Word: batmanic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Michael Jackson Meets Batman (Warner Bros.; Anton Furst) This proposal from the production designer of Batman has a quirky logic to it, teaming music's baddest icon with pop culture's most marketable superhero. If the movie bombs, maybe the sound track could offset the losses...
...character more interesting than any of his family or friends can imagine but also an interior life richer than even its owner recognizes. Rabbit's undiscriminating curiosity takes in everything, from old songs on the car radio to the crammed titles on a cineplex marquee: HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. These are the fragments he innocently shores against his ruin, the kind of details that historians millenniums hence will cherish. Even his loopiest private opinions carry the whiff of theological profundity. Months into the Bush Administration, Rabbit misses Reagan: "The powerful thing...
Darkman wants to be Batman. Its hero, a scientist (Liam Neeson) scarred in body and soul after being left for dead by venal thugs, is a cloaked crusader bent more on vengeance than on justice. Director Sam Raimi, whose cheapo slasher film The Evil Dead achieved cult status, mines familiar comic-book terrain with a plucky heroine (Frances McDormand), a couple of corporate villains -- one slick (Colin Friels), the other slimy (Larry Drake) -- and plenty of explosive violence that virtually reads KA-BOOM! in block letters across the screen...
...like Batman, this comic-book movie is anything but comic; every plangent chord of Danny Elfman's splendid pop-Wagnerian score underlines the scientist's twisted nobility. Raimi isn't effective with his actors, and the dialogue lacks smart menace, but his canny visual sense carries many a scene. And he knows how to give resonance to a tinny plot: by portraying a character so powerful and warped that he is urban America's perfect patron saint...
...successfully over the past few years by the Fox network, MTV and other competitors. NBC has come up with hip-hopping shows like Ferris Bueller and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. CBS is trying to get the youngsters who flocked to the theaters for comic-book extravaganzas like Batman to tune in for a lavishly produced fantasy series, The Flash. (Unfortunately, the show has been scheduled in the Thursday-night death slot, opposite The Cosby Show and The Simpsons...