I’ve been a Mac user since 1993, when, that spring, I returned from my senior class trip to find a Colour Classic on the table; my father had, despite my lack of enthusasim about having my own machine, purchased one for me to take to college. Before that, we had an Apple IIe. I fell in love with that Mac, writing my graduation speech on it and playing Prince of Persia. A procession of Macs has graced my computing life since: A PowerBook G3, PowerMac G4, PowerBooks G4 (titanium and aluminum), a black plastic MacBook, an Air, and many more.

My First Mac

My usage of PCs and Windows has always been either professional or academic, where I had to use a machine for work because that’s what they gave us, or because the library at school used it for literature research. A succession of uninspired HPs and Compaqs took unwelcome residency on my desk at work, until the day came when I was able to use my own computer because everything had moved to the cloud, the network admin told me how to log onto the district wireless network, and platform didn’t matter quite so much.

But even when you get what you want, you always wonder what’s going on on the other side. In that spirit, I took a chance to borrow a Microsoft Surface Pro 7 for to kick the virtual tires and see what life is like for a Mac user taking up a Windows device. That, and my kids are Windows users who don’t care a lick about troubleshooting. And now, a couple of years later, I’m trying out a Surface Pro 9.

Surface Pro 7

The good news? Both devices are nice hardware. Windows 11 is a fine OS. And a lot of my favorite, must-have apps are available for Windows. 1Password? Yes. TextExpander? Yep. OmniFocus? Sorta.

The bad news? Battery life isn’t great, although the 9 is much better than the 7. The hardware/software integration is not what you would expect for a boutique expression of a platform. And surprisingly, the software landscape is thin.

I’m going to whack this up into a few different posts: Hardware, The Windows-as-Tablet Experience, and Software.

Hardware

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” -Steve Jobs

Unlike the plasticky, off-the-shelf garbage that I had been handed at work, the Surface Pro 7 hardware is top notch: it feels solid in your hand. The magnesium backing provides a pleasing texture; the lines are tight and clean, and the power cable, while proprietary, uses magnets. The newer Surface Pro 9, however, a less premium-feeling aluminum.

The Surface Pro kickstand, possibly the most polarizing design choice, allows for a remarkable array of viewing positions. (t works only OK on my lap, which is a common criticism of the device’s design, but not as well as a traditional laptop or Apple’s iPad adhered to a Magic Keyboard. The soft, texturized plastic surrounding the Surface Pro 7’s Keyboard feels great, and the keyboard itself is a minimal, island-style keyboard in the vein of Apple’s Magic Keyboard. (The blue Alcantara on the 9 is nice, too, but I prefer the 7’s feel.) The use of magnets allows for both flat and angled keyboard layouts, which is both clever and useful. Typing feel is excellent, with enough travel to provide tactile feedback, but not mechanical or loud. Overall, the hardware feels very well conceived and considered. You want to pick this thing up.

Surface Pro 9 Kickstand

The magnets on the Surfaace Pro 7 hold the Pen firmly on the side of the device, where you can mount and unmount it as needed. It’s not so strong that you won’t find yourself fishing around in your bag for it from time to time. Unlike the Apple Pencil, I don’t feel the need to secure it while moving around.

The Pen on the Surface Pro 9 is tucked into a small dugout at the top of the keyboard, and probably necessitated the carpenter-pencil design of the new Pen. It’s not a better design, and the expensive device feels much cheaper than the textured metal barrel of the original Pen.

Surface Pro 9 Pen

Speaking of the Pen, Microsoft’s version is different than the iPad’s, in ways that compare both favorably and otherwise. For example, the Pen is held onto the left side of the Surface Pro 7 via magnet, and it is a strong, reliable attraction. It does not, however, charge the pen; for that, you’ll need a AAAA battery (that’s correct, quadruple A, and you’ll need to pay attention to the charge level since it doesn’t charge while connected to the device. (On the Surface Pro 7, I was at 93% after about a few weeks of use, and eight months later, at 67%.) Unlike Apple’s Pencil, you can erase with the back end of the Pen, and there are programmable gestures available by using a (gasp) hardware button on the top of the Pen. For example, two firm presses will bring up either the Inking input panel, or the full screen Snip application, while one press drops me into Microsoft Whiteboard. Both Pens are stouter than the Apple’s Pencil.

The refresh rate on the Surface Pro 7’s display pales in comparison to any Pro-level iPad, even an older 2017 10.5″ Pro I compared it to. Windows 11 has appreciably improved the smoothness of scrolling on most applications, but you will immediately notice the difference if you’re a heavy ProMotion-enabled iPad user. The Surface Pro 9’s display runs at a much smoother 120 Hz.

The Steve Jobs quote above (ironically) points to why Microsoft went in this direction: they wanted to show off best-of-breed hardware, how they imagined Windows 11 best showcased on a premium hardware device.

Windows

So let’s talk about Windows, specifically how it works on this device. Oogling the hardware will only get you so far; at some point, you need to sit down and use it.

I am perhaps the worst choice to consider its benefits and drawbacks, but it simply does not feel integrated in the way iPadOS does with the iPad, and macOS feels on a Mac. That used to make sense, when Microsoft was designing the OS, but vendors were loading the OS onto their own hardware. But this? This should be the true Windows experience.

The most obvious consideration is this: the Surface Pro wants to be two things: a Windows computer, and a tablet. The question is whether this works, to mix the two or not. As not-unrelated aside, this is the debate that has raged on since the dawn of the iPad. “The iPad is a just a big iPhone.” This was very much true in 2010, and while iPad has gained a number of features and its own branded OS, the criticism of the device today remains: It’s not Mac enough to be your only computer. And looking at the prices for the upcoming iPads Pro, you can understand why a buyer might want an iPad to do it all, no Mac required.

Surface Pro 9 with Signature Keyboard

Swiping and gestures, for example, are present on Windows. In a very Microsoftian way, Windows 10 allowed you to swap between a Tablet Mode and a more traditional Windows interface.; Microsoft didn’t seem to have an opinion about how you should use their device. (Tablet mode is no longer included in Windows 11) Unlike iPadOS, which was once described as a big iPhone, Windows proper was always lurking beneath the surface of Tablet Mode. It looked a lot like Windows 8, with the tile-based interface and Charms. If you were expecting the Surface Pro to turn into an iPad when you turn on Tablet Mode, you’d have been disappointed: The desktop was replaced with a kind of Springboard-like launcher, but it’s not a canonical list of your installed applications, a la iOS’s default behavior; rather, it’s a permanently visible Start Menu. You can toggle a full list of installed applications, though.

Windows 11 is bit more ChromeBook-like; its interface is more easily suited to tablet use (when you want it), but it works fine as a desktop OS, too. I should probably put that a different way: tablet affordances are baked into Windows 11, so it works acceptably well without a secondary mode. That said, many interface elements and touch targets aren’t sized for your fingertip. Having been able to use this device on both Windows 10 and 11, I agree that the latter is much improved. Is it as good as an iPad? No. But the Surface Pro is trying to be two things.

There is one area where the interface between hardware and software is well considered and thoughtful: the Pen. I don’t know how third-party styluses work, but Windows shows you where your pen is going to land when it eventurally touches the screen… like a hover, it shows the exact touch point, and even highlights menu items on hover. It’s a nice touch that gives you feedback about where you are aiming on screen, and is a nice visual interface touch. The Apple Pecnil, but contrast, registers touches in the interface.

One big difference here is that Apple created iPadOS (and iOS) to be touch-first interfaces. You can quibble about what this means, but the touch targets on Windows are pretty small in comparison to iPadOS. This is meaningful difference, but it fades when you consider that a lot of the work you’re going to do involves websites. And websites don’t necessarily go to any trouble at all to make sure that it works nicely on the iPad.

The Appmosphere is Suprisingly Thin

Shockingly, on Windows, the app ecosystem is utterly lacking compared to the Mac and iPad. Are there speicality apps that make Windows better in niche markets? Maybe.

There are a number of big-ticket applications that exist, happily for me, on both Mac and Windows: most notable is 1Password, the lack of which would really make my life difficult. TextExpander is also available, but my writing volume is a bit lower than it once was, and I could live without it. Office, of course, is at home on the Surface Pro; I continue to pay for Office, if begrudgingly, because I use Excel a lot.

Setting up a device on a new platform makes you think about what you really need. Through a far liess rigorous process than I’d ever admit, I started looking for:

• an RSS reader with Feedbin support
• email
• Text Editor
• Utilities

Surface Pro 9

Email

A pinch for me has always been that I don’t use Outlook. The obvious darling of high-volume email overachievers sat idle, because on iOS, it pales in comparison to both Mail and (most pointendly, for me, Spark), and on the Mac, my beloved MailMate. So I was excited to finally get to use Outlook on a proper Windows device, where it would emerge the (paid) victor of all options.

Or would it? What the fuck is the deal with Outlook and Gmail? Is it the competitive spirit that prevents them from letting Outlook exist harmoniously with a Gmail account? You have to manually add Google Calendar to Outlook using a “secret” URL. I can install iOS apps all day that will read my Google Calendar. Furthermore, it doens’t readily recognize Gmail’s dreaded “All Mail” folder, which is where (ahem) all mail goes, only to be tagged with relevant information such as “Inbox.” I get it: Gmail’s IMAP implementation is non-standard. But hey Microsoft: everyone uses Gmail. Support it. Out of the box. Make it easy. Like on the Mac.

I’m being a little harsh; Outlook handles IMAP, Echange, and Pop. My favorite email application, Mailmate, requires considerable configuring to get it working correctly because Gmail’s isn’t a standard IMAP implementation. Similar shenanigans are required to get it working on Outlook.

Microsoft Mail is probably a better alternative if you use Gmail; it functions mch more like a modern, webmail-friendly application should. It also downloaded all 9 GB of my work email to the Surface Pro without warning. Mailmate downloads all of your email, and I understand this; I have seen the giant footprint that being a fussy Mac user invites. Mail doesn’t say anything; it just nukes and paves. It works though.

I alighted for greener pastures and tried out Postbox, which is an application I tried some years ago when I was looking for a Mail client for the Mac. I liked the Mac version quite a but, but it wasn’t terribly different from (at the time) Mac OS’s Mail client, which I generally liked using (and enhanced with InfoClick). It’s a good Gmail client on Windows, though, and-unlike so many applications-it looks good on Windows. It does not, however, handle large IMAP accounts well, and they charge for tech support, whether they actually help you or not. So it’s OK if you don’t need your old email.

I tried a number of other email clients, but I’ve settled on Spark Desktop since the latest version came out. It looks and runs like Spark Desktop on the Mac, and while I can’t yet replace MailMate with Spark Desktop, I do try to run it on my Mac. So that’s what I’m using on Windows, since I’m already paying for it.

RSS

I found FeedMill, an RSS reader that supports FeedBin, my aggregator of choice. Windows does not offer the embarrassment of riches this space that you find on any of Apple’s platforms, but this one looks the part and syncs, if a bit slowly, with FeedBin. The price was nice, too, and only 5 USD. It doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2020, though, and it chokes on my account after a while. So I created a web app of FeedBin using Edge. Boring, but that’s where we’re at.

Calendar

Calendaring is a different story. Outlook supports Google Calendar, but it’s not intuitive to set up, and at least for me, was a constant source of errors and stalled syncing. Microsoft Calendar is passable for keeping appoints documented and supporting a bevy of online sync services, but it lacks power-user features like Zoom and Meet support.Calendaring isn’t much better. Microsoft Calendar is passable for keeping appoints documented, but it lacks power-user features like Zoom and Meet support.

Until the New Outlook (aka Project Monarch) becomes available for me to use with my work Gmail account and home iCloud accounts, the only tenable calendar solution is Morgen, which isn’t free. It’s a solid calendar app and it’s available across platforms. I don’t prefer it to Fantastical, but that’s not an option on Windows.

Making Life a Little Less Painful

Here are a few gems I found that make moving to Windows more fun:

PowerToys app launcher: Launchbar fans will miss having a keyboard-based app launcher. This particular little gem of an app doesn’t do much besides open applications and URLs, but it’s better than nothing. It’s minimal interface is nice, too. Fluent Search is a commendable alternative, with built-in file searching across the file system (a la Spotlight) as well as other plugins, such as firing off terminal commands. Even better is the electron-based Ueli, which is available for the Mac as well.

Microsoft Edge: I have actually been using this as the Chromium-based browser to handle G-Suite duties at work on my Mac, so I was familiar enough with it. It handles PDF with annotation duties very nicely, and you can save to the files system once you’ve made your edits.

Ditto: I am embarrased to admit that I ignored the benefits of a clipboard manager until very recently, when I read Take Control’s excellent Take Control of Launchbar. I don’t do a trememdous amount of repetitive writing anymore, but there are many times when being able to grab the last few things I copied and reuse them comes in handy. Ditto isn’t Launchbar and it’s certainly not Pastebot, but it’s a nice little free app that does what you need. Alternatively, Microsoft’s own Windows-V keystroke is a nice, simple clipboard manager.

Morgen: Until the New Outlook (aka Project Monarch) becomes available for me to use with my work Gmail account and home iCloud accounts, the only tenable calendar solution is Morgen, which isn’t free. It’s a solid calendar app and it’s available across platforms. I don’t prefer it to Fantastical, but that’s not an option on Windows.

Make Mine Nine

Regaridng the Surface Pro 9, and I have a few things to add.

The experience of using the Surface Pro 9 after having the seven for a few years is incremental, to be sure, but it is decidedly better. Gone is the sluggishness that I associated with the 7; the 9 is snappy and fast in all the right ways. The 120 Hz refresh on the display is not only welcome but necessary; the Surface Pro 7 sruggled along with a premium price but suffered in comparison to older apple iPad hardware. And the Surface Pro 9 battery seems much improved, too.

I do miss the magnesium of the origintal design; this new Pro 9 is a bit more staid in its desig (although the black looks fabulous). I paired mine with a blue alcantera keyboard and it looks downright classy.

Conclusion

I really like using the Surface Pro. I like the size, I like the hardware, and surprisingly I like Windows 11. It makes for a weird tablet, though, and I can see why Apple didn’t Frankenstein the iPad and the Mac when their own slate first came to market. It’s not weird enough not to use it, but you are confronted with some level of dissonance if you’re used to something that was developed as a touch-focused device from conception to execution.

But the software situation on Windows isn’t great, and it’s a big surprise to me, because that was always the jab at Mac users back in the dark days of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The tables have decidely turned, and if you love software, you might not find Windows exciting.

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

Barry Lopez on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life – The Marginalian

Tuscans are of this time; they simply have had the good instinct to bring the past along with them. If our culture says burn your bridges behind you—and it does—theirs says cross and recross.

Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

On psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s notion of “good enough” parenting:

But Winnicott recognized that adapting and readapting to a child’s ever-evolving needs for attention versus independence is no easy feat, and he reassured mothers that getting it perfect isn’t possible, nor is it the goal. In fact, as long as she’s usually reliable and her child is well-cared for, her “failures”—minor miscues and slip-ups—are par for the course. Being good enough (as opposed to perfect), he championed, ultimately fosters independence and autonomy in the growing child. He writes of the good-enough mother: “Her failure to adapt to every need of the child helps them adapt to external realities. Her imperfections better prepare them for an imperfect world.”

How many important things in life call for us to accept “good enough,” not out of a pathological need to settle, but because “overall love and consistency” with “inevitable blunders” not only is good enough, but describes all of us rather well?

Why good-enough parenting needs to be a movement

Temple Gradin, Writing for the New York Times:

I often get asked what I would do to improve both elementary and high school. The first step would be to put more of an emphasis on hands-on classes such as art, music, sewing, woodworking, cooking, theater, auto mechanics and welding. I would have hated school if the hands-on classes had been removed, as so many have been today. These classes also expose students — especially neurodivergent students — to skills that could become a career. Exposure is key. Too many students are growing up who have never used a tool. They are completely removed from the world of the practical.

When I was a school psychologist, we used to lament the slow attrition of the trades programs at the high school at which I worked. Kids who didn’t care much for academics looked forward to cabinet making or metal shop every day. It seems like things have been turning around lately, though, with more vocational programs and county schools that offer programs that would be expensive and difficult for your local public to produce.

Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All

Heartbreaking. Ben Rhodes, reviewing Down and Out In Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, for the Atlantic:

In the end, that’s also what is most disturbing about his suicide. Leehrsen has an eye for the devastating detail. And to me, the most devastating of all is the fact that Bourdain had an “as-it-happens” Google alert for his own name, and that he spent the final hours of his life Googling Asia Argento hundreds of times, presumably staring at the same paparazzi photos over and over. How sad it is that Bourdain, who offered the promise of escape from the mundane social-media addictions of our time, spent his last days triggering himself while staring at screens. After a life of exploration, his last journey was down an online rabbit hole about his own failed romance.

What Kind of Man was Anthony Bourdain?

As with anything worth watching or listening to, I was late to White Lotus. I found it bewitching, but unsure why. The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert lent a hand:

Across all six episodes, a convincing thesis emerges: The curse of the privileged is that they would rather be miserable than lose even a tiny fraction of the things they’ve been given.

…

Every interaction in the series is an exchange of power, and even when people try their hardest to use that power in benevolent ways, or to redistribute it, things go awry. “Nobody cedes their privilege,” Mark tells his wife and kids during a tense dinner debate. “That’s absurd. It goes against human nature. We’re all just trying to win the game of life.”

The Awful Secret of Wealth Privilege

More Ruth Chang on the issue of choice:

The key thing about parity is that it opens up a new way of understanding rational agency that is a substitute for the usual Enlightenment conception according to which we are essentially creatures who discover and respond to reasons. On that view, our agency is essentially passive – our reasons are ones given to us and not made by us. Our freedom as rational agents consists in the discovery of and appropriate response to reasons given to us and not created by us. Parity allows us to see that our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place. So we might be free in a deeper sense – we are free to create reasons for ourselves under certain conditions.

Dr. Chang’s TED talk and NY Times article are written for a more general viewer/readership. This interview is far more academic in its content, but interesting if you have a philosophical bone in your body.

Interview in 3 AM Magazine

Soren Kierkegaard:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it…. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”

Am I making a terrible mistake?

I was removing a window unit air conditioner today and saw this on the sill in the unit’s absence:

It was a bat; this much I knew.

So what are you supposed to do with a bat that you think is injured? Two things:

1. Call a wildlife rescue expert and,
2. Give the critter a bat box.

My younger son willfully donned gardening gloves and a dishtowel, and moved the bat from the sill into a Clark’s shoebox into which I’d put a plastic dish with some water and drilled holes. Son #1 snapped this picture:

I left a voicemail with Shaw Wildlife Sanctuary and Crystal Shaw called me back within minutes. She offered to take a look at the bat, but that would have been a bit of a ride.

A friend sent me a list of of rehabilitators from the NJ Division of Fish and Wildlife, and from there I texted Jackie Kashmer of the New Jersey Bat Sanctuary. She texted me back within seconds asking for a picture of the bat.

Jackie said that it’s a Big Brown and that they are “pretty hardy.” She advised that I release him at night, from a high point, as he would get eaten by a bird if relased during the day, and that he’d crash into the ground if released from the ground. (I don’t know if the bat is a “he”.)

So the bat remains, for now, in a box downstairs, until it’s time to say farewell.

Update: The bat took wing on Nov 14th in the early evening.

There are a handful of great utilities on the Mac for managing how much of your screen a window takes up: Moom, Mosaic, and BetterSnapTool, to name a few. (I use Mosaic on my Mac at home, and BST on my work MacBook.)

Here’s a short video showing how I use Mosaic regularly to split my display’s real estate between two applications.

The ever-evolving Raycast, interestingly, can be used for the same purpose. There are a number of pre-configured extensions that you can invoke by typing the name of the action, including splitting the open windows between the right and left halves of your display.

Raycast

At a recent Halloween party, an attendee (who was ironically dressed up like a cowboy) reeled in horror at the mention of Brokeback Mountain and that someone there, whom he’d never met, liked the film.

It was evident why he didn’t like it: to him, it was a movie about gay cowboys. That’s too on the nose, though, and a gross simplification.

Roger Ebert:

But it’s not because of Jack. It’s because Ennis and Jack love each other and can find no way to deal with that. “Brokeback Mountain” has been described as “a gay cowboy movie,” which is a cruel simplification. It is the story of a time and place where two men are forced to deny the only great passion either one will ever feel. Their tragedy is universal. It could be about two women, or lovers from different religious or ethnic groups–any “forbidden” love.

He was an artless turd and proud of it.

Via One-Foot Tsunami, Scientific American on the evidence that gun control measures are not only supported by the data, they are popular with Americans:

As we previously reported, in 2015, assaults with a firearm were 6.8 times more common in states that had the most guns, compared to the least. More than a dozen studies have revealed that if you had a gun at home, you were twice as likely to be killed as someone who didn’t. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health tells us that states with higher gun ownership levels have higher rates of homicide. Data even tells us that where gun shops or gun dealers open for business, killings go up. These are but a few of the studies that show the exact opposite of what progun politicians are saying. The science must not be ignored.

The Science Is Clear: Gun Control Saves Lives

We saw The Batman in IMAX, which I am not sure was worth it. 4DX, though, sounds downright silly:

Annoying chair convulsing aside, I’d argue that all the unpleasantly translated movie-to-reality bits from our 4DX The Batman experience were quickly overshadowed by the batmobile scene. Before the batmobile was even on screen, we felt the revving of its engine under our seats, which gradually became more powerful as it slowly teased. Our chairs should have come with safety restraints, because when the car chase finally commenced in earnest, our theater became a Universal Studios roller coaster.

I Accidentally Watched The New Batman Movie In The Worst Way Possible

The Light Gives Way to the Dark

In 1989, Michael Keaton’s Batman said onscreen to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, “Ever dance by the devil in the pale moonlight?” Joker’s eyes widened, recognizing a signature line from an earlier time, before his face absorbed a blow from an angry Batman.

Tim Burton’s Batman, and this moment of cinema, was redemption of all of the shit I’d had to watch on television when the not-so-Dark Knight visited my cathode ray tube. Burton and Keaton rescued Batman, in one film, from the ridiculous 60’s Adam West and Super Friends Saturday morning cartoon versions to Matt Reeve’s in The Batman, which I just saw on an IMAX screen.

Batman was ridiculous to me as a child. That’s not entirely fair to say– I loved Batman. I loved the comic books. I used to get month-old comics for cheap with my dad at the Paperback Bookseller and the general store at the Ripicon Mall after a slice. Even clad in gray and blue, the comic book version of Batman was sullen, quiet, violent, and laser-focused on his mission. But on screen, he was ridiculous. I remember hating the Adam West show, wanting it to be something it never would be. The POOF and the PAZOW, the camera angles, the bright colors and direct lighting. It was better than nothing, but I hated it.

The Superfriends cartoon was more of the same. Batman was corny and unbelievable: he pulled all manner of things from his utility belt, a deus ex machinaaround his waist, complete with whatever might be needed at that moment to rescue him and the Super Friends from trouble. In one episode, he announced, “I’ll use the Bat Bazooka.” And from somewhere in the folds of his cape came a giant firearm, the likes of which would have made his moments-ago acrobatics impossible.

And the along came Michael Keaton’s Batman, in the Tim Burton film. Upon hearing that he had been cast for the role, I judged it a betrayal on par with Adam West’s ruination of the character: the long-awaited film casts a funny guy?

But Keaton was awesome. On Burton’s decision:

“A bat is this wild thing. I’d worked with Michael before and so I thought he would be perfect, because he’s got that look in his eye. It’s there in Beetlejuice. It’s like that guy you could see putting on a bat-suit; he does it because he needs to, because he’s not this gigantic, strapping macho man. It’s all about transformation. Then it started to make sense to me. All of a sudden the whole thing clicked, I could see the pointy ears; the image and the psychology all made sense. Taking Michael and making him Batman just underscored the whole split personality thing which is really what I think the movie’s about.”

Batman fans and critics can argue, but the ones worth watching were Burton’s two films, and all three of the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale films. The others are not worth your time.

The World’s Greatest Detective(s)

The Batman is, at its heart, a detective story. We did’n’t need the origin story again, and so were spared it. There were tasteful and useful nods to it, but not once did the film dwell on the Crime Alley shooting that led to the Batman’s origin. Instead, the Wayne legacy takes a monied black eye, when John Turturro’s Carmine Falcone leans in and gives the orphaned Bruce Wayne a possible explanation for the killing. (Turturro, by the way, plays it like Pacino.)

The Batman’s Riddler taps into the zeitgeist; he’s a rabble-rousing conspiracy theorist, one who can, through force of persuasion and words, marshal a Kenosha, Wisconsin-esque militia of acolytes eager to bear–and fire–arms. As he admits himself, the Riddler lacks muscle, using his brains to inspire others to enact his agenda. This Riddler is a modern, timely take, ditching the corny cackle and bright colors for remote terrorism, shared using poorly captured video over a cell connection.

Pattison’s Batman, despite a prescient knowledge of all but one riddle, is classic early-era Frank Miller Batman: driven, able, but inexperienced and fallible. He is well equipped but a damaged recluse. Rather than a focused, single minded vigilantes of means, he is odd, unfamiliar with social interaction, and obsessed. He takes a lot of hits.

There are some cinematographically rivetting shots in The Batman: Batman narrowly escaping the police, grappling vertically up a central staircase while the police converge around the opening. He falters for moment in his escape, almost plunging to his doom before realizing he needs to activate his flight suit. In another scene, the Penguin (Oz, played by a physically transformed Colin Farrell) waddling in anger, having been cuffed at his ankles. I saw The Batman in an IMAX theater, and the appearance of the new Batmobile is announced by rumble that shakes and thumps. (I longed for my 2013 Mustang GT, in the shop for repairs, in that moment.) After a an explosive car chase on a dark and rainy highway, red lights squeezing through the murky dark, Batman swaggers up to Oz, who is suspended upside down in his car. With the grappling gun holster on his leg and the weighty clunk of his boots, he’s a cowboy. Near the finale, after Batman cuts the lights to “do it my way,” he takes down a squad of gunman in the inky dark, the battle illuminated only by bursts of syncopated gunfire.

If the movie has a weak spot, it’s the finale, the final bit of chaos the Riddler has sown. In this, the Batman is again tricked; he is never one step ahead of the Riddler. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody didn’t like the film, especially the ending:

Again avoiding spoilers, the Riddler doesn’t only target individual high-level miscreants in Gotham but decides that the entire city deserves to go down with them. (The possibilities, with its Biblical implications, are endless—and remain untapped.) When his monstrous scheme is unleashed, crowd scenes conjure mass destruction as a plot point, the staggering loss of life as a generic and inchoate jumble.

But otherwise? It’s a great story. Long, but great.