Among the directors I more or less trust, Tim Burton seems to share my aesthetic sensibilities much of the time.  Some of his films I don’t really care for, but I have seen the balance of his feature offerings.  Since I’ve been watching Burton, and since we have DVDs of the Batman anthology that started the present movie trend featuring both Batman and the Joker, I decided to watch it again for the first time in many years.  Certainly the last time was before I began blogging.  Before Burton’s 1989 movie, the last Batman feature film had been in the sixties and it was campy.  The idea of making Batman serious drama representing a disturbed hero was quite the buzz at the time.  Of course Burton and his followers were eclipsed by Christopher Nolan, and Heath Ledger’s Joker outshone that of Jack Nicholson, but Burton’s film isn’t bad.

The pacing is a little slow.  Things have speeded up in the intervening years, however, and attention spans have shortened.  Michael Keaton does a good job playing a pensive Batman.  Nicholson was, for those of us who grew up in the sixties, a satisfyingly unhinged Joker.  The sets also stood out to me.  Burton concocted a gothic Gotham City that I appreciated.  And strangely, although it’s been at least a decade and a half, there are scenes I remembered precisely.  The nod to comic book origins with the Joker’s excessively long pistol struck me both in the eighties and now as strangely nonsensical.  After the build-up of the Bat-plane, it’s brought down by a single bullet?  Overall, however, the movie holds up pretty well.  Nolan’s trilogy is better, but then, Ledger’s Joker is a legend.

I mentioned that a DVD anthology exists.  I remember well going all over trying to buy a copy in the early 2000s.  Mainly it was because my wife and I had watched the original film and Batman Returns in the theater but we hadn’t bothered with Batman Forever and Batman and Robin.  The latter two, after both Burton and Keaton had left, weren’t very good.  I watched the two on my own after finally finding the DVDs and have never had any desire to see either one again.  They’d received poor reviews in the first place, but I really don’t like dropping things in the middle.  Burton’s Batman is darker than some of his other work.  So much so that it startled me a little upon rewatching the film.  It did, however, kick-start an interest in bringing these characters back to the big screen and, although tripping a time or two (that pistol!) was still satisfying to watch as the days shorten.