Animation in August: Batman: Year One (2011)

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Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One comic from 1987 is one of the greatest comic book stories of all time. It traces Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the vigilante known as Batman while simultaneously tracing Jim Gordon’s first year policing in Gotham.

It partially inspired Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (2005) and has influenced countless comics since it was published.

For well over a decade DC has been creating straight-to-video animated movies that are adapted from some of their best and well-known comics (or periodically are original creations). I’ve seen a few and I mostly like them. They often involve A-list actors and creators and exist somewhere between what you’d normally think of as a straight-to-video release and true made-for-the-theater cinematic experience.

It has been far too long since I read the comic, so I can’t say how closely this adaptation follows the story, but from what I’ve read online it does indeed follow it closely. Perhaps too closely. A good adaption needs to let go of the source material in some ways so that it can allow cinema’s strengths to shine through.

Bruce Wayne (Ben McKenzie) returns to Gotham City after a 12-year absence. He’s still mourning the loss of his parents and his one goal is to enact the type of justice the police force seems incapable of granting.

Police Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Bryan Cranston) has just transferred to Gotham. He left his last post because he dared to take down a corrupt cop and the rest of the police force shunned him for it. Gotham Police isn’t just a place with a few bad apples. It has a basket full of them. Hell, the entire tree is corrupt from top to bottom. Police Commissioner Loeb (Jon Polito) is openly corrupt.

The film follows Bruce Wayne as he becomes Batman and fights crime in Gotham, while Gordon battles corruption on the police force.

It is pretty good. Again my memory of the book is too fuzzy to really compare, but I do know I loved the book and I didn’t love this. It is a fine story told well. Cranston especially is good as Gordon. The animation is fine. The action sequences are well-developed. But it never wowed me. I’d never recommend this over the comic.

The First Movie of 2024: Miller’s Crossing (1990)

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I always make a big deal out of the first film I watch in a given year. I guess I feel like it sets the theme for the year or some such thing. Or maybe I just like stats and the first anything of the year seems randomly important.

As I noted in previous posts we were supposed to be in Kentucky today, the first day of 2024. But Covid kept us home. That and a million other things kept me from really thinking about what movie I’d watch today. In fact, I spent most of the day not watching movies at all, but binge-watching the excellent Amazon series Fleabag.

But as night came I knew I needed to watch a movie and my mind completely randomly thought of Miller’s Crossing, the 1990 gangster film from the Coen Brothers.

I love the Coen Brothers. I have ever since I first watched Fargo in 2006. That movie blew me away. It was so quirky, and funny, and violent. I had previously watched Raising Arizona, but at the time it didn’t make much sense to me. I now consider it one of the funniest movies of all time.

After Fargo I started seeking out Coen Brothers movies. I think I first watched Barton Fink (didn’t get it at first but now consider it a classic). Then I watched Miller’s Crossing and absolutely loved it.

That movie single-handedly turned me on to the writings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler and made me a fan of film noir. I owe it a lot.

I hadn’t seen it in years so this viewing was somewhat fresh. It is still absolutely perfect.

It is loosely based on Hammett’s novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key, but with plenty of Coen Brothers spin. Gabriel Byrne plays Tom Reagan the right-hand man to mob boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) who gets into a war with up-and-coming gangster Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito). There are lots of twists and turns making the plot a bit confusing on first viewing, but it is full of wonderful dialogue and that Coen Brothers humor. It looks great, the acting is great, and the music by Carter Burwell is beautiful. It remains one of my all-time favorite films.

I think that makes a good start to 2024.

The Friday Night Horror Movie C.H.U.D. (1984)

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The 1980s were a wild time for horror movies. The advent of home video and the rise of cable/satellite TV meant a massive uptick in potential viewership. No longer did low-budget horror movies have to rely on midnight movie screenings in large cities to make their money, there were now thousands of movie rental houses looking to fill up their shelf space, and dozens of new cable channels with time to fill. Horror Hounds have never let low budgets or shoddy effects keep them from watching a movie and so the 1980s were filled to the brim with horror movies of all shapes and sizes being churned out in straight-to-video releases.

C.H.U.D. actually received a theatrical release (at least in a limited capacity) and had a not terribly tiny budget of $1.25 million, but it is very much a movie of the ’80s. John Heard and Daniel Stern star as fashion photographers and soup kitchen operator who begin an investigation of the disappearance of numerous NYC homeless people. Stern’s character notices that the missing people were all underground dwellers, those who live in the various tunnels underneath the city.

At the same time, Bosch (Christopher Curry) a police Captain begins his own investigation despite the protests of his boss and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission goon (George Martin) both of whom are trying to cover up the disappearances.

What they find under the city are killer mutants known as C.H.U.D.s (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) which – surprise surprise – were caused by the NRC goon dumping all kinds of industrial waste in those underground tunnels. It is all very silly and kind of dumb, but also charming in its own way.

It also stars Kim Greist (in her film debut) as Heard’s wife. She manages to be a surprisingly tough character who fights off the mutants with a sword. John Goodman, Jay Thomas, and Jon Polito also have minor roles.

29 Palms (2002)

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About 3/4ths of the way through 29 Palms an inept security guard (Jon Polito) says, “Nobody thought I’d do that, did they?” In a way, this line could sum up the entire plot structure of the film, for it seems the filmmakers want nothing more than to surprise the viewer at every turn. They seem to be wearing a smirking smile knowing they are coming up with something different, something no one would expect. Yet, in spite of all the twists, turns, and quirkiness, it all feels like something I’ve seen before.

It is as if, while attending film school all of the filmmakers heard over and over again to avoid clichés and then skipped class the day originality was discussed. As if the avoidance of redundancy is all that it takes to be interesting.

To say something nice, it is filled with lots of great character actors like Michael Lerner, Michael Rapaport, and Jeremy Davies and they do manage to rise above the lackluster material.

Barely.

Davies plays an unnamed drifter who starts the film as a clerk for a corrupt judge (Michael Lerner) and may or may not be an FBI agent. The judge is about to make an important decision on whether or not an Indian Casino can expand. The judge hips the Native Americans onto the drifter and they promptly kill his girlfriend. A hired killer (Chris O’Donnell) is turned loose to do the same to the drifter.

The killer contract includes a bag of money and a severed hand (which is apparently from an enemy of the Native Americans and is to be used to frame someone, but it’s all fairly vague and unclear.)

The inept security guard steals the bag which is in turn stolen by a corrupt cop (Michael Rapaport) and then again stolen by the drifter (who somehow knows about the bag, though this too is also vague and unclear).

The remainder of the film centers on all of these characters (and more!) trying to get their hands on the bag. There are quite a few plot turns and the characters are all quirky and indie-friendly, but honestly, by the midpoint I stopped caring enough to write it all down.

If the filmmakers had stopped trying to make everything so original and quirky for a second and worked on their stories, and maybe developed a couple of their oddball characters, it might have worked. But instead, we get a film that may be “different” but it never makes me interested enough to care.