Teen Titans GO! to the Movies

Year 12, Day 25 - 1/25/20 - Movie #3,427

BEFORE: This one's running on HBO right now, so it's easy-peasy to add it to the mix.  Think of this one as the substitute for "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay", I guess.

Tara Strong is a notable and versatile voice actress, and this week I've heard her voicing Batgirl, Luthor's bodyguard/assistant (carrying over from "Superman: Brainiac Attacks") and tonight she's Raven, one of the Teen Titans.  In other movies and TV shows she's also been the voice of Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, Mary Jane Watson, Black Cat, Scarlet Witch, Invisible Woman, X-23 and Twilight Sparkle on "My Little Pony".  All I know is, she's the glue that made my DC Comics theme week possible - otherwise I might have had to drop in all kinds of mortar to make these bricks connect.

THE PLOT: A villain's maniacal plan for world domination sidetracks five teenage superheroes who dream of Hollywood stardom.

AFTER: It's not just Tara Strong, a lot of the main cast here consists of professional voice actors, which, judging by the number of credits each one has, is probably a pretty sweet gig, and not just for the reasons I mentioned yesterday. Tom Cruise, one of the biggest stars ever, has only 44 IMDB credits (one of those is a cameo and one is a music video) but some of these voice actors have 200 or 300 credits - yes, that includes TV series and video-games, but there's apparently a lot of animation being made all the time, and once you've got a track record as a versatile voice actor, the checks may not be huge, but at least there could be a lot of them.  I had difficulty figuring out where I've heard some of these actors before, because I don't count appearances credited as "additional voices" or "ADR group", because that would double my workload.

If you thought the "Deadpool" films were full of inside references and humor that's self-deprecating of the whole superhero genre, well, you ain't heard nothing yet.  Deadpool even gets name-checked here because Slade gets mistaken for him by the Titans, which is even funnier when you realize that Deadpool might be Marvel's riff on that DC character in the first place.  (Slade is usually called "Deathstroke" in the comics, a name possibly inappropriate for a kids cartoon, and even Deadpool's secret identity, Wade Wilson, is a take on Slade Wilson, Deathstroke's real name.). Rob Liefeld is credited with "creating" Deadpool, but did he?  Or did he just rename a DC villain and give his costume a color change?

In some ways this is what you get when you mix the tone of "Deadpool" with the comic-universe crossover power of "The Lego Movie" and the self-referential and self-promoting nature of "Ralph Breaks the Internet".  It's a movie (that at all times knows it's a movie) about making a movie, neatly introducing the kids out there to the concept of "meta" or even "ultra-meta".  I don't know if this is a good thing or not, because it demonstrates that the whole superhero genre has been forced to eat itself in order to survive, so it's either a sign that the end is near, or the start of a new self-parody genre for comic book movies.  How can I take this movie seriously if it's not even interested in taking itself seriously, not for one moment?

There are plenty of inside jokes for comic-book fans, from poking fun at the Challengers of the Unknown (a rather obscure DC team that probably inspired the Fantastic Four) to the casting of Nicolas Cage as the voice of Superman.  Remember, at one point Cage was lobbying to be the next actor to play the hero, only Tim Burton never got the film past the concept/screen-test stage.  And they even talk about the failed "Green Lantern" film, if only to say, "we don't talk about that..."

People who can't distinguish one comic-book universe from another might even have trouble telling this one apart from a Marvel movie - from the comic-book page flipping opening logo to the Stan Lee cameo (respect) some parents might end up asking their kids why Spider-Man or the Avengers aren't in this one, causing some rolling of the eyes from the kids.  But remember, characters from both comic-book universes were seen in "The Lego Movie", and they HAVE made joint comic-book appearances in everything from 1976's "Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man" to "X-Men vs. the Teen Titans" and most recently, "JLA/Avengers".  (Some discount these crossovers as non-canon, because sometimes the scenario depicted crossing between two different universes, other times the impossible team-ups were never explained at all.)

OK, so I agree not to take this one seriously.  Because otherwise I'd point out that the time-travel doesn't really work, as the Titans try to get a movie career that would only be available to them "if there were no other superheroes".  So they travel back to the origins of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, et. al. and mess with the timestream to come out ahead (saving Krypton and preventing the Waynes from walking down Crime Alley I can get behind, but killing Aquaman with a plastic six-pack ring?  Not cool, or heroic.)  They return to the present only to find the world in shambles and on fire, because there were no superheroes to prevent that.  Point taken, but haven't we established that the existence of superheroes caused the rise of the super-villains?  So without heroes there wouldn't be armageddon, their world would just be more like ours - with climate change, political turmoil and reality TV.  Oh, wait, that does sound bad, I see what you did there.

But let's say you did travel back and kill Hitler as a baby, then traveled forward and realized that you somehow made the present day WORSE instead of better (I know, but just work with me for a second...). The only way to fix this isn't to go back and protect Hitler, you've got to find a way to un-do what you did, which means if you go back again, you've got to stop YOURSELF from killing that baby, or else you've got to erase it by not doing it in the first place, like by killing yourself as a baby so you never did time travel in the first place.  Either way, you've created a paradox and broken the time stream, so that's one reason not to mess with time travel at all.  This is the kind of NITPICK POINT I would make if I were taking this film seriously, so let's all be thankful that I'm not.

Plus there are parodies of, or shout-outs to, everything from "Back to the Future" to "The Lion King".    But how come this movie remembers the plot points of "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice", but manages to forget that Robin WAS in a big-screen movie, it was called "Batman and Robin".  Different Robin, sure, and maybe a different movie universe, but it DID happen, even if kids today regard it as a joke.  BTW, since I'm not up on my Teen Titans animation history, which Robin IS this, anyway?  Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake or Damian Wayne?

It's also a little weird, if you think about it, and I do, that in a world where superheroes are real, that there would be movies about superheroes being made.  That reality wouldn't need superhero movies, because people could just look out their windows and see superheroes fighting crime or doing amazing things.  As we saw in "Watchmen", people in a world with heroes wouldn't even read superhero comics, they'd read comics about pirates, and logically, therefore, watch movies about other things instead.  So I know I'm overthinking things again, but the premise doesn't completely work here, and that's before even thinking that most superheroes wouldn't have the time or interest to become movie stars.  Right?  Except maybe Booster Gold.

But I did like the song "Upbeat Inspirational Song About Life", even though it was clearly an attempt to be the new "Everything Is Awesome".

Also starring the voices of Greg Cipes, Scott Menville, Khary Payton (last seen in "Baby Driver"), Hynden Welch, Will Arnett (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature"), Kristen Bell (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Eric Bauza, Michael Bolton (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Nicolas Cage (last seen in "The Weather Man"), Joey Cappabianca, Greg Davies, John DiMaggio (last heard in "Batman: The Killing Joke"), Fred Tatasciore (ditto), Halsey, Tom Kenny (last seen in "The Battle of the Sexes"), Jimmy Kimmel (last seen in "Gilbert"), Vanessa Marshall, Phil Morris (last seen in "Comic Book: The Movie"), Patton Oswalt (last heard in "Sorry to Bother You"), Alexander Polinsky, Meredith Salenger (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Dave Stone, James Arnold Taylor, Lil Yachty, Wil Wheaton, with a cameo from Stan Lee (last seen in "Avengers: Endgame").

RATING: 5 out of 10 Kryptonian crystals

Superman: Brainiac Attacks

Year 12, Day 24 - 1/24/20 - Movie #3,426

BEFORE: Well, this was supposed to be a slot for "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay", another DC comics-based animated film, only it WAS on Hulu when I programmed it, and last night I found out it's no longer available there.  So I could still watch it, but now it's on iTunes and Amazon for $3.99, and I don't think I want to pay that much, not without knowing if it's worth it.  What I don't get is WHY it came down from Hulu, I mean I guess everything expires from every service eventually, but it seems like most films start out as PPV or renting at a premium price, and then when that's over, a film might go to Hulu or Tubi or even screen for free at IMDB.com - how did this film go in what seems to be the other direction?

Does it have anything to do with the fact that the first "Suicide Squad" live-action film wasn't that well received, but the sequel (called "THE Suicide Squad) scheduled for next year seems like it might be better?  Does that news make the animated knock-off suddenly more valuable?  I'm not sure.

Anyway, the good news is that I can drop a film and just move on to the next one, and the chain is still good, because the same voice actress was scheduled for 4 or 5 films in a row, so dropping one in the middle won't make much of a difference, except that now I can stop watching two films per day, because dropping "Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay" puts me back on schedule to start romance films on Feb. 1.

But this whole experience, of learning that I'm sort of counting on films to stay on Hulu or Netflix or whatever until I can get around to linking to them, has me very concerned.  I had to stop today and review my whole romance chain for February and part of March to make sure that all the Hulu films I programmed are still THERE, and for the ones that scrolled off of Netflix, I had to make sure I can get those films somewhere else, even if that's iTunes or IMDB or Tubi.  I was putting off choosing between the 46-film romance chain and the 43-film romance chain, but as luck would have it, two of the three films missing from the shorter chain are now not available unless I pay top dollar for them, so that kind of makes my decision for me - I'm going with the shorter chain.  I also can't view the last film in the chain any more, but that won't affect the linking, I'll just end the chain one day earlier than planned, and link to another topic.  So now it's down to 42 romance movies.

Tara Strong carries over from "Batman: The Killing Joke", where she voiced Batgirl.

THE PLOT: Lex Luthor forms a dangerous alliance with the powerful computer/villain Brainiac.  Using advanced weaponry and a special strain of Kryptonite harvested from outer space, Luthor specifically redesigns Brainiac to defeat the Man of Steel.

AFTER: Brainiac is back, though this is NOT a sequel to the other Superman vs. Brainiac film I watched earlier this week.  This film was made 7 years earlier, and is more of a sequel to events seen in "Superman: The Animated Series", with most of the regular cast from that show also providing voices here - once you lock down an actor as the voice of Superman or Batman, that's some good steady work for a few years' time.  And you know actors love doing voice-work for animated films, they don't have to dress up or put on make-up, just show up at the sound studio and be ready to speak into a microphone - they don't even have to memorize lines, because it's the one time they can be holding a script to read from, nobody's going to see them.

Once again, we're back to Lois Lane not knowing that Superman is also Clark Kent, but at least here Clark gives her credit, by pointing out that she probably WILL figure it out one of these days, so he's sort of preparing himself to tell her if he can find the right words.  It's funny, they just did a story last month in the Superman comics where Superman reveals his identity to the world - Lois already knew, of course, because since before even the Rebirth reboot, they're married and have a teenage son.  (He was a young son, then sort of rapidly aged while time-traveling with his grandfather, long story...)

But the recent choice to reveal his dual identity to the world came from noting the discrepancy between Superman standing for "TRUTH, justice and the American way" and yet essentially lying to everyone at the same time by pretending to be two different people.  Some of the other heroes, like Batman and Wonder Woman, knew his secret, but not all of them - so I suspect the writers just got tired of keeping track of which heroes knew and which ones didn't, because anytime Batman called him "Clark" they had to check to make sure all the other heroes in the room were also on that list.  I hope this isn't a fake-out, because it's an interesting new idea, for Superman to reveal himself and just get that out of the way - or perhaps it will only last until the writer runs out of ideas or another writer takes over and gives the world amnesia, or they re-boot things again.

Speaking of fake-outs, this movie ALMOST has Lois put two and two together, but just as Superman is enjoying the new level of honesty with Lois and thinking of getting serious, he realizes that it's all an illusion, and he's still in the Phantom Zone.  He went there to get an antidote for Lois's Kryptonite radiation poisoning, and the Zone phantoms decided to trick him into thinking he left and returned to Earth, only he didn't.  So then we're back to square one on the Lois & Clark front yet again - and here I thought we were making progress.

This is all a bit too cartoony for my tastes, like the animation in "Superman: Unbound" was a bit more detailed and refined, this looks like caricature by comparison - like Superman's jaw is so chiseled it looks like you could cut glass with it.  And Lois is always in a blazer, skirt and high heels - the only character that didn't seem on model was Lex Luthor, who talked very "street" here, I thought.  I think of him as a refined, cultured businessman despite being an evil genius - did some writer think that those two things couldn't exist in the same character?

I also found it very hard to determine Brainiac's motives - OK, so he's attacking the earth, but WHY?  He's still looking for knowledge?  What kind, and how is he planning to get it?  At least he's not still bottling up cities in this movie, he's moved on, but it's a bit hard to say what method he's moved on TO.  Lex rebuilds him and lets him transform a satellite into a new body, but even then it's still hard to say what he's after, exactly.  Anyway it's an uneasy alliance between businessman and killer robot, and so there are fail-safes and disabling devices built in, only Brainiac knows how to disable the disabling devices, so really, it's a wash.

Brainiac can also track Superman down by his DNA now, which is a little weird when done from a distance.  Usually you need a spit sample or something to test DNA, right?  But this is apparently how Brainiac tracks Superman down in his Fortress of Solitude, and when the Fortress is destroyed, Brainiac thinks Supes is dead, only he's gone into the Phantom Zone to find that cure.  Eventually he gets back, but I'm not sure how he does that, since the portal got destroyed on the Earth side. But Superman saves Lois in a method that evokes Prince Charming waking up Snow White, and then later as she races to cover a story, Clark Kent says, "Lois will be just fine, as long as Superman and Clark Kent are there to look out for her!"  Wow, that seems like a very outdated macho attitude. And this was made in 2006?

Also starring the voices of Tim Daly (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse"), Powers Boothe (last seen in "Sin City: A Dame to Kill For"), Dana Delany (last seen in "Tombstone"), Lance Henriksen (last seen in "Appaloosa"), George Dzundza (last seen in "Dangerous Minds"), David Kaufman, Mike Farrell, Shelley Fabares.

RATING: 4 out of 10 Daily Planet restaurant reviews

Batman: The Killing Joke

Year 12, Day 23 - 1/23/20 - Movie #3,425

BEFORE: And here's part 2 of today's DC Comics double-feature, second of two films with Batman vs. the Joker.

Mark Hamill carries over from "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker" and so do three other voice actors.

THE PLOT: As Batman hunts for the escaped Joker, the Clown Prince of Crime attacks the Gordon family to prove a diabolical point mirroring his own fall into madness.

AFTER: This film is based on the graphic novel of the same name, which was released back in 1988 - it took 28 years to turn it into an animated film.  Part of that delay was apparently due to the unimpressive box-office returns of "Watchmen" back in 2011.  Development started in 2009, but suddenly there was doubt over whether audiences wanted to see more adult stories in their superhero films.  (More on that in a bit...). But SPOILER ALERT if you haven't seen this film, or read the 1988 (very) graphic graphic novel.

But this is what I was talking about in my review of "Joker", this is what I think of as the definitive origin story for the character, although as Joker says in this film, "If I have to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple-choice!"  Meaning that as an insane psychopathic villain, he's an unreliable narrator at best, even when it comes to his own story!  But this was the first attempt at making the pre-villain Joker somewhat sympathetic, and it did so by saying, "Hey, maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."  From the flashbacks we see here, he was a struggling comedian (unnamed in the story) who needed money to support his pregnant wife, and so he agreed to adopt the persona of the Red Hood for ONE robbery, a break-in at the Ace Chemical Plant to rob the Monarch Playing Card Company next door.  (Because as we all know, nobody has more money than banks except for small, independent playing card manufacturers...)

Now, they had to change the story a little bit for contemporary audiences - they added a whole sequence at the beginning about Batgirl being trained by Batman to fight crime, though for her this has also turned into something of an issue with me, because the writers here used this to set up a sort of love triangle between her, Batman and a flirty mob criminal named Paris Franz.  (And yes, his adopted name is just horrible, but acknowledging that it's a bad pun and terrible name for a character doesn't prevent it from being both of those things.). First off, Batgirl shouldn't be flirting with a criminal, not even to trap him, not even to give him the illusion that she's into him and playing his game.  That's a no-no where superheroes are concerned.  The last time a superhero dated a villain was, hmm, let's see, NEVER.  No wait, I guess Batman and Catwoman are the exception here.

But the other leg of the triangle is worse, because Batman is her mentor, her teacher, and for her to have feelings for Batman, well, it complicates things, and it gets too close to the "abuse of power" scenario - besides, in the comic books Batgirl has dated Nightwing (Robin I) and that just feels like a better fit.  One night, after fighting crime together, Batman and Batgirl cross that line, and that feels like a very bad idea, both for their characters as people and as part of this particular story.  It doesn't even fit with his character to get involved with her, because he's supposed to be super-moral, stoic, the man without emotions, except for the ones he has for Catwoman, and those are buried deep down.  Batgirl's much too young for him, and he's teaching her, so this plot point should have been nipped in the bud.

Anyway, those of us who read this comic know what's coming, which is that Joker attacks Commissioner Gordon and his daughter (who is also Batgirl) at home.  He shoots one and kidnaps the other, all to prove a point that it just takes one really bad day to turn someone mad, or perhaps evil.  As proof of his theory, Joker offers up his own situation (he had that really bad day that culminated in him falling into the vat of chemicals and going looney) and also Batman, who he figures also had a really bad day once.  Joker happens to be correct, but he doesn't KNOW for sure that he's correct, and I guess this is what leads him to experiment on James Gordon, who's taken away to an old carnival, tortured by circus freaks, and shown photos of his own daughter, injured and stripped naked, in an attempt to drive him mad.  Joker also strips Gordon naked and puts him in a cage, then forces him to be the judge in a mock trial of Batman.

Gordon doesn't break, and Batman does come to the rescue, but the damage done to the Gordon family is long-lasting - Barbara ended up paralyzed (at least until the next reboot) but continued fighting crime as the computer expert Oracle.  There's a strong implication that Joker raped Barbara, though neither the comic or the film could come out and SAY that, but then again, he's crazy, so who knows.  Maybe he just wanted those photos and the ability to make bad librarian puns.

And Batman, god bless him, he still thinks he can fix crazy - he's seen at the start of the film visiting Joker in prison (or maybe Arkham Asylum) and trying to reason with him, come to some agreement before one of them crosses the line and kills the other.  Too bad the Joker is long gone at this point and he's talking to a decoy.  Joker always finds a way out of his imprisonment, and always lives to torture and kill another day.  It isn't until the far-off future that Batman finally learns that killing him is the only way to stop him - here, instead, for some reason, they share a good laugh at the end.  It's an odd moment, because Batman's laughing with the man who tortured his best friend and shot his lover.  Is it appropriate to joke around with her assailant while she's lying in a hospital bed?

Time and time again, these two men are somehow portrayed as opposites, yet also somehow similar.  At least the flashbacks here are used appropriately, to shore up that point, and suggest that maybe, just maybe, this struggling comedian didn't choose this life for himself, he just had a bad day once and it colored his whole life.  Whereas in "Joker" Arthur Fleck had a bad few years, and that eventually pushed him over the edge - but I think at some point you have to stop making excuses for the Joker, especially when his body count rises past any level where he could possibly be forgiven.

Still, this is powerful stuff, both the comic version of "The Killing Joke" and also the film.  It's just a shame they had to add the Batgirl chapter at the beginning as a lead-in, and that sort of cocked the whole thing up.  There had to be a better way to introduce Batgirl as a character before Joker's attack, because this portrayal of her as a love-struck fledgling crime-fighter really weakened her.  What happened to the new trend of portraying women as strong, independent superheroes who don't need a man's help to fight crime?  Wouldn't that have been a better way to view the character?  Instead we get a Batgirl so clueless that she needs someone to Batman-splain crimefighting to her?

Also starring the voices of Kevin Conroy, Tara Strong, Bruce Timm (all carrying over from "Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker"), Ray Wise (last seen in "Bob Roberts"), Robin Atkin Downes (last heard in "All-Star Superman"), John DiMaggio (ditto), Fred Tatasciore (ditto), Brian George (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), J.P. Karliak, Andrew Kishino, Nolan North, Maury Sterling (last seen in "Outbreak"), Anna Vocino, Kari Wahlgren (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature"), Rick D. Wasserman.

RATING: 6 out of 10 dangerous carnival rides

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker

Year 12, Day 23 - 1/23/20 - Movie #3,424

BEFORE: Yesterday was Superman's day, today is Batman Day, two films with Batman taking on the Joker, in fact.  So THREE films this week about the Joker - I can't remember how long these films have been on my list, but I put this one on a DVD with "The Lego Batman Movie" which probably came on cable in late 2017.  Yesterday's Superman films aired on SYFY Channel in March 2018, as part of a promotion for their TV series "Krypton".  Now I think all of these films have probably migrated over to DC's new streaming service, so that's partly why I'm not doing a deeper dive into DC's animated films, because I can't access the newer ones.

Andrea Romano carries over from "Superman: Unbound".

THE PLOT: In the future, the Joker is back with a vengeance, and Gotham's newest Dark Knight needs answers as he stands alone to face the infamous Clown Prince of Crime.

AFTER: Hmm, I was aware of the "Batman Beyond" series, but I never watched much of it, or got very into it.  I know it's in a futuristic setting, with Bruce Wayne acting as the older mentor to a new, young tech-savvy Batman, with the secret identity of Terry McGinnis.  Maybe watching the show was sort of a pre-requisite for enjoying this film, because I didn't really get much out of it.  Still, I had it in my DVD collection, I wanted to watch it, clear it off my list and get it out of the way.  So on that front, anyway, mission accomplished.

The story set in the future flashes back, though, to a time in the past (our present, I guess) when Robin was a kid named Tim Drake who had figured out Batman's secret identity and used that knowledge to become the third Robin.  The first, Dick Grayson, had aged out of the program and became an adult superhero named Nightwing, and the second was Jason Todd, who ended up getting killed by the Joker (the classic "Death in the Family" storyline) and then brought back via some kind of multiverse transfer or universe re-boot.  (He came back calling himself Red Hood, which was Joker's first nom de crime, only then they said it WASN'T Jason Todd, it was Clayface impersonating him, but then some other writer realized it was a good idea to bring back Jason and went and did it anyway.  Comic books are very confusing, right?)

When I started reading Batman comics, Jason Todd was Robin, only they'd JUST re-booted the universe so it wasn't the first incarnation of Jason Todd, it was the second.  Then the fans apparently hated Jason enough to kill him (via a 900-number call-in poll) and then years later the same fans apparently regretted the fictional blood on their hands and supported his return (even if it wasn't really him at first, but then it was.  Or something like that.)  But a couple years after Jason Todd's death, that's when the writers introduced Tim Drake - he was young, smart, and he fit into the suit, just like Greg as Johnny Bravo on "The Brady Bunch".  I think he eventually broke up with Batman, but then somebody brought him back as "Red Robin", because by that time Damian Wayne (yep, Batman's bastard son...) was the new Robin (#4 or 5, depending on whether you count Stephanie Brown's brief stint as the first female Robin.

But what is future Tim Drake's connection to the Joker?  The flashbacks reveal that Drake was caught by the Joker and Harley Quinn, injected with Joker toxin and then dressed up to look like their adopted son.  Batman and Batgirl worked together to rescue him, but during the battle a catatonic Tim Drake managed to shoot (and kill?) the Joker.  Wow, just think what this kid could accomplish if he were trying...

I guess I just felt I was at a real disadvantage here in the future scenes, outside of the flashback material.  There's a whole new set of villains in the "Batman Beyond" storyline, and they have names like Chucko and Bonk, not logical names like Riddler or Catwoman that tell you a bit about what they do.  Plus there's some future-ish tech like orbital lasers and satellite jammers, but this is all sort of dicey, predicting what tech's going to be like, even just 30 or 40 years in the future.  Like, nobody in futurisitic films ever predicted things like cell phones or Roombas, right?

I've got no major continuity errors or weird plotlines that go nowhere, as with "All-Star Superman", but this film didn't really thrill me either - it's just kind of neutral, right down the middle, neither good nor bad.

Also starring the voices of Will Friedle, Kevin Conroy (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Mark Hamill (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Angie Harmon, Dean Stockwell (last seen in "Once Bitten"), Teri Garr (last seen in "The Conversation"), Arleen Sorkin (last seen in "Comic Book: the Movie"), Tara Strong (last heard in "Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation"), Matthew Valencia, Melissa Joan Hart, Michael Rosenbaum (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Don Harvey (last seen in "Secret in Their Eyes"), Henry Rollins (last seen in "God Bless Ozzy Osbourne"), Frank Welker (last heard in "Mulan II"), Lauren Tom (ditto), Rachael Leigh Cook (last seen in "Get Carter"), Ryan O'Donohue, Vernee Watson-Johnson, Mark Jonathan Davis (last heard in "The Lego Batman Movie"), Mary Scheer, Bruce Timm.

RATING: 5 out of 10 joy buzzers

Superman: Unbound

Year 12, Day 22 - 1/22/20 - Movie #3,423

BEFORE: OK, here we go with the second part of a double-dose of Superman-based animated films today.

Frances Conroy carries over from "All-Star Superman" to voice Martha Kent again.

THE PLOT: Superman and Supergirl take on the cybernetic Brainiac, who boasts that he possesses "the knowledge and strength of 10,000 worlds".

AFTER: Ugh, I'm still reeling from the confusion and nonsense that propelled the "All-Star" story forward.  I can't understand why that comic series was voted as one of the best Superman stories of all time, I'm just not seeing it.  Today's second film is a little more straight-forward, not so obtuse and "arty", and it features Brainiac coming to Earth in his giant skull-shaped ship.  This seems a little like the plot of that "Superman Lives" movie that Tim Burton tried to make, which never got through the screen-test and art direction phase.

Basically Brainiac is the ultimate collector, something that comic-book fans are familiar with, only he collects whole cities instead of comics or toys.  Sometimes he's depicted as a green-skinned alien, only here he's more of an alien robot, who flies around the galaxy in a giant skull, finding cities that he likes, shrinking them down and putting them under glass.  When Brainiac comes to Earth, this is how Superman ends up with the bottled city of Kandor, which was a plot point in yesterday's film.  Here Kandor is referred to as the capital city of Krypton, and when Superman ends up in the tiny city, it's really the first time in his adult life that he's been to a Kryptonian city, so it's a chance for him to learn about his culture and meet Supergirl's parents, who I think are his aunt and uncle.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, first there's an alien probe that comes to Earth, and it contains a destructive robot drone.  Supergirl recognizes design, and realizes that the robot is an advance scout for Brainiac, because she saw one like it shortly before he bottled Kandor, which was shortly before the destruction of Krypton.  So Superman, to keep Earth safe, flies out into the universe to find Brainiac - only this sort of backfires, because it alerts Brainiac to the fact that Earth exists, and at least one Kryptonian lives there.  Up until this point he might have skipped over Earth and not been interested in it, so, umm, thanks, Superman?  Also, please stop helping!

It's a little unclear whether this film suggests that Brainiac blew up Krypton, but his basic M.O. is to roam the universe looking for civilizations, and when he finds one, he bottles a city and adds its vast knowledge to his own, then I guess he blows up the world so it can't change any more, which would result in his knowledge being incomplete and out of date.

Superman escapes from Kandor and leaves with the bottled city, but Brainiac then flies to Earth and puts a big chunk of Metropolis inside a container to add to his library.  Do you want to bet whether he takes the part of Metropolis that contains the Daily Planet, including Lois Lane and all of his co-workers?  Of course it does. So now he's fighting to save the city and the woman he loves (oh, yeah, in this Superman story Lois already knows that Superman is also Clark Kent, and Lois and Clark are dating, but they haven't been doing so publicly).  You're gonna get it now, Brainiac.

Supergirl stops the missile that would have blown up Earth's sun, while Superman crashes Brainiac's ship and defeats him with, what, the power of bugs?  Apparently once you get cyborg Brainiac off his ship and out of his so-perfect environments, he can't really handle all the chaos that life and nature has to offer, so he goes a little crazy and shuts down.  This seems like a fairly big cop-out, Superman didn't really DO anything here but take him to a swamp and let him get covered in mud.  Then Superman puts the bottled city of Metropolis back and everything's back to normal, right?

Just imagine if Superman didn't put the city back at EXACTLY the right spot, or the right angle though.  As Metropolis grew back to normal size, what if the streets didn't line up exactly right, or the power lines or the sewer system, and everything was just a bit off after that, requiring massive repairs and renovations?  I mean, what's the chance that everything just fell back into place as it was before, probably there would be citizens complaining that their office used to have a really good view of the sunset, and now since Superman wasn't that careful restoring the city, now they've got blinding sun coming in through their windows in the morning, and they can't concentrate on work?  Just saying.

Also starring the voices of Matt Bomer (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Stana Katic (last seen in "CBGB"), John Noble, Molly Quinn (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Diedrich Bader (last heard in "Bartok the Magnificent"), Jason Beghe (last seen in "Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief"), Alexander Gould (last heard in 'Finding Dory"), Sirena Irwin, Wade Williams (last seen in "Venom"), Melissa Disney, Michael-Leon Wooley, Will Yun Lee (last seen in "Rampage"), Andrea Romano (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse"), Stephen Root (last seen in "Life of the Party")

RATING: 5 out of 10 metal tentacles

All-Star Superman

Year 12, Day 22 - 1/22/20 - Movie #3,422

BEFORE: I've got a whole week planned of DC Comics-based films, riffing off from "Joker" and ending next Monday (?) with "Shazam!".  And it's extremely helpful that the five animated films I've had on my list for a couple of years form a very neat little chain that gets me from one to the other.  I usually find that similar animated films use the same voice actors over and over, so once I get on an animation kick, it makes sense to stay there.  But what are the odds against those five films forming a chain that links to ONE live-action DC film and ends with another?  I can't even calculate it.

Problem is, I've been adding to the January chain pretty freely, "Stand Up Guys" and "Once Upon a Time in America" weren't part of the original plan, and now I also see a way to add TWO MORE animated DC superhero films to the mix, so it looks like a series of double-features this week until I get myself back on track.  I know what film kicks off the romance chain on February 1, but I have to double-up now if I want to get there right on time.  Thankfully these Superman/Batman films are pretty short, none of them are over three hours like "The Irishman" was, most of them run about 75 to 90 minutes, so I think I can handle this.

Frances Conroy carries over from "Joker", where she played the Joker's mother - today she's the voice of Martha Kent (does this mean that Superman and the Joker are half-brothers?)

THE PLOT: After being poisoned by sun radiation, a dying Superman decides to fulfill his lifelong dreams while Lex Luthor has his own agenda.

AFTER: I remember reading the comics that this animated film is based on, it was a 12-issue series written by Grant Morrison that ran outside of Superman's regular continuity - this was both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good because it gave the writer creative freedom, he could tell whatever Superman story he wanted, and didn't have to worry about whether these events fit between Superman's battle with General Zod taking place in Action Comics or his fight against terrorists in the middle east taking place in the Superman title.  But that's also bad, because regular monthly readers of those titles are trying to keep his ongoing narrative straight, plus keeping track of little things, like whether Lois knows that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, or whether they're currently dating, engaged, married or what.  (It's something of a cycle, thanks to constant re-boots of the DC Universe.)

And this series wasn't a re-boot, it was more like a re-vamp, the author was trying to make Superman stories that were "timeless" and not rooted to one time period in his life, something that was universal and enjoyable, that didn't require reading a lot of other issues to get the proper background to set the stories up.  Another good/bad situation - good for new readers, bad for long-time ones.  Since the film follows (essentially) the same story arc as the 12-issue series, there are a lot of those "big surprise" moments that were designed to come on the last page of issue 3, to make sure that you also then bought issue #4.  It's almost like there are six little stories here Frankensteined together to make a big one, but then characters sort of come and go, plotlines are introduced and then dispatched (or forgotten about) and the whole thing ends up with a lot of plot holes, and if you ask me, it's fairly incoherent if you're looking for a story that starts at point A (Issue 1) and ends at point B (issue 12).

Actually, I take that back, because the story does sort of manage to circle around to where it began, or at least an echo of where it began appears at the end.  It's the loose threads in-between that drive me bonkers, like two other Kryptonians that are introduced in the middle of the story and then their fate is settled shortly thereafter, and they're never spoken of again.  Superman thought he was the LAST survivor of Krypton, meeting two other Kryptonians should have been a bigger deal (they were off-planet on assignment when Krypton was destroyed, apparently.)  But, wouldn't you know it, they're kind of dicks and they want to re-make Earth into New Krypton, so as soon as they get a very convenient form of Kryptonite poisoning, into the Phantom Zone they go, and we're on to the next non-connecting plot point.

The first episode has Lex Luthor commanding some kind of remote monster creature that's aboard a space mission to explore the sun.  What's really weird is that for once, a sci-fi plot acknowledges that the sun is 8 light-minutes away from the Earth, so there's an 8-minute delay if Lex wants to get the creature to DO anything.  But this is handled all wrong, if you ask me - it seems like Lex then has to do something 8 minutes before it has to be done, to counter-act this delay - only, how does he know what to do, 8 minutes in advance?  NITPICK POINT - the real way this would work would be that the remote-controlled creature would just be incredibly slow to react to anything (it would take 8 minutes for the sensory data to go from the creature to Lex, and another 8 minutes for his command on how to react to reach the creature - so the creature would always be 16 minutes too late for every action.  That's just not very efficient!)

So Luthor's plan to sabotage the space mission gets ruined when Superman saves the day - but in the process, he gets too close to the sun and absorbs too much solar energy.  Remember, Superman gets his super-powers from Earth's yellow sun, because he was born under Krypton's red (weaker) sun.  So here some writer wanted to make a statement - some energy from the sun is good, but too much will kill him?  I don't know, this sounds like N.P. #2 to me - I'm trying to think of a good human equivalent, like Vitamin C is good, but too much vitamin C is lethal?  No, that doesn't work.  Maybe water - the human body needs water, but if you drink excessive amounts, it can be lethal.  OK, so the sun's energy is like water to Superman - he needs it to survive, but too much will kill him.  Still, WTF?  Luthor's plan succeeds in the end, and Superman is dying.

But this prompts him to do what he's always wanted to do, bring Lois Lane to his Fortress of Solitude for a night of romance.  Sure, because a terminal illness is so very sexy...  First he finally (although he's done it before in the regular comics) reveals to her that Superman and Clark Kent are the same person.  It's funny, she's an investigative reporter, so therefore smart, but in the early part of the Superman/Lois cycle, why is she do dumb about this?  Here, in this storyline, after he reveals his identity to her and they spend a wonderful night together, she still, on some level, doesn't believe it's true.  WHAT?  Did she just forget, or is she that dumb?  Neither of those options work for me because again, she's supposed to be a smart person.

On their night out sharing super-powers, Superman and Lois encounter two time-traveling "heroes", Samson and Atlas, who I've never seen before in another DC comic, nor have I seen them since.  I wonder if the writer created these heroes just for this story, because he needed a couple of meat-heads that would flirt with Lois to make Superman jealous.  It's totally in character for Lois Lane to lead them on, but it's NOT in character for Superman to act like an even BIGGER meat-head just to win his woman back.  Can we please stick to the script?  Somehow this leads to another character, the Ultra-Sphinx, showing up to ask Superman an important riddle, which in the end doesn't feel very important at all.

Superman also gives her abilities based on his super-powers for 24 hours, she just has to drink a serum derived from his DNA.  Ewww, if somebody offers you a drink containing their DNA, please don't drink that!  But for some reason she does, and she gets to fly with him and have x-ray vision, and...well, the author sort of leaves the rest to our imagination.  But the story casually mentions that though they're in love and potentially have a future together (umm, except for the whole terminal illness thing!) they can't have a child together because they're not genetically compatible.  Oh, but drinking his DNA gives her his super-powers, but a super-baby is out of the question?  Seems like somebody can't really commit here.

Anyway, the storyline shifts AGAIN and Clark Kent goes to visit Luthor in prison, where Lex gloats about giving Superman a terminal illness and then just berates Clark the whole time for being not as good as Superman (oh, if only he knew, right?  Lex is another "genius" who also never seems smart enough to realize that Clark Kent, minus glasses equals Superman...).  Before long the Parasite, conveniently located in the same max-security prison, attacks and starts absorbing energy from inmates and guards, and Clark has to find a way to defeat the Parasite without revealing his super-powers to Lex.  So he uses his freeze-breath whenever Lex is looking the other way, and creates a convenient "earthquake" that buries the Parasite under rubble.  Then Lex reveals that he can escape from prison any time he wants to, because he's had a robot using a sonic wave to create a tunnel under the prison that looks like it took about 20 years to dig.  Another huge NITPICK POINT here, because wouldn't someone have heard the high-pitched sonic wave?  And how did he dig such a big tunnel in a short period of time?  Did the robot start on it years before he was imprisoned?  And why doesn't Clark turn Lex in for having a secret exit from his prison cell that leads to an underground river?  Something's just not adding up here.

Plus, if Lex has a way out of jail, why doesn't he take it?  He actually WANTS to face the electric chair for crimes against humanity, and it's enough that he'll die, only Superman's going to die first?  That still sounds like a terrible plan, certainly not one worthy of an evil genius.  But maybe he's just blowing smoke up Clark's ass here, because it turns out that Lex isn't really going to go to his execution willingly, he's got another plan, he reprogrammed one of Superman's fortress robots to steal that Superman DNA serum, to give him super-powers for 24 hours.  Which is bound to work, it's not like Superman can speed up time or anything and find a way to defeat him in the end...

Before the final showdown, Superman takes a long trip into space to deliver the bottled city of Kandor to its new planet.  Gotta call NITPICK POINT #4 here, because Superman knows that he's dying, only he doesn't know when.  So is this the BEST time to take a 2-month trip into space, to make sure that the last viable part of Krypton gets a new home?  What if he dies along the way, then Kandor isn't going to get where it needs to get.  Terrible plan.  Plus, he leaves Metropolis un-guarded for 2 months, just when they need a hero more than ever - this is when those 2 new Kryptonians, Bar-El and Lilo, come into the picture.  Couldn't Superman have arranged for another hero to city-sit for him while he was gone?  Wouldn't Wonder Woman or Flash or Green Lantern have heard the news about the new Kryptonians in Metropolis, and wouldn't they have dropped by to check them out?  Instead all the other heroes were thinking, "Ah, Metropolis is Superman's turf, he'll be back in a month or so, and he can deal with it then, I've got my own problems here in Star City."  No, that's not how superheroes WORK!

Hold on, because I'm just getting started here with the N.P.'s.  How does Superman get from Earth to wherever it is that he's bringing Kandor?  Is he taking a spaceship or just flying there through space - and if it's the latter, how does he know which direction to go?  Also, remember, he gets his powers and energy from Earth's yellow sun, so what happens when he flies out of the solar system - does he run out of energy like three weeks later?  If so, this mission to the other planet is doomed to fail.  And what happens if he flies through another solar system that has a red sun, does he just run out of gas and get stranded near that star?  If feels like I'm the only one thinking this trip through.  OK, maybe he's still powered by that does of super-yellow-sun radiation from the beginning of the film, but how far across the galaxy is that energy going to get him?  And if he uses up that bad energy on the trip, how come when he gets back to Earth, he's still DYING?  Why can't using the bad energy to deliver Kandor to the other planet also be the thing that cures his illness?

Finally it's time for the end-game, Luthor has a version of Superman's powers and avoids his execution, and he reveals his secret partner, Solaris, who tampers with the sun and turns it blue.  Umm, so what are the ramifications of this, is it deadly to humans, explain, please!  Superman conveniently has a pet "sun-eater" in his Fortress of Solitude that he can unleash on Solaris, but getting the sun back to its original yellow state is going to require more of a sacrifice.  If only we knew somebody who was full of the sun's energy that would also do ANYTHING to save the world...

So yeah, the story eventually loops back to the sun and a satisfying, if depressing, conclusion.  But it took SO long to get there, with so many dead-ends and dangling plot-lines that it makes me wonder if the journey was at all necessary in the first place.  It feels like the writer was easily distracted and firing plot points in all directions at once - then he bent the story over backwards to create a scenario under which Superman and Lois could potentially have a chid together, and then never got around to writing a follow-up story - and it's been 15 years now!  So after a lot of traveling around, the story ultimately goes nowhere.  But thank God this took place outside of all regular Superman continuity and it didn't screw anything (permanently) up!

Also starring the voices of James Denton, Christina Hendricks (last seen in "Dark Places"), Anthony LaPaglia (last seen in "He Said, She Said"), Edward Asner (last seen in "The Bachelor"), Linda Cardellini (last seen in "Daddy's Home 2"), Cathy Cavadini, Steve Blum, Obba Babatunde (last seen in "The Notebook"), Chris Cox, Alexis Denisof (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy"), John DiMaggio (last heard in "Ralph Breaks the Internet"), Robin Atkin Downes, Michael Gough (last heard in "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies"), Matthew Gray Gubler (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip"), Finola Hughes (last heard in "Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World"), Arnold Vosloo, Kevin Michael Richardson, Fred Tatasciore (last heard in "The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature").

RATING: 3 out of 10 lizard men

Joker

Year 12, Day 21 - 1/21/20 - Movie #3,421

BEFORE: The last three crime films have led me here, to a film about the "Clown Prince of Crime" - it makes sense, right?  Part of me regrets not getting to this one during calendar year 2019, but hey, now it's Oscar season and this film is starting to get some buzz, being nominated for Best Picture and all.  I know people are probably still remembering that Heath Ledger won an Oscar for playing the Joker in "The Dark Knight" and perhaps everyone is thinking that lightning might strike twice - is it possible?  Time to find out...

Robert De Niro carries over from "Heist" for the last time this month, but the end of Robert De Niro Week is also the start of a whole week of films based on DC Comics.

THE PLOT: In Gotham City, mentally troubled comedian Arthur Fleck is disregarded and mistreated by society.  He then embarks on a downward spiral of revolultion and bloody crime.  This path brings him face-to-face with his alter-ego: the Joker.

AFTER: I've been reading Batman comics since 1983 or so, so I may be over-qualified to comment here, my history of learning about Batman's villains has been ongoing, and indeed if you ask me about the Joker, I may reply with "which one"?  Even the comic-book Batman has been re-booted at least twice since I started reading, meaning they went back to his origin story and updated it to land new readers, or in one case they dissolved an entire universe just to scrap everything and start over.

Because it turns out that the DC universe is really a multi-verse, meaning that there are many parallel realities existing simultaneously - in fact, it's always been this way, back in the old days there was the Justice League of America and also the Justice Society, and one existed on Earth-1 and the other was on Earth-2, and I think once a year the two teams would cross over and have a picnic or something.  I don't know how anybody kept it all straight back in the day, but one team had Jay Garrick as the Flash and the other had Barry Allen as the Flash, for example.  A lot of this was before my time, and I started reading shortly after an event called "Crisis on Infinite Earths", which tried to clear up a lot of the overblown continuity problems and return the DC universe to ONE timeline, ONE set of characters.  This seemed like a pretty good place for me to jump on board, so I started with Batman's and Superman's updated origin stories in 1983 - "Batman: Year One" and the miniseries "The Man of Steel".

Things were fine until DC decided to tell a group of stories called "Elseworlds", these were stories set out of the main continuity, with new twists on classic characters - the first was "Gotham by Gaslight", which set Batman in the Victorian era, tracking down Jack the Ripper.  Many other one-shot stories followed, such as "Superman: Red Son" (Kal-el's rocket landed in Soviet Russia), "Batman & Dracula: Red Rain", "Batman: The Blue, the Gray and the Bat" (Batman during the Civil War), "Superman: War of the Worlds" (Superman vs. classic martians) and the future-set mini-series "Kingdom Come".  If this is all starting to sound a bit like "Into the Spider-Verse", you're not far wrong.  The Elseworlds stories really opened the door toward creating a new multi-verse, the only limits on the new realities were up to the writers' imaginations.

And then before you know it, DC scrapped everything again with "Infinite Crisis" in 2005, then "Final Crisis" in 2008, and then in 2001 the "Flashpoint" event gave way to "The New 52", which was meant to be the last word on updating the DC universe for modern times.  Only not everybody liked it, so in 2016 along came "Rebirth", another line-wide reboot that brought back some of the most popular characters from the pre-"Flashpoint" continuity.  Look, can we all just admit this is doomed to constantly be an ongoing process?  DC is going to tear down their universe and rebuild it every few years, just to give the writers more creative freedom and a new sandbox to play in.  (Marvel essentially does the same thing, but they've scrapped the universe fewer times over the years - I guess since DC's been around longer, the more continuity you have, the more often you have to re-work it?)

So in a (relatively) recent comic-book event, Batman had the occasion to sit in this device called the Mobius Chair, usually used by a New Gods character named Metron - and the chair grants knowledge about the universe to the person sitting in it.  Batman asked the chair to tell him Joker's real name, and Batman learned that there are really THREE Jokers - possibly the chair was counting the ones from the last two versions of the universe, but as yet we haven't received clarification on this.  My point is, the Joker's origin is just like Batman's, it can be told every few years by different writers, and everyone who tackles it brings some new information to the table.  And the new version is considered canonical until another writer decides to scrap that one and substitute his own.

What's important is for there to be a REASON to update the character's story, when you scrap the old one and start again.  We've seen glimpses of the Joker's origin most notably in Detective Comics #168 in 1951, which told the story of how he began as a criminal called the Red Hood, and during a robbery at the Ace Chemical company (because we all know how much money chemical companies keep in their warehouses, right?) he was knocked into a vat of chemicals by Batman, and the fact that he was wearing a metal hood didn't help, and the chemicals turned his hair green and his skin white, ironically matching the Joker in the Ace chemical company's logo.  This version of events fell out of favor at some point, but a version was revived for the 1988 graphic novel "The Killing Joke", only it added a bit about the character being a failed comedian who was coerced to put on the metal hood and participate in the robbery.  (I'll get to the animated version of "The Killing Joke" in a couple of days...) This version of the origin was also tweaked a bit for the 1989 Tim Burton "Batman" film.

More time passed, and then things changed again - Fox-TV created the show "Gotham" which suggested new origins for many of Batman's prominent villains, so they could face off against police officer James Gordon in his 30's and a Bruce Wayne in his teens.  They couldn't tackle the Joker directly for some reason, but there were strong indications that this anarchistic cult leader, Jerome Valeska, would ultimate fill the role - only then they killed him.  But then they figured out a way to bring him back, then they killed him again.  Finally they revealed he had a twin brother, Jeremiah, and set about possibly turning HIM into a Joker-like psycho-criminal mastermind.

So now that all brings me to "Joker", and in some ways we've come full circle - we're reverting back now to a version of the "Killing Joke" origin, where the future Joker is a failing comedian, only now we've added a boatload of mental problems and mother issues, plus another connection to the future Batman.  Because Fleck's mother is also some form of crazy, and she used to work for Thomas Wayne, she's convinced herself that she once had a relationship with him, and that Arthur is Thomas' son.  Now, it's very ballsy to put this out there, because if Bruce Wayne and the Joker are half-brothers, we've essentially got a whole new dynamic.  Only it's probably not true if Mama Fleck is a looney-tune.

You know, I'm probably over-thinking this whole thing, that's what I tend to do.  Maybe it's helpful to think of "Joker" as something of a cross between "The King of Comedy" and "Requiem for a Dream", which a bit of "The Purge" thrown in at the end.  A lot of this comparison has to do with De Niro playing a talk-show host named Murray Franklin, and Fleck always watches this show with his mother, and he dreams about being a guest on the show.  This ends up coming true after the show airs footage of Fleck bombing at a comedy club, so he makes it to the show, but it's really for the wrong reasons, it comes from a place of humiliation, and it's one more link in the chain of failure that makes up Fleck's life - or is it?

Fleck is so delusional at this point that he reminds me of Rupert Pupkin trying to get on the Jerry Langford show, and he's willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen.  Only his life keeps getting worse and worse (this is the "Requiem for a Dream" part...) as he follows bad advice, takes too much medication, loses his therapy sessions due to financial cutbacks, and gets fired for bringing a gun to an appearance at a children's hospital.

Then they added a bit about Joker having some kind of weird neurological condition, where he laughs at inappropriate times, when nervous or scared, as an offshoot of Tourette's syndrome or something.  Is this an actual medical condition?  It's another part of the need to apologize for who Joker is, and I don't know, I think I maybe liked it a little better when he was just insane.  This, combined with the fact that he becomes the poster child for some kind of "Occupy Gotham" movement, sort of chips away at who he is at the core, like when you add it all up he's not to blame for his psychotic actions, and that sort of feels like a cop-out.  Thomas Wayne supposedly said something years ago about the average Gothamites being a "bunch of clowns" and that's a very creaky bridge that this film tries to cross - yet another attempt to suggest that somehow, the Joker created Batman, instead of the other way around.

Another cop-out is that we don't get to hear very much of his comedy routine at the club - partially because he's laughing so hard, there's that convenient nervous neurological condition again.  Or it's also possible that some screenwriter just found it hard to write "bad jokes" - funny jokes are easier to write, I think, but to create ones that are a particular level of bad.  Or so I suspect.  I don't know why, but I imagined that before becoming the Joker, his comedic style would be more observational, like Stephen Wright or Mitch Hedberg.  I guess that's just me, but that style of comedy would fit more with the symptoms of depression, right?

(Now if I were writing this film, I'd have Arthur Fleck perform at a comedy club called "The Laughter House" and then when his set bombed, he'd walk outside, spray-paint a big letter "S" in front of the name to change it to "Slaughter House", then he'd go back inside, lock the door and kill everyone inside.  That's my love of wordplay, I suppose, but I think that this could have been a very dramatic moment.)

I don't know, maybe this is the Joker origin that this new decade deserves - even though the film is set way back in 1981.  But the desire for attention on a talk show isn't all that different from some people's desire to find fame on social media, and then the "Eat the Rich" mobs at the end is very reminiscent of modern protests calling for economic equality.  But still, this doesn't feel like the Joker I know, and that alone turns what should have been a Grand Slam idea into sort of an inside-the-park home run.  Know what I mean?  It's still a run, and the score still increases, I just have some questions about the process that got it there.

Also starring Joaquin Phoenix (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Zazie Beetz (last seen in "Deadpool 2"), Frances Conroy (last seen in "Maid in Manhattan"), Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Guilt Trip"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Bill Camp (last seen in "Molly's Game"), Glenn Fleshler (last seen in "Suburbicon"), Leigh Gill, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "Red Sparrow"), Josh Pais (last seen in "The Famly Fang"), Marc Maron (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Dante Pereira-Olson (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), Carrie Louise Putrello, Brian Tyree Henry (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Gary Gulman, Chris Redd (last seen in "A Futile and Stupid Gesture"), Bryan Callen (last heard in "Planes: Fire & Rescue"), Rocco Luna, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Hannah Gross, Frank Wood, Sam Morril, Carl Lundstedt, Michael Benz, Ben Warheit, with a cameo from Justin Theroux (last seen in "Mute"), and archive footage of Fred Astaire (last seen in "Ghost Story"), Charlie Chaplin (last seen in "The Great Dictator").

RATING: 7 out of 10 rambling journal entries

Heist (2015)

Year 12, Day 20 - 1/20/20 - Movie #3,420

BEFORE: I took a little time today to check through the list of "1,001 Movies You Should See Before You Die", because every year they come out with a new edition of that book, and I've been tracking my progress.  There aren't many older films on the list that I still want to see, because the list is heavy with foreign films, arty films, and even some old silent movies, so except for the Bergman films that I want to see, anything before 1957 on that list doesn't really interest me - although "M" and "Grand Illusion" are still on my watchlist, I just have no way to link to them.  But every year it seems they tweak the list a little bit - some older films fall out of favor I guess, but mostly it seems they clear a few films that were added during the last decade to make room for last year's crop of films.  Sure enough, they dropped a couple pre-2000 films like "Three Kings" and "Magnolia", but also "Lincoln", "Spotlight", "The Revenant", "Hell or High Water", "The Jungle Book" (2016), "Jackie", "Manchester by the Sea" and "Arrival" - I'd dispute a couple of those, but who listens to me?  So 10 films that I've seen are gone from the new list, which put me behind.

BUT, they also cleared off 11 films that I HAVEN'T seen, which made more room for other recent films that I HAVE seen - like "Lady Bird", "The Shape of Water", "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri", "Mother", "Blade Runner 2049", "Get Out", "The Greatest Showman", "Black Panther", "Crazy Rich Asians", "A Star Is Born", "Avengers: Infinity War", "The Favourite", "Sorry to Bother You", "Vice" (2018) and "BlacKkKlansman" - that's 15 more in my favor, so my stats improved by 5 films overall, thanks to my being up on currently hot films.  Plus two films were added that are on my watchlist now, "Phantom Thread" and "Call Me By Your Name" - so now I've seen 425 of the 1,001 films, with 8 more of them on my watchlist.  Reaching 450 may be possible, but I doubt I'll make it to the halfway mark.

Sorry, but I'm just not interested in "Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler" from 1922 or "Storm Over Asia" from 1928 - who the hell cares?  I wish they'd clear out some of these films from the 1920's that nobody gives a damn about, except for a few hardcore film nerds, if they want to make more room for recent additions.  Anyway, Robert De Niro carries over again from "Once Upon a Time in America" (which also happens to be on that list) to another crime-based film today.

THE PLOT: A father without the means to pay for his daughter's medical treatment partners with a greedy bouncer to rob the casino where they work.  When things go awry, they're forced to hijack a city bus.

AFTER: At first it's easy to sort of dismiss this casino heist film, in which the robbery is followed by a long highway bus chase - so the first notion is to imagine that somebody just pitched "Ocean's 11 meets Speed" and honestly, that wouldn't be so far from wrong.  But there's a little more going on than just that.  It also reminds me quite a bit of the ending of "The Commuter", but the climax to that film took place on a derailed train, not a bus - still, the stand-off with cops, some of whom are corrupt, feels very similar to that one.  I think this one was released three years before "The Commuter", so maybe that film copied this one?

And there's a clever way to make the audience feel sympathetic for the robbers - just create a larger villain.  The "Ocean's 11" franchise used the same tactic, if they can get us to hate the casino owner, then by default we're sort of rooting for the robbers.  For good measure this one also throws in the fact that the daughter of the main antihero has a daughter in the hospital, and she needs a lifesaving operation that HAS TO be paid for by Friday, or she'll lose her chance at the operation.  Gotta call a NITPICK POINT here, because as bad as some health insurance is, I don't think too many hospitals operate on a cash basis.  And if one does, then I'd probably say to find another hospital.  We hear about hospital billing all the time, I think most hospitals will do an operation and then be willing to work out financing or an installment plan for a major operation, no?  Thankfully I've never had to worry about this, so I may be in the wrong here.

The other cagey way to make our anti-hero here seem a bit more heroic is to pair him up with much more ruthless teammates, ones that don't care very much about the hostages, ones who only have their eyes on the prize, no matter what happens.  Meanwhile former casino dealer Luke Vaughn actually has something of a conscience - he's still a potential thief but compared to both the casino owner and the other robbers, he's practically a saint by comparison.  He even hits up the casino boss to see if he can borrow the money before going through with the robbery - the answer is "No", of course, but you can't say he didn't try.

The film doesn't say where the casino is located, but since it's a riverboat one assume that it's located somewhere on or near the Mississippi River, perhaps.  Two years ago I went to a riverboat casino that was south of New Orleans, but some filming for this took place in Mobile, Alabama.  But other answers are possible - since the thieves were trying to get the bus to go to Galveston, Texas perhaps it was fictionally located somewhere in Louisiana not far from the Texas border.

There are a couple of other neat little tricks played in this film, compared in the dialogue to a card trick, sleight of hand - a magician is able to get you to watch what one hand is doing, and that's when he does something crafty with the other hand.  But I don't know about the "magic" trick performed here - I mean, sure, it's a way to get the money needed for the operation from one place to another.  But for the trick to have been set up that way, that would have required for Vaughn to KNOW that things were going to go wrong in a very particular way, and OK, maybe he was hedging his bets, but how could he have known?  The bus wasn't part of the original plan, remember - they had a getaway car waiting for them, how could he have known that the driver would bolt?  Sorry, NITPICK POINT number 2 right there.

And then NITPICK POINT 3 concerns a character lighting up a cigarette at the end very very close to where another character had been doused with gasoline just a few minutes before.  I'm super-paranoid about this at gas stations - I don't smoke but my wife does, and with this sort of thing it's best not to take any chances.  I wouldn't strike a match within at least a block's radius of gas fumes.

The film moves very quickly, it won't waste a lot of your time, and it's very clever, almost too clever.  By trying to impress us with the magic trick, logic ended up getting thrown out the window (and run over by the bus) at the end.  Points for the attempt though.

Also starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan (last seen in "Rampage"), Dave Bautista (last seen in "The Boss"), Morris Chestnut (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Kate Bosworth (last seen in "Movie 43"), Gina Carano (last seen in "Deadpool"), D.B. Sweeney (last seen in "Taken 2"), Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Stephen Cyrus Sepher, Tyson Sullivan, Christopher Rob Bowen, Lydia Hull (last seen in "Vice" (2015), Tyler Jon Olson (ditto), Scott Herman, Alyssa Julya Smith, Hawn Tran, Colin Lawless (last seen in "The Big Short"), Elizabeth Windley, Ritchie Montgomery (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Han Soto (last seen in "Logan").

RATING: 6 out of 10 SWAT team members

Once Upon a Time in America

Year 12, Day 19 - 1/19/20 - Movie #3,419

BEFORE: This WAS originally the slot I was going to use for "The Irishman", which meant that Kathrine Narducci would also have carried over from "The Wizard of Lies" - so it's also a bit funny that this film seems to share some DNA with "The Irishman", both films are decades-spanning crime sagas, and they also share two other actors in addition to De Niro.  So I stand by moving up "The Irishman" on the schedule, but really, it would have worked out much the same if I hadn't...the only real difference is that now I'm going to cram 33 films into January instead of 31 - and I guess maybe come November or December I'll finish 2 days earlier now.  But hey, more time for Christmas shopping maybe - I find it's best to plan WAY ahead for some things.

Robert De Niro carries over again from "The Wizard of Lies".

THE PLOT: A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.

AFTER: Two more things this film has in common with "The Irishman" - first, both films are much too long.  This one runs close to four hours, and that makes it tough to watch, you've got to block out the better part of a day to get through it, or spread it out over two days.  I started early (for me) at 11 pm the night before, on a Saturday, to maximize my chances of getting through it without falling asleep.  I also had extra Diet Mountain Dew standing by, just in case.  And I did make it all the way through (unlike "The Wizard of Lies", which bored me, I kept falling asleep at the halfway point, rewinding, then falling asleep again...) but now I'm wondering if it was completely worth the effort.

The second thing the two films share is that both stories jump around liberally in time, toggling between the present and the past.  Too many flashbacks for my taste, but I'm slowly (SLOWLY!) coming to understand the use of this technique to reveal information to the audience in a gradual way, that is, when the technique is properly used, and honestly, quite often, it's not.  When you have flashbacks-within-flashblacks, or multiple framing devices like in "The Irishman", things are bound to get confusing very easily.  "Once Upon a Time in America" starts and ends with its main character in an opium den in the 1930's, which suggests something about the cyclical nature of time and events, but also possibly implies that everything we've seen in-between is a drug-induced hallucination.  That's one interpretation, anyway.  (The shadow puppets in the Chinese theater also imply that everything we're seeing is just shadows of events, and that nothing is really real.)

The director, Sergio Leone, actually envisioned a story that was close to six hours long, but by then you're approaching mini-series length, like I think that's about the combined length of "The Godfather" and "The Godfather II".  The inability to screen or properly market a film of that length convinced him to trim it down to four hours, only that wasn't good enough for the studio.  After the European release, the studio cut out a random (?) hour and a half, and re-edited what remained into chronological order, without telling the director.  Since this film was envisioned as one that would skip around in time via flashbacks (and how it pains me to say this...) by putting the shots in linear narrative order, you mess with the director's vision, and what you gain by increasing the audience's understanding, you lose in artistic vision.  And I believe (again, it partially pains me to say this) that a director should (almost) always have final cut, because that's what they do - even if they screw up and make a mess of things, that's what they have the right to do.  (I say "almost" though, because of the rare instance like Josh Trank with 2015's "Fantastic Four", clearly there you're dealing with a very immature filmmaker and despite the mess the studio released, based on interviews it was much better than what Trank WANTED to release.)

(Interestingly, this all created a contradiction of sorts, where the European cut of "Once Upon a Time in America" was named one of the best films of 1984, and the American cut was reviewed as one of the WORST films of the same year.  Any Americans who heard about the film's success at Cannes and rushed out to see the film at their local theater were therefore soundly disappointed, or left scratching their heads.  So the film received zero Oscar nominations, and didn't really find an audience until the 229-minute version was released on VHS and DVD.)

Anyway, this is old-school filmmaking, where if you needed to make Robert De Niro look 30 years older, people didn't rely on multi-camera scanning methods and CGI effects, they had to use make-up for him to look old and gray.  I know, "The Irishman" used these effects to make him look younger, and to make De Niro look old they just...waited until he was old.  If that didn't take 30 years, I'd say it was a cheat.  But I think they did use SOME make-up to make him look older in "The Irishman", for the framing scenes where he was telling his story - but I think a lot of that was De Niro just being old.

By the same token, they had to make the Lower East Side of Manhattan look like it did in the 1930's - again, I think they used a lot of practical effects because back in 1984 they couldn't just take their footage to an effects house and digitally change it to match old photographs from the 1930's, they had to paint buildings and hang up a lot of laundry and maybe use a filter to make the film tone look all sepia-like - it was a lot of work, that's all I'm saying.  Not to mention blocking off the set so no modern cars would drive through it during the shoot.  But if you think about Manhattan neighborhoods, maybe some of them hadn't changed all that much over five decades, and the Lower East Side might have been one of those.  This would have been pre-gentrification and before all the hipsters took over the L.E.S. and starting running artisanal cheese shops and tattoo parlors and bike shops.

(The bar scene in which the teen gangsters accepts their money for torching the newstand, and then chooses a drunk to rob, was shot in McSorley's Ale House on 7th St., which was a frequent hang-out for NYU students back in the late 1980's, when I went to college there.  I guarantee you that in 1984, nobody who ran that bar had done one thing to change, upgrade or improve the place since at least the 1930's.)

The worst thing that resulted from the long running time, though, is probably the fact that the film starts with a number of enigmatic flash-forwards - the opium dream that Noodles has features a prominent ringing phone, for example, and then there's a quick cut-away to James Woods, and something about a car crash with three dead bodies being sent to the morgue.  What does it all mean? Well, by the time the film got around to some solid answers, honestly, I had forgotten the questions.  I had to stop, pause the film and force myself to think back to the opening sequence.  OK, clearly someone was going for "arty" here but it's very easy to bypass "arty" sometimes and end up in "hopelessly enigmatic" territory.

To discuss the film further, I really need to divulge some specifics, so here comes a rare SPOILER ALERT for a 36-year-old film.  If you've never had the occasion to watch this film since 1984, and hey, I feel you because I avoided it myself, then please go no further, because there are some plot points and twists I want to discuss.  I mean, sure, if you've got 4 hours to spare watch the film, but if you're planning to do that in the future, stop reading now.

OK, so Noodles loves Deborah, he takes her out on a very extravagant date, pays for a restaurant that's closed for the season to re-open JUST so they can have a fabulous dinner together, and then Noodles proposes to Deborah, but when she says no because she wants a career in Hollywood, he rapes her in the car?  I'm not following the logic here, even if he's very upset over her turning him down, there's no justification for this rape.  Even if I allow the fact that this is taking place in 1933, and men have antiquated attitudes about women's rights, AND even with the understanding that he raped a woman during an earlier robbery and that woman kind of seemed to enjoy it, there's still no justification for rape. Noodles is a violent person, Noodles made a mistake, it still seems like Noodles somehow thought that if he raped her, she would change her mind?  There's no scenario here that works, a man just doesn't rape a woman if he cares about her, it's not part of the formula.  Noodles may be a gangster, but he's not a sociopath - that's Max, he's the crazy one.  This is a very difficult part of the film to understand.

Then Noodles visits Deborah 35 years later and it raises more questions - they're civil to each other, so I guess they're just not going to talk about the rape?  Again, it was 1933, it was a different time, and we always view the past through the lens of the present, but it still doesn't track for me.  Rape wasn't allowable in 1933, not in 1984, and not today.  Plus there's this NITPICK POINT: Noodles ages 35 years between the times he sees Deborah, but she doesn't?  How does she still look like she's 20 years old?

Tangential to this is another non-logical point - why would a man who faked his own death then rise to a prominent position in the government, which could lead to someone checking out his background?  Wouldn't someone with his checkered past, looking for a fresh start, prefer some kind of job that would offer him more anonymity?  Then, assuming all of this made sense, which it doesn't, why would the answer to the problem of his past possibly being exposed be to hire his old friend to kill him?   How is THAT a good solution for all parties involved?  OK, great, nobody's going to find out that he used to be a gangster, but he'd be dead, so is that supposed to be an improvement?

There's also much debate also over the next best solution to the problem, which is to (apparently) commit suicide by jumping into a passing garbage truck, one that has the equivalent of a wood chipping in the back.  This is likewise enigmatic - like, did he really jump IN or did he jump on to the far side of the truck (garbage trucks usually have hand-holds and foot-holds so sanitation engineers can hang on the side.  For me, the answer is quite obvious, because even a man intentionally commiting suicide by garbage truck would probably scream in pain as the auger tore him to pieces.  No screams, therefore no suicide.

But again, it's possible that this whole film is some kind of drug-induced vision, so not everything necessarily has to make sense.  That's a double-edged sword though, because it forgives some mistakes but also messes with the story's overall relevance.  Still, it's a huge, ambitious story and clearly a lot of work went into it, even if it doesn't all add up properly in the end.

Also starring James Woods (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Elizabeth McGovern (last een in "The Commuter"), Treat Williams (last seen in "127 Hours"), Tuesday Weld (last seen in "The Cincinnati Kid"), Burt Young (last seen in "Betsy's Wedding"), Joe Pesci (last seen in "The Irishman"), Paul Herman (ditto), Danny Aiello (last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), William Forsythe (last seen in "88 Minutes"), James Hayden, Darianne Fluegel (last seen in "Pet Sematary II"), Larry Rapp, Dutch Miller, Robert Harper, Richard Bright (last seen in "The Sugarland Express"), Gerard Murphy (last seen in "Night and the City"), Amy Ryder, Angelo Florio, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran, Mike Monetti, Noah Moazezi, James Russo (last seen in "Black Mass"), Arnon Milchan, Marcia Jean Kurtz (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Estelle Harris (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Richard Foronji (last seen in "Repo Man"), Julie Cohen, Mario Brega.

RATING: 6 out of 10 babies in the maternity ward