Poor Joel Schumacher. It just seems that no matter what happens with the rest of his career, he's never going to live down the bat-nipples incident. Sometimes when Schumacher works with relatively much smaller budgets (Phone Booth, Tigerland) he tends to shine brightly enough to wash any taste of Batman & Robin out of our mouths. I mean, this is the guy who directed The Lost Boys, and Flatliners, and wrote the screenplay for The Wiz. Which is why when we heard he had a film coming to Sundance, we began to pep up. After all, that meant it would be a low budget, and a return to Schumacher of days past, right?
Wrong. Instead we were given Twelve, a movie that closed the Sundance Film Festival, and our interest in future Schumacher movies. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Nick McDonnell, who was 17 years old when he wrote it, and when Publisher's Weekly calls an author "precocious," I usually take that as a warning sign. That means, "Gee, isn't he cute? Just wait until he grows up," and the source material definitely reflects that. Schumacher didn't make any adjustments to the story, and as a result this feels like a very special episode of Gossip Girl.
Continue reading Sundance Review: Twelve
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