Word: batmans
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...first Batman seemed a symptom of that malaise. Batman Returns is an antidote. For a start, it's alive, not an effects showcase in a shroud. Daniel Waters' script delights in elaborate wordplay and complex characters. "The characters are all screwed up," Burton notes. "I find that much more interesting." Returns tops the first movie's shrill wrestling match between Batman (Michael Keaton) and the Joker (Jack Nicholson) with a funnier, more lithe and daring villain: the Penguin (Danny De Vito). He is a vicious troll with a righteous grudge: his rich parents dumped him in the sewer when they...
...this brisk, buoyant movie gets its emotional weight from an entirely other conflict: the tangle of opposites between -- and within -- two credible people. Wealthy orphan Bruce Wayne (Keaton again) -- the "trust-fund goody- goody," as Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) calls him -- is also Batman, a trussed-up do-gooder who cannot reveal his identity. Selina Kyle, the single woman with a lousy love life, is also the vengeful kitten with a whip: "I am - Catwoman! Hear me roar!" Bruce and Selina are drawn to each other's worldly wise grace and the hint of hidden wounds. They are attracted...
...passwords for Batman Returns are duality and isolation. "People-in- masks is pretty key," says DeVito of the movie's theme. These people are what they wear; Bruce's closet is filled with a dozen Batman costumes. All four main characters, Bruce and Selina, Penguin and Max, are isolated from themselves. They live in mansions, railroad flats, towers and sewer caves -- haunted houses, anyway, dwellings of the different. "You're a well- respected monster," Penguin says to Max. "And I am, to date, not." But all are at one time respected, at another time not, and always sacred monsters, removed...
Like a superhero for cinema, Batman Returns arrives in the nick of time. Movies are in big trouble. The magic is gone; the danger is missing. Genres that vitalized the box office a decade ago -- the sci-fi epic, the horror movie, the adult comedy -- look sapped. Top directors like Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese remake their own or other people's movies. So does everybody else. Lethal Weapon 3 and Patriot Games and Sister Act may bring millions into a cool theater on a hot evening, but are audiences getting the fresh kick that good films are supposed...
That could have been the mood on the Batman Returns set. It was chilly enough: 38 degrees F for the 12-hr. working days. Annette Bening, set to star as Catwoman, ducked out when she got pregnant, and Burton scurried to hire Michelle Pfeiffer. Anton Furst, who designed Batman but was not working on the sequel, died jumping off a roof and plunged the crew into melancholy...