Category: 1981
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Dan Adkins’s inks are a mess here. Because of them, there’s barely one good panel of Don Newton drawing Batman versus a werewolf. The story’s something of a surprise–with Conway concentrating solely on Batman; I assumed the issue, since Conway did Werewolf by Night, would be Batman meets Jack Russell, but it’s anything but. Since…
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So the Joker breaks out of Arkham for no reason other than to create an elaborate room of deadly toys to kill Batman. It’s definitely insane, but also completely idiotic. This issue makes me wonder if there were (and are) editorial mandates for how often a villain has to appear. Maybe it had been a…
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Now there’s a done-in-one. Wow. Conway fits a ton into the issue, which boils down to another poisoned Batman goes after the Scarecrow story, but with all sorts of decoration. It opens with Batman–Bruce mooning over Selina no less–going about his routine. He gets a mysterious dart shot at him and strange things start happening.…
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So… Alfred’s somebody’s baby daddy. That little detail is sort of overlooked in this issue. Not only is he a baby daddy, he’s an emotionally disconnected one (he financially supports her, but won’t tell her his identity–I think they almost used a similar thing in Batman and Robin to explain Alicia Silverstone’s Batgirl’s history). It’s…
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I love the scene with the Paris police giving Batman the okay because of his “unofficial” Interpol status. I wonder if Conway realized how silly the scene reads, given he’s sitting there in the office in his costume. Maybe Batman needs a different costume for such official meetings. Otherwise, the issue’s decent. Bruce heads to…
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For issue 500, DC went with something rather celebratory for Detective Comics–it’s very oversized (84 pages) and has many Detective Comics regulars–back to Slam Bradley–making appearances. The opening Batman story, from Alan Brennert and Dick Giordano, is fantastic one about Batman going Earth-3 to save his parents. It’s a great, touching story. I love it.…
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Well, Batman fights the crooked miners union again this issue… but this time… he wins! Actually, it’s a really nice story about Batman and Blockbuster saving a bunch of miners in a collapsed shaft. Conway takes his time, reintroducing everything from last issue (I love the recaps comics used to integrate into the stories), then…
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It’s Batman versus the crooked coal miners and guess who wins? Not Batman. Okay, maybe I’m abridging a little, but not by much. Conway makes Batman a little too human here, way too fallible (he gets hit in the head with a shovel–isn’t he supposed to know when people are sneaking up on him?). It’s…
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I didn’t read anything about The Four Seasons before watching it–I didn’t even know it was Carol Burnett in a dramatic role (she’s fantastic)–and if I had, maybe I would have had some idea where Alda was taking the film. Because he doesn’t take it where I was expecting, not from the narrative’s apparent intentions.…
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Even with Albert Finney’s hair style, which seems to be inspired by a drag queen who just doesn’t care, Wolfen is a beautifully made film. The big action sequence at the end (the film’s genre progresses from police procedural to horror to thriller–Finney’s investigation leads the way) is a fantastic sequence. I’d actually forgotten it…
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For whatever reason, Sam Raimi now has The Evil Dead released in a matted version (to 1.85:1 from 1.37:1). It looks awful. Raimi’s strength as a director comes from his constantly agitated camera; his static shots are–well, I guess the shots of the sun setting and the moon rising in Evil Dead are cool–mediocre at…
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Okay, so the Batman story is about Batman fighting the bastard, half-human offspring of a yeti and the Robin backup is about Robin trying to clear his friend of murder. The Batman story is probably better, but maybe not. I mean, it’s kind of dumber–Gerry Conway overwrites the narration and the dialogue is all exposition…
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With Thief, Mann leaves plain an American standard–the gangster movie. Halfway through the film, I wondered how it fit, as the energy the film opens with is gone. The film moves these awkwardly handled scenes without much flare. These scenes are presented as the standard dramatic scenes, but with something not quite right about the…
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Halloween II–if it isn’t the worst film John Carpenter ever worked on in some capacity–certainly features Carpenter’s worst script. There isn’t a single well-written conversation in the entire picture–the closest one is a couple young women talking; presumably co-writer Debra Hill wrote that conversation–and then it’s one of the handful of scenes Carpenter himself directed.…
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I’d heard–read, actually, but maybe heard as well–the 1981 Postman Always Rings Twice was terrible. If I knew Rafelson directed it, I’d forgotten. I did remember David Mamet wrote it. For some reason, I always thought it was an in name only remake, not at all based on the Cain novel. The film opens with…
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I’m not sure I have the vocabulary to properly discuss The Incredible Shrinking Woman. It’s an experience–Ned Beatty was in Network and he appeared in this one? Sorry. Anyway, according the IMDb, the movie might have made money–in fact, it might have even been a hit. I always assumed it was an enormous failure, but…
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All due respect to Rick Baker, but Rob Bottin’s werewolf transformation in The Howling is superior. The transformation lasts so long it’s no longer shocking, just interesting. It’s so deliberate, it got me wondering what the werewolf would do if he needed to change in a pinch… if he didn’t have three or four minutes…
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Don Siegel had an anecdote about the length of titles. He showed them to his boss, who kept asking for them to be longer, then showed them to the boss again, telling him each time he’d made the changes. In fact, he had not–his boss was simply familiar with the titles and couldn’t gauge the…
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Steve Gordon died the year after Arthur came out, so he never made any other films, which is an exceptional tragedy. Arthur is a singular comedy–it’s a mix of laugh-out-loud comedy, romantic comedy, sincere human relationships and genuine character development. The first two are not mutually exclusive, but I’m not even sure Woody Allen’s managed…
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What Peter Hyams does at the end of Outland–cutting away from Sean Connery to a shot of the mining station with a superimposed message from the character to his wife–ought to be a crime. Hyams gets one of Connery’s better performances out of him and then cheats both Connery and the viewer from giving the…
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There’s a certain tragedy about All Night Long. Not the film’s story or anything, but the film itself. It’s a debacle–Barbara Streisand is unbelievably terrible and the cuts made to the film (twenty minutes) significantly damage it–a painful to watch debacle. It’s such a chore to get through, I can’t imagine trying to watch it…
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Goliath Awaits stars Mark Harmon as Doug McClure. Well, sort of. Harmon plays the Doug McClure role if Goliath was one of director Kevin Connor’s American International lost world pictures. And Goliath really is nothing but those four films rolled into one and modernized and given a budget (for a mini-series) far beyond whatever Connor…
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If one were to, empirically, examine the films of the 1990s and onward to the present, he or she might be inclined to not believe in Blow Out. Literally, not believe such a film could exist. Not only does Brian De Palma’s remake of Blowup work, it succeeds… partially because of De Palma’s script (here’s…
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Catherine Mary Stewart’s British? She’s in Nighthawks for a second and she looked familiar but I don’t keep track of her filmography, so I didn’t find out until the end credits. (Actually, she’s Canadian, which is closer than I thought). Besides that trivia tidbit–if it even qualifies as a tidbit–the most amusing thing about Nighthawks…
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Das Boot probably has–of serious films–the most number of alternate cuts released. Besides the two and a half hour theatrical version, there was a three and a half hour director’s cut (which I saw theatrically, so I suppose I only saw the original version on VHS), and finally, now, there’s the five hour “uncut version,”…
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Rip-roaring, serial-inspired adventure set in the 1930s has archaeologist/adventurer/heartthrob Harrison Ford traveling the globe to keep the Nazis from getting their hands on the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Exciting, well-written (by Lawrence Kasdan), and beautifully directed by Spielberg. John Williams’s score is so important it could be top-billed. Sometimes moves a little too fast…
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Gentle, deliberate dramatic mystery/thriller (reuniting director Yates with BREAKING AWAY writer Steve Tesich) has custodian William Hurt lying about witnessing a crime so he can cozy up with TV reporter Sigourney Weaver, who he’s got a major crush on. Excellent performance from Hurt, sometimes excellent, sometimes not performance from Weaver. Not quite successful but a…
The Stop Button 