If you think my movie reviews tend to run long, you're correct. However, you're very wrong if you think I'm the only one, or even the longest one. Thanks to a link I've long since forgotten, I ended up at the
Agony Booth earlier tonight, and marveled at the wonder that was the Batman and Robin
review/recap. At thirteen (
yes, 13) pages, it's quite possibly longer than the script for that misbegotten adventure in celloid waste.
It's also not the longest review on the site, since his
treatise on Zardoz comes in at 15 pages, and after cutting and pasting from the handy printer-friendly version, I discovered that it ran almost 25,000 words. And, because I was curious, I checked my longest review, which is inexplicably for
Underworld! A film I awarded a 4 (out of 10) to and disliked enough to skip avoid ever watching it again, despite its nearly constant presence on cable TV. My Underworld review runs a mere 6400 words, or hardly long enough to measure on the Agony Booth metric. (My review pages for
The Matrix 2 and
LotR:RotK are both much longer, but each compiles several blog entries, reader feedback, etc.)
Penis issues aside, the Agony Booth reviews aren't reviews; they're more like recaps, or perhaps post morteums would be a more accurate description. They're like live blogs of the entire films, with every scene described, memorably bad dialogue quoted, sarcastic comments inserted when needed, and so forth. They must take hours and hours to write, but if you want to know all about a movie without acutally sitting through it, the Agony Booth can be a valuable resource, and it's definitely a lot more enjoyable to consume.
I've never made it through more than 5 or 10 minutes of Batman and Robin, but I read a good chunk of the Agony Booth dissection, and gained great insight into why exactly that film is probably the worst megabudget movie ever made. I've always been astonished by the horrible performances, with absolutely everyone but Alfred the Butler camping it up worse than Boy Scouts on an overnight to Lake Minnehaha, but it seems that the film has far more horrible stuff to offer than just the acting and dialogue. For example, it's absolutely chock full of laughably-implausible action scenes, incredibly stupid human interactions, and is constantly punctuated by horrendous puns and various stupid scenes that clearly exist only to set up the horrendous puns. Director Joel Schumacher has defended it by claiming he meant the whole thing as a sort of an over-the-top action movie parody, and yeah, it kind of is, but 1) I think that might have been accidental, and 2) a parody has to do something other than suck self-ironically to sustain viewers through 100 minutes of flashing lights, bright colors, and loud sound effects.
The film and its ridiculous circus antics did serve a purpose though: it killed off the franchise for a decade, and ensured that when Batman got back on the big screen in last year's
excellent Batman Begins, the character and the film would be appropriately dark and serious.
Labels: batman, movie review
