Word: batmans
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...paternal butler in Batman Begins and Nicole Kidman's pop in Bewitched, Michael Caine is summer cinema's father figure...
...What is Batman afraid of? What might give the moody masked millionaire the primal shakes? The answer-and it's an easy one if you stop to think about it-is bats. Those furry, whirry creatures traumatized little Bruce Wayne when he was a kid. He has other, more guilt-edged issues, involving his saintly parents, as well. When we first meet Bruce (Christian Bale) as a grownup, he has traveled far (to Asia) and fallen low (a Chinese prison) in an attempt to restore wellness to his troubled soul. Specifically, he joins up with a bunch of muscular moralists...
...while, Batman Begins is fitfully entertaining. Maybe the Force, with its ascetic demands, is too strong with our modern superheroes: enigmatic mind games are played as the karate chops fly. It may also be true that urban dystopia has become too much a ruling cliche in movie art direction. The weather in Gotham is perpetually inclement, and its garbage is forever uncollected...
Basically, Nolan's job is to revive a troubled studio franchise, and you can feel him struggling to reanimate the neurotic dislocations of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. His effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck-some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply. -By Richard Schickel
...Sullivan Show, where he was a guest the night the Beatles made their U.S. TV debut. ("Look at all these kids that came to see me!" he said backstage.) But he gained his greatest fame playing the Riddler, the cackling, green-clad villain on the campy 1960s TV series Batman. Most recently, he won critical acclaim for his dead-on impersonation of actor-comedian George Burns in the one-man Broadway show Say Goodnight, Gracie...