For the week of September 16th, Twentieth Century Fox and Walt Disney Home Entertainment are bringing X-Men: Dark Phoenix to Blu-ray. To understand the Fox-sourced X-Men movies is to hold two mutually exclusive concepts at the same time: the X-Mens are maybe the most influential studio blockbusters of the last thirty years (the MCU would not exist without them), yet with a few exceptions, they all play like afterthoughts. Dark Phoenix marks the end of an era, the last Fox-exclusive X-Men property before Disney will likely revamp the entire IP...but it's already a movie that feels like it barely exists even as you're watching it. The scuttlebutt is that Fox ordered massive reshoots on Dark Phoenix before dumping it in early June (the first trailer dropped a full year ago), and at times, you can sense what writer/director Simon Kinberg (the series' longtime franchise architect) might have been going for before Fox ordered a total overhaul. This is the second iteration of the Jean Grey/Phoenix saga (after X-Men: The Last Stand), only I think Kinberg wants to look inside Jean Grey (Sophie Turner) to chart the psychological effects that such power would have on her. Parts of Dark Phoenix look like a Hollywood noir, all moody shadows and dark lighting, and I get why, post-Logan, Kinberg was able to convince Fox to let him make Taxi Driver with superpowers. But before we can interrogate Grey's psyche with any real depth, the film lurches into bargain-basement action-movie territory and never returns. Whoever handled the reshoots put forth a bare minimum of effort. The final cut has maybe two action setpieces (the train-set finale and the opening space rescue, although the latter is so short it barely counts) and tends to place its cast in direct sunlight so they can bark exposition at one another. And the actors largely respond in kind. The younger cast (Turner, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan) look confused about what tone to set, while their "elders" adopt a kind of active contempt; I have never seen two actors that want out of their franchise on an almost molecular level as much as Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence do. To be fair, though, the performers seem to hate the movie more than you might. Unlike the gaudy trainwreck that is X-Men: Apocalypse, Dark Phoenix isn't offensive. It's too underbaked, too ephemeral to really register as a proper movie. It exists and then doesn't, or maybe vice versa, just the way the whole X-Men franchise did. RIP.
Warner Home Entertainment is putting out a 4K collection of the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher Batman movies. I rather enjoy Burton's 1989 Batman. Anton Furst's production design has the Expressionistic brutalism of Metropolis or something, so looming and totemic are the streets of Gotham City. And as Bruce Wayne/Batman, Michael Keaton gives what now feels like the definitive interpretation of the character. When he's Wayne, Keaton layers in this reserve we might mistake for haughtiness when in actuality, Wayne is so sick of his "normal" alter ego that he's crawling out of his skin if he's not dressed in cape and cowl. But both the film and Burton feel like they're on their best behavior. You can sense Burton straining to counter-balance some inspired visual gag (when the Joker poisons people, they die with a grinning rictus smile on their faces) against the requirements of the superhero brand (that lazy ret-con wherein the Joker is also responsible for "creating" Batman). The whole endeavor is fun, but it's been calculated to within an inch of its life. Which brings us to 1992 and Batman Returns. As a Batman feature, it's kind of an appalling failure. Batman/Bruce Wayne appears in less than half of Batman Returns' runtime: he'll show up, kick a few clown-faced baddies in the head, and then Burton will shuttle him off screen to focus on something else. And there's the rub - for all its shortcomings as a Batman movie, Batman Returns is a phenomenal Tim Burton picture. Maybe his best: Burton packs the frame with every bizarre idea and setpiece he's ever imagined but could never afford. There's Danny DeVito's repulsive Penguin and Christopher Walken's loathsomely suave Max Shreck and Michelle Pfeiffer's deranged Catwoman (Pfeiffer should have gotten a Best Supporting Actress nomination - it's one of the greatest performances in any comic-book movie, full stop) and a whole coterie of psychotic circus freaks Burton can cut to if the crazy meter starts running low. Focusing on all these violent misfits lets Burton make a studio film as personal as anything in Big Fish or Ed Wood. Everyone here is lonely. And sad. And lashing out because they can't control their feelings. It's an $80-million comic-book movie about trauma and alienation. Once Batman Returns underperformed relative to Batman and inspired a wave of horrified critical opprobrium, Burton was out, and Joel Schumacher was in for 1995's Batman Forever. Forever is awash in loud neons and screaming soundtracks and two superheroes (Val Kilmer replacing Keaton; Chris O'Donnell stepping in as a dudebro Robin) and two villains (the violently overacting duo of Jim Carrey's Riddler and Tommy Lee Jones' Two-Face) and a psychosexual subplot that finds Nicole Kidman's oversexed analyst trying to help Bruce Wayne unpack the murder of his parents, mostly so Schumacher can stage a couple of bizarre dream sequences. The experience is not dissimilar from being trapped in a broken pinball machine. That said, Forever has its charms. Kilmer is the most underrated Batman, and Schumacher does a great job of aping the '60s Batman's antic, cartoon-adjacent spirit. However, just as the success of Batman let Burton double down with Batman Returns, so does Batman Forever embolden Schumacher to make Batman & Robin louder and sillier and shriller and crazier. Even Schumacher seems embarrassed by what he's wrought. In subsequent interviews, he's blamed both the success of Forever and Warner's rapacious merchandising department for forcing his hand on the movie's more critically indefensible decisions (he does take credit for the nipples and butts on the Bat suits, however).
Of Batman, Martin Liebman wrote that "The story plays complimentary to the aesthetics, the acting is first-rate, and there's an interesting dichotomy between light and dark, with the villain taking on the outward characteristics of the former and the hero the outward - and also in many ways inward - characteristics of the latter. Keaton and Nicholson play very well against one another and the film is full of terrific support performances." He was less keen on Batman Returns, noting that the film "is nowhere near as good as Burton's original, but DeVito does bring an ominous presence to the screen, even if the character is a little too ridiculous to be taken seriously. The story isn't as tight, either, and pacing is a problem. Still, it's better than what was to come in the later 90s Batman adaptations." Batman Forever, however, Martin called "not awful but it's also a shell of the Burton films, even the lesser Batman Returns. It's too much style, and that style doesn't bring a particularly good aesthetic with it, either. The movie is very much product of its time: big sound, grossly overdone, and anything but subtle." As for Batman & Robin, he argued that Schumacher "cranks [the tone] up to unfathomably ridiculous levels here, and the end product suffers as a result. The movie works as hammy, mindless fun, but it's quite amazing at just what a far cry this is from Tim Burton's masterful 1989 film."
Shifting gears entirely, we land on John Waters' Polyester, which the Criterion Collection is releasing this week. It is hard to imagine, but back in 1981, people viewed Polyester as Waters making a concession to the mainstream! A pisstake on the films of Douglas Sirk, Polyester takes the iconic drag queen Divine - the De Niro to Waters' Scorsese - and casts him as a frustrated housewife with a pornographer husband (David Samson), two sexually voracious children (the daughter sleeps with anything that has a pulse; the son is into feet), a duplicitous lover (Tab Hunter), and one catastrophe after another. I'm talking abortions and suicides and murder plots and suicide (both of the dog and people varietals), all of which are so luridly pungent that Waters had theaters distribute "Odorama" cards at theatrical screenings so you could, y'know, smell the movie...but because Polyester lacked the unsimulated sex and fecalphila of Waters' Pink Flamingos, some viewers accused Waters of selling out. However, like Cry-Baby or Serial Mom, what Waters loses in excessively graphic content, he gains in satirical bite. The reason Polyester plays as so daring today is that it takes a sledgehammer to so many still-relevant parts of suburban culture. In something like Female Trouble, Waters was uncovering all the human depravity that burrowed deep into society's subcultures; with Polyester, he makes the case that we're at our worst when we're living in suburbia. Genuinely transgressive, even forty years later.
But the best movie of the week might be Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year, which arrives courtesy of Warner Archive. For anyone who loves classic television, this backstage farce is essential viewing. Mark Linn-Baker (of Perfect Strangers and, oddly enough, The Leftovers fame) plays young Benjy Stone, a writer/gofer working for NBC's Comedy Cavalcade variety show in 1954. Benjy is desperate to make it big at 30 Rock, and he gets his shot when he agrees to "babysit" the Errol Flynn-esque marquee idol Alan Swann (the great Peter O'Toole) during the week Swann's guest starring on the show. There's just one problem: Swann is an inveterate drunk and consummate troublemaker, and his actions put the big live taping - and Stone's fortunes - in jeopardy. If all My Favorite Year had to offer was the interplay between Linn-Baker and O'Toole, it would still merit a viewing. Linn-Baker is a great straight man to O'Toole's charming rascal - it's one of O'Toole's best, most enjoyable performances, and that's saying something considering O'Toole played freakin' Lawrence of Arabia. But it's the '50s television milieu that elevates My Favorite Year into a minor classic. The important name on the film isn't Benjamin, writer Norman Steinberg, or even O'Toole. No, it's producer Mel Brooks, who lends the film his years of experience writing for Your Show of Shows and The Sid Caesar Show. Brooks understands this comedy realm innately, and he helps get all the details right, from the beleaguered insanity plaguing the below-the-line talent to the brusque arrogance of Comedy Cavalcade host King Kaiser (Joseph Bologna, doing a dead-on riff of Sid Caesar or Ernie Kovacs). You feel like you could live in the world of the film, and while My Favorite Year isn't perfect - I'm not keen on the subplot with Jessica Harper's comely fellow writer - it gets so much right when invoking a bygone era.