Word: gotham
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...familiar blue sky behind the Warner Bros. shield grows dark. The clouds gain some menacing heft. A cumulus of urban steam shrouds the camera as it goes cruising for trouble in Gotham City. Nighttime is the right time for . . . Batman...
...trumpets and Pop art facetiousness of the '60s TV series, which turned Bob Kane's superhero into a camp crusader. Director Tim Burton's approach is dead serious. He renounces the bright palette, the easy thrills, to aim for a psychodrama with the force of myth. He creates a Gotham City that looms like a rube's nightmare of Manhattan. He strips the Bruce Wayne legend down to its chassis, dumping Robin and the goony rogues' gallery. This is a face-off between two men in weird masks: one in a leathery black item out of a dominatrix's pleasure...
...that eats the skin off his body but doesn't damage his signature deck of cards; when he gaily vandalizes some classic paintings, the film spells the museum's name two different ways; and when he starts tossing $20 million in cash onto the street, the good people of Gotham don't go into a looting frenzy and attack his perch. More important, the picture's first hour poses one big question: How will ace photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) react when she learns that Bruce is Batman? We never find out; the revelation occurs offscreen...
...sets are well done and a vast improvement on last year's efforts. Cafe Ole's backdrop features ornate Art Deco design of marble and gold, and a city layout as good as Batman's Gotham. The best set is in the Metal Shop Nightclub, with its eerie flourescent green ghouls and cage fashioned from Flinstone-style dinosaur bones...
...well. Rudolph Giuliani, famed prosecutor of Wall Street manipulators (Drexel, Ivan Boesky), mobsters (the Colombo family) and corrupt politicians (former Bronx Democratic leader Stanley Friedman), announced that after 5 1/2 years as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he would resign at month's end. Gotham Republicans, a tiny band of inveterate losers, delightedly anticipated being able this fall to field a candidate for mayor who might actually have a chance. Giuliani coyly remarked that "I have not shut the door on the possibility," and incumbent Edward I. Koch, who has been hurt by Giuliani's prosecutions...