I already love the new Batman film, The Batman. I haven’t seen it, obviously, but its lofty self-importance keeps tickling me, from the definite article of the title to Robert Pattinson’s cut-glass cheekbones to the director Matt Reeves’s recent revelation that his Batman is inspired partly by Kurt Cobain. “Is this guy some kind of wayward, reckless drug addict? And the truth is that he is a kind of drug addict. His drug is his addiction to this drive for revenge. He’s like a Batman Kurt Cobain,” Reeves told Esquire, which I read written down, but I heard in an Alan Partridge voice. As I often think whenever I see socks with George Orwell’s face on them, it’s what he would have wanted.
It’s unsurprising that the Seven-esque trailer makes The Batman look about as fun as Damon Albarn’s DMs after the Swifties had set upon him. Batman is inherently po-faced these days; the era of tights and little silicone nipples and terrible puns is long gone. Last week, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that The Batman is almost three hours long. That’s with credits, but you no longer get to shave off 10 minutes by leaving the cinema as soon as the director’s name comes up, in case you miss a post-credits sequence or a bloopers reel (in fairness, if there’s a bloopers reel here, I will eat my bat-cape).
Is it finally time to agree that three hours is too long for a film? A running time should not require a lavatory break and/or a brief nap for sustenance. Titanic was too long. The Irishman is so long that I still haven’t steeled myself to watch it. Three hours is an ordeal, not because of the debatable notion that our attention spans are declining, addled by dizzying TikToks and those pesky memes, but because I have never seen a film that is more than two-and-a half-hours long that wouldn’t have benefited from a flattering trim.
The argument in favour of long films is that they give moviegoers more value for money. But there’s something cynical about the idea that making a film longer will somehow improve its quality. It’s double-spacing your homework, setting the font size to 14.
The Batman may well earn every one of its 175 minutes, but in 2015, YouGov found that 55% of Brits believe the ideal movie length is under two hours. Using no scientific evidence whatsoever, I believe this: the ideal movie length is a neat, succinct, respectful and kind one hour and 39 minutes.
Emma Thompson: to bare or not to bare – that is the question
In her new film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, Emma Thompson plays a woman who hires a sex worker to help her have her first orgasm. Last week, she explained that she rehearsed for the part in the nude, along with her director, Sophie Hyde, and co-star Daryl McCormack. “It’s very challenging to be nude at 62,” she said during a CinemaCafe discussion at the Sundance festival.
This is a transitional time for on-screen nudity. In recent weeks, full-frontal male nudity, usually doled out sparingly, has appeared on television with gusto. And Just Like That... famously showed Charlotte’s husband, Harry, whipping it out, with the show’s creator later confirming that it was a prosthetic. Meanwhile, teen tearaway show Euphoria, rarely coy about anything, has embraced both female and male nudity with extra enthusiasm for its second season.
Yet Sydney Sweeney, who plays Cassie on Euphoria, pointed out that there remains a double standard when it comes to nudity. “When a guy has a sex scene or shows his body, he still wins awards and gets praise. But the moment a girl does it, it’s completely different,” she told the Independent, suggesting that she gets more acclaim for the roles in which she does not take her clothes off.
Thompson said she didn’t think she could have done a nude scene before she was 62, though added that her age made it challenging, “because we aren’t used to seeing untreated bodies on the screen”. (The prosthetic, I suppose, would count as “treated”.) But we are used to bodies, treated or not, and for women it remains as complicated a decision as ever.
Frank Ocean: good luck if you’re trying to cover his songs
There are some artists who are uncoverable, either because their songs are so idiosyncratic or because they have such unique, indescribable magic that it’s impossible to do them justice. For all of the times that people have tried, and basing this on my own experience of mangled karaoke, Abba are pretty uncoverable. Covers of Patti Smith seem tough to pull off, though conversely her covers are in a league of their own. I always thought of Frank Ocean as one of the uncoverable artists, for those same reasons. His songs are strangely structured, with their own language, and they are very much his alone.
Yet this is the season of Ocean covers, suggesting that people are at least willing to give it a good go. Last week, Machine Gun Kelly released his version of Swim Good, which did not undermine my theory. Cat Power’s new album, Covers, opens with a version of Bad Religion and she has remade and reshaped it in her own image, which did undermine my theory. I went digging, and found a whole stash of new versions of Lost, by corrJoy Crookes, Khalid and Jorja Smith, all finding a different spirit in it. Not uncoverable, then, but it depends who’s doing the cover.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
