Remember when the troika of Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and Bane (Jeep Swenson) led their villainous charge across the screen in Batman and Robin, the final installment in the Batman franchise that was rebirthed in the 80s and mercifully executed in the 90s?

Me neither.

However, the blame shouldn’t fall on the thin shoulders of Thurman whose villain was never really more than eye candy and whose ability to make her victims fall in love with her is rather lame and more suited for romantic comedies than superhero action movies. Nor should it fall on the roided-out broad shoulders of Bane, whose character was wasted, or Schwarzenegger, whose most memorable lines were terribly written puns that rivaled Robin’s unnecessary exclamation of “Holy rusted metal Batman!” in Batman Forever: which is both an allusion to the campy television series from the 1960s as well as a factual exposition that they are standing on pile of holey, rusted, metal. Boo.

The blame also can’t be placed on Robin (Chris O’Donnel) or Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone), primarily because their inclusion didn’t cause the debacle; they were just widgets within this conglomerate time bomb.

To assess the damages here, one needs to step back and look at Batman and Robin as a whole, noticing that fourth installments (though only the second by Joel Schumacher) are rarely successful and are reserved more for the horror and sci-fi genres.

More importantly, Batman and Robin perfectly epitomizes the mortal sin of superhero-driven movies: the deluge of villains and sidekicks, whose sole purpose is to distract the audience from a flimsy story or illogical plot points. For additional examples, please see Spiderman 3, a film that focuses much more on visually masturbating its audience than birthing and building on Venom, the best character in the Spiderman canon. One can also refer to X-Men: Last Stand, another film that showcased how superpowers can be translated from imagination to live action, but it becomes more caught up in battle scenes than storylines.

Too many villains spoil a movie because each comes with an origin story of his or her own, and with this story comes  motive. The same can be said for heroes. Why is Robin so determined to get revenge? Well because his parents also died. Why is Batman willing to take him under his wing? Well, because both of their parents were murdered. Granted, it would be lazy to have Batman and Robin run into each other at a bar and exchange the brief:

“Nice outfit.”

“I wear it because someone murdered my parents and my inability to save them has made me seek closure vicariously.

“Me too. Want to work together?”

“Buy me a beer?”

However, the drawn out exposition between the symbolic (and often literal) connection between the two characters takes up time; unfortunately these connections are often lateral and don’t progress the story; rather, they only justify the introduction of another character. The same can be said for villains. There never seems to be a need to team up, yet the “two of us could work together and eliminate [insert superhero here]” often enters conversation at the local Villain Lodge, but this is futile, not the least because two villains with domination on their minds aren’t going to work together well – that’s why they’re villains. More importantly two people having one plan leaves little room for failure. Logically, it would be more difficult for [insert superhero] to foil two malicious plots simultaneously:

“I’m going to release Sarin gas in school full of children.”

“I’m going to blow up a large office building.”

“Let’s say March 21^st.”

“Buy me a beer?”

They should just exist separately, mutually wreaking havoc on whatever parody of New York City the setting happens to be.

Unfortunately, the emergence of additional characters often signals a larger problem: uninteresting primary characters to drive a story. When this happens, the only thing left to do is fill time by creating vignettes of semi-story that lead to fights or explosions.

Take Batman for example. His story is rather basic: parents were killed, unable to save them, guilt drives him to don the cowl. The progress he makes from young boy to martial arts knowing / gadget wielding badass was interesting to watch in Batman Begins, but what next? This issue is exposed in The Dark Knight because, honestly, Batman is comprised of one note: he seeks closure, though it’s masked as “justice.” He’s seen as an enemy, but he’s also a hero. The story can’t go much beyond that. Fortunately, Ledger’s performance as the Joker carried the film, partially because he was a character whose origin story was the lack of a rational origin story, one that constantly changed and aided his mystery and psychopathy.

At the same time, The Dark Knight also treads on the “too many villains” motif when it births Two Face, killed thirty minutes by creating a conflict between Batman, Two Face, and Commissioner Gordon, then killed him off, never to be seen again without an illogical story line in a subsequent installment. If the purpose of introducing him was merely to kill him off, then what was the purpose of introducing him? Sure, Batman now gets to be the villain – again – because Harvey Dent should always symbolize something “good,” but why? If Dent is exposed as a villain, then people will know that they can’t always look up to politicians? And, why is Batman taking the rap for this? Well, because “we have to chase him.” But why?

All in all, the bigger issue here is that Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises is dancing dangerously close to becoming a villain-filled debacle that promises to visually mesmerize but leave a viewer disappointed, and I hate saying this because Nolan has resurrected the Batman franchise and established himself as one of the best directors in Hollywood.

At the same time, the cast of characters grows.

In addition to Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine (who have 4 Academy Awards between them), the third installment includes Marion Cotillard (Also an Oscar winner), Joseph Gordon Levitt, Anne Hathaway, Tom Hardy, and Matthew Modine. The latter three are the ones that cause concern as they will play Catwoman, Bane, and Nixon, respectively. The villain quota is up to three thus far, and while Catwoman is the well-known villain of the triad – and at times a love interest – the question becomes “where is there room for the other two?” given that time also needs to be allotted for the presence of Cotillard and Levitt.

Perhaps the highly-anticipated sequel will be a three and a half hour opus, and in a way, I hope it is. Nolan revitalized a franchise that devolved to silliness in Batman Forever and ridiculousness in Batman and Robin, but he might be flirting with disaster with his own tidal wave of villains.

Let’s hope not.

I heard there was an Oscar broadcast last night, but when looking back on the evening, it seemed that there was less of an awards show and more of an attempt to draw in a younger, hipper audience to the annual event, which was mocked at least three times in the first half –hour by hosts Anne Hathaway and James Franco, who welcomed us to the “younger, hipper” Academy Awards.

And, maybe this was the shtick the Academy was going for, playing off of the snarkiness and sarcastic tone of the younger generation, but the train wreck begins when the snarkiness is scripted, rendering this awards show like many others: predictable in awards and gimmicks, resulting in more boredom than entertainment.

Predictability in Awards hardly bothers me now unless the show runs over four hours. As Anthony Lane has suggested, “people who seriously expect movies to be original should find themselves another art form,” and he has a fine point here. Many of the movies we are surrounded by are derivative, and the challenge is to convey the content in some variation of a variation of a variation. In the same vein, the Academy Awards is a rat looking for a food pellet in a maze while avoiding being zapped by a phony feeder bar.

The pellet for all of these shows is ratings: do people tune in? If so, they are satiated, and despite some of the terrible shows in recent memory, people keep watching. Despite the running times that fluctuate from 180 minutes to 269 minutes, people keep watching. In a sense, it can be likened to NASCAR: there’s a high percentage of a wreck, but if not, the finish could be close.

Who could turn away last night while watching the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Hathaway’s over-exuberance with Franco’s uncomfortable – and seemingly unprepared – dopey-straight man performance. Perhaps they were both just performing and went a tad overboard; on the other hand, Hathaway is an actress who took a role in Havoc, one in which she stripped naked a handful of times, just to shatter the Disney image procured through The Princess Diaries. She wants to belong, and she wants to stand on that stage with her very own Oscar, so perhaps her quandary of when nakedness stopped equaling a nomination is more truthful than tongue-in-cheek, though it certainly came off as scripted.

And perhaps Franco, who has been magnificent in a number of films including this year’s 127 Hours and Howl, wasn’t acting so much as showing how indifferent most of us are to who hosts the Oscars. What more could you expect from a guy who spends his days on General Hospital, his nights on a full course load at Yale, and the rest of his time rumored to be producing adaptations of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying? The Academy might have been driven to use Franco because of his current hot streak in Hollywood, but what else could they have expected?

It seems evident that they expected little more from their hosts than to move the show along, particularly in the decision to put Hathaway in a tux to slander Hugh Jackman (Why did he get so much flack last night?), which leads to the predictable emergence of Franco in a dress. Cross dressing can be funny, but please see my previous post about why this was not. The same can be said for Kirk Douglas announcing the Best Supporting Actress Award. Kirk Douglas deserves the respect any storied actor does, but that segment might have been the most uncomfortable scene in recent memory – ranking right up there with the last few Rocking New Years Eves where Dick Clark delivers the coda through the side of his mouth. It’s noble to think “once a performer, always a performer,” but both inclusions border on embarrassment and humiliation – kind of like asking Muhammad Ali to announce “Let’s get ready to rumble!”

It is wonderful that Douglas is still mentally sharp and has a sense of humor – one of the funnier parts of the broadcast was certainly his recurrent pregnant pauses before Melissa Leo became catatonic and then tourretic on stage – but most of his appearance was scripted, which is evident when the suited stage hand took his cane and held it on the bottom — an awkwardly shot moment because no one would hold a cane as such – which prompted Douglas to enter into a hand-over-hand competition to see who wins the cane.

In the end, the Academy favorite won the award for Best Picture, Firth took last year’s Best Actor award home this year, Christopher Nolan remained shut out, as did David Fincher who – if not Aronofsky – deserved the Best Director Award. Therefore, regardless of who hosts the Oscars, the predictability is constant, and perhaps instead of moving to a younger, hipper audience, the Academy is going for the indifferent kind.

1. Never Let Me Go

A haunting, sci-fi tale, set in a not so distant past, about a group of young adults whose sole purpose in life is donate organs for more privileged human beings, while struggling with experiencing profound emotion, knowing the fate of their impending demise. I couldn’t help but think of the Springsteen line from “Mary Queen of Arkansas”; “I was not born to live to die…” while sitting in the theater. That’s the entire point of these lives. Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield (who completely transforms himself here; which, if you see him in “The Social Network”, that same praise is lauded to him there, as well). This is the most overlooked film of the year. With any luck, the film will find its audience on DVD.

2. Blue Valentine

Two days in the life of a marriage that unfolds over flashbacks of a blossoming courtship. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams go to emotional depths that haven’t been explored as lovingly and as articulately since Cassavetes’ “Faces” & “A Woman Under the Influence”. Derek Cianfrance has made one of the most honest love stories in ages. What he’s able to achieve in his two leads is to be marveled.

3. 127 Hours

Danny Boyle traps James Franco in a hole. Do you know how many women dream about this? And yet, no one has seen this life affirming piece of work? Franco has arrived. More people need to come out and greet him.

4. Inception

Here are my initial thoughts on Christopher Nolan’s film. They still apply.

5. The Town

“Gone, Baby Gone” was no fluke. Taking references from “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” writer/director/star Ben Affleck updates the heist genre, with a stellar cast, notably with Jeremy Renner, who enters Pesci of “Goodfellas” territory.

6. The Kids Are All Right

The ensemble cast of the year. I recall “Terms of Endearment” in thinking about this film; not that there’s an overwhelmingly sad death at the end, but at it’s honest, and often humorous approach to the family unit, although not conventional. Annette Bening gives one of the best performances of the year. Completely nuanced, never over the top.

7. Black Swan

If you’ve seen Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes,” then it’s impossible to not draw comparisons to this film. Another story set in the ballet world about performance, passion, drive (like “Shoes”), and the depths one goes to get lost in the part. It’s a tour-de-force for Natalie Portman, and another milestone in Darren Aronosky’s filmography.

8. True Grit

The Coen Brothers remake evokes the spirit of John Ford while remaining definitively Coen. Jeff Bridges take on Rooster Cogburn is exceptional, but it’s the underrated and under praised work of Hattie Steinfeld that is the real reason to check out this gem.

9. The Ghost Writer

McKee says, “Wow them in the end, and you’ve got a hit.” With references to his own life and work, Roman Polanski’s modern day noir about a successful ghost writer who agrees to complete the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister exceeds all expectations. Career highs for Ewan McGregor’s ghost writer and Pierce Brosnan’s prime minister. Though it’s Olivia Williams performance as the prime minister’s better half that is most memorable, and least discussed.

10. Another Year

Mike Leigh’s funny and heartbreaking story that chronicles a year in the life of a blissfully happy couple in their golden years and their friends, who all seem to be lacking happiness in their own lives. Another great ensemble, led by Jim Broadbent, but it’s Leigh regular Lesley Manville’s performance that really keeps you glued.

What’s incredibly refreshing about this film is that the star is not Mr. DiCaprio, but the movie itself. It’s a wild ride through one man’s tumultuous psyche; one that will continue to raise questions upon each repeated viewing.