Batman, 22 years later

I'm sure a bunch of ya - in your thirties and forties now - recall the 1989 version of "Batman" with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson as The Joker. It was released a few weeks after high school graduation, and was a much-hyped and profitable movie. If memory serves it made a buttload of cash.

It should've, I saw it at least 4 or 5 times that summer.

I'll back up a moment. I loved Batman since I was old enough to watch TV. The campy Adam West show from the 1960's and the cartoon and also "Superfriends" were all my favorites growing up. I had Batman sheets. Batman underwear. Batman posters. The ubiquitous Bat-symbol tee shirt. Stickers on my car. Sometime in the late 1980's I picked up some of the comics (Frank Miller's "Dark Knight Returns" among them) and was introduced to a "new, dark" version of Batman.

When I first met the gal I eventually married, she was sporting a Batman tee-shirt and earrings. I figured it was serendipity.

The Keaton-Nicholson movie became "our" movie that summer, in part because the other movies out that year weren't as good OR simply because 2 adolescents on the cusp of adulthood aren't typically connoisseurs of movies with good stories - we wanted to see explosions and cool villains, etc etc. It was directed by Tim Burton, then known for "Beetlejuice" and "Pee Wee's Big Adventure."

So, to the point. Sunday night I had the bright idea to watch it again, this time with our 4 kids. They loved it. I found it a little depressing - you can't go home again.

The movie suffers from bi-polar disorder, in addition to having been made in 1988 - a few years prior to the CGI revolution in film. Today, I'd say it's half of a good story and half baloney. Keaton appears to be sleepwalking through most of his scenes, and Kim Basinger is pretty much eye-candy. The absolute worst scene in the movie is when she confronts him in his cave - I think they write better dialogue in Japanese-dubbed monster movies. "This is how it is, I tried to avoid all this but I couldn't..."

Ouch. Painful. Ventriloquist dummies are given better material.

The flip side is Jack. His Joker, once he's arrived, is all joyful maniacal id. You can tell he realized it was a goofy role for him to take and he rips up every scene he's in. Without his Joker this movie is pretty much unwatchable. He manages to nail the character, as both funny and criminally evil. This isn't to say that he doesn't look ridiculous in his purple costumes (and as a 50-ish man he looks a little....fleshy), and some of his dialogue is equally wooden. But he delivered the movie, period.

A lot of "Batman" plays like a long-form music video, which is cool thanks to the bombastic score and the fairly well-paced action scenes. As we all know, they've done Batman better with the more recent movies and in the amazing video game "Arkham Asylum." Still, without this 1989 movie, those projects probably never get off the ground. I guess if you look at the movie for what it was at the time, it has its' moments.

At the time it was released, I loved it. I think Carol loved it, too. I know my younger brother (he was 10 at the time) was a huge Batman fan, and to some extent he still is. It's funny, some movies hold up and some don't. By way of contrast, Tim Burton's "Pee Wee's Big Adventure" holds up as funny all these years later, while his "Batman" does not. But for us I guess it's a kind of time capsule, a mile-marker...do you remember when????

[it wasn't serendipity, by the way. Within months the Batman stuff was gone and she'd replaced it with the J Crew catalogue. There would be no shared love of the caped crusader's adventures. So it goes]

My kids, of course, loved it. Our 4-yr old was reciting lines of The Joker's dialogue all day yesterday ("One thing I am not, is a killer. I am an artist.").

So you can't go home again. So what? The kids don't care. Why should they?