Martybear (Batman & Robin)
Batman & Robin
1997, PG-13
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman
Batman & Robin is probably one of the most inspirational movies ever made. There exists a message hidden beneath the films multilayered content, and for those brave enough to seek it out, it is enlightenment. Through perfect harmonic convergence, fate has brought together an assemblage of the most utterly inept, completely clueless rubes possible and given them the tools to create a feature length film based on one of America’s best known franchise characters.
Certainly, no single human creature possessed of the power, influence, and financial clout needed to single-handedly enable the making of a film would be so cruel as to delude this double-stuffed short bus full of window-lickers into thinking they could make a movie people would like—much less get it distributed world wide so that audiences everywhere could, as one unifying experience, know the collective dread of seeing it. And yet, this is exactly what occurred.
In much the same way that you know the depths of your own sinful nature when you laugh at the winners of the special olympics, hating this film fills the soul with exactly that sense of ones own inherent shortcomings. And how, you might be asking yourself at this point, is this explosion of internal angst-ridden self-loathing the inspirational event I mentioned earlier?
For two reasons, faithful reader. First, that it has inspired me to create a whole new system of movie ratings in order to properly express my utter contempt for it — as a simple set of low numbers is an embarrassingly poor conduit to express the wretchedness of this pile of shit, and second, that it proves the existence of a loving god.
In a godless, uncaring world, this film could never have been made. Someone, somewhere along the way would have realized that there wasn’t a collective IQ of 12 to share between the entire crew of this movie and pulled the plug before he lost, literally, millions of dollars. But, alas, even the financiers were so utterly blinded by their own incompetence that they failed to recognize this bad investment. Which leads only to a single, inevitable conclusion….
A loving god allowed this film to be made so that all of us in our savage, heathen depravity could stop for a moment, realize our own evil and turn towards the only salvation there could be—Him.
It should be no shock to anyone that it worked. In the years following the release of Batman & Robin, the number of Americans who attended church regularly jumped more than 4%. That might not sound like a lot, but it represents over 12 million people seeking penance for their dark ways.
And that is truly inspirational!!
Getting back to my other point, there exists (as I am sure my dear reader is aware) an elite fraternity of assassins. I’m not talking about the idiots from Wanted with their magic-bullet voodoo, but a group of movies so unwatchable that their mere appearance at a party can, in fact, ruin the evening. These fun-sucking, anti-blockbusters have, until now, been all but indistinguishable from one another in their near-perfect crappiness.
Many of the less mathematically inclined among you are going to get mad at me in a second, because I’m about to drop a really nerdy bit of math on you. It’s actually very simple and I will explain it so that it makes more sense to you. Please bear with me.
S = 101-100(e/R)
Where:
- R is the total running time of the film, in seconds, and,
- e is the moment at which you can no longer stand to watch another minute of the movie, in seconds, then;
- S is the unwatchability of a movie.
To find S:
- Start watching a bad movie.
- Press pause at the moment you first want to throw the remote control through the television.
- Make note of the elapsed time. In this example, the moment at which my brain threatened to punish me severely if I continued to watch Batman & Robin was at 00:06:58 (six minutes and fifty eight seconds)
- Convert the elapsed time into seconds. This becomes e. In this example e = 418 seconds
- Find the total running time of the movie. Batman & Robin runs for 2:04:45 (two hours, four minutes and forty-five seconds)
- Convert the running time into seconds*. This becomes R. In this example R = 7485 seconds
- Divide: e ÷ R. Using the values above we get 418 ÷ 7485 = 0.0558
- Multiply the result of step 7 by 100. 0.0558 x 100 = 5.58
- Subtract that value from 101. Our example would be: 101-5.58 = 95.42
- You have now determined that Batman & Robin is 95.42% unwatchable. Feel free to try this with other movies.
* Remember, there’s 60 seconds in a minute, and 3600 seconds in an hour
Review by Martybear