batman franchise, but what he really did was recognize that the camp had to be embraced. But Shumacher's films weren't perfect, either. Yes, there were George Clooney's bat-nipples, a masterstroke of ushering Batman out of the camp closet, and there was Arnold Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze making his henchmen sing along with the Snow Miser's song from "The Year Without a Santa Claus," but Shumacher didn't recognize the danger of overkill, and, frankly, too much money. If you go back to the TV show, part of the essential charm was its no-budget effects (Batman and Robin scaling the side of a building, with its "of course it's fake" sensibility, became a signature scene). The camp becomes too heavy with honest-to-goodness special effects, which I think illustrates a general rule of camp entertainment--it can't travel first class.

To return to The Dark Knight for a moment, this problem of taking the story and characters seriously is directly related to its overlength. (I won't even talk about the movie's twisted politics wherein George W. Bush is Batman.) The movie should have ended when Harvey what's-his-name turns into Two-Face, when exactly half his face gets burned by acid and he makes all his decisions by flipping a coin. I'm going to repeat that, because it illustrates the point I'm trying to make--he turns into Two-Face, when exactly half his face gets burned by acid and he makes all his decisions by flipping a coin. In other words, he's a comic book villain in a comic book world--you can't take him seriously. And you certainly don't want to close out his story arc by adding another half-hour to a movie that's already been banging on too long. What should have happened was, Harvey becomes Two-Face, giggles maniacally while flipping a coin, and we tune in text time. Or we buy the next issue.

And that's the fundamental problem with comic book movies in general--they're movies and not comic books. They're also not pitch-perfect TV camp classics. If the medium is indeed the message, then the message comic books send simply don't jibe with the message of movies. There are, however, a few exceptions. The first two Spiderman movies were pretty good (didn't see the third)--largely because you have a hero who already provides a running commentary on the world of superheroes. Peter Parker is essentially a dorky kid navigating a fundamentally ridiculous set of circumstances, the ridiculousness of which he completely recognizes. (That's why he can say things like, "I will be Spiderman no more"--he knows that sometimes, he has to talk like a comic book.)

You know which comic book movie really got it right? Superman, from 1978. What critics complained about initially--its unevenness of tone from "mythic" to "big city comedy" to "camp" to sincere heroism and back again--was its key strength. That's what you get in a comic book from page to page, sometimes panel to panel. It took not a "visionary" director like Burton or Christopher Nolan, but a fairly literal director like Richard Donner to realize that all those elements are part of comic book heroism, so he put them all in there, one after the other. It helps if you have an impossibly comic book style actor to play your hero, too, plus an impossibly legendary star to play the hero's dad. Christopher Reeve never really topped being Superman (could anybody?), and if Marlon Brando's legendarily overpriced turn as Superman's pop gave us the silliest part of the movie, that fits the picture even better. If only Marlon had taken a sock at one of his detractors, and we could see a big "sock!" on the screen. I'd like to think that scene exists somewhere, in a more perfect world.

shoop and superior donuts

Superior Donuts is recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts' new Broadway play, doomed to be something of a bust as it closes early next month. Critics have been fairly kind, but they all reference TV in their reviews--sitcoms (sometimes a specific sitcom--either Laverne and Shirley, in which Donuts star Michael McKean appeared for many years, or Chico and the Man, with which the play shares something of its setup) or after-school specials (those popular shows that usually came on at 4:00 in the afternoon on a weekday where the characters learned valuable life lessons about hunting, old people, or drugs, for example). And they're exactly right--I've never been witness to a play that so thoroughly evokes the staging, rhythm, goofy supporting characters, and resolutions of a TV situation comedy. Critics who like the play immediately take on a Seinfeldian "Not that there's anything wrong with that" approach to calling the play a sitcom, and I think the play, audience response, its lack of success on Broadway, and (I would imagine) its future healthy life in university and community theatre bear some discussion.

How sitcom-like is the play? The examples would make a long, long list. First, as I've mentioned, there's the set-up--a young African-American man named Franco hustles his way into an assistant position with the grumpy old Vietnam draft evader who runs the titular Chicago donut shop (Cue Jose Feliciano music: "Franco... don't be discouraged... the aging hippie dude, he ain't that hard to understand..."). Then there are the plot complications--the older man is scared to ask the goofy but lovable female cop who has a crush on him out, so Franco gives him some pointers regarding his beard and ponytail: "You know who looks good in pony tails? Girls. And ponies"--a good sitcom joke that Freddie Prinze, Jimmie Walker, or Bea Arthur could knock out of the park to the delight of a laugh track, and that's just what happens in the theatre. Plus there's the two shady hoodlums who are dogging Franco, who has not quite left behind his outside-the-law past, guys you wouldn't take seriously on an episode of Law and Order, but who would fit nicely in a very special episode of, say, Roseanne. The play even looks like a sitcom--I've been in the studio audience for filming a couple of sitcoms here and there, and the functional set, the snow outside the door with the parked car and the parking meter--it's all there, a complete sitcom set. There are at least two examples of the classic "entrance in a goofy costume" gag. Moreover, the sitcom atmosphere pervades the theatre audience as well. Not only do we hear the equivalent of a TV laugh track, but at the points where the heroes suffer (sometimes violent) setbacks, we also get the "Ohhhh" and the gasp-track. There's a moment toward the end where the annoying but lovable Russian neighbor buys the donut shop, which I think is there so Letts can let us know he's read The Cherry Orchard, but the play as a whole is a fascinating example of one form of media totally informing another--the play as sitcom.

In the end, is this necessarily bad or good? The first time I tried grad school, I had a playwriting instructor who actually scored with a fairly major play in the 1950s--Take a Giant Step. He stated, quite flatly, that audiences won't go to the theatre to see sitcoms--meaning that before TV, what we would now consider sitcom rhythms and situations were common elements of many popular Broadway comedies, but now ("now" in this case was the mid-1980s) audiences wouldn't make a special trip to the theatre to see what was pretty common on TV. And in a way, I think he's right--in this case, at least, Superior Donuts might make it to just about 100 performances. Nevertheless, the audience reaction that I witnessed speaks to a very real power that sitcom characters and situations have. We, as an audience, laugh, ohhh and awww, and gasp on cue. And it's not just because the sitcom is well-executed with Great Direction and Actors--in fact, there's a fight scene in Donuts that's downright poorly staged and executed. The power in the form of storytelling that we call "sitcom" is real and has its place, and we might want to re-think the idea that "sitcom" is an automatic putdown when describing a piece. But if sitcoms don't belong on Broadway, what does, exactly? That's a question too big for a blog.

shoop and a serious man

It's been a while since I've checked in with the Coen brothers. I'm glad A Serious Man turned out to be the occasion of my brief reconnection. At any rate, go see it if you haven't already--it's a challenge in the best sense of the word, a film that demands and rewards your complete engagement. For this shoop-i-sode, I'll just tackle a couple of questions that I've seen come up in various discussions...

1) How Jewish do you have to be to get it?
Having a Jewish upbringing helps somewhat--although it didn't help me get the Yiddish prelude; I needed the subtitles as much as non-Jews would. (As a side note, two of the expressions I actually knew in Yiddish weren't translated literally--"in mitten dritten," all of a sudden, and "bubbemeise," literally, "grandmother's tale" or "old wives' tale." It just shows how flat English translations of Yiddish tend to be--or, how expressive Yiddish is.) But Jews can probably catch on to the connection to Jewish law implied in the scene between the professor and the recalcitrant Asian student--the professor explains that the stories are illustrations that show how the math works, but the math is HOW physics works. Similarly, the Law, or Torah, for Jews is "illustrated" through the stories of the Talmud and the Midrash. The fact that the professor doesn't get the stories (he doesn't get Schrodinger's cat, but the failing student does) is an important detail. Also, I think you need to have been bar or bat mitzvahed to fully appreciated the stoned bar mitzvah scene. Nevertheless, I think non-Jews can follow the film as well (or as poorly) as anyone else.

2) Is the film anti-Semitic?
The Coens have been hit with the "self-hating Jews" charge before--Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink come to mind--and I can understand the feeling behind such accusations. Personally, I've been sensitive, and admittedly sometimes absurdly so, to perceived anti-Semitic characterizations in movies and TV. I don't think those who say the Coens are anti-Semitic (in this case in particular) are wrong, exactly, but I do think they're only focusing on part of the picture. Yes, they like to focus on grotesque Jewish faces, ears, and bodies, for example. But I think they're working from an insider's--a LOVING insider's--perspective. That's why the ones who call the Coens anti-Semitic aren't far off, just as there's always a fine line between love and hate. The Coens kid, ridicule, and, I think, ultimately respect their Jewish characters a great deal.

But, again, go see for yourself. Then discuss it with some friends.