Batman Returns (1992)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael “Greatest of All Time” Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher “Yeah, But Imagine If I Had Been Playing The Scarecrow” Walken 

Have I Seen it Before: So, so many times.

Did I Like It: I’ll do you one further. Not only is it a great movie—even if it intentionally plays fast and loose with the core of Batman—it may be damn psychic.

But before I get to the film’s prescience, let’s talk a little bit about the movie in the context of the time it was released. One supposes that Warner Bros. wanted to reassemble as much of the team responsible for Batman (1989) as possible, and were willing to just about anything to get Michael Keaton and Tim Burton to acquiesce where they might have otherwise been disinterested in the prospect of returning to the batcave. 

So Warner Bros. decided to let them do whatever the hell they wanted as long as it featured the Penguin, an action set piece with the Batmobile, and was ready for summer 1992.

They delivered on all of those promises, and went completely nuts with everything else. In a movie essentially meant to entertain children, there sure is a lot of filicide, borderline S&M, and biting of Republican noses*. I can almost see why McDonalds got all bet out of shape in the summer of ’92. Maybe that means I’m getting older, but we’re treated to an unashamedly idiosyncratic movie in place of what could have been a throughly bland summer blockbuster. The Schumacher of it all that was to follow proves pretty conclusively that this movie was a special treat that is unlikely to come 

But in the twenty-five years since the film’s release, it has taken on a new life.

Now, I don’t want to say that there is some modern parable in the story of a woman beset by a crushing degree of sexual violence and harassment, while the rest of society is slowly burning under the caprice of a malevolent homunculi trying to grab all the political power he can before laying siege to everything in sight…

But I could.   

*Watch that movie again and tell me that each and every person supporting The Penguin (DeVito) in his bid for Mayor of Gotham isn’t a Republican, and I’ll be able to tell you haven’t been paying attention. Oswald Means Order, indeed.

Beetlejuice (1988)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Michael (f’ing) Keaton, Winona Ryder, Geena Davis, Alec Baldwin, Jeffery Jones, Glenn Shadix, Robert Goulet, Dick Cavett… Christ, the cast on this picture is bonkers.

Have I Seen it Before: It is a core member of the “VHS tapes I wore down to the point of evaporation during childhood” association. 

Did I Like It: It’s a weird movie, but that’s more of an objective statement, isn’t it?

Beetlejuice—Tim Burton’s second feature—is about death. Again, that seems like a pretty objective statement. Perhaps it is about death in the same way that Young Frankenstein (1974) is about neurosurgery. And yet, over dozens of viewings in the late 80s and early 90s, that never seemed to be what the film was about. If you were to ask me in my first decade of life what the story of the film actually is, and I would probably tell you that some people wander around a movie for the better part of an hour before Michael Keaton shows up and the real movie begins. This may be because a) I was more familiar with the ensuing cartoon series based on the movie, that transformed Beetlejuice (Keaton) and Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) from the lecherous demon in search of a suicidal child bride into a pair of wacky pals and b) I wasn’t quite ready to comprehend the idea of death at the age of five.

And yet, I can kind of get where I missed the idea way back when. The whole movie attaches itself to a pointedly nebulous aesthetic. The football team is out of left field, especially when they’re in the last shot of the picture. Why do dead people get sent to Saturn? Why is it a huge public health issue in the deceased community? Why has no one noticed Sand Worms traveling the surface of Saturn? Why did the sandworm appear out of nowhere at the Maitland/Deetz residence? That one’s a bit of deus ex machina, right? Don’t get me started on the fact that this may be the only film in existence which is regularly uncertain about the spelling of its title.

And so the film exists in a state of contradiction, often bewildering, but just as frequently charming. It might be the key case study in my Michael Keaton Theory. (Which postulates that a film is automatically ten percent better than it would have been otherwise. It works wonders in cases like Robocop (2014), and brings the rottentomatoes score of a movie like Multiplicty (1996) into the mid-eighties).

Another thought that only just now occurred to me on this screening: So odd that Burton directed this as sort of a warm up to Batman (1989) and didn’t cast Baldwin as the Dark Knight the next year. I mean, I’m grateful. Baldwin at this point in his career is too-on-the-nose for the “dance of the freaks” Burton was intent to bring to the screen, but the fact that the studio didn’t insist—or, in the alternative, Burton was able to bypass their insistence—is sort of freaky.

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985)

Director: Tim Burton

Cast: Paul Reubens, Elizabeth Daily, Mark Holton, Diane Salinger

Have I Seen it Before: Many, Many Times.

Did I Like It: There’s a reason Pee-Wee and Tim Burton have hung around in our natural consciousness. It is this movie.

It’s so rare that a movie can be so steeped in old sensibilities (Bob Hope road pictures, Bond movies, Godzilla, Beach Party pictures, and Chaplin’s Little Tramp can all be found in the DNA) and blaze such a trail for movie comedies yet to come. From Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) to Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990, and another favorite), to even <this movie>, Big Adventure’s influence is all around us.

The first few minutes of the movie are so chockfull of imagination (and low budget animation to boot!) that upon first viewing, one couldn’t help but be forgiven for assuming that the movie won’t let up from there. 

Yes, Batman (1989) is what cemented Burton’s reputation as the occasional maker of undisputed box office charm, but both this and Ed Wood (1994) (his two films that I think age the best) tell us that his first and main love were the sensibilities of weird B-pictures. I wished he would keep making films like this, instead of the watered down gothic fantasies that he must think Hollywood demands of him. The fact that Danny Elfman doesn’t write more scores like this is kind of depressing as well.

Pee-Wee’s relationship with his bike is such a purely Spielbergian idea, but refracted through the lenses of Burton and Reubens, are able to go in far more wry directions. I remember being a boy and looking at my bike like that, even if it couldn’t do all of the things that Pee-Wee’s rig could. If I sold the rights to my life story, I’d probably want James Brolin circa 1985 to play me, too. The movie celebrates the obsessive, the spazzy, and the myopic elements within us all, and never loses sight of the fun in the journey.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I don’t want to hear your excuses. But what? Everyone I know has a big “but…” C’mon, Simone. Let’s talk about your big “but.”