Movies I Watched in April & May 2025
Batman Forever
1995, Joel Schumacher dir.
I've been banging the drum about this movie in chats and in person for years. I love this movie. I will fight you about this movie. And Val Kilmer, at time of writing, just died.
So of course I rewatched it.
This movie is not subtle, but it took a swing at doing something with the character of Batman. I love Keaton's Batman as much as anyone else. That first Burton movie is the first VHS I remember owning. I heard Jeff Gerstmann say on a youtube video recently that it may have been the movie that finally sold people on VCRs, since they had been too expensive and the movie transfers were pretty bad, but the Batman VHS was a good release for the time. Regardless, I loved all those movies as a kid. I used to draw Riddler's big question marks all the time, and I think at least until I had to clean out my childhood home I still had a cheap Halloween costume plastic Riddler cane somewhere. I may have finally gotten rid of it; I haven't seen it in a while.
Anyway. I think this movie has had a reevaluation in the past decade, but I entered my 20s among exactly the kind of nerds who hated it because it has colors in it and sometimes it's funny -- never mind that Burton's two movies are funny constantly, you know what I'm talking about. And I have started people to yelling at parties by declaring this is the best Batman movie. And it is still the best (live action) Batman movie. In no other movie, with the possible exception of the Pattinson one because I haven't seen it yet, but apart from that in no other movie is Batman ever in any way a detective.
Look, the riddles are goofy but the movie tries its hand at having Batman actually figure something out. And those riddles? Listen to me, have you read the damned comics?
This is the thing, and I think this is the thing people online finally started to point out after years of nerd-hegemony on this point: Batman hasn't always been the Animated Series and the Burton films. And the other versions of Batman, the campy versions, the old stilted 40s comics versions, those are all still Batman. There's no one version of that character, and this far in that's the point. A US style superhero is a jazz piece; everyone knows the basics but we're here to see what this quartet will do with it.
And Schumacher did some good shit with it. Famously drawn to camp and vamp, famously gay, Schumacher did nothing but hearken back to older strata of Batman with an eye towards doing it well, making it look good. It's very 90s of course, or 90s looking at the 80s, with the neon suddenly lighting up a city Burton had defined as crisp dark lines and bare streetlights in the dark.
You know this already. Tommy Lee Jones is playing the Joker playing Two Face. Jim Carrey is kind of also playing the Joker playing Two Face. But given that Nicholson's Joker is, well, Jack Nicholson (and that kicks ass, don't get me wrong), it's not terrible to just see some comic book hijinks. And it's also true that this statement, that this Two Face is really the Joker, is based on modern takes. Let's face it, this is based on the way The Animated Series made both villains different from their comic book versions and created what some still feel are the definitive versions. You know what they did with Mr. Freeze.. But they were pretty goofy. Two Face just kept doing things associated with the number two. Insert your own joke here.
The whole movie's about duality, right? I said it took a swing at being about something; I didn't say it was subtle. So the villains are extra loud so Kilmer's Batman can have more of a range, as well as revisit some camp himself. Giving the commissioner a thumbs up from his plane comes to mind -- we can imagine that in the 60s series if it had enough of a budget to do the shot.
It's a little dated, but sometimes I feel weird even saying that. Of course it is, it came out at a previous date! Some of the stuff in the first half I moved through at speed, though less than I was expecting. I don't really need to see the Graysons doing stunts, though I'd never try to say that shouldn't be in the film. It was late, I wanted to get in by a certain time, so sue me.
Chris O'Donnell is... fine? All I remember from when I was a kid was people being mad he had an earring. He just doesn't ever seem to quite decide where he wants to go with the character -- though that may be from external factors, given that they give him everything from dark fantasies of revenge to Tim Ward quips -- and I had totally forgotten when they try to sell him as knowing martial arts and being cool by... doing laundry like a jackass. Someone's going to have to mop that floor Dick. Alfred. Alfred is going to have to mop that floor.
So it's possible O'Donnell was really just doing the best he could in the circumstances.
The Castle of Cagliostro
1979, Hayao Miyazaki dir.
I think this movie may be perfect. I was expecting it to be good and I was still surprised. What's impressive is that it feels both like a pitch-perfect Lupin story and is still very obviously a Miyazaki joint. There are planes; there are weird guys; there are strange mechanical contraptions; there are loving depictions of a rural area. But it never feels like it's something other than a Lupin story.
If you haven't already seen it and also don't know what those things mean, basically, Lupin III is a thief, the kind of classic art thief cat burgler type. He's partnered up with Jigen, a marksman, and they pull off a heist only to discover the money is counterfeit. Lupin knows who made it -- generally -- and takes Jigen to where it's produced, in a castle known as Cagliostro. We learn he tried to get in once when he was young; he nearly died, which still means he did better than all the others who tried, who are dead in the dungeons.
Meanwhile, a young woman is trying to escape from a bunch of men pursuing her, while decked out in a wedding dress. Lupin rescues her in a really amazing car chase sequence, recognizes her signet ring, and we slowly learn the man forcing her to marry him is the guy making the funny money. He runs a crime empire from his estate in rural Italy.
The rest of the movie is the rest of the movie. I can recommend the blu ray edition I have, which is the collector's 4k; it's not just a good transfer of the movie, it also has a special feature where you can watch the entire movie as the production drawings and storyboards, seeing big differences and the wild sketches layered over the audio and a small picture-in-picture of the finished film.
Night of the Living Dead
1968, George Romero dir.
What the hell do you say about one of the best to ever do it? I've seen this before, but Criterion did a release and I had to have that, so I rewatched it one night after my partner had gone to bed.
What I feel like I hadn't picked up on in undergrad is that everyone is an asshole here. Yes, Ben is trying his best, and is basically our "good guy" here, but even he's so stressed he's being a dick. It is in fact worth considering that Harry has a daughter he's trying to protect. Though of course Harry is the closest thing we've got to a bad guy.
Minor plot spoiler paragraph
I actually remembered Harry noping out during the scene with the molotov cocktails, leading to the deaths outside, but he doesn't, he actually comes through with that part of the plan. It's later, when Ben is trying to get back in, that Harry freezes up and nearly gets Ben killed. I think I saw the 80s remake before the original so, for all I know, that's how it goes in the remake.Probably the best movie in this post. I took a picture of my tv on the first frame of the film and two people I know correctly identified the movie based on that. When you see it, you know what it is you're looking at. And that's impressive.
Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit
2005, Nick Park & Steve Box, dirs.
I've never seen Wallace and Gromit before. Seriously. I always wanted to, and I just kept never catching a chance. Well, it's on streaming, and my partner had fond memories of it, so I just went "hey next day we're both free you wanna just watch it?" And we did. And it's good.
This movie is so fucking good. It reminds me of the heyday of children's animation, where it's not dumbed down, it's just, you know, paced and directed in a way kids can follow and there aren't any swears. Like Shrek, or the corpus of Looney Tunes before the 90s. You don't feel like you're slumming it, watching Paw Patrol or something because you're sick and nothing else is on tv.
If you aren't familiar, Wallace and Gromit are longstanding characters in a series of shorts by a British claymation group, Aardman. This was the first film, though the company had made Chicken Run before that (a film I also still really want to see). Wallace is a goofy inventor obsessed with cheese, and Gromit, his dog, is the sensible brains of the pair.
The basic plot is that they've offered a cruelty-free service catching rabbits ahead of the town's annual vegetable festival, because everyone in town is a lunatic specifically for growing big vegetables, and there's a contest. Wallace and Gromit are live-trapping the rabbits and... holding them all in their basement, feeding them and quickly running out of space. Wallace decides to use his new brain scan machine to brainwash the rabbits into hating vegetables. Naturally it backfires and you get the plot of the film.
All the characters that I presume are unique to the film are amazing. The rich lady and the hunter are obviously well developed as they're integral to the plot, but the priest, a fairly incidental character, has an amazing design and voice as well. I think I said something like, "this truly represents the Anglican priesthood tradition like nothing else I've ever seen." Priesting is his job, and, you know, if he uses the altar to help grow his prize cabbages, no one will mind.
The Assassin
2015, Hou Hsiao-hsien dir.
This movie was ok. When I say that, I have to say that my partner fell in love with it. So there's nothing actually wrong with the film. It's actually very well made.
I read the Criterion Channel preview of the film, and a little bit about it online, and it's talked about like some kind of really impressive reinvention of wuxia movies. It's just a wuxia movie with very little dialogue and lots of slow shots of scenery and people putting on clothes.
This is not bad. I was just kind of misled by the typical hyperbole of reviews and such. It was in fact, as I said, good. For the most part I enjoyed getting to see people perform things you don't usually see in a movie, or don't see all that often, like preparing tea over a wood fire or a noblewoman dressing herself surrounded by attendants. But, just be aware, it's very much that kind of movie where you need to expect going in that there are going to be long shots of scenery. It's pretty.
So the basic plot is based on a very old novel, it turns out. The main character was taken away when she was young by a nun who trained her to be a perfect assassin. She won't kill a guy who is nice to her kid while she's spying on him, so the nun sends her back home to her family, with orders to kill the local lord -- who she was betrothed to when she was young. There are a few good action sequences, and I don't disapprove of the decision to make them mostly short and sharp, rather than extended "cool fight scenes."
The film sometimes tries to play with how the main character watches from the shadows, by doing strange things with the camera itself. It doesn't do it often though, and one scene that's very obviously that is filmed through a curtain basically, and the effect is simply annoying, or it was to me.
I think it's kind of assuming familiarity with the story, because we had to pause halfway through and read a summary to understand the events we had already seen. Pretty much everyone is related, and the film just... doesn't tell you that.
Now, having said all that, what I want to say is that the movie is in fact amazing. It's less than two hours long. If you sit down after and think about everything that happened, you can't imagine it all happening in less than 150 minutes. But it can! It's like 104 minutes total I think? Turns out, dialogue eats a lot of screen time, and if you just don't bother, you can fit a lot of stuff in there!
The Tale of Zatoichi
1962, Kenji Misumi, dir.
This is the first Zatoichi film in what would turn into a long series. I just counted on Criterion and they have twenty five of them. Wow.
I see there's a short interview with a film critic that refers to "Serialized Success," and certainly, at 25 films, that's a serial all right. What's interesting about this one is that it doesn't feel like it's trying to set up a series at all. The first Lone Wolf and Cub, by contrast, is very clear that it's the start of something.
This isn't crazy gonzo samurai bloodletting, either. Not that I dislike that. I was surprised at first at how quiet it lets itself be, but then I learned that the 70s is when that other sort of more familiar samurai (or, more broadly, just martial arts) film started taking off. Don't get me wrong; by the end of this film, a lot of people die.
The basic plot is that a yakuza on a trip met Zatoichi -- or just Ichi 1 -- and saw him perform amazing sword feats even though he was blind. He invited Ichi to come stay with him; his ulterior motive is to use Ichi against his rival crime lord.
Said crime lord has a yojimbo staying with him for the same reason; Hirate has consumption, and spends his day freeloading off the crime boss, drinking, and fishing. Ichi meets him on the river bank and they become friends.
So in a very real way this is a Romeo and Juliet bromance. And despite having other elements, it gives itself the space for that story to be the most important thing, even as no single element ever takes up time for long because the movie respects our time. It's 96 minutes long.
Those "other elements" include an asshole younger yakuza who breaks up with his girlfriend upon learning she's pregnant and takes money from a fellow gangster to lure his own sister out -- the fellow gangster is her ex, and threatens to mutilate her if she won't get back with him. She naturally falls in love with Ichi when he rescues her.
It's not a lot of balls in the air, but bearing as it does its inevitable comparison to Kurosawa's Yojimbo, it's interesting it specifically chooses to focus on a group of characters all intersecting rather than Kurosawa's comparatively obsessive focus on the locus of chaos in the desolated town. You begin to feel like everyone knows everyone else, and the fact some of them are fighting just seems weird.
It also looks nice sometimes -- that is to say, I like the way it looks all the time, but clearly, with their budget, they had to pick and choose their moments. The scene where the lady walks home with Ichi after her ex confronts her is on a pretty but eerie stage of dead or leafless trees with the waning gibbous moon in the sky.