Film with Fanuzzi

Batman, ‘New York values’ and Charles Bronson

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The Republican and Democratic presidential primaries are coming to New York, and your choice is simple. If you believe that the Obama presidency has brought the country to the abyss, you’ll consider voting for Bernie Sanders. If you feel we must fight, curse and insult our way out of the abyss we’re already in, then you’re for Donald Trump.

Movies worth leaving home for: You might also like “Batman V. Superman:  Dawn of Justice,” the second-most controversial reality show in America after Trump’s rallies. It really is the perfect movie for our nasty, brutish and short (fingered) times, eerily like the “Trump Effect” — a pirated Internet streaming campaign ad that, as the New York Times reports, stole its voiceover and disaster-chic footage from one of those dire apocalypse-themed video games. That’s essentially the last third of “Batman V. Superman:” computer generated hell, with an interminable fight to the death between the good, the bad and the ugly. You’d better finish your popcorn before Batman breaks a sink over Superman’s head (he really does that) and then run out. Can you believe it?  You’ll need reality, the mean streets of New York City, as an escape from escapism.  Let that sink in for a minute.  

Too bad. I was all set to be the contrarian. For the first two thirds, Zach Snyder, the misanthropic director behind this comic book universe, had put his finger on an evil little secret. The rage to do good is not for nice people. And Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne has a rage inside. His Batmobile is a violent projectile, not a car. His Batman is inhuman; even the people he saves call him “it.” The first sight of him, so central to the Batman film mythos, is beyond original. Wedged in the corner between a ceiling and two walls, he looks like a horrific black cobweb stain. There’s no pretense to Bruce, either. Killing Superman will be his legacy. “We’re criminals,” he reminds his colleague Alfred, played by Jeremy Irons.   

If Affleck’s Batman did his worst only to Gotham City’s worst, you’d just have a darker “Dark Knight.”  Everyone loved that pathos to Christian Bale’s characterization of Bruce Wayne. Destroyed inside, an orphaned man had to become the wraith his city needed, ugly and dark. Director Christopher Nolan’s commitment to Bruce’s humanity was such that he created “The Dark Knight Rises,” by no means a great movie, just to give his plaintive hero the mercy he needed from the very first scene of “Batman Begins:” release from saving the people he loved.  

Snyder, on the other hand, made a movie about what it takes to save a world in peril. And truth be told, he might be right. You look at the Doomsday golem-thing at the end of the movie and you say, oy, this is worse than my news feed: ISIS, the Syrian civil war, the despoliation of the planet’s climate, nuclear proliferation, crushing Third World poverty all rolled into one. Next to this world scenario, the once terrifying inspiration for Batman’s Gotham City looks pretty good. You watch young men in fedoras and horn rims sail down Ninth Avenue on these colorful blue bikes. People gather on weekends to plant trees and meet farmers. What is this, Smallville?  

Worth staying home for: If you long for the days when New York City inspired fear in the hearts of film-goers, then it’s time to reintroduce yourself to “Death Wish,” the Charles Bronson 1970s classic.  Now streaming on Amazon Prime, “Death Wish” gave birth to the vigilante genre that spawned the modern Batman movies. But be ready for a surprise. This is a light, jazzy, even comic film with a sense of humor about everything vile, from racism to corruption. Enjoy watching Charles Bronson’s “bleeding heart liberal” character slowly go loco to a lovely, meditative score by Herbie Hancock. And all the characters play their offensive New York caricatures to the hilt. For lovers of the Brooklyn-Italian romance “Moonstruck,” there’s even great byplay between Vincent Gardenia’s operatic police inspector and his underling, Officer Olympia Dukakis.  

Michael Winner, the director, creates scenes of women’s posttraumatic shock with great sensitivity and heartbreak. He would go on to direct the most terrifying New York City film of all time, the feminist shocker “The Sentinel.” But in “Death Wish,” he wants to have fun with location and genre, giving Bronson’s citified sophisticate a plausible introduction to a “Wild West” and an American gun culture that are so out of touch with New York City that at first, he smirks.  

Smart and ironic, “Death Wish” reminds us that we once smirked at Donald Trump.  Anyone for “New York values?” I’ve heard they’re on the ballot.  

Batman, Superman, Death Wish, Film with Fanuzzi

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