Year: 2022

In an effort to heal from failed relationships, two frenemies chill on a beach in the middle of the night while exploring the effects of peyote and a few stray muscle relaxers. No, this isn’t the logline of the latest Euphoria; it’s a pivotal scene in the series premiere of Grace And Frankie.

As a woman who is approaching the big 4-0, I am so very grateful this show exists. I might not qualify for an AARP membership just yet, but in the eyes of Society At Large, I’m already losing currency. Older people, especially older women, tend to become less visible as they age. It’s odd to feel how the shift in how the world has started seeing me differently — or sometimes not at all. But Grace and Frankie give me buoyant hope that, for everyone, the best can be yet to come.

I say this with the utmost seriousness: I want to be Grace and Frankie when I grow up. I never want to believe that aging precludes me from living a life where I can take hallucinogenic journeys on a whim or forge new, meaningful relationships. Or start thoughtful businesses! Or get entangled with the FBI! Grace and Frankie do whatever they want, whenever they want, age be damned.

And I love them so much for it.

The narratives about people Grace and Frankie’s age have traditionally been about dying, illness, or searching for meaning in the face of impending death. When the series begins, both women are in their 70s — two full decades older than Blanche, Dorothy, and Rose were on the Golden Girls. (Yes, Sophia was in her 70s, yes, but she was one of four and even though she was brassy and brazen, she was often treated as the “old” one on the show.)

When Grace and Frankie drops its final episodes later this year, it will depart as the longest-running series on Netflix. It will also leave a legacy of bringing visibility and vibrance to older female characters on television.

Grace Hanson and Frankie Bergstein started off as frenemies, but in real life, the two actresses have been long-time pals. In 1980, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda starred in the raucous workplace comedy 9 to 5 (beside Dolly Parton, of course), and they became fast friends. The two women are staunch climate activists, and Tomlin was even arrested in 2019 as she participated in one of Fonda’s “Fire Drill Friday” protests in Washington D.C. The two women prove — both on-screen and off — that life definitely does not have to slow down after reaching a certain age.

As A-list Hollywood royalty, Fonda and Tomlin may have enjoyed several sensational acts in their lives, but many women, especially older women, have been relegated by society to feel as if they are not essential past a certain age. The third episode of Grace and Frankie demonstrates this concept in spectacular fashion as Grace accompanies Frankie to a mini-mart to buy cigarettes. The doofus clerk ignores the duo so he can chat with a buxom young blonde instead. Grace goes apoplectic, screaming, “Do we not exist?!” The clerk turns to look but doesn’t apologize or even move to help these two women. Moments later in the parking lot, Frankie calms Grace down by showing her the pack of cigarettes she stole. “If they can’t see me, they can’t stop me,” she smiles.

Grace and Frankie is about eschewing the societal norms that have been placed upon women of a certain age while twisting those preconceived notions to their advantage as benefits. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? Instead of fading into the background, the women dare to dream big. They come up with multiple business schemes that fill an invisible demand for products for women just like them: Yam lube for vaginal dryness, a dildo with an arthritis-friendly grip, and the “Rise Up,” a toilet that helps lift older bodies up so that they can go about their day with dignity.

While it revels in the concept of living life with no regrets, the show doesn’t ignore the obvious. Narratives of aging and ageism wind stealthily through Grace and Frankie like a funeral procession creeping through a foggy cemetery. With characters at this age, there’s just no avoiding it. Grace had knee surgery, Frankie had a stroke, and their ex-husbands Robert and Sol (who fell in love with one another) had a heart attack and received a cancer diagnosis respectively. They represent a grab bag of maladies that just eventually happen to older bodies. And in telling these stories, the series dares us to confront our looming mortality (all of our looming mortality) in a bold and unabashed, yet comedic manner. Will there be a main character death before the end of the series? It’s very possible. (But hopefully not. Don’t do it to us, Netflix. Please? We’ve had a tough few years.)

Family and love are also constants throughout the series. Both Grace and Frankie seek out and nurture important relationships, most importantly with one another. When their familiar family constructs were shaken by Robert and Sol’s bombshell, they had to rebuild. The Brady Bunch-esque mixture of two fiercely nuclear families into one chaotic whole helps propel the spontaneity of the narrative, but the real treat at the core of the series is how these two women have realized that they can find soulmates in the most unlikely of places.

Grace and Frankie are the embodiment of the Odd Couple. They’re two women who could’ve easily written each other off — and they have, many times! — but they always come back together. And the duo is nothing short of perfection. As the two are pretty far apart on the personality trait spectrum — Frankie is full of childlike wonder and impulsivity while Grace is often a rule-follower with an anger streak that is glorious to behold — we can easily picture ourselves doing the things they do. Case in point, I’m more of a Frankie than a Grace, but I do truly love it when Grace lets it rip on some unsuspecting person. Also, Jane Fonda is an unimpeachable goddess on earth and I would do literally anything for her. Samesies with Lily Tomlin, actually.

The embrace of anger and rage in older women on the show is also striking. Whenever these ladies have Feelings with a capital F, they let people know about it, even if those feelings might be unpleasant to others. One of the highest-rated episodes of the show on IMDb is the season 2 finale in which Grace and Frankie ruin Bud’s (Frankie and Sol’s son) birthday party as they spectacularly air grievances against their ex-husbands. It’s always refreshing to watch them buck the system, declaring that they aren’t going to simply settle for silence or stagnation anymore.

Last, but not least, Grace and Frankie serves as a delightful reminder that no one has it together at any age. Even though the two friends have followed their respective paths, taken chances, and often leaped into the unknown, they still don’t have it all together. No one has it all together. Not at 16, not at 40, and not even at 82. Age might make us wiser, but absolutely no one has life all figured out. Figuring things out is overrated; the business of living is far too complex to have a singular answer. Until death do we part this world, Grace and Frankie have taught us that there’s always the possibility for new loves, exciting adventures, and peyote-fueled trips on the beach with friends.

Alongside hosting her own long-running talk show, perhaps the defining job of Ellen DeGeneres’ career is voicing Dory in the Finding Nemo movies. On today’s Ellen episode, Machine Gun Kelly was a guest and he brought those two DeGeneres worlds together by remixing one of DeGeneres’ most iconic Finding Nemo moments.

To wrap up the “Burning Questions” segment, the final prompt was “Do your best Finding Dory impression.” That was a set-up for something MGK had planned, which started with him pulling out a piece of music production hardware. He started by showing DeGeneres an audio sample he pre-loaded onto the machine, a clip of her Dory character making whale noises. From there, he reversed the sound and used it as the foundation for an instrumental beat, which left DeGeneres impressed.

Elsewhere during the segment, DeGeneres asked what boyband Kelly would want to perform at his wedding. He responded, “Which boyband am I going to know the most songs of? For sure, NSYNC. Which band do I surprisingly know all these facts about? BTS. […] I remember one time, I met them at the Billboard awards. They were, like, stoked to meet me. I think I have a better chance of getting BTS to come.”

Check out the segment above. Kelly also talked about his and Travis Barker’s tattoos, so check that out below.

As Kanye West’s campaign to continuously rail on Pete Davidson — who has been dating his ex-wife Kim Kardashian — presses on, some clever Starbucks baristas are using the ongoing spat as a way to generate more tips.

In a TikTok video captured by user @dejapoo00, she visits a Starbucks drive-thru that has two separate tip jars on the counter; one is labeled “Kanye West” and the other says “Pete Davidson.” She drops a dollar in the Davidson jar, which was visibly receiving more love. The Kanye jar, in fact, seemed to be filled with mostly chump change.

In recent months, Davidson has frequently been the subject of the rapper’s ire. The ongoing feud between the two sees no signs of stopping, granted most or all of the pettiness has been initiated and perpetuated by Ye. Most recently, the stop-motion video for Kanye and The Game’s track “Eazy,” (the lyrics of which have Ye saying that he wants to “beat Pete Davidson’s ass”) depicts a claymation Davidson getting killed, buried, and turned into a plant. Meanwhile, good sport Davidson took it in stride, saying it was “hysterical” and that he is “flattered by it all because it is so ridiculous to him.”

As Kanye keeps throwing jabs and Davidson keeps letting them roll off his shoulder, it’s easy to see why most of the Starbucks tip money is ending up in Pete Davidson’s jar and why the top TikTok post comments are also largely backing Davidson over Ye. And while West’s antics are coming across as increasingly childish, if it helps already underpaid Starbucks baristas make some extra cash, then that’s a win for the little guys.

As the NFL and other sports leagues have gone all-in on the legal sports gambling space, with massive sponsorship deals and constant ads during games, it has come with the continued caveat that players can’t partake in the action as it pertains to their sport.

Gambling controversies in sports aren’t anything new, from the Black Sox scandal to Pete Rose to Tim Donaghy, but with the money now being tied directly to the league, increased scrutiny comes with it. On Monday, word broke that the NFL had its first issue with a player not following those rules.

The league has suspended Falcons wide receiver Calvin Ridley for a year for gambling on NFL games during the season.

It seems to be an issue of Ridley betting on non-Falcons games while he was away from the team, which is still disallowed by the league but a bit less scandalous than if he were wagering on his own team. It is in that area that the waters get very murky and can lead to game-fixing allegations. That is the major reason sports leagues prohibit players from betting on any games, so there isn’t any temptation to toss a few dollars on their own squads, win or lose, and raise questions about the integrity of the games.

Ridley, unfortunately, finds himself in a position to be made an example out of by the NFL to dissuade any other players from doing the same, and now he finds himself out of a paycheck for a year.

For most of its first season, Bel-Air, the dark, gritty reboot of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, has steered clear of bringing in cameos from the original show, including Will Smith who serves as an executive producer for the series. However, all of that is about to get flipped, turned upside down.

In an official announcement from Peacock, the streaming service has revealed that original Fresh Prince stars Daphne Maxwell Reid and Vernee Watson-Johnson will appear on the ninth episode of Bel-Air. Watson-Johnson played Will’s mom, Vy Smith, for all six seasons of the show while Reid famously replaced Janet Hubert as Vivian “Aunt Viv” Banks during the Fresh Prince‘s fourth season. (In a memorable moment from 2020’s Fresh Prince reunion, Reid and Hubert met for the first time following a segment where the original Aunt Viv and Will settle their decades-long feud resulting from her exiting the show.)

According to the announcement, Reid will play “Helen” and Watson-Johnson will play “Janice,” members of the Art Council Board of Trustee in Episode 109, which will be available for streaming on March 24.

You can see promotional stills for the episode below:

Here’s the official synopsis for Bel-Air:

Set in modern-day America, Peacock’s new one-hour drama series Bel-Air imagines the beloved sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air through a new, dramatic take on Will’s complicated journey from the streets of West Philadelphia to the gated mansions of Bel-Air. As these two worlds collide, Will reckons with the power of second chances while navigating the conflicts, emotions, and biases of a world far different from the only one he’s ever known.

Bel-Air is currently streaming on Peacock.

Shelley Duvall was famously (and regrettably) nominated for Worst Actress by the Razzies for The Shining when she should have been up for Best Actress at the Academy Awards. But so it goes for actors and actresses giving award-worthy performances in Stephen King movies — and all horror movies, for that matter.

In an interview with The Kingcast podcast, the horror author discussed the performance in a movie based on one of his stories that he felt should have received Oscar consideration. “One of the other ones that’s really great… was Cujo. I thought, again, this is the sort of conversation that you get into with people about awards season, and who gets nominated and who doesn’t get nominated. Dee Wallace should have been nominated for an Academy Award, and in my opinion, she should have won it,” he said. “She was just passed over.”

Cujo — about a mother (Wallace) protecting her son from a rabid St. Bernard that didn’t f*ck me up when I saw it as a pre-teen, nope, definitely not — was released in 1983. Let’s see who was nominated for Best Actress that year: Shirley MacLaine (the winner) and Debra Winger for Terms for Endearment, Jane Alexander for Testament, Meryl Streep for Silkwood, and Julie Walters for Educating Rita. By that point, Streep had already been nominated for four Oscars, winning twice — her spot should have gone to Wallace. She’s the mom from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, for christ’s sake!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the latest installment of Me Complaining Oscar Snubs From Decades Ago. Thank you for your time.

(Via ScreenRant)

Did you ever think you’d see the day when there would be enough Batman movies for a ranking list? With Matt Reeves’ The Batman opening this weekend, there have now been 10 movies about the zorro-esque aristocrat in a mask who fights for the common man, not counting animated versions (Lego Batman) and spinoffs like Catwoman, Joker or Birds of Prey — the Harley Quinn movie (Harley Quinn is the Joker’s girlfriend; the Joker is the evil clown who fights Batman, for those of you who haven’t been keeping a mental spreadsheet of such things).

Robert Pattinson will be the sixth actor (West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney, Bale, Affleck) to play Batman. Reeves will be the sixth director (Leslie Martinson, Burton, Nolan, Schumacher, Snyder) to helm a live-action Batman movie. There are now identifiable Batman eras. Do you like your Batman with murder or no murder? A weirdo or a boy scout? Glib and funny or intense and brooding? Someone should design a Myers-Briggs test to match you with your ideal Batman.

With so many different approaches to Batman having been attempted, we thought why not dance with the devil in the pale moonlight and try to rank our favorite? Because the only thing the internet appreciates more than a numbered list is the opportunity to fight about our favorite cape daddies. Keep in mind, tastes are subjective, so if you disagree with me on any of these it’s probably because you are wrong.

10. Batman Forever

Year Released: 1995

The Principals: Joel Schumacher directing, Val Kilmer as Batman, with Nicole Kidman and Drew Barrymore as love interests and Jim Carrey and Tommy Lee Jones as villains.

I really wanted to be one of those smart critics with a brilliant, bespoke take about how the much-maligned Joel Schumacher Batman movies are actually better than you remember, full of sardonic wit overlooked by contemporary critics and the ultimate reflections of America’s obsession with blah blah blah. Then I tried to actually rewatch Batman Forever. It’s clear from the very first frames that something isn’t quite right here.

Batman Forever opens with a “gear montage,” of Batman suiting up, which leads into a shot of the Batmobile, this iteration of which looks a bit like a big veiny dildo on wheels.

It’s first lines are:

ALFRED: Can I persuade you to take a sandwich, sir?

BATMAN: …I’ll get drive-through.

It feels like a fast-food commercial, and… it sort of was one? Batman Forever allegedly cost $100 million to make, and yet the whole thing feels cheap, like a disposable plastic toy come to life. Schumacher made no effort to make his sets look like anything but sets, and his big visual idea seems to have been “canted angles” (which he may have taken from the villain scenes in 1966’s Batman, which were allegedly shot with Dutch angles to convey that the characters were “crooked”). Pretty much every scene opens with the camera cocked sideways, and having to tilt your head does not improve the plasticky sets or bizarre tone — which finds neither the goth camp of the Burton Batman movies nor the grounded realism of the Nolan Batmans. Schumacher’s efforts land somewhere between “half-assed” and “community theater” with an occasional jolts of bracing horniness.

It’s strange, because if you had told me in 1995 that the director of The Lost Boys and Falling Down was doing a Batman movie starring the guy from True Romance and Tombstone I would’ve thought it sounded like the greatest idea ever. Kilmer on paper seems like a fantastic Batman — he has the perfect eyebrows and lips for it, and he’s a great actor with classic action movies on his resume. In practice his Batman is a weirdly bland boy scout; even worse than Clooney’s glib version. At least that was a take.

The only time the Joel Schumacher Batman movies are interesting is when they’re horny, and Batman Forever is far less horny than Batman & Robin. (Nicole Kidman’s psychiatrist character showing off her cleavage to seduce Batman, to whom she’s attracted because she has psychopath fetish, is the only interesting scene).

9. Batman (1966)

Year Released: 1966

The Principals: Leslie H. Martinson directing Adam West and Burt Ward as Batman and Robin; Cesar Romero, Lee Merriwether, Burgess Meredith, and Frank Gorshin.

Any Gen Xer or younger who thinks their generation invented irony or post-modernism needs to watch this swinging sixties version of Batman, in which Adam West does deadpan puns for 90 minutes and fights off a rubber shark in the first act. Vigilantes?? This Batman rejects the label. He and Robin are “fully deputized agents of the law!”

This generation’s sense of camp is somewhat opaque to us now, but Batman seems clearly intended as some kind of knowing, wink-wink nudge-nudge parody, which kids could naively enjoy while their chain-smoking parents smirked appreciatively at the drollness of it all before going out for an eight-martini steak dinner.

Burgess Meredith, aka the original trainer from Rocky, plays Penguin, with Cesar Romero as the Joker (a role for which he refused to shave his mustache) and Lee Merriwether replacing Julie Newmar as a very pointy-boobed Catwoman. Burt Ward played a dopey, maybe-gay Robin who wasn’t smart enough to get any of Batman’s jokes.

This was the era when everything in the Batman universe had a “bat” label and/or pun, like the batcopter and batladder, the latter of which dangled from the former while the pastel-clad Batman punched a shark (“hand me down the shark repellent bat spray, Robin!”). The matter-of-fact goofy labels on everything feel like a particular inspiration for Wes Anderson.

The whole vibe reminds me of Tarantino’s conception of pre-hippie Hollywood’s halcyon days that inspired Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, or of a sketch being performed at the Playboy Mansion to loosen everyone up before the hot tub. Which is to say, some knowingly goofy pantomime that existed largely as a way to kill some time before everyone got drunk and fucked. There aren’t actual bikini go-go dancers in it, but it feels like there are? The go-go dancers are implied? Was that a thing?

Anyway, this is a movie where it seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun. Not that much of it actually translates to us the viewers, mind you, especially almost 60 years later, but it does look like the sixties were a sexy fun time.

8. Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice

Year Released: 2016

The Principals: Zack Snyder directs Ben Affleck as Batman and Henry Cavill as Superman; with Amy Adams as Lois Lane and Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor.

I don’t know if this one even belongs on the list, as I’ve always thought of it primarily as a Superman movie rather than a Batman movie. I did like the idea of Zack Snyder directing Ben Affleck as a ‘roided-out, over-the-hill Batman, and perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I quite enjoyed at least the first two-thirds of Man of Steel.

Yet six years later, the only things I can remember about Batman V. Superman are that it had a dream sequence within a dream sequence (double dream!) and the heroes bonding over both their moms being named Martha. Otherwise it was just a long, dull commercial for future DC movies. Which honestly makes me a little nostalgic for Batman movies as-commercials-for-McDonald’s. Say what you will about the Schumacher Batman movies, at least they weren’t 156 minutes long.

7. Batman & Robin

Year Released: 1997

The Principals: Schumacher back as director; George Clooney as Batman and Chris O’Donnell as Robin; Uma Thurman and Alicia Silverstone as Poison Ivy and Batgirl; Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze, plus an early version of Bane.

Schumacher’s second Batman movie opens with an even sillier version of the gear montage from the first one, now with gratuitous closeups of butts and codpieces (angles canted, of course). That leads into an action set piece so goofy it makes the old Adam West Batman TV show look like Heat by comparison. Batman and Robin try to steal back some giant, cartoony jewels from Arnold’s Mr. Freeze (see above), who’s trying desperately to shoehorn every groan-worthy catchphrase however many screenwriters this movie actually had could think of. It truly must be seen to be believed, making absolutely no concessions to the laws of physics, with Batman and Robin literally floating from place to place as if being controlled by a kid playing with dolls, all while fighting bad guys dressed like evil hockey players.

On the one hand, Batman & Robin is a tonal disaster and the acting is more grating than your average high school play. On the other hand, it is extremely horny, and it’s hard not to begrudgingly respect Schumacher for fitting so much horniness into an otherwise nonsensical half-assed kids movie. The conceit of Poison Ivy was that she was a femme fatale, a budding eco-terrorist who could inspire so much lust in men that they would kill each other or themselves just for a taste. And suffice it to say, this was wildly believable as embodied by 1997 Uma Thurman (even taking account the awful Mae West accent she uses the entire movie). During a wild charity gala sequence, Poison Ivy takes the stage in a giant gorilla costume for a pseudo-burlesque dance sequence, during which she coquettishly reveals a nipple, shot in close-up — a papier mache gorilla nipple!

That scene along bumps this one a couple spots up on the list, a bizarre porno for 8-year-olds. It’s wild. And yet also, kind of boring and shitty.

6. The Batman

Year Released: 2022

The Principals: Matt Reeves directs Robert Pattinson as Batman, with Zoe Kravitz as Catwoman, Paul Dano as The Riddler, Colin Farrell, and John Turturro.

Adding to the “things that sounded good on paper” theme of the first part of this list, I really liked the idea of a stand-alone, not-part-of-the-DCEU Batman movie starring Robert Pattinson as a weird goth Bruce Wayne. Robert Pattinson has the ideal jawline to play Batman, and between him and Zoe Kravitz, there are times when The Batman feels like a movie about sharp jawlines. Unfortunately, The Batman is also two hours and 56 minutes long, far too much screen time to be filled with sculpted jawlines alone. Warner also managed to hire the only mainstream blockbuster director with even less of a sense of humor than Christopher Nolan, Matt Reeves.

Perhaps you enjoy Reeves’ Planet Of The Apes films. Many people I normally agree with do. While I grant Reeves a rich visual vocabulary, I find his Apes movies oppressively joyless, which in retrospect probably should’ve been a clue as to how I’d find The Batman. The Batman uses as its main musical cues the traditional “Ave Maria” and Nirvana’s “Something In The Way,” the worst song on Nevermind and a perfect Nirvana song for people whose favorite thing about Nirvana was Kurt’s self-pitying heroin hangovers. (Someone please make the “Drain You” of Batman movies, I prefer my cynicism drenched in sarcastic cheer).

The Batman starts out attempting something like a film noir, a Chinatown or a The Crow about the real power behind the city, starring Batman. Yet it lacks both the coherence of Chinatown and the earnestness and camp flair of The Crow, and really any sense of exuberance or joy whatsoever. It skips Batman’s origin story for once, which in theory is admirable, but in practice just leaves more room for The Batman‘s leaden yet somehow frantic plotting. God, I’m so sick of baroque plotting.

A good film noir breathes. It’s anchored in time and place. The characters are recognizable types. In The Batman, Italian gangsters who control the city, 1940s-like, coexist with a social media-famous killer, 2020s political debates, and multiple characters who grew up in 1920s orphanages. It’s a lot of things at once, all of them GRRRR DARK SAD but not especially coherent or believable.

A film noir Batman sounded like a cool idea, the same way a 70s Deniro homage Joker was kind of a cool idea. Yet even more so than Joker, The Batman can’t seem to commit to its own idea. Despite the sheen of art cinema it eventually throws in all the old corny Batman clichés anyway, complete with a post-credits sequence that might as well have been a big middle finger reading “f*ck you for sitting through the credits, you dumb asshole.”

I’d actually kind of respect it if I hadn’t just sat through a Batman movie longer than The Godfather.

5. The Dark Knight Rises

Year Released: 2012

The Principals: The third Christopher Nolan-directed, Christian Bale-starring Batman, with Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Caine.

I think most of us can agree that The Dark Knight Rises was the weakest of the Nolan-Bale trilogy, right? Probably three Batman movies is a lot to ask of any director.

In the broader context of Batman movies in general, The Dark Knight Rises still pretty good. I just think most of us were getting pretty tired of endless twists, motiveless villains who get caught on purpose, and armies of inexplicably suicidal henchmen by this point. At this late stage I mostly remember Bane being unintelligible, way too many endings, and an overbearing score that made most of the action sequences feel like music videos.

Which is a bit of a shame, because Nolan had gotten pretty good at shooting action by this point, surprising considering he started his career as one of the foremost offenders of hacked-together shaky cam action. TDKR was also 165 minutes long, which is, again, way too long for a Batman movie. Sorry, guys, I love a lot of Batman movies but Batman is not Apocalypse Now. I honestly shouldn’t even have to elaborate on this point, if your protagonist is a guy who wears a cape and punches people two and a half hours plus is too long.

Still, for all his tics, and all the tropes Nolan popularized that other directors ripped off and did poorly, it’s undeniable that Christopher Nolan is real movie director. He understands themes, his compositions are spectacular (in the true sense of “spectacle”), his actors always bring their A-games, and his scenes tend to work even when the story is overplotted and/or full of holes if you stop to think about it.

4. The Dark Knight

Year Of Release: 2008

The Principals: Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhardt, Maggie Gyllenhaal.

I know, I know, CONTROVERSIAL TAKE here, but if you can stop shouting for a moment, I’ll defend the indefensible by saying that while The Dark Knight was almost certainly my favorite Batman movie when I was leaving the theater, it’s a brilliantly-made movie that doesn’t have a ton of rewatch value for me these days.

The action scenes were easily a high-water mark for superhero movies up until that point, and Christian Bale and Heath Ledger are a basically perfect Batman and Joker. But again, the motiveless killer and army of inexplicably-loyal-to-the-point-of-human-sacrifice henchman don’t really do it for me. The frenetic pacing and busy plot are things that worked well enough in the moment but don’t hold up that well in retrospect.

3. Batman Returns

Year Of Release: 1992

Principals: Tim Burton directing Michael Keaton as Batman, Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, Danny DeVito as the Penguin, Christopher Walken.

Batman Returns is admittedly one of the weirdest blockbusters ever made, but unlike Schumacher’s Batman movies, it’s fascinatingly weird. It was written by Daniel Waters, who also wrote Heathers and Demolition Man, another one of my favorite weird action movies from the early 90s, and Batman Returns feels like a high-water mark of 90s goth-camp culture. After all, it brought together two titans of 90s art student kitsch — Waters and Tim Burton.

No other Batman movie balances camp silliness and goth noir as well as Batman Returns. It has scenes that are hilarious, scenes that are borderline disturbing, scenes that are absurd, and scenes that are costume-freak sexy. The scenes between Batman and Catwoman are arguably the only legitimately sexy scenes in the Batman universe (though Schumacher’s Batman movies are enjoyably horny at times), with real sexual chemistry (“mistletoe can be deadly if you eat it”) and two characters who seem like they’re seconds from f*cking every time they’re onscreen. With all due respect to Heath Ledger’s memory, Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot is easily my favorite Batman movie villain. “It could be worse, my nose could be gushing blood” edges out “wanna see a pencil disappear?” for the best line.

Batman Returns is also a strangely great satire of political optics with an underrated performance both by Christopher Walken as Max Schreck, with Andrew Bryniarski (aka Lattimore from The Program) perfectly cast as Max’s large son, Chip, in his brief scenes. Oswald Cobblepot’s penguin funeral is truly surreal and the whole film is strangely unforgettable, even if most of us probably left the theater scratching our heads at the time it came out. In many ways it’s the opposite of The Dark Knight, a movie that’s maybe too weird the first time you see it but seems to get better with every rewatch. I love Batman Returns.

2. Batman Begins

Year Of Release: 2005

The Principals: Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Cillian Murphy.

Trying to decide between Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and Batman Returns is the hardest part of this ranking by far — they all have things about them that I love and other things about them that I don’t. Batman Begins is, in my opinion, by far the strongest of the Nolan Batman movies from a story standpoint. It had a few twists, as all Nolan movies do, but it didn’t try to do too much and it didn’t try to make the whole world or the whole universe the stakes of every scene. If I could beg the people who make superhero movies for one thing it would be to stop having the heroes have to save the entirety of existence in every movie. It’s exhausting. Cable news has done the same thing. If everything is the most dangerous thing in the world, eventually nothing is.

Anyway, Batman Begins was an ideal introduction to Bale-Batman, and Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow is an underrated villain — essentially, a guy who gets you way too high and then goads you into bad trips, but on an industrial scale. I love the idea that a supervillain is the Bad Drug Friend.

The biggest shame of Batman Begins is that for as strong as it is on story, it was firmly ensconced in the “shaking-makes-it-more-realistic” era of Christopher Nolan action scenes. Batman might be doing something really cool, but all we’re going to see is breaking glass, a close-up of someone’s lapel, a blurry something, and then a shot of Batman snarling. My dream would be for present-day Christopher Nolan to remake Batman Begins, and he has to let a third party supervise the sound mix.

1. Batman

Year Of Release: 1989

Principals: Tim Burton directing, Michael Keaton as Batman, Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Robert Wuhl, soundtrack by Prince.

It’s easy to forget how weird Batman was in 1989. Producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters (also known as Barbra Streisand’s one-time boyfriend, since parodied by everyone from Kevin Smith to Paul Thomas Anderson in Licorice Pizza, in which Peters is played by Bradley Cooper) had developed it for 10 years before it actually came out, and it’s hard to imagine anyone less crazy and prone to bizarre wild hairs than Jon Peters could’ve made it.

When he was hired, Tim Burton had had just one feature released, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, in 1985. Shooting on Batman didn’t get the go ahead until after the success of Beetlejuice three years later. Michael Keaton, meanwhile, was a slightly-built comedic actor with poofy hair, known for such films as Johnny Dangerously and The Dream Team (Pierce Brosnan and Tom Selleck were apparently considered for the role, among many others — part of me still wants to see the Tom Selleck version of Batman). Batman itself was a sixties TV show about a chipper boy scout in a blue suit who drove a convertible.

Imagine telling a financier that you want to turn a kids TV show into a dark, PG-13 adult drama starring the little poofy-haired guy from Mr. Mom directed by the guy from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure with Jack Nicholson and a soundtrack by Prince. We should all write a thank-you letter to cocaine.

Almost every single creative choice in the development of Batman seems like a wild longshot, but by some weird alchemy they kind of balance each other out. Keaton is a shockingly effective mix of unassuming, wild-eyed, guarded, and fierce, and Tim Burton still feels like the ideal director to balance the schlock, camp, noir world of Batman while still making it feel real. I’m not even a Burton fanboy, but his are the only Batman movies to have jokes in them without being jokes themselves. The story breathes. It has just one big action set piece, the Joker’s free-money parade, but it doesn’t need more. The script builds up to this one big action scene, and then the scene delivers.

If there was one movie that laid the groundwork for the current content ecosystem of psuedo-kids entertainment actually aimed at adults, it was Batman. (I actually tried to watch it with my 8-year-old stepson and he made me turn it off because it was too scary). Yet whereas Marvel mostly makes violent-but-sanitized war propaganda with cutesy dialogue, Batman was an eerie drama about a weird guy and a broken villain directed by an art school goth. There’s a wit, a level of craft, and a sweetness to the 1989 Batman. Other directors’ Batman movies might’ve had one or two of those at the same time, but never all three.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

We did it, folks, we’ve survived February 2022. More importantly, we’re all playing Elden Ring and it’s really really good. Rejoice, Tarnished! But 2022’s games aren’t stopping there, so Noah and Noelle from Recon are here to help you all sort through the never-ending series of games threatening all our free times and wallets this year.

2022’s games onslaught continues with a year jam-packed with everything from massive RPGs to games where you play as a cat. Noelle is looking forward to the next game that’ll terrify her and all the while, everyone is joined in hands trying to will Hollow Knight Silksong into existence. It’ll happen one day, guys. In the meantime, new games aren’t the only ones that matter. I’m starting to think Noah’s right: what about our Halo Infinite challenges?!

So many games these days just don’t end thanks to DLC, expansions, and updates that just keep adding more features and mechanics. Others, like Cyberpunk 2077, are getting a second chance to make a better first impression in 2022. This steady stream of additions to existing games has been changing how we think about new releases for a long time. Everything old can be new again!

We do love new games though and even more than that, we love the possibility and rumors of them. Is there any possibility for a sequel to Among Us? Will Noelle get to play God of War: Ragnarok this year?! Only time will tell if these things will come to pass, but one thing’s for sure: 2022’s video game schedule is looking pretty packed right now. So make that wish list and check it twice alongside some of our recommendations on the latest episode of Recon!

Last week marked the fifth week the Encanto smash “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” had spent in the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. It was also the final week of the song’s chart-topping run (for now, at least): On the new Hot 100 dated March 12, “Bruno” has lost its top spot to Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” which ascends to No. 1 for the first time.

It was a long road for “Heat Waves” to get to No. 1. In fact, it was the longest road ever: It finally topped the Hot 100 in its 59th week on the chart, which shatters the record for longest climb to No. 1, besting the 35 weeks it took Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to do so.

The band’s Dave Bayley wrote and produced the song himself, which makes “Heat Waves” the first such No. 1 hit since Pharrell’s 2014 chart-topper “Happy.” It’s also just one of a handful of songs to ever debut at No. 100 on the chart before rising to the very top. Additionally, the song is both the band’s first No. 1 hit and their only song to ever actually chart on the Hot 100.

Bayley spoke with Uproxx for an interview a few months ago and said of the song, “With ‘Heat Waves,’ it was coming to terms with the fact that it’s OK to understand, appreciate, and know that you’re missing someone — that it’s actually probably quite healthy. That you should let yourself do that, you shouldn’t try to bury it the whole time. It’s kind of like a eureka, euphoric moment. Or it can be.”

Mary Wollstonecraft is considered by many to be the founder of feminism. Her book, titled “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” was groundbreaking for challenging the notion that women existed for the sole purpose of pleasing men, and its philosophy is still the heartbeat pulsing through the women’s movement.

Wollstonecraft died only days after giving birth in 1797, but not before bestowing one last piece of advice to her baby girl. And it’s wisdom that every daughter deserves to hear.

“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice, or enter into my reasoning: I would then, with fond anxiety, lead you very early in life to form your grand principle of action, to save you from the vain regret of having, through irresolution, let the spring-tide of existence pass away, unimproved, unenjoyed. — Gain experience — ah! gain it — while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness; it includes your utility, by a direct path. What is wisdom too often, but the owl of the goddess, who sits moping in a desolated heart.”

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According to The Marginalian, the words come from another book Wollstonecraft had been brewing as a follow-up novel to Vindication, meant to take on a more personal tone. Her words indicate that Wollstonecraft knew the end could be approaching, making her message all the more bittersweet.

In our modern era, this passage might not seem all too radical. Gain experience, pursue your own happiness. Got it, we’ve heard it before. But the fact that Wollstonecraft encouraged self-mastery to her daughter—in a time when a woman’s fate was decided wholly by men—is what makes it so remarkable. Wollstonecraft inherently knew the value of empowering women, and wanted her daughter to have the same inner knowing.

She also wanted her daughter to come into this world with the knowledge that she is, and always will be enough. She writes how remembering that will help ensure a happy life.

“Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”

Wollstonecraft’s words—and her feminist principles—would continue to live on through her daughter, Mary Shelley, who went on to write “Frankenstein,” giving the world its first taste of science fiction.

Scholars have noted how Shelley’s iconic novel is, in its own right, a feminist novel. Primarily for the way Shelley criticized how females and femininity had been devalued by a male-driven science community in patriarchal society. I mean, the bride of Frankenstein was torn to pieces … so …

Like her mother advised, Shelley rebelled against convention in favor of pursuing her own path. And not just in her career, either. In fact, both mother and daughter had passionate counterculture romances that warranted a rather spicy double biography.

The Marginalian adds that little Mary Shelley learned to read by tracing the letters of her mother’s gravestone, and really only came to know her mother through her work. It’s a bittersweet, yet touching image. The words of her late mother clearly resonated and shaped her identity.

It seemed Wollstonecraft’s dying wish was to instill within her daughter a fiery independence that couldn’t be squelched. If that’s the case, she succeeded, and her words continue to inspire women everywhere to enjoy (even fight for) the genuine blessings of being exactly who they are.