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Apparently, no one else is going to say it, so we're going to say it: We miss Michael Keaton.*
We know Michael Keaton is actually readily available to us, starting this weekend in multiplexes across the nation, in the apparently-not-good and not-at-all- related-to- the-novel-of- the-same-name- by-Don-DeLillo thriller White Noise. But we want the old Michael Keaton: the Beetlejuice Michael Keaton. The underrated-actor Michael Keaton. The take-this-fanboys thwarter of expectations in Batman Michael Keaton.
Most of all, we'd like to know what halted his career so suddenly. You remember him, right? Big star at the dawn of the '90s? And it seems like just yesterday he was hot enough to be making showy appearances in hip, all-star-cast ensemble films like Jackie Brown. Or wink-wink cameos in slick, cred-heavy movies like Out of Sight. He could do everything! He was funny in Beetlejuice. He was grave in Batman. He surprised everyone with his stunning dramatic turn in Clean and Sober, that addiction drama no one saw but everyone heard was quite good.
And then -- what? Nada. He stars in a TV movie. He plays the President in First Daughter. He shows up in White Noise, an off-season thriller that looks better suited to Stephen Dorff or Craig Sheffer. (You know, like that weird film from a few years back, FearDotCom, a title that totally doesn't sound dated now.)
Is this how Hollywood works? You star in one film about a guy named Jack Frost who comes back to life as a snowman, and suddenly all your friends abandon you? And, okay, maybe the clone movie wasn't such a hot idea. And the whole jut out the chest, squish in the chin, talk like Daffy Duck as a three-pack-a-day-smoker comedy routine got a bit tired right around Much Ado About Nothing or, as we like to call it, Much Ado About Nothing With A Special Appearance By Beetlejuice.
And, while we're on the topic, it's true that he's always had an air of jittery menace that undercut his everyguy appeal, which he exhibited so nicely in Night Shift and Gung Ho, but which eventually got subsumed. And he did always seem to fall through the cracks, a classic neither-here-nor-there star: not movie-idol handsome, not Oscar-winning good, not gut-busting funny. He was like the utility baseball player who's decent at a bunch of things but not possessed greatly of any one skill. He won't win a home-run crown, but he'll knock in eighty runs every year -- which for you non-baseball-fans out there, is a number of runs-batted-in that would make you the equivalent of the Michael Keaton of baseball.
And the Michael-Keaton-of-baseball isn't a damn bad thing to be. It's certainly not enough to get you exiled to Nowheresville. If Dennis Quaid can have a late-life renaissance, then, by gum, Michael Keaton can have one too. And if White Noise isn't the film, then we're sure it will start with his next big movie, which is...Herbie: Fully Loaded. Okay, the next big one after that.
Welcome back, Michael Keaton! We're rooting for your triumphant return...even if it comes while riding inside Herbie the Love Bug.
*Okay, at least one person did say it: Joe Queenan, in fact, in a GQ piece awhile back. The piece, however, did little to agitate the suddenly and strangely stagnant career of Michael Keaton, which proved to us that we were wrong about Joe Queenan being the most powerful man in Hollywood.
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