I have a friend who loves everything.*

I really wish I was more like my friend who loves everything. I wish I could love everything. By all standards of storytelling, THE FLASH is a mess, but how negative a guy do I want to be? I spent three hours of my life and nearly twenty dollars on a ticket for this movie so trust me, I wasn’t going in hoping to dislike anything about it. I wanted to like it all. I just couldn’t. But maybe let’s start by naming some things I liked:

1. I loved seeing Michael Keaton as Batman. In that way I’m an easy mark. He looks great, almost even better with the age, and I couldn’t help but daydream about how much better off we had been if he had never stopped being Batman and if we’d gotten maybe a dozen Batman movies starring Michael Keaton over the past thirty years. (I thought something similar seeing Harrison Ford in the trailer for the new Indiana Jones movie that played before this show.) Michael Keaton was the first superhero I saw on the big screen. Yeah, that carbon-dates me. I’m old, but I’m not quite Christopher-Reeve-as-Superman old. I remember well that June summer in 1989 when I got Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and the Ghostbusters and maybe best of all for me in that moment, Michael Keaton as Batman. It’s goofy to be one of those guys, but I have to admit that it still means a lot to me in 2023 to see Michael Keaton do it again. There’s been no big-screen Batman that I’ve disliked, but he is by far the best one. He’s the only one I ever truly believed would put on that costume and go out at night to beat up bad guys. He’s always been the one who looked most comfortable.

2. I really liked the new Supergirl. Some of that is looks, I’ll admit. I’m really sorry, but not really. I like what I like.  In another multiverse she would have been good casting as a Prince protégée. So I guess I like what Prince likes too. My friend who loves everything and saw this movie before I did knew I would like her. Everyone has a type. But I also liked her ferocity, even in such an underutilized role. You don’t get “ferocity” as a character beat from many of these super-characters, but it fits the genre at large, and particularly with the backstory they give Kara here. Just from a few scenes, you wish she had one of these movies to herself. Give Sasha Calle her own movie. It doesn’t even have to be Supergirl.

3. I like Michael Shannon in just about anything, even if he’s dressed like a big old space beetle, even if he’s hardly in it and I can’t even remember how he left the movie (and I JUST saw it), even if he may have been CGI animated using a Michael Shannon voice impersonator for all I can tell. There aren’t too many oddball geniuses at work these days. They are our most precious cinematic resource.

4. Speaking of which, I liked the cameo from a certain oddball who I will watch in anything, even if people who aren’t absolute movie nerds with extensive knowledge of failed Superman productions will have no idea of why he’s in there, and even if he appeared to be entirely made out of CGI.

5. I liked the whole theme of the end credits. Just because I’m a dog guy.

Okay, now I’m running low on things I liked. It sure wasn’t the lead actor. I’m sure there’s an audience for people who like Jimmy-Fallon-looking guys who whine a whole movie through, but I am most definitely not it, and I would like a word with whoever’s idea it was to clone him and make it so the whole thing was a buddy comedy about twowhining Jimmy-Fallon-looking guys. Aside from that, there isn’t even really a movie here.

In theater, there’s this thing called “jukebox musicals.” Basically they take pop songs that you’ve loved on the radio and someone writes some sort of story to connect them, but the main draw is hearing those songs. I have to admit I absolutely don’t get the appeal. I mean, if I want to hear Abba, which never happens anyway, I am gonna put on an Abba record. What I am not going to do is pay Broadway ticket prices and go watch some theater kid sing Abba, and another thing I’m not going to do is watch Meryl Streep sing Abba in a movie. (Although I did have to do that once; bad example in every way.)

All these superhero movies, having shown us everything I guess they’re going to show us, are turning into jukebox musicals now. I’d love to use the analogy that they’re sampling like hip-hop DJs but it’s not that hip. It’s just “Hey, remember that other superhero movie you liked? Here’s some parts of it again. You liked the score? We’ll play bits and pieces of that in there too.”

When did this start happening? Superhero movies lend themselves to this because of the whole multiverse concept. Was it SPIDER-VERSE? Was it NO WAY HOME? Either way, seems like it was Spider-Man’s fault. You can’t go home again, but you can shop there.**

Another thing I was thinking about with regards to theater is Shakespeare. Whether or not a play is a tragedy or a comedy depends on if it ends with death or weddings. Similarly, THE FLASH tells you what kind of a movie it is and how seriously to take it by which Batman it ends on. There are, by my count, at least four different Batmans in this movie. Notice which one is last to arrive, and then you tell me if this is junk or not.

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* Except Nick Kroll. Sorry if you’re reading, Nick Kroll! My friend who loves everything absolutely cannot stand Nick Kroll, and by extension I guess anything that Nick Kroll appears in. What can I say? Everyone has their own garlic and holy water. I’m not sure if my friend is the vampire in this analogy. To him, the vampire is Nick Kroll.

** To quote a different movie, one that is at least unlikely to be repurposed in a multiverse thing. But you never know! Maybe he could fight the Punisher.