Batman (1989)

I am here in the sunny Bahamas!  Today I swam with dolphins and tomorrow I am going to snorkel off a tropical reef.  But I still made time for you, internet people.  Because I love you.    Before there was dark, gritty Batman Begins, there was kinda-dark, almost-gritty Batman!  Tim Burton wanted to take the film in a different direction from the campy Adam West 60's Batman and succeeded admirably.

Gotham City on the edge of the 90's is kind of a hellhole.  Crime is rampant, thanks to kingpin Carl Grissom (Jack Palance) and his number-one guy Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson).  But there is hope in the form of masked vigilante Batman.  Reporter Alex Knox (Robert Wuhl) and photographer Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) team up to try and find out if he actually exists.  That is, until billionaire Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) shows up to sweep her off her feet.

Grissom sends Jack out to Axis Chemicals to stage a break-in because the cops are sniffing around and then calls in an anonymous tip.  Batman and the cops storm the building and Jack falls into a vat of toxic chemicals.  A back-alley plastic surgery later and he is reborn as the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker.  He, too, becomes entranced by the lovely Miss Vale but still has time to plot the mass murder of Gotham City's inhabitants while listening to Prince.  Now there's a man who knows how to prioritize.

I remember this movie being the coolest thing my 8-year-old eyes had ever seen when my mom brought it home on VHS.  All the special effects were amazing and, having watched every rerun of the old TV show, Batman had never been so badass.

Now, of course, this movie is so dated as to be laughable.  The matte backgrounds, the dodgy CGI, Nicholson's over the top performance, the costumes, Kim Basinger's screaming every three seconds and oh dear Lord, the Prince soundtrack.  Everything is as campy as Cesar Romero putting white paint over his mustache because he didn't want to shave.

I still have a lot of nostalgic love for this movie, though.  This was Tim Burton before he decided he would only work with Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.  This catapulted Batman back into the spotlight and paved the way for other, admittedly shitty, comic book movies in the 90's.

This was supposed to be a post about Basic Instinct 2 but I just couldn't do it.  I turned it off about half an hour in, and I do not regret that decision.  It deserves every piece of negative criticism it got and then some.