Tag: batman (Page 1 of 3)

FADE IN: But NOT TOO MUCH because it’s Gotham City and so everything’s gotta be dark. The characters, the themes, and the cinematography. Maybe there’s some TORTURE happening? This seems like one of those movies where TORTURE plays a cheerful role. Let’s say there’s TORTURE.

TORTURER
I’m gonna shove your eardrums up
your butt.

TORTUREE
Must you?

TORTURER
Yes.

TORTUREE
Drat.

CUT TO: A CRIME SCENE IN A MANSION.

COPS do cop stuff. COMMISSIONER GORDON (played by THE GHOST OF PAUL SEYMOUR HOFFMAN) wears a trenchcoat with a sense of purpose. A YOUNG COP walks up to GORDON.

YOUNG COP
Maybe we can handle this one
ourselves, Commissioner.

GORDON
Nope.

YOUNG COP
Our detectives are top-notch, Commish.
And this is not a Batman-level crime. It’s a guy
with a knife sticking out of his face.

GORDON
Thanks for reminding me. Don’t let anyone
touch that knife ’til Batman gets here. I like to let
him fondle all the evidence before a legal chain
of command is established.

YOUNG COP
Sir, the perpetrator left his wallet. We have his
driver’s license. We could just–

BATMAN (played by ANSEL ELGORT) just kinda moseys up.

BATMAN
Knife in the face, huh?

YOUNG COP
You just walk into rooms full of people now?
What happened to clandestine meetings on
rooftops?

BATMAN
Rooftops? ROOFTOPS?

Batman GRABS one of the COPS and BEATS HIM ALMOST FULLY TO DEATH.

GORDON
Aw, y’shouldn’t have said “rooftops.”

YOUNG COP
What the FUCK?

BATMAN
ROOFTOPS!? ROOFTOPS!?

GORDON
He’s been through some rooftop-related
trauma. You can’t blame the boy. Come here,
buddy. It’s okay.

Commissioner Gordon and Batman HUG THERAPEUTICALLY.

BATMAN
He said “rooftops.”

GORDON
He didn’t mean it.

BATMAN
Sorry about the cop.

GORDON
Oh, don’t worry about him. It’s
Gotham. Cops die here a lot.

YOUNG COP
I cannot believe this is okay.

BATMAN
I wanna go punch a clown.

GORDON
What a good idea! You go punch a clown.
But, hey! Not just any clown! Remember
what happened last time?

BATMAN
I ruined that child’s birthday.

GORDON
Honest mistake. But let’s avoid making
it again going forward.

BATMAN
Are you my dad?

GORDON
No, I’m not.

Batman PUNCHES A HOLE IN THE DRYWALL and stomps off.

GORDON
Where would we be without him?

YOUNG COP
Better off. We’d be better off. The man’s
presence makes all situations worse.

GORDON
He’s gonna go punch a clown to teach the
city a lesson.

YOUNG COP
That’s it. I’m transferring to Metropolis.

CUT TO:

The STREETS OF GOTHAM which, despite a new director being in charge, still look EXACTLY LIKE THE STREETS OF CHICAGO. Batman is DRIVING his ROCKET-POWERED TANK-CAR up on the SIDEWALKS and THROUGH THE HOMES OF INNOCENTS.

CUT TO:

Another LOCATION BATHED IN PITCH DARKNESS. We can maybe if we squint make out a BAD GUY (played by BEN MENDELSOHN).

BAD GUY
You’ll never defeat my overly-elaborate, mostly-
symbolic schemes, Batman.

BATMAN
Give me a clue.

BAD GUY
What now?

BATMAN
A clue. It’s only fair.

BAD GUY
Fair? I don’t play fair. I’m a super-villain.

BATMAN
C’moooooooon.

BAD GUY
Absolutely not!

BATMAN
Li’l hint. C’mon. Li’l hint.

BAD GUY
You’re a terrible detective.

BATMAN
Tell ya what: I’ll try to guess your plan,
and you tell me if I’m hot or cold.

BAD GUY
I’m leaving.

The Bad Guy LEAVES. Batman PUNCHES THE DRYWALL.

CUT TO:

Seems about time for a CAR CHASE, I suppose. Maybe some HELICOPTER STUFF.

CUT TO:

A BUNCH OF CLOWNS for some reason.

Batman BEATS ONE OF THEM HALF TO DEATH.

BATMAN
Wait. Are you guys birthday clowns or
murder clowns?

CLOWNS
Murder.

BATMAN
Oh, good.

Batman BEATS THE CLOWN THE REST OF THE WAY TO DEATH.

CUT TO:

CATWOMAN (played by ZAZIE BEATZ’ AFRO) is maybe robbing an ART MUSEUM, but it’s tough to tell because everything’s so fucking dark.

BATMAN
Stop doing crime so we can date.

CATWOMAN
No, I like crime better than you.

BATMAN
But I’m VENGEANCE!

CATWOMAN
What does that even mean?

BATMAN
I personify the spirit–

CATWOMAN
I mean, you sound like a goofy goofball
when you say shit like that. That’s why Poison Ivy
ghosted you.

BATMAN
–of veng…I GHOSTED HER.

CATWOMAN
Not what I heard.

BATMAN
It was a mutual ghosting!

Batman starts CRYING and PUNCHING SO MUCH FUCKING DRYWALL.

CATWOMAN
Please stop that.

BATMAN
If I reveal my secret identity to you, will
you touch it?

CATWOMAN
No.

BATMAN
Touch it. I’m rich.

CATWOMAN
Get away from me, Bruce.

BATMAN
HOW DID YOU KNOW!?

CATWOMAN
Oh, everyone knows. Who else could you be?

FADE OUT: Or maybe the screen just remains dark.

POST-CREDIT SCENE: Batman BEATS SEVERAL MORE CLOWNS TO DEATH.

• Think of how much buttfucking must have gone on in Sodom.
• 5,000 years later, and we’re still talking about it.
• Those people fucked butts, man.
• I thought you were talking about the Batman movies.
• Eventually.
• Now, please.
• Oh, fine.
• The Batman movies–Batman Agonistes, The One With The Joker, and The Shitty One–directed by Christopher Nolan and his impeccable education are both much better and far worse than you remember.
• Sweet sweaty Jesus, do these movies take themselves seriously.
• Enthusiasts, there are Themes.
• Big Questions are asked.
• About chaos and fear and panic, and the immovable burden of the past, and guilt, and what a man owes to his city, and ninjas.
• The first picture, Suddenly Batman, is simply chockablock with ninjas.
• Far more than you recall: the first half of the movie is ninja-centered.
• They got the swords, the pajamas, the whole bit.
• Liam Neeson’s on top of a mountain.
• You can’t find ninjas on Craigslist; you have to go to the top of a mountain.
• And Liam’s like, “Hey, Bruce, you’re from Gotham, right?”
• And Bruce is all, “Yuh-huh. Go Knights!”
• “Oh, shit, bro. We’re totally gonna kill everybody there.”
• “Bro! Not cool! Why?”
• “Dude, I forgot to tell you: we’re not just ninjas, we’re also kind of the Illuminati.”
• “Not cool!”
• And so on.
• That’s all three movies: the bad guys’ plans always boil down to “I wanna teach Gotham a lesson.”
• Mwah-ha-ha.
• Anyway, Bruce Wayne was on the mountain in the first place because his parents were shot, and he was like, “Fuck you, crime,” and he wandered around the globe learning how to punch poor people.
• Which, let’s face it, is not the healthy way to deal.
• Li’l Orphan Annie didn’t hit any poor people.
• Daddy Warbucks’ financial machination probably starved a bunch, and I’m sure he called the Pinkertons out on strikers a bunch of times, but Annie didn’t turn herself into a fearsome symbol of harsh justice who was also a ninja.
• Annie just hung out with Sandy the dog and sang songs with her fellow urchins.
• Whereas Bruce Wayne worked through his trauma by looping cable around policemen’s ankles and chucking them off roofs.
• But he doesn’t kill, or use guns.
• Except when he kills (Batman kills so many people) or uses guns (the Batmobile, Batcycle, and Bathoverdrone all have literal cannons on them).
• Batman has a code.
• This is what makes him different than the bad guys.
• Also: the looming.
• Nobody looms like Batman.
• Darth Vader is good, but not like Batman.
• We are told that Batman has no superpowers, but this is a lie.
• Batman possesses psionic abilities that make everyone within a hundred-foot radius forget they’re holding guns.
• I cannot count the number of times I shouted at the screen, “JUST SHOOT HIM, DIPSHIT!”
• “NO, DON’T SWING THE RIFLE AT HIM!”
• So many opportunities to put a bullet in the man, and every single time: form a circle around him and wait to get awkwardly punched.
• The punching gets better in the second and third flicks, but the first movie’s fights are just fast cutting, mostly because once again Batman couldn’t actually move.
• This was a feature of both the Burton and Schumacher films, too: ever since Adam West took off the spandex, the Dark Knight has been armored up in latex and rubber to the point of immobility.
• And this was 2005, mind you.
• We had put a man on the moon.
• Surely someone could have figured out how to engineer a ball joint into the neck of Batman’s cowl.
• Just do a helmet on top of a turtleneck.
• But, no, we get a Batman that staggers around like Tor Johnson in a graveyard.
• There is also the yelling.
• Christian Bale’s bellow in Batman Bayou is positively restrained when compared with the (computer-enhanced) silly shouting he gets up to in the second and third flicks.
• “HGGGGGGGGGH!”
• That was an actual line in the script.
• Batman has two superpowers: the gun thing and not needing a lozenge.
• Try doing the voice; you’ll be hacking up blood in seconds.
• Batman Begginstrips is a podgy movie that, like the others, makes not one lick of sense but it does introduce the best part of the Nolan trilogy.
• The Tumbler.
• 
• Look at her.
• Smell the justice coming off of her.
• Fuck her tailpipe.
• I think there’s five or six tailpipes.
• Fuck all her tailpipes.
• You’re getting weird again.
• Shh.
• The Tumbler (and the skittery rumble of her soundtrack) was the best part about the first Nolan film, save for Cillian Murphy’s soft, kissable lips.
• Like a cross between an F-117 and a dune buggy designed by Frank Gehry, the Tumbler had a secret weapon, and that was that it existed and actually tore ass across Chicago.
• There was, to be sure, some CG bullshit, but the vehicle was not created entirely of pixels inside some computer in the San Fernando Valley.
• Like this piece of shit:
• 
• That’s from the Justice League movie, and the picture is of a toy because they did not build a real Batmobile this time.
• There was a prop created:
• 
• But it didn’t have an engine, and so all the shots in the movie were not shots at all, but generations.
• Which is, admittedly, 9,000,000th on the list of problems with Justice League, but it bears pointing out.
• This new one is clearly just the Tumbler having gone through Snyderfication, a process by which all thought and color is vacuumed from an idea and regurgitated over a classic rock soundtrack.
• Look at those back wheels.
• Does the whole casing ride up and down with the shocks, because there’s no room for the tires to bounce.
• Wouldn’t that design make the structure inherently weaker and more prone to attack?
• You’re dumb and I hate you, Batmobile from Justice League.
• Forgettable were the Schumacher versions
• 
• You’re trying too hard, Schumacher Batmobile.
• Also, the placement of your front wheels only makes sense if you’re only going to drive backwards.
• And, like Snyder’s piece of garbage, this design apes the previous (and creatively fresh) iteration, which was…
• 
• The Burtonmobile.
• Or, as some refer to it, THE PHALLUS OF JUSTICE.
• As with the Tumbler, the Phallus was driveable, but far more fragile.
• It’s a Chevy chassis with a shit-ton of fiberglass on top, and the jet engine is not real.
• Most engineers will advise against placing a jet directly in front of the driver.
• The vehicle also turns about as well as a Ukrainian diner.
• Also very tough to reverse.
• There is literally no way to parallel park this car.
• Lot of drawback, if we’re honest.
• Unlike…
• 
• Ah, yeah.
• The original onscreen (forgetting the serials from the 40’s) Batmobile is still a fan favorite, and why shouldn’t she be?
• Look at her.
• Fuck her tailpipe.
• STOP THAT.
• It’s a Lincoln.
• A concept car from 1955 called the Futura, and that certainly would have been an apt name in 1955.
• Dig those swoops and curve, Daddy-o.
• The studio that designed Alfa Romeos built it and charged Lincoln $250,000 for it; they hauled it around to car shows and loaned it out to movies, and sometimes in the 60’s sold it to a guy named George Barris for a buck.
• He made the hood a little gnarlier, and sunk a flamethrower in the trunk so that the car would shoot fire as it sped away from the camera, and painted the Batsymbol on the doors.
• Took him a week-and-a-half.
• Shit.
• I was writing about the Nolan movies.
• Why do you let me go on tangents like that?
• All of this is your fault.
• Anyway, there are other characters besides Batman in these movies.
• You got Alfred, played by Michael Caine, who is on the verge of blubbering in every scene.
• A bemused Morgan Freeman.
• Gary Oldman’s American accent.
• Gary Oldman’s American mustache.
• Rutger Hauer and Eric Roberts, for some reason.
• Nestor Carbonell’s mascara.
• There are also bad guys with whom Batman squabbles.
• The underwhelming Scarecrow, played by Cillian Murphy’s bottomless eyes and bedroom lips, and Liam Neeson, who is playing “Liam Neeson if he were a ninja.”
• The iconic Joker, played by Heath Ledger when he was alive, and Two-Face, who also does stuff, I guess; his makeup looks a lot better than Tommy Lee Jones’ did, I’ll give him that.
• And then the absurd Bane, played by Tom Hardy’s costume and neck muscles, along with Marion Cottilard, who is hot and evil, and also Cillian Murphy comes back for a cameo and remains delicious.
• Plus Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.
• She’s not a bad guy.
• She’s morally ambiguous.
• That’s what you call a bad guy who is also a hot chick.
• There are two other women in the Nolan Batman trilogy, leaving aside Bruce’s murdered mother (who has no lines) and Jim Gordon’s wife, who spends all of her screen time standing in doorways worrying.
• They both play the same character because, hey, a chick’s a chick.
• Suri’s mom is in the first one.
• Married to Tom Cruise.
• She was in Dawson’s Creek.
• I think maybe she was also in an Adam Sandler movie.
• …
• …
• KATIE HOLMES!
• I knew it would come to me.
• She’s an abominable actress, but her face is crooked in an appealing way and she has a hefty bosom.
• This makes her morally ambiguous.
• Katie is replaced in the role of Rachel Dawes, no-nonsense District Attorney, in the second film by Maggie Gyllenhall and I cannot lie to you, Enthusiasts: I do not enjoy looking at Maggie Gyllenhall.
• She has a droopy face.
• As if her features might slide off her skull at any moment.
• Then, she blows up.
• This happens because Joker has forced the Batman to make a choice harbleyarble whatever.
• The second one is dumb, but the third is just stupid.
• All the cops?
• Every single cop in the city went down into the sewers at once, enabling Bane to trap them down there?
• Stop that.
• That is foolishness and I will roll my eyes at you, Christopher Nolan.
• Oh, and Neil Patrick Harris or whatever that kid’s name is.
• Joseph Gordon Levitt.
• It’s a hard pass from me on JGL, dog.
• You can smell the child actor all over him.
• And there’s a nuclear bomb but Batman threw it into the bay so everything’s fine (except if the wind was blowing in that day) and everyone got to live happily ever after.
• Except for Heath Ledger.

Into every life, Enthusiasts, a little pain must fall.

Rain.

SHUT UP I HATE YOU.

Really?

I’m emotionally naked right now.

Ew.

I was going to thank all the Enthusiasts for their various kindnesses during this, my week of tragedies happening to me through no fault of my own.

You learn nothing from your failures.

And you interrupted me. I was going to be all poetical. Some of that poignant bullshit I throw in there when fuckers aren’t looking. Then some dick jokes. Maybe a guest star or two. All my usual tricks. The Enthusiasts have been sweet and consoling, and some of them gave me stuff.

You love stuff.

All of my favorite things are stuff. And money. Some lovely humans sent money, and money is the best thing and money is the best stuff. Money is the king of both of those categories, large and all-encompassing as they are. You know what you can do with money?

Everything?

Literally everything not ruled out by the underlying rules of the universe. You can build dams with it, or buy ice cream, or have people boiled. Money’s like Green Lantern’s ring: it makes wishes come true.

Same color, too.

That’s deep.

It’s not.

Fine, whatever. Can you go, please? I want to be nice to the nice people. I’m planning on treating them to something special.

This will end in tears. Oh, fuck you. DO NOT bring Sleepy fucking Batman out here.

It’s not Sleepy Batman.

Good.

It’s Sleepy Batman’s sidekick, Emotionally Scarred Robin.

“HOW DID NONE OF YOU SEE WE WERE BEING ABUSED?”

This is not okay.

“We were CHILDREN, man! He kept us in a CAVE and made us FIGHT MONSTERS!”

Calm down, Emotionally Scarred Robin. Wait, we?

“He went through Robins like normal people go through lightbulbs. Like how a dozen dogs played Lassie. He was still getting my name wrong when he threw me at Killer Croc. I was 12.”

I’m sorry you went through that. Hey, at least there wasn’t any sexual abuse.

“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? LOOK AT THESE SHORTS HE MADE ME WEAR!”

That’s no good.

I thoroughly disapprove of this new character.

No, he’s great. A child with PTSD. What could be funnier?

This was your plan to thank people for, among other things, sending you a computer?

Yes, it was.

I quit.

You can’t.

I know.

GOTHAM – NIGHT – EXT.

COMMISSIONER GORDON and a UNIFORMED COP stand next to the BAT SIGNAL.

They are eating pizza.

COP
I’m just saying that we ordered the pie after
turned on the signal, sir.

COMMISSIONER GORDON
He’ll be here. Maybe there’s traffic.

COP
It’s three in the morning and he has a
tank, sir. And a plane. And a boat.

COMMISSIONER GORDON
What’s your name, officer?

COP
Jenkins, sir.

COMMISSIONER GORDON
Shut the fuck up, Jenkins.

The BAT SIGNAL pops and fizzles ominously.

COP
How long is this thing supposed to be on?

COMMISSIONER GORDON
It’s getting really hot.

BATCAVE – INT.

ALFRED check under tables and desks, then finds SLEEPY BATMAN curled up in the back-back of the BAT STATION WAGON.

He pounds on the window.

ALFRED
Are you not wearing your CPAP machine?

SLEEPY BATMAN
Dude, I just can’t wake up.

ALFRED
Bane just ate the mayor.

SLEEPY BATMAN
Well, then, there’s no real rush to get there,
is there? I’ll wake up early and take care of it
tomorrow morning.

ALFRED
Gotham needs you, sir.

SLEEPY BATMAN
I’m just bushed.

Stop this. Again. Stop this. There’s no joke here.

I’ll find one if I keep typing.

You won’t. There is no meat on this particular bone.

Let me explain this to you; I see you don’t understand the humor.

I can’t find the humor.

It’s Batman.

Got you.

And he’s sleepy.

Fuck you.