Read this hilarious review on IMDB of 'Batman and Robin'

[runnersdialzero]

To each their own I guess.

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12 out of 23 people found the following comment useful:-
While I like Batman Forever and Batman Returns better, this is still a great film, 26 May 2005

Author: Brandt Sponseller from New York City


I hate consumer purists. I think purism is ignorant. I also hate sacred cows. I refuse to watch any film, or go into any artwork, with notions of how such and such is "supposed to be". If I could write and direct my own Batman film, Batman would be a geriatric transvestite who cuts down villains with a lawn mower. There would be a lot of bloody lawnmower deaths in the film. The batsuit would be a combination of a fur dress with "real", huge bat wings and a feminized baseball uniform. Batman would have fangs, eat insects and always sit or sleep upside down. Gotham City would be a small town in Oklahoma and Alfred would be a midget who is older than God and who has a horseshoe fetish. He'd go around naked and barefoot, except he'd have horseshoes on his feet. The Batmobile would be a bicycle. Batman would flap his big, stinky bat wings while he peddles. I'd have a villain who looks like the Penguin but who drives a pick-up truck with a shotgun in the rear window and chews tobacco. He'd spit it out into a bottle, and he'd have a huge collection of bottles in a warehouse full of refrigerators. I'd have a villain like Poison Ivy who dates the Mayor's teenaged daughter. Batman would dance with Poison Ivy and her girlfriend at a hoedown. They'd eat barbecued chicken while they dance, then lick the sauce off of each other's clothes. This wouldn't be intended as a spoof, and it's not that I dislike the Batman character--he's one of my favorite fictional characters.

So you can see how director Joel Schumacher's changes to the Batman characters, production design and tone of the film wouldn't put me off of Batman & Robin. I like artists to do things differently, to express themselves. That doesn't mean that I want to make them slaves to the "cult of originality"--maybe they feel strongly about keeping some or most things "traditional", and that's fine. My main requirement is that they do something that they think is artistically valuable. And for me to like what they do, I have to find it interesting, enjoy it, or get something in the way of aesthetic or philosophical worth from it. I definitely find Batman & Robin interesting, I enjoy most of it, and it is very aesthetically pleasing to me. I do think there are a couple flaws. But they're minor enough to only bring my rating down to an 8.

Batman (George Clooney) & Robin (Chris O'Donnell) have to battle two villains, Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman). Mr. Freeze is a scientist who went wacko when his wife acquired a terminal disease and he fell into a vat of cryogenic liquid. His primary ambition is to save his wife's life and make everyone else suffer along with him while he waits by freezing them--literally turning them into big peoplecicles. Poison Ivy is a psycho environmentalist who wants to turn the world back over to plants, but only after she's given plants animal characteristics, so if you try to do any weeding, they'll bite your bummies off. At the same time, Alfred (Michael Gough) is sick, and his hot niece, Barbara Wilson (Alicia Silverstone) comes to visit. The film features various scenarios of Batman & Robin trying to capture Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, and alternates this with relationship explorations between Batman, Robin, Alfred and Barbara.

For my money, Batman & Robin has the best beginning of any of the Batman films to date. I love the frozen Warner Brothers logo. I love the segue into garish colors that look like Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. I love the sequence of body-part close-ups with the camp and homoerotic factor cranked up to 11. And I love the kick-ass extended action sequence that's as intense as the climax to most films and that features Batman and Robin playing ice hockey and then boogie-boarding on rocket ship parts at 30,000 feet. That just rocks.

And things remain at a high level for some time. At least the first half of this film is a solid 10 to me. I'm a fan of George Clooney, and the bizarre casting of him as Batman is a stroke of genius in my book. The only better Batman would have been Tiny Tim, but he died during the production of Batman & Robin, so it's good they didn't cast him. I'm also a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He would have been a good Batman, too, but he's also excellent as Mr. Freeze.

I like Gotham City better here than in any of the other films, at least architecturally. Schumacher makes the city huge and gives us constant eye candy. The other Gotham Cities may have had attractive atmospheres, but this one I'm pining to visit. I'd love to explore it. I want to race down that highway. I want to visit that observatory. The production designer, Barbara Ling, shouldn't have just received an Oscar for her work--you should be sending her your firstborn.

I love the humor in the film. As I've noted many times, I'm a huge fan of the Adam West "Batman" (1966). Schumacher makes a firm commitment to that level of camp in this film. Some scenes here are simply hilarious, like Mr. Freeze yelling at his cronies to sing along with Snow Miser song from The Year Without Santa Claus (1974). Schumacher also does interesting things with the extremely twisted family metaphors of Batman, Robin, Alfred, and Barbara. And I love the colors.

In fact, the only real problem I have with this film is that Schumacher slightly loses the plot focus about halfway through. It begins to seem more like a collection of set pieces than a taut story. But the set pieces work (except for some clunkiness in the logic of the climax), and the film is excellent otherwise.
>>>>>>

[jdumbjokes]

I want to watch his movie. Someone give him some money to make it.

[chess]

I've read quite a few of this guy's reviews. Here's his review for Batman Forever, with which I agree entirely. Until Begins, Forever was my favorite of the series.

Series note: The Batman films largely stand on their own; they are only continuations of the same story in some very minor details. It's not at all necessary to watch them in a particular order.

Maybe it's because I love the Adam West "Batman" (1966) series so much, but I like Batman Forever better than the two Tim Burton Batman films--this despite the fact that I usually love Tim Burton. But there's more to it than the simple fact that director Joel Schumacher didn't turn a blind eye to the campier past instantiations of the character.

Batman Forever has Batman (Val Kilmer) battling two different villains--Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) and The Riddler (Jim Carrey). The film tells of the villains' origins (Two-Face's is told much more briefly, through a flashback). It also features yet another tortured romantic entanglement between Batman and a blonde--this time it is Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), a published psychiatrist whose work Batman has read, and who has a kind of obsessive fascination with the caped crusader (and other deviant or psychotic personalities). The villains are both working on world-domination plans, naturally enough (although starting locally), and the film eventually introduces the origin story of Batman sidekick Robin (Chris O'Donnell).

One thing I like better about Batman Forever is that Schumacher decides to spend a lot more time with Batman. In interviews that Tim Burton has given, including those in the book Burton on Burton (first published in 1995), he seemed to not know what to do with the character. Burton expressed concern that Batman needed to be grounded in reality, and there needed to be some justification for him dressing up as he does to fight crime. It's a problem I'm not sure Burton ever solved for himself, and as a result, he spends much more time on other characters.

Schumacher, on the other hand, seems very comfortable with the character. He still gives him the same kind of "reality grounding" and the same kind of dark disposition with a touch of sarcasm/smarminess (Keaton's Batman had this as well), but Batman Forever gives the audience a chance to emotionally step into Bruce Wayne's world. At the same time, Schumacher loses none of the focus on the film's villains. There is a fine balance. Plus, the villains seem better constructed here. We have a clear sense of who they are, what their goals are, and why they are doing what they're doing. That combination didn't exist for Burton's Joker, Penguin or Catwoman, who all had some cloudy aspects in terms of motivation and goals. These factors make for a more engaging story.

Stylistically--when it comes to production design, cinematography, and overall atmosphere--Burton can't be beat for what he does, but Schumacher has his own admirable approach. Just as our entry into Batman's world is a bit more open here, so is our entry into the world of Gotham City. Schumacher often uses brighter colors, occasionally almost garish (I like that look--just check out my own artwork), and he has much more broader expanses of architecture, occasionally with a much more open feel. Much of the darkness and claustrophobia of the Burton production design is still present, but in patches. Schumacher takes a more varied approach--heck, there's even a scene here shot in bright, clear daylight. Schumacher's cinematography is also more varied in terms of a greater breadth of exaggerated comic book angles and perspectives, and he occasionally gives us sequences of very quick and glossy insert shots that almost have the feel of a slick, high-budget television commercial. For my money, that works well in this context.

The Riddler and Two-Face are far better integrated here than were The Penguin and Catwoman in Batman Returns--both with the film overall and with each other. Carrey and Jones are given a chance to play off of each other's energy and style, and as different as they are, their chemistry is excellent. For viewers who aren't normally fans of Carrey's comic work, his performance might be a bit difficult to take at times, but he's really just giving a superbly satirical take on Frank Gorshin's Riddler--he's just cranked up both the camp and psychosis levels to 11.

And speaking of psychoses, this is the first Batman film in my view where there is an effective sense of danger from the villains. It may be because Burton has said that he rarely sees anyone in terms of just good or evil, but his villains tend to come across more like Clive Barker's Nightbreed (1990) monsters--you'd just as likely want to hang out with them as with Batman (although don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Nightbreed and Burton's lovable freaks, too). Schumacher directs Carrey and Jones to project visceral, out-of-control menace, yet he still manages to make them multi-faceted.

Even though Burton's films can't escape camp--I'm skeptical that it would be possible (and it certainly isn't desirable, in my view) with Batman--Schumacher differs by giving a number of strong nods to the intentionally campy past Batmans, including Carrey's Riddler and Robin giving us a "Hol(e)y rusted metal, Batman" near the end. I suppose your opinion of the merit of this would be correlated to your view of the Adam West Batman. As I mentioned, I loved West's version, so I'm not at all bothered by the nods to it here. I'm a huge fan of camp.

But the bottom line for me is that Batman Forever just flows better than the two previous films. There's a flow to the story, sequences, and scenes that makes the film coherent, captivating and relatively taut. I know it's not cool--I'll lose any chance of Batman fanboy membership--for saying it, but I love this film. Now it's off to re-watch Batman & Robin and see how many people I can make furious with me about that one!