Burton's Batman: Nolan, Alan Moore, and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman

Drank and watched Tim Burton's 'Batman Returns' with room-mate (Rich) a few nights ago--it was stranger than I remembered (the Penguin is played as a nasty caricature that's the opposite of subtlety--a viscerally nasty, nightmare cartoon, Danny DeVito in very heavy makeup)--the plot points are often crude, but Michelle Pfeiffer's sensual, physical, destructive, half-insane, psychologically fractured Catwoman was alone worth the ticket price (15$ for a DvD ten years ago).***  The movie has its flaws, but her portrayal of a psychologically disturbed woman broken under a mix of poor social confidence and nasty establishment/masculine oppression is as close as you're going to get to the final word on the Catwoman character. It's the darkest, the creepiest and most compelling, and has the most interesting romantic arc.

The 1992 movie was also shocking in how much more successful it was, artistically (for me, at least), than Nolan's last--despite all the cartoonishness and flaws. How much more resonant and relevant the characters and themes seemed (there may be something to the assertion in the article linked below: that Burton in 1989 made a quintessentially Burtonesque film that nevertheless had its finger on the character's pulse more than Nolan ever did. I think this is arguable--thoughts? Certainly, say, Anne Hathaway's Selena Kyle, while competently rendered, is less resonant and striking than Pfeiffer's, I'd say

But the other issue is this: Burton's second Batman film (which I almost made it through without pause, until the beginning of Act V, when the Penguin launched into a Shakespearian/Greek pre-battle oration addressed to...an army of penguins with rockets on their backs colored like barbershop poles. Which penguins were somehow radio-controlled and about to set off on a military strike against Gotham's population centers...fucking weird), which is not his most celebrated but which was nevertheless striking, also reminded me that Burton was once 'a gifted visual director' who 'coupled a cartoonist's expressiveness with a deeply humane empathy for the socially dispossessed,' in the words of the article linked to below, which rightly calls out Burton (and Depp) for his/their oddly lightweight fare since the mid-nineties or so, something fans have been rather slow to admit.

How did it come to this? How did Burton's dark cartoon aesthetic, full of storytelling verve and grounded in sympathy for the underdog and the dispossessed, go so hollow? Read the article--it's mostly dead on, with the exception that I'm not on board with the author's interpretation of the Keaton Batman being an 'overgrown boy crouched in a cave' (or words to that effect), or the idea that is a basic part of the Batman myth. But the rest is worth your time if you're interested in his ouvre.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8462672/what-happened-tim-burton-career-how-did-all-go-wrong-fast

Thoughts? How does Burton's vision compare to Nolan's, with the less successful last installment under the latter's belt? What happened to Burton? And the following:

***Selena Kyle's character raises one final question: Alan Moore's 'The Killing Joke,' with its portrayal of a likewise psychologically fractured Joker, is known to have influenced Burton's Batman material. But is that influence actually stronger in the second film than the first--where it's usually assumed to connect because that's the one about the Joker? Nicholson's hammy take on The Joker is pretty may share a plot point or two with The Killing Joke, but his character is pretty much uniformly malevolent.