Danny Ocean, Batman, a vicar and some umbrellas: a movie and TV

Steven Soderbergh has spent his career doing art movies like Kafka (which tanked badly enough I’ve never been able to find it for rewatching) and paying the bills with hits such as Erin Brockovich. I presume it’s that pragmatic approach that led to himn directing OCEAN’S THIRTEEN (2007) as a follow up to Ocean’s 12.

The movie feels “off” from the beginning as we spend 30 minutes with George Clooney explaining to Eddie Izzard how they’ve set up 90 percent of their plan to take down casino magnate Al Pacino (for double-crossing team meber Elliott Gould). However they need Izzard to help them thwart an unbeatable AI that watches people’s body language to tell if they genuinely won or were scamming the casino (it sounds very much like the kind of bullshit claims the tech industry makes about junk AI products). As in Ocean’s Eleven the team is all male (Ellen Barkin as Pacino’s right hand provides the token female) and the whole thing feels almost like self-parody — any random episode of the TV series Leverage would be more fun. “Screw Sinatra’s hand!”

So is the excellent first season of BATMAN: The Caped Crusader, Bruce Timm’s return to the world of the Masked Manhunter. It’s a vaguely 1940s Gotham City, though more diverse than the reality would have been (Commissioner Gordon and Barbara are POC, Det. Montoya is an out lesbian), Batman has just started his career and the GCPD treats him as a criminal. Can he take down the Penguin (a woman voiced by Minnie Driver), sinister psychiatrist Harley Quinn, spoiled heiress Selina Kyle and scarred former prosecutor Harvey Dent? And what about corrupt cop Harvey Bullock?

Timm is doing non-canonical interpretations of most of these — way more so than in Batman: The Animated Adventures — which made my guesses about where it was going wrong in several episodes. It doesn’t always work — Two-Face without his coin flipping just ain’t Two-Face — but it usually does, and the series does a good job developing his relationship with Babs and Alfred over the course of the 10-episode run. “What do you do when the evidence is pointing you in a direction you don’t want to look?”

The third and final season of THE VICAR OF DIBLEY (you can check out my S1 and S2 reviews) has the Gerry (Dawn French) and the rest of the cast coping with Hugo and Alice’s baby, David (Gary Waldnorn) falling for Gerry and the entire village facing being turned into a reservoir to solve a persistent drought problem (the last of the four episodes). Good fun (though the David/Gerry relationship becomes surprisingly downbeat) and a satisfactory series ender — though 10 years later we’d revisit Dibley in a series of specials. “How about digging up moles and bashing in their heads with a flat stone?”

The ending of the THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY‘s third season had the apocalypse averted once again but with the team now stranded and powerless in another new timeline. Netflix’s final season picks up several years later with the team in normal lives — Five working for the CIA, Luther a male stripper, Alison and Lila with kids and so on. Only now their powers are returning. Weird shit is going down. And a cult claims that the current timeline is a distortion of the real, perfect one which somehow they’re going to get back to …

I had mixed feelings about S3 but this was a satisfactory (if rather sad — I won’t go into detail beyond that) finish explaining why they’ve had to deal with so many apocalypses and bringing them all together for the big finish. While I haven’t been able to sit through the final season of the Doom Patrol‘s endless squabbling with each other, this series I did and it worked for me. ““Alison and Claire had to dig me out of the grave of a dead greyhound.”

#SFWApro. Covers by Jim Aparo (top) and Neal Adams