Christmas with Batman and Sherlock Holmes

Good dialogue is hard to come by these days. Too often it feels as if people in movies don’t talk realistically, or are just saying whatever explanatory dialogue is necessary for the viewer to understand something. This is partly due to the limitations of film as a medium, since there’s no way to look directly into the mind of a character and see what he or she is thinking, short of using a narrator, which many films do not have. Literature does not have this problem, since it is able to enter the minds of characters more easily. (Depending on what kind of narrator you use, anyway, but that’s a literary discussion for another time.)

But what does all of this have to do with Christmas? Nothing, particularly, I just wanted to convey how much I appreciate well-written and well-delivered dialogue. I was thinking about this last night when I watched “Christmas With the Joker,” the Christmas episode of Batman: The Animated Series, which I watched religiously when I was but a lad and still enjoy to this day.

After the Joker makes a typically-ludicrous escape from Arkham Asylum, this time via rocket-powered Christmas tree, Batman is paranoid on Christmas Eve that Joker is going to try something. Robin, ever the optimist, tells him he’s being paranoid, reasoning that “Even scum spend the holidays with their families.” Batman is unconvinced however, so Robin makes a deal with him that if they go out on patrol and Gotham is quiet, then they’ll go home, have Christmas dinner, and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Batman considers this, then says, “You know, I’ve never seen that. I could never get past the title.”

I love this. It’s great. For one thing, it’s funny. It makes you laugh. For another, it’s well-delivered. Kevin Conroy, who voices Batman, and Loren Lester, who voices Robin, are both fantastic, and give their lines a lot of emotion. Third, it tells you about each character’s personality. Robin is cheerful and upbeat, Batman is dour and grumpy. And fourth, connecting to what I was talking about earlier, it feels natural. It’s a conversation that two actual human beings could really have (outside of the context of superheroes and escaped supervillains, anyway).

I love that little exchange so much that I just had to point it out. But moving on to the rest of the episode, Batman of course turns out to be right about the Joker, who has kidnapped Commissioner Gordon, reporter Summer Gleeson, and crusty Detective Harvey Bullock and plans to kill them if Batman can’t figure out where he is by midnight. All of this is conveyed via Joker’s television broadcast, which takes the form of one of those cheesy Christmas specials hosted by some famous guy. I don’t really know how else to describe one of those cheesy specials, I think that kind of thing was maybe a little bit before my time. Regardless, Joker’s Christmas special is complete with cheesy one-liners, canned laughter, and Words From Our Sponsor. He even wears a green turtleneck and a red sweater instead of his usual purple suit, although the purple pants remain in place.

Christmas-related shenanigans ensue, including the Dynamic Duo fighting off some gigantic if apparently poorly-constructed mechanical nutcrackers, and Batman whacking a bunch of little Joker-airplanes with a baseball bat, leading to the somewhat obvious joke from Robin, “They don’t call you BATman for nothing!” ZING!

Come to think of it, I have no idea what remote-controlled Joker-airplanes have to do with Christmas, but music from the Nutcracker plays in the background during that scene so what the heck.

They eventually track down the Joker, where he has his three captives suspended precariously over, what else, a giant bubbling vat of acid (there were a lot of giant bubbling vats of acid on this show). He tosses Batman a present and tells him to open it. He cautiously does, despite Robin’s warnings, and…a pie comes out of the box and splats in his face, and Joker laughs hysterically.

Think about this for a second. Think about all of the things that Joker could have put in that box. A shotgun to blow Bats’ head off. A bomb to blow him up. Some kind of horrible Joker nerve gas or something. But no. It’s a pie. Splat. Maybe I’m overthinking this, I dunno. Batman and Joker really do have kind of a symbiotic relationship with each other, it almost seems like Joker doesn’t want to kill Batman (Christopher Nolan would explore this later in The Dark Knight, of course).

But despite what that may or may not say about the nature of the twisted relationship between these two great adversaries, the episode ends with the hostages rescued, Joker back in Arkham (you’d think they could keep him there for longer than five minutes at a time) maniacally singing Christmas carols, and Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson back home at Wayne Manor, having just finished “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “And it is a wonderful life,” Dick says. “It… has its moments,” Bruce admits with a grin.

Next up is the 80’s British television adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” starring the inimitable Jeremy Brett as the famous detective. I enjoyed the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock movies well enough, but for my money Jeremy Brett is and forever shall be the greatest screen incarnation of Conan Doyle’s most famous creation. Every movement, every gesture, every line of dialogue is so perfectly contained and controlled. It had been a while since I had last watched one of Brett’s Holmes episodes, and he reminded me a lot of Alan Rickman in how he is able to convey so much with relatively little movement and a very clipped way of speaking.

The story concerns a famous jewel, the titular Blue Carbuncle, which has gone from owner to owner, with many people murdering whoever the current owner was in order to obtain it. It is currently owned by some rich, stuck-up baroness or countess or something, until it is stolen from her and finds its way into the gizzard of what was doubtless a very confused Christmas goose.

The story is composed of how the carbuncle came to be in the goose’s crop, which of course entails the identity of the person who put it there and how he came to subsequently lose the bird with such an important item lodged in its gullet.

The Blue Carbuncle is a fun story, I think it’s one of Conan Doyle’s less dark ones. There are no nasty murders or general creepiness, aside from the carbuncle’s previous owners all being murdered. It’s also a fun Christmas story, with lots of talk about the Christmas Goose and whatnot (“The Christmas Geese” would be a good name for a rock band). It’s so odd now to think about carrying a dead goose around by the neck with the body slung over your shoulder like Santa’s sack of presents.

Watched back to back, “Christmas With The Joker” and “The Blue Carbuncle” make for a fun Christmas double feature, and if you have them both handy I suggest you give it a try.

As a side note, on Christmas Eve I am going to post about the Greatest Christmas Movie Of All Time, which also happens to be the Greatest Movie Of All Time, period. So keep an eye out for that if you’re interested.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a movie to watch.

Bane’s Tears

It was totally worth it.

That was my first thought once the movie was over. It was completely, totally, absolutely worth it. All the hype, all the buzz, all the long months of rabid anticipation have paid off.

I could tell you a lot of things about “The Dark Knight Rises.” I could tell you about how epic it is in scale. I could tell you about how it’s technically flawless. I could tell you about how great the acting is. About how Michael Caine doesn’t get much screen time but easily warrants a Best Supporting Actor nomination, if there were any justice in the world. About how Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman provides a bit of levity in an otherwise incredibly dark story, or about how every time Bane speaks, chills will run down your spine.

I could tell you about all of these things.

But I won’t.

If you’ve read any reviews of this film, you’ve probably heard about all of these things already anyway, and from people much more experienced in describing them than I.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about what this film meant to me.

To put it simply, it meant a lot. Christopher Nolan’s entire Batman trilogy has been something of a dream come true for me and for plenty of other Bat-fans. It’s meant a return to prominence for the Dark Knight, and a return to the character’s dark, serious roots. I walked out of the theater after having seen Batman Begins in 2005 with the incredibly gratifying sense that, after nearly two decades of mediocre-to-terrible Batman films, my hero had finally been done right.

I’ve been a dedicated Bat-fan ever since I got my very first Batman action figure. As best as I can figure, this was around 1992, when Batman Returns was in theaters. I had no idea then who Batman was, all I knew was that my uncle was very kindly going to buy me a toy, and the dude with the pointy ears looked coolest. I still have that action figure. His joints are loose and his colors are faded, but he’s still kicking.

The biggest part of my Bat-education when I was a kid was the still-awesome Batman Animated Series, which I think ran in its original incarnation from around 1992 to around 1994. I could look that up, but I’m lazy so I’m not going to.

Man that show was awesome. To this day, the voices of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill as the Joker are the voices I hear in my head whenever I read a Batman comic. I remember that show also scared the hell out of me sometimes — there were a few episodes that were incredibly creepy. The entire series recently become available on DVD, and I had fun reliving those memories. That series is also the primary reason I have always had a huge crush on Catwoman, and needless to say, Anne Hathaway was a worthy successor to the Animated Series’ Catwoman, who had always been my favorite.

But enough with the nostalgia. I’ve seen “Rises” three times now (once in IMAX, which was AWESOME) and I can safely say that anyone who tells you they were disappointed by it is completely full of shit.

Aside from the sheer dizzying scale of the film, here’s part of what makes it so impressive: it feels like a natural continuation of the story begun in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. In so many cases, sequels feel tacked-on or unnecessary, and rarely make any sense plotwise. Take the Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, all of which were largely unnecessary and mostly incomprehensible.

Not so with The Dark Knight Rises. It builds upon the story begun in the previous two films in a way that feels organic and logical. Everything that happened in BB and TDK is important and has an effect on the story of the third film. So many times with sequels, the story that was established in the earlier films is ignored or restructured in order to make room for a half-assed plot in a movie that would never be as good as the original in the first place (look at Spider-Man 3 for an example of this). This is not the case with Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film. Everything that happened in the previous two films is acknowledged and unchanged, which makes these three films feel cohesive and strongly connected to each other, like they’re really all part of the same story.

That’s really all I have to say on the film for now. There’s plenty more I could say about the plot, but I won’t give it away for those of you who haven’t seen it yet (and if you haven’t, seriously, go see it ASAP). Between Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy and the similarly excellent “Arkham Asylum” and “Arkham City” Batman games, it is a good time to be a Bat-fan.

A word about Bane. I’ve read some reviews and such online that didn’t like Bane, the movie’s primary villain. That his voice was too hard to understand or his character was underdeveloped or some such. I disagree. While there are some differences between Bane’s portrayal in this film and his comic book backstory, I can easily forgive those differences. The version of Bane in this film makes sense because it is so strongly connected to the previous two films. And even if his backstory isn’t the same as it was in the comic book, it doesn’t really matter because the essence of the character remains unchanged.

Tom Hardy’s performance in the role reminded me of Hugo Weaving as V in V for Vendetta, since the mask he’s wearing for the entirety of the film means that you can’t see his facial expressions. But give Hardy and Weaving a lot of credit, both of them invest a lot of emotion into characters that could seem like mindless automatons. Both performances are strongly dependent on body language and vocal inflections, and in my opinion, both actors knocked it out of the park. Watch Bane during the final battle with Batman, and as how he becomes more desperate, he starts to fight more ferociously, like a wounded animal. It’s something I didn’t really notice the first time I saw the film, which is why you really need to see it more than once. And in the end, a single tear from Bane is enough to humanize the most monstrously evil cinematic villain since, well, since the last Batman movie.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a movie to watch (namely, The Dark Knight Rises).