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Archive for February 17th, 2008

Sunday Cinema Presents The Batman in: Isn’t He Dead YET?

Posted by scott on February 17th, 2008

Welcome to the latest installment in our continuing effort to get through the 1943 Columbia serial The Batman, one episode per week, the way it was intended to be seen, and to make you all suffer along with me.

Chapter 7: The Phony Doctor

When we last left our hero, he’d turned into a chunky stuntman who’d doubled over and collapsed after getting punched right in the Bat-fat. Meanwhile, hydrochloric acid pours out of a bullet-riddled Doughboy Pool and washes over the live wires writhing on the floor, touching off an explosion. The entire ceiling collapses, and the Batman is simultaneously crushed, electrocuted, and asphyxiated by chemical fumes while his corpse is hideously disfigured by the spreading puddle of acid.

Robin runs out of the cardboard vault screaming “Bruce! Bruce!” at the top of his lungs. Really, Dick, do you even care about the secret identities anymore? Admit it, this whole thing is just an excuse for you to put on a cape and run around without pants on.

Anyway, they come upon the burnt, crushed, rapidly dissolving body of Bruce, but before anyone can puke, the Batman just shakes it off.

“Boy, you were lucky,” Robin says. “Those beams formed an arch to protect you.” Yeah. Actually, I think what protected him was the writers’ need to throw together some lame solution to last week’s cliffhanger so they could punch out and start pounding whiskey sours at Formosa.

In all the excitement, Alfred’s fake beard has come unglued, prompting the Batman to pat his butler’s bare cheek and teasingly murmur, “You think that half a beard is better than none at all, Alfred?” The fey factotum responds by making a moué and squeaking, “Ooh! Ooh!” I don’t know what kind of cuisine Alfred is serving Bruce and Dick at Wayne Manor, but I’m pretty sure it’s heavily seasoned with soy.

Back in mufti, Bruce phones Miner Ming to say the villains are probably on their way back to his hotel. Ming doesn’t appear concerned, as he stuffs a .45 Colt Peacemaker down his pants and declares, ‘I’ve handled tougher hombres than them before,” which sounds like really cool, authentic frontier gibberish, except that he pronounces the “H” in “hombre.” Ming hangs up, then dons a special rig under his coat that delivers a Derringer into his hand with the flick of a wrist. Okay, The Batman doesn’t have a Batmobile, he doesn’t have Batarangs, and so far the only thing he’s pulled out of his utility belt is a pack of smokes, but this grizzled old hardscrabble prospector has cool, James Bondian gadgets? WTF?

The Batman drops a pack of Lucky Strikes as he climbs down a fire escape (h/t to Happenstance)

Suddenly, a doctor shows up. Apparently, the studio’s insurance company requires that Ming have a physical before he’s allowed to participate in a fight sequence. For a miner, however, Ming seems surprisingly delicate, because he passes out at the first whiff of a chloroform-soaked handkerchief shoved into his face. The Phony Doctor signals for a Phony Ambulance, which we can tell is phony because on the front of the vehicle, “Ambulance” is spelled “Ambulance” instead of “ecnalubmA.”

In keeping with tradition, Bruce and Dick arrive too late, and the bad guys get away, but not without leaving a clue behind. Bruce instantly recognizes the all-too-familiar smell of chloroform in the air, then he locates the doctor’s discarded handkerchief, and he and Dick take turns sniffing it. Call me a prude, but it seems a bit frivolous to indulge your chloroform fetish when a man’s life is in danger. But then, it’s pretty clear by now that the Batman and Robin’s whole crime-fighting crusade is just an elaborate excuse for their cos-play, and other pervy shenanigans. After trading increasingly deep snorts, Bruce giddily snatches the handkerchief away and they chase each other out the door.

Back at the Bat Lab, Bruce gazes at the captured handkerchief under a blacklight, because he is so high right now. “See that mark in the corner?” Bruce asks. “That’s a Japanese laundry mark.”

Dick scoffs, “I’ve never heard of a Japanese laundry.” Yeah, why can’t these ethnic types keep their stereotypical occupations straight? The next thing you know, we’ll have the Quaker Oats guy show up as a Pullman porter

However, Bruce just happens to know of a Japanese laundry in the warehouse district, and they make plans to go there later that night. But first they eat a bag of Bugles, then Bruce shows Dick how cat urine glows under the blacklight, and they totally get the giggles.

Back at the lair, Dr. Daka’s minions bring in Ming on a stretcher, and the string tie-sporting superspy interrogates him about the location of his radium mine. But not only is Ming merciless, he’s stubborn, too. Daka changes tactics and uses his Mr. Microphone to summon Uncle Martin – Ming’s old friend and benefactor. The middle-aged zombie shambles in, and a stunned Ming seizes him by the arms and shouts, “Marty! Marty! Don’t ya know me?” Suddenly, It’s A Wonderful Bat-Life.

Daka can’t resist showing off how strong his flabby, dew-lapped, above-draft-age zombies are, and orders Martin to strangle Ming, then signals that he’s laughing by slowly, painstakingly annunciating the words, “Hee! Hee! Hee!” Ming can’t stand Daka’s affected chortling, however, and before the supervillain has a chance to laboriously over-pronounce the words, “Har-de-har-har,” Ming pulls the ol’ Derringer up the sleeve trick. He takes Daka hostage and tries to escape through the Japanese Cave of Horrors, but he gets clubbed senseless by one of the exhibits. This struck a chord, since I was once beaten to a pulp by the dolls in It’s A Small World.

Back to our heroes. The Batman and Robin drop through a skylight into the Japanese laundry and start hitting people, who obligingly smack them in return. I understand, and even admire the Batman’s refusal to use firearms, but I have to say, I’m even more impressed by the way Gotham’s criminal underworld respects his scruples and refrains from pulling a gun whenever he shows up and starts punching them in the face. Anyway, the Batman and Robin have their usual fight scene, which consists of sloppy haymakers punctuated by the Batman’s efforts to disentangle himself from his own cape.

Suddenly, one of the thugs charges the Batman from behind. The caped crusader turns and delivers an uppercut, and the thug goes into premature rigor mortis, and slowly does the Nestea Plunge into a pile of laundry.

Well, we’re almost at the end of the chapter…about time for Batman to fall to his death. His options are limited, since he’s indoors, so he takes what he can get and falls down an elevator shaft. And this time, we actually get to see him land – face-first, right on the concrete floor of the shaft, with an impact so terrific it almost knocks the horsehair stuffing out of the dummy. Well, that seems like a sufficiently crappy end to a crappy day, but the thugs are apparently aspiring screenwriters who’ve taken Robert McKee’s seminar, and they “up the ante” by sending the elevator down to crush what’s left of the Batmannequin.

Well, this is where we left off last time, so next Sunday we’ll be heading into terra incognita with Chapter 8: Lured By Radium! (The sluttiest of all isotopes!)

If you’re a glutton for punishment, or just as confused as I am, click here for the previous entries:
Chapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter Six

I was pretty sure K-Lo completely covered this subject back in July with her “Coming Attractions with Substance” piece in Townhall. (Who can forget her pitch for the riveting biopic, Cheney!…)

He was White House chief of staff. He was secretary of defense. They thought his career was over. And then he became one of the most hated and feared politicians in the land, one heartbeat away from the presidency. But that was only the beginning. After months of the politicos’ eyeing the field, Dick Cheney surprised them all by storming in late in the race and taking the Republican nomination for president in 2008.

…at gunpoint.

But while K-Lo’s piece was in deadly — if not actually mass-murdering — earnest, screenwriter and novelist Andrew Klavan brings a puckish sense of whimsy to Hollywood’s upcoming anschluss with the liberal-run Reichsfilmkammer. In a commentary in today’s Los Angeles Times (my hometown paper, and the reason I recently bought a Hyacinth Macaw — mightiest of the parrot family, weighing in at nearly four pounds — because I wanted something that could crap on the Op-Ed page with authority) entitled “The Right Kind of Oscars, he takes us down a crazy rabbit hole where up is down and black is not allowed to vote:

Well, the writers strike is over, the Oscars will go on and, by golly, we conservatives just can’t wait to watch Hollywood pat itself on the back for another year of anti-American, anti-military, anti-traditionalist filmmaking.

“Traditionalist filmmakers,” for you rubes in Flyover Land, are those who reject the authenticity of any newfangled movie not made using William Lincoln’s patented zoopraxiscope method.

And while red-carpet anticipation is giving me the shivers, I can’t help but imagine an alternative Oscar ceremony in a different kind of Hollywood with this list of exciting best picture nominees:

“Oono.” Hilarity ensues when a 16-year-old girl finds herself pregnant and gives the baby away to a similarly unmarried neurotic so that the infant grows up to become a drug-addicted loser and dies of an overdose at 23, whereupon the hilarity abruptly stops. What struck me about this film was that Hollywood filmmakers finally ended their attempts to sanitize and glamorize the irresponsible lifestyles that are destroying their own children before the paparazzi’s very eyes. A production of Don’t Hold Your Breath Films in association with Not in This Lifetime Pictures.

Finally! Someone else who agrees with me that Juno should really just have gotten that parasite vacuumed out, rather than leaving her child to be raised by Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, which when you think about it is really just a slow motion, time-release abortion.

“From the Jaws of Defeat.” A hard-charging general races against time to win an unpopular war before self-serving politicians can engineer a surrender. This film became a front-runner after a moving Time magazine interview in which impassioned studio head Bernie Wattle declares, “Look, I’m just a fat little man in a suit making movies, but these soldiers are out there risking their lives to fight some of the worst enemies this country has ever faced. What kind of people would we be if we made films attacking our soldiers and their mission?”

So does Al-Qaeda have a battleship? I’m just curious about where we’re going to sign this surrender. But I have to say, the Occupation of America couldn’t be better timed. Like the Japanese after World War II, we need a conqueror to dictate us a new Constitution, since the one we’ve got now is clearly as porous as a picket fence (I mean, we can’t even tell if our Vice President is part of the Executive or the Judicial Branch — for all we know, he’s in Accounting, or IT), and like all the Axis nations, we could use a Marshall Plan to lift our war-shattered economy out of the doldrums.

“All the Prosecutor’s Men.” Journalistic heroics based on a true story. Intrepid radio talk show host Sean Hannity…

Oh, so it’s a Dali/Bunuel film, like Un Chien Andalou, or L’Age d’or

…fights for justice when the mainstream media attempt to railroad four innocent white students who’ve been falsely charged with the rape of a black woman. It’s the dialogue that wins the day here. Take the scene in which fanatical news weekly editor Chet Shallow (played by two-time Oscar nominee Phil Shallow)

…it’s little touches like this that remind you that Andrew is a highly paid professional writer!

…snarls, “This narrative is about race and gender. The facts don’t matter.” To which our square-jawed hero snaps back, “This is journalism, chucklehead. The facts are supposed to shape the narrative, not the other way around.” I mean, this stuff just crackles.

So does bubblewrap, but I’m not sure I can watch someone sit there and pop the stuff for two hours.

“Clayton Michaels.” A chemical corporation that employs thousands of people, enhances agriculture and protects millions from disease is nearly destroyed by money-grubbing lawyers who smack it with a bogus billion-dollar lawsuit. Most interesting here was the statement by the filmmakers that they “committed to this project because we were tired of feeding our families with corporate paychecks while making movies about how evil corporations are. This more honest depiction of the benefits of capitalism seemed to restore some of our integrity.”

“Also, Union Carbide slipped us a cool mil to finish the film after everyone who had ever walked by their plant in Jaffna, Sri Lanka spontaneously combusted.”

“The Hours and Hours and Hours.” An apparently committed lesbian reveals her true yearning to become a wife and mother.

I don’t see where the drama comes in. All she needs is a turkey baster and a trip to Vermont…

She gets married, devotes herself to her husband and two kids and looks back at 80 to find she’s lived a happy and fulfilling life. OK, this one was a bit slow for me, but I did enjoy the scene in which the heroine’s executive sister returns from yet another business trip and declares, “I feel so empowered!” before bursting into hysterical sobs.

Again, I don’t see the tragic potential here — hysterical sobs are common enough. For instance, if everyone who read the above paragraph and decided that Andrew needed a good cock-punching actually bothered to deliver it, he’d be feeling as empowered as all heck right now.

“Good Night, Uncle Joe.”

Oh you’re not really gonna go there, are you? Jesus Christ on a Sybian…

In the 1950s, a dogged congressional investigator hunts down a screenwriter who’s been propagandizing and organizing in support of a Soviet regime that has murdered millions of people.

Screenwriters were The Most Dangerous Game back then, and tracking them down often involved exhausting trips into the wilds of Ciro’s, the Trocadero, and the Coconut Grove before finally running your prey to ground at the bar in the Mocambo.

In this groundbreaking work, Hollywood finally takes responsibility for the many filmmakers who gave propaganda and financial and organizational support to one of the most repressive and homicidal governments in history.

Cyrus Nowrasteh, of The Path to 9/11 is the first up against the wall…Lionel Chetwynd, of DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is in the on-deck circle…

The ad line, “Ideas Matter,” says it all.

“If It’s Mattel, It’s Swell,” says just a bit more, however…

Of course, we’ll have to wait until Oscar night to find out who the winner is — or until hell freezes over, whichever takes longest.

Remember folks, these are the kinds of jokes that only a professional conservative writer can provide. For a complete transcript of this column and its many humorous japes, write to “The U.S. Government Guide to Mummery, Tomfoolery, and Monkeyshines, Pueblo, CO, 81001.