The Big Picture · Discussion · Hall of Fame · Interview
August 30, 2024/ 144 min/ Sean Fennessey · Amanda Dobbins
On the eve of 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,' Sean and Amanda bring in Griffin Newman of Blank Check to argue Michael Keaton's whole strange career into four faces on a Mount Rushmore. Then Sean talks to Jason Schwartzman and Nathan Silver about 'Between the Temples.'
59 films across 3 segments.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
Michael Keaton, the strangest movie starSean and Amanda with Griffin Newman of Blank Check
Griffin's gateway to Keaton, ahead of Batman. A PG movie with severed heads, rooted in German expressionism and borscht-belt comedy, where Keaton has under 20 minutes of screen time and doesn't appear for 38 minutes but owns the poster. The role Burton first imagined for Sammy Davis Jr.
The reason for the episode, out the coming week. Keaton's fifth Burton film. Recorded hours after a four-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere; the reassuring word from people who'd seen it was that it isn't weighed down by self-important legacy-sequel bullshit.
The left-turn casting that made fans furious and then converted them; to Sean, still the best Batman. The one time all eyes were on Keaton. He'd circle back for Batman Returns, The Flash, and the shelved Batgirl.
One of his best movies, though it belongs to Michelle Pfeiffer and Danny DeVito. Their heat is the real engine; Amanda fast-forwarded to the scenes between Keaton and Pfeiffer and called it a great way to watch it.
The full-bore hit that codified his movie-star persona and later lands as the Jefferson slot. Written by John Hughes; watching someone else shoot a Hughes script, Griffin says, underlines how much Hughes did as a director. Kind of dopey, kind of good, all Keaton.
His first proper movie and a relative hit, co-lead in the Ron Howard comedy that launched the 'glib young man' persona.
Amy Heckerling's gangster spoof, Keaton doing a Cagney-meets-modern-meta thing. Excellent and a hard bomb; Griffin's John Adams of the filmography.
Ron Howard's culturally cringey relic about a Japanese company taking over an American car plant. The first movie where he's reaching for a serious, Jimmy Stewart register; Gedde Watanabe is the standout.
His first real dramatic role, same year as Beetlejuice; the two got him a National Board of Review best-actor nod and helped sell Warner Bros. on Batman. Sean found it overwrought going back.
John Schlesinger's dingy yuppie-nightmare thriller, one of Scott Rudin's first productions. Keaton as an evil tenant against Melanie Griffith and Matthew Modine; entertaining, though you never quite learn what's in it for him.
Griffin's pick for the worst film of his he's seen, and one of the rare cases where Keaton himself is bad and the whole movie is out of whack.
A supporting Dogberry, and an interpretation of Shakespeare unlike any other actor's: the weirdness applied to the Bard.
Bruce Joel Rubin's flat, un-cinematic drama about a dying man taping videos for the son he won't live to see. Should be devastating; lands with the mise en scène of an episode of Mad About You.
The noisy Ron Howard newspaper ensemble that should have unlocked his Hanks phase and comes up short. Griffin wanted to reclaim it and couldn't; it's a mess he adores anyway.
A classic rom-com setup reuniting him with Geena Davis after Beetlejuice, one of four conventional mid-'90s leads that just don't live on.
Harold Ramis high-concept comedy, his last strike at a comfortable classic-Keaton broad-comedy turn. When it didn't work, he throttled down for years.
One half of the great double Ray Nicolette gag: he plays the same ATF agent here and in Out of Sight. A cool, small performance from his slow-down years.
The other Ray Nicolette. The crossover rules, but it's two small performances in a stretch where the gaps between his movies were widening.
One of his lesser films (the source of the photo on Griffin's 'Michael Keaton Rules' shirt), and shorthand for the fallow periods when nobody cared and he was just trucking along.
President dad, first of a loose trilogy of supportive girl-dad turns in family comedies.
Race-car dad. Amanda had forgotten how precipitous the 2000s drop-off was; this is a landmark of it.
Chick Hicks, the mean green rival in the three-way finish. Sean saw it for the first time at a playdate with his kid.
The first of two sad-hitman dramas he directed and starred in; he stepped in to direct after the original director's appendix burst ten days before shooting.
The third supportive girl-dad turn, the Alexis Bledel post-Gilmore Girls vehicle where he's just the encouraging father.
Ken. A supporting scene-stealer in a giant hit that Griffin took as a sign his Keaton stock would finally pay off.
Ferrell and McKay just let him be funny, and he's remarkable: five lights-out scenes. The moment Griffin thought he was fully back.
The comeback role, and his only Oscar nomination, which he loses to Eddie Redmayne (to the hosts, an Oscar travesty). Both find the movie built on a foundation of bullshit: its premise that no one takes this guy seriously falls apart because Keaton is too inherently intelligent to read as a dumb action hunk.
One of the thankless supporting roles he was doing mere months before Birdman, filed under the stuff we can ignore.
The other thankless 2014 IP role, insane to place months before an Oscar nomination.
He voices Walter Nelson, one of two men named Walter he played in 2015.
Robby Robinson, the Globe editor and self-described 'player-coach.' Pure craft, all the tics stripped away: the 'that was me' moment is lights-out and devastating. Star of two straight Best Picture winners; the Lincoln slot.
His Ray Kroc; a January-dumped movie that has weirdly grown for Griffin on rewatch. The low end of the Moneyball-adjacent men-and-their-demons genre, hobbled by John Lee Hancock's inert direction.
Adrian Toomes / the Vulture, widely agreed to be one of the few MCU villains who is both operatic and grounded: just a guy who built something, no superpowers.
'Business Beetlejuice': a sadistic white-haired mogul, basically evil Walt Disney, in Tim Burton's real-time existential crisis about being commodified by a major studio. Sean saw it at the El Capitan and found it bad.
Ramsey Clark. Originally in line for the bigger Kunstler part (which went to Rylance) before scheduling shook out; his eight minutes are the best stretch of the movie.
Second lead to Maggie Q in a Martin Campbell thriller more or less built around how sexy he is at this age: she's hired to kill him but he's too hot. It does not work.
The Netflix-dumped 9/11 compensation-fund drama; Griffin calls it rock solid and Keaton's performance really good.
The most extreme case of John Lee Hancock inertia: where it ends feels like where the movie should have started.
His Adrian Toomes cashes in for the end credits; nobody holds it against him, the way nothing sticks to him anymore.
Named as the only Despicable Me-universe film Amanda has seen; occasion for a Minions-are-cinema debate.
His Batman returns; he's the one who came out of the movie with a little heat and a bump rather than dragged down by it.
His second sad-hitman movie as director-star: John Knox, a hitman with rapid-onset dementia who just becomes more evil. A strange, cruel choice that doesn't really work; even in press Keaton was passive about directing it.
Hallie Meyers-Shyer's film with Mila Kunis as his grown daughter: old-man Mr. Mom, a bad dad turned reluctant single father to young kids. Coming in six weeks; Sean's presumptive favorite of the year regardless of quality.
His film debut, a non-speaking role in Joan Rivers's comedy about a pregnant Billy Crystal, long before Junior.
A hockey drama so slight that calling it bad gives it too much attention.
One of the most bizarre studio films Sean has ever seen: an artist tangled in a criminal conspiracy, shot like an INXS video, impossible to follow scene to scene.
Part of the post-Beetlejuice run that made his Batman casting look, on paper, like a mistake.
A direct-to-video-feeling thriller with Michael Caine, filed among the depressing 2000s IMDb credits.
Another of the barely-there 2000s credits, opposite Brendan Fraser.
The Michael Keaton Movie Mount Rushmorefour films, four presidents
George Washington: the biggest brand reach, the blockbuster that started everything, and the one time all of culture was looking at him.
Thomas Jefferson: less about greatness than influence, the first real leading-man role, an idea that persists as a concept and a way of life.
Teddy Roosevelt: unusual, fearless, and hard to pin to one lane; less screen time, more influence.
Abraham Lincoln: the restrained, steady, all-craft late-career peak; the bookend of the elder-statesman era.
Jason Schwartzman and Nathan Silver on 'Between the Temples'the star and director, in conversation with Sean
Silver's bigger, crew-having comedy about a grieving cantor who can't sing (Schwartzman) and his late-in-life bat mitzvah student (Carole Kane, cast during a feverish COVID night in Paris). Written from a 60-page 'scriptment' (between a treatment and a script, dialogue suggested not separated), with most lines built during an 18-day shoot. The climactic dinner scene, shot over two nights across three competing versions of the dialogue, is the work Silver is proudest of.
The documentary Silver made about his mother after cutting her from an earlier film; making it, he learned she was taking a late-in-life bat mitzvah class, the seed of Between the Temples. Schwartzman watched it as a way of meeting Silver before they worked together.
Silver's third feature, cited as the moment an actor's on-the-fly choice (one performer dragged back into a scene) upended the plan and taught him what improvisation could do for a movie.
The May-December template a producer invoked when he pitched the story; Silver's co-writer C. Mason Wells hates it (thinks it's cloying), which made him the right partner to build something new.
Silver's last-great-thing: a Jean Grémillon film he found on Criterion, about a man who lets another go to prison in his place and then must live with the guilt.
Schwartzman's last-great-thing: he saw it alone in a theater while working in Atlanta and came away thrilled by the acting, the writing, and how hard it must be to shoot tennis.
Also mentioned raised along the way
The Hanks-as-market-correction and career-arc talk Apollo 13Top Gun: MaverickThe HustlerThe Color of MoneyToy StoryToy Story 4JuniorGhostMy Life Without MeAmerican FactoryMoneyball
Roads not taken Batman ForeverThe Purple Rose of Cairo
The 2015 Best Actor field, and Oscar what-ifs FoxcatcherAmerican SniperThe Imitation GameThe Theory of EverythingThe Danish GirlThe RevenantThe Grand Budapest HotelGone GirlThe WhaleEverything Everywhere All at Once
In passing North by NorthwestChasing LibertyMatch PointHome Alone 2: Lost in New YorkHome Again
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV Live from Baghdad (2002 HBO film)Beetlejuice (animated series)The Mary Tyler Moore HourMad About YouGilmore GirlsMSNBC
Podcasts Blank CheckClub RandomBreak Stuff: The Story of Woodstock 99
Web / other media GQ video seriesBeetlejuice (Broadway musical)
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