Word: penguine
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...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 saw he had flippers for hands. Now he wants to be loved and, even more, elected -- mayor of Gotham City. In DeVito's ripe performance, Penguin...
...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...
Burton's gift is to make movies about beguiling outsiders -- the dead couple reclaiming their home in Beetlejuice, the deformed snow sculptor Edward Scissorhands, even the childlike Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens plays the Penguin's father here). Burton inverts pictures and fictions, and makes it seem as if he has just turned them right side up. In Batman Returns, everything is familiarly topsy-turvy. Black is good -- Batman, of course -- and white or bright is bad. Max, the rapacious industrialist, has a Stokowskian white mane that helps Gothamites think of him as Santa Claus, though Selina derisively calls...
...appearance. Fine. But that is all he does. Durang makes little attempt at any satire more insightful than this. Of all Morton's lines the one which the audience seems to find most amusing is his holler at a reticent nun, "Get off my show you fucking, fuck face penguin...
...Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant (Sleeping Beauty's Castle). When a kid alights from the Big Thunder Mountain railway and exclaims "Genial!" everyone nearby can tell he means "Awesome!" You need no French diploma to read a gamine's serene exhaustion when she staggers out on penguin legs at the end of a 12-hour day at Euro Disneyland, Europe's biggest, drop-dead- gorgeousest theme park, which opened last Sunday...