As I type this, it’s almost three in the morning and I have stayed up later than I should to watch the last disc of the Freaks & Geeks complete series DVD box set. I’m about to watch the last episode and I feel kind of silly, but I’m actually really sad that after this one, it’s going to be all over.

Watching the 18 episode complete series, I’ve grown to love these characters. I was shouting at Sam to go for it when he had the chance to kiss Cindy. I winced when Lindsay crashed her parents’ car. And even though I knew damn well they weren’t going to kill him off, I couldn’t help it: I nearly wept when Bill went to the hospital (and I wanted so badly to beat the shit out of Alan for putting that peanut in his sandwich). I am so engrossed in the world of the show that I almost can’t believe that this was a television series. It feels like a really long movie or a visual novel or something.  And while we’re here, let me just say that watching Busy Phillips as Kim Kelly feels like watching a real person.  I would almost venture to call it the best acting job I have ever seen.

It’s no surprise to me that Freaks and Geeks was cancelled before the first season finished airing. It’s too good for TV. And on top of that, I can’t believe that it ever made it past the television censors with its realistic portrayal of family life and teenage angst. Between the language, nearly explicit depiction of drug use, allusions to underage drinking, and frank portrayal of high school sex and relationships, this is not what anyone would expect to find when flipping through the channels of broadcast television.

It would have been nice for Freaks and Geeks to continue, just for the nod to the cast and creators for a job well done. But then it probably would have been less special. As it is, Freaks and Geeks is a work of Art. It’s flawless. And it’s no wonder that almost everyone involved in the making of it went on to become a huge star.

I have dreamed of working on a Judd Apatow production for years. I already thought he was one of the most brilliant and tuned-in creators working in any medium. But now I see that he’s a true Artist.

I am going to miss the Weirs and all of their friends.

The Easter Bunny has come!  And instead of leaving me a chocolate replica of himself, he’s posted Plinkett’s in-depth review of Star Wars: Episode Two – Attack of the Clones on YouTube.

Plinkett is the name of the reviewer who made news last year by posting a 70-minute critique of The Phantom Menace.  Now he’s topped it by posted and even more elaborate, even longer 90-minute review of Attack of the Clones.  You’re probably hearing those running times and thinking that there’s no way they can be entertaining enough to warrant those lengths, but I dare you to start watching the first part of his Episode One review and not get sucked right into it.  Go ahead.  Here it is:

Watching Plinkett’s reviews has got me all fired up again, remembering some of my feelings about the prequel trilogy:

• I call bullshit on George Lucas from Jump Street.  Episode One proved that he’s full of shit about having the whole long story worked out ahead of time.  It’s like that myth that Sylvester Stallone was homeless before writing and starring in Rocky – a good story that feeds the mythology, but is utter bullshit.  He might have had a couple of ideas randomly floating around, but my impression from Episode One is that George Lucas bought into his own hype, took it for granted that a prequel trilogy was going to be earth-shakingly awesome, and then went “oh shit, I’d better think of something!” when he got to where he had to shoot something for the release to be on time.
• Episode Two should have been Episode One.  It plays like it’s the beginning.  There’s no reason whatsover to show us Anakin Skywalker as a child, except that George Lucas was rushing to get one movie done instead of thinking out the whole trilogy ahead of time.  But the inverse scenario can also be a problem, which is the reason why Iron Man, as great as it is, is not the classic that it almost was.  It’s also the reason why the Hulk movie was a dud.  In those two cases, the reason is that they’re so focused on building up towards a posse-cut team up Avengers movie that they’re scrimping on making the individual movie something that stands alone.  I guess you can’t win on this one.
• What’s up with the pervy romance angle?  Amidala is a grown woman in the first one.  Even if she’s only supposed to be sixteen or so, Anakin is about ten.  Then suddenly Anakin is all grown up, and nothing suggests that Amidala is any older than she was in the first movie.  But even if they had cast another actress in the role to play Amidala ten years later, there’s still nothing to suggest why a little boy grown up a bit is of any interest to a woman who has been Queen and a Senator.
• CGI Yoda is awful.  I understand that he can’t light saber fight if he’s a puppet, but why does he have to look so gross?

Whenever I draw at Free Comic Book Day, a lot of the kids want me to draw them characters from the prequel trilogy and it makes me want to scold their parents for not selling them on the original trilogy.  For shame, parents of today’s youth.

There is one inarguable ‘biggest influence on pop culture’, and that is The Beatles. There are two contenders to the title of biggest influence on pop culture since The Beatles, and those contenders are Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang Clan.

‘Meet The Beatles’ was Inevitable

Both The Wu and J-Hova are central to the mainstream embrace and popularization of hip hop in the 90s and 00s. But until very recently, only Jigga-Man has been blended with The Beatles. When Producer Danger Mouse’s visionary THE GREY ALBUM dropped in 2004, remixing Jay-Z’s entire Black Album with beats made only out of samples from The Beatles’ White Album, it was a sensation that started a variety of trends which would shape popular taste to the present day, and allow both acts to entrench their dominance and influence in ways neither could have predicted.

Now comes Wu-Tang VS Beatles – Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers. This is a mash-up album by DJ Tom Caruana. Upon discovering it, I tweeted that it was my two favorite things in life coming together, and I was extremely happy to report that it is an amazing and richly entertaining album (I personally feel like it’s better than The Grey Album, but that is open to debate and will vary by individual)

An Unlikely Pairing, Unless you Know your Stuff

I thought I was the only one who loved The Beatles and Wu-Tang equally, but Caruana really knows his stuff. The use and juxtaposition of interview clips turns the listening of the record into an education in both groups’ histories, a comparison of their rise to fame, and a celebration of their legacy.

The album samples Beatles songs, solo Beatle songs, and covers of Beatles songs which means that Wu-Tang VS The Beatles presents a much more diverse listening experience than the gimmick might suggest. It’s full of witty and fun pairings, like the piano from You Never Give me Your Money under I’ve Got Your Money, or using You Know My Name (Look Up the Number) for M.E.T.H.O.D. Man. At twenty-seven tracks, it’s a bit big to take in on first listen but if you love these groups anywhere near as much as I do, you will really enjoy listening again and again, uncovering the layers, and seeing your favorites emerge.

Comparisons with The Grey Album – an “instant classic”, according to Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan of NYU – are inevitable, but Wu-Tang VS The Beatles takes the idea to different place than the limited scope of The Grey Album and becomes something very different. It might not end up being as big of an earth-shaker as The Grey Album, if only because The Grey Album was the pioneer in the mash-up album genre.  But Wu-Tang VS The Beatles equals or betters The Grey Album in three key areas:

BETTER THAN THE ORIGINAL VERSIONS:

Encore and 99 Problems on The Grey Album are way better than the original Black Album versions. Here you get similarly superior versions of Labels (remixed with McCartney’s Momma Miss America), Clientele Kidd (using a reggae cover of Live and Let Die), and Uzi (chopping up It’s Getting Better, Skiing from Harrison’s Wonderwall soundtrack, and more), among others.  I’m thinking that there are many fans who love both groups, and this record is an absolute treat for them. And get ready to die of awesomeness when you hear the Wu VS Beatles Outro closing the proceedings.

IT’S GOOD:

It’s one thing to lay some Wu-Tang acapellas over of Beatles songs. It’s another to take the time to make beats out of Beatles songs. It’s yet another to create this insanely detailed, beautifully produced, and eminently replayable sound collage of official release quality.

IT’S EXCITING AND NOVEL:

Technical brilliance and entertainment value are the yin and yang that make or break a project like this. Without one, the other is rendered moot. Wu-Tang VS The Beatles hits both notes with grace, ease, and excitement.

My only complaint about Wu-Tang VS The Beatles: Tom Caruana did it first! I’ve got an idea for a Beatles Meets Wu-Tang project and I never thought others were seeing the parallels that I see.

Download or listen to the album at producer Tom Caruana’s official site - http://www.teasearecords.net/wuvsbeatles

Further reading: check out cover designer Logan Walters’ series re-imagining classic Wu album covers as Blue Note-era sleeves – http://website13156.com/?p=193

What do you think about Wu-Tang VS The Beatles?  A natural fit or an unlikely pairing?

Warning – I’m going to discuss the ending of the movie in this review so if you haven’t seen it and don’t want it spoiled, read no further.

Last night I was in my San Fran pad, thinking about some correspondence I needed to write.  I grabbed a DVD off the rack and put it in the player, expecting that I was going to just have it on as background.  The movie was Closer – a 2004 film by Mike Nichols which is one of the most grown up things I’ve seen in years.  Instead of passively letting it play behind me, I was sucked into it from the first frame and held transfixed until the finale.

The movie succeeds as a summation of the current attitudes and morality regarding love and romance.  What we say we want and what we really want are often two different things, and it is this inability for people to be honest with themselves that causes the characters’ turmoil and distress.

The Dramaits Personae:

Larry (Clive Owen) is one of the two respectable characters in the movie.  He’s a an unapologetic hedonist, but he’s upfront and honest about his intentions.  He knows what he wants, and he doesn’t mind telling you.  His flaw is that once you cross him, he doesn’t let it go.  He has to punish you.

Anna (Julia Roberts) is a bitch whose self-esteem is so low that she can’t handle it when someone loves her.

Dan (Jude Law) thinks he’s slick but he is a fuckin’ douchebag who can’t take Yes for an answer.  When everything is going fine, he need to mess with it and seems actually surprised when how horrible he’s been hurts the people who love him.

Alice (Natalie Portman, looking like a grown-up Mathilda from The Professional for a big chunk of the movie) emerges as the hero, and the only person of the four with any integrity.  She’s the only one who’s got their inner life in order, despite the fact that her past would make most people think she’s got the most problems and needs the most help.

The movie takes place over four years during which we see the beginning and the end but not the middle of relationships between Dan and Alice, then Dan and Anna, then Anna and Larry, then Larry and Alice.  These four people make up a model of the quadrants of the dating public.  I identify most with Alice, and I have dated several of each of the other three types, even though I’m sure you could find people who who would tell you I’m one of them.  I guess it’s one of those things where we can see a little of ourselves in each one of them but at the end of it all, being Alice is all you can hope for – love huge, wear your heart on your sleeve, and let other people deal with their own karma.

One of the most profound moments in the movie, for me, comes late in the film.  Alice and Dan have reunited, and we have every indication that they will live happily ever after until Dan has to go picking at it again.  He’s asking Alice about her interaction with Larry while they were apart.  She’s trying to make him understand that whatever may or may not have happened while they were apart, and were probably never going to see each other again, has no bearing on their life together now.  Dan knows the answer, but he won’t let it go.  He has to hear it from her.  By the time he finally gets her to admit that she had sex with Larry he’s destroyed his and Alice’s future together.  Still not satisfied, he screams at her “Why him??”  Alice, exasperated and crying, screams at him “Because you weren’t there!”  What is with this compulsion we have to punish people for things that have nothing to do with us?  And why do we insist on torturing ourselves with truths that we really don’t want to know, and that ultimately don’t matter in the grand scheme of things?

Other reviews of this movie have concluded that Alice is just as bad as the other characters when we discover her big deception that’s revealed at the end of the movie.  Not me.  I applauded her.  I think this moment reveals her to be the wisest and most grown-up person in the story.  She’s lived some, and she knows what people are like.  She knows how she wants to live and she won’t let anyone make her cynical.  In this world, sharing it with these characters, that’s heroism.

As you saw in recent posts, I was visiting with my buddy Dwayne (drummer for Wildlife) this weekend. While I was there, he asked me if I had seen a film called Into the Wild. I hadn’t even heard of it. Dwayne was very insistent that I take his copy of the DVD home with me and now, moments after it’s ended, I have to wonder if he just thought it was a good movie that I might like or if he knew that he was handing me a mirror.

Into the Wild tells the true life story of Chris McCandless who, right after graduating from university in 1990, set out on a two-year spiritual journey that took him west to California, south to Mexico, and finally north to Alaska where he would pit himself against nature.  He didn’t tell anyone he was going.  He didn’t even take a map or compass.  He destroyed his ID, donated the remainder of his college fund to Oxfam, abandoned his car, and split.

I was left in a very emotional state when the movie was over because the exact same youthful exuberance and yearning for experience & adventure that led Chris to Alaska was the same as what made me quit my job to go be an artist and sell comic books on the street.  I spent the whole movie waiting for the triumphant ending that would reaffirm my belief in ‘buying the ticket and taking the ride’, to paraphrase Dr. Thompson.  I was wholly unprepared for it when it was revealed to have been a true-life cautionary tale, with a photograph of the real Chris McCandless (a self-portrait left undeveloped inside his camera amongst his belongings in his make-shift Alaskan home) the final image of the movie.

A movie couldn’t be as intense as this based on the subject matter alone.  It’s the treatment of the subject matter that is everything.  And in Into the Wild, screenwriter/director Sean Penn has crafted one of the most beautiful, poetic, and graceful movies I have ever seen.  Whether it’s the sweeping grace of the start of Chris’ journey or the jarring unease as his fate slowly reveals itself to him, this movie completely nails the feel of every stage of the journey.  It’s so good because you can tell that Sean Penn was as affected and moved by McCandless’ story as I was, and inspired to do it justice.

One of the most skillful things to have pulled off was to make it so that this is not a sad movie.  This is an inspirational movie.  I want people who see this movie to think about what’s deep down in young men that drives them to want to abandon the world around them and uncover something that’s never been seen before.  Chris did it by going to Alaska.  Other people have done it by becoming writers, starting businesses, or finding a cause worth fighting for.  I hope that you’ll do it your way.

“There’s what you think and then there’s reality” -a wise woman once told me this.

Michael Mann made HEAT and that one ruled. It was a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them that got really heavy about the personal lives of everyone involved. I have watched Heat so many times I couldn’t even count. It’s the bomb.

PUBLIC ENEMIES is a movie about bank robbers and the cops trying to catch them, directed by the same guy only this one takes place in 1933 during the Great Depression. There’s no reason that PUBLIC ENEMIES shouldn’t have been as good as HEAT. In fact, it could have been better than HEAT because with the whole American ‘economic downtown’ and the comparisons thrown around about now and The Great Depression, it could have been a really cool look into how these kinds of circumstances mold these kinds of people.

But we don’t get any of that. PUBLIC ENEMIES is plot for plot’s sake and that’s it. There are a couple of intense action scenes (none of them the bank robberies) but they’re strung together with soap opera bits of nothing. It’s fun to watch everyone playing dress up and having fun doing the period piece thing, but at no point does anyone give us any reason to care about anything anyone is doing. The characters are never fleshed out into people. I don’t know anything more about John Dillinger now than I did before the movie started. He’s an archetypal old-fashioned bank robber. And Christian Bale is the archetypal cop who’s after him. I’m a fan of 30s pop culture and gangster lore so it’s kind of fun to watch the action scenes and hear the names Frank Niti, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson thrown about but I didn’t even know which guy was supposed to be Baby Face Nelson until the last scene he’s in.

Oh, and Giovanni Ribisi is in it. He doesn’t do much and he’s kind of a throwaway but for some reason I always get a kick out of it whenever I see him. I think that started with BOILER ROOM. But we’re not talking about BOILER ROOM. We’re talking about PUBLIC ENEMIES.

The archetypal girl in this movie has nothing to do but fawn over John Dillinger. I get that women are attracted to confidence and power but beyond that we have nothing as to why she would go along with him, and we are given absolutely nothing about why John Dillinger is so interested in and devoted to her. He just seems to pick her out of the crowd and instantly go cuckoo obsessed with her and we don’t know anything about either of them.

The movie looks like it was shot by the cinematographer from Trailer Park Boys. I’m used enough to that digital look in movies but for a movie that takes place in 1933, it absolutely kills the illusion. You can see the make-up and it looks way different when the camera pans than if they had shot it on film. Maybe it was just the digital projection, I don’t know. Regardless, at no point was I able to lose myself in it. I was always conscious of the actors. It never feels like we’re looking at that era the way THE UNTOUCHABLES did.

MIAMI VICE went kind of the same way, giving us no characterization and just plot, shot digitally. But that was sort of the point. It was supposed to play like any random episode of the TV show. It doesn’t work here though, and the whole movie feels like something everyone made to screen test the costumes and see how the period details photograph. It doesn’t feel like a whole movie.

It says a lot about the talent involved that despite these flaws, it’s never boring. It’s fun to look at, especially if you like those 30s cars, clothes, hairstyles, etc. Definitely worth a watch but you can safely wait for the DVD or download it.

Notorious, the Christopher Wallace biopic that I offered my commentary on while it was in production, has come and gone from the theaters and is now available on video. Notorious tells the story of Christopher Wallace’s transformation in the 80s and 90s from the crack dealer on the corner into Biggie Smalls, King of New York and Bad Boy Record’s flagship talent at the top of the hip hop industry.

This movie was up against high expectations, as Biggie remains one of the most popular and influential rappers of all time 12 years after his late-night murder in the streets of Los Angeles at the age of 24.  Being a HUGE Biggie fan myself, I came to the movie trepidatious but excited.  My expectations were not high, but I held out hope for the promise of something special that lay in the material.

Not only was Notorious better than I was expecting, I quite liked it.  It’s not good the way Ray is good, but it comes together into a pleasing whole on the strength of a go-for-broke script and impassioned performances all the way around.

Jamal Woolard faces the intimidating task of filling Biggie’s shoes.  While he matches up to Biggie in neither charisma nor skill, his is a confident and charming performance that we can root for and get into.  The rest of the cast is equally spirited and impassioned.  As moments around them sometimes take on a cartoonish quality, the performances never descend into mimicry or caricature.  Angela Bassett as Voletta, Biggie’s mom, is the movie’s backbone.  Voletta is the story’s moral and intellectual core, while Ms. Bassett lends a crucial air of legitimacy and experience to the proceedings.

The biggest trap that lay waiting for this movie was the possibility of losing itself to its own admiration of the hero, and fondness for the setting.  I was worried that it was going to amount adults playing dress-up, re-enacting vital moments in a person’s life without constructing a dramatic arc.  What we get instead is a loving and insightful tribute.   Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker have stripped the Biggie legacy down to it’s essentials.  Their goal here is not to show us that Biggie was just a man.  Notorious is inspired to show Christopher as much more than a man.  It glorifies as it simplifies but that’s sort of the point since it’s trying to tell us that despite our challenges, you and I can do all of this and more.

The deal-breaker for snobs is going to be that Jamal Woolard, a.k.a.Gravy, is no Biggie Smalls in the rap department.  I think you’re going to get a lot more out of this movie if you’re a Biggie fan and know the songs than if you’re seeing it cold because Woolard isn’t really there to represent Biggie, he’s there as an avatar for you as you rap along either in your head or along with a room full of people.

I am glad that I saw this movie on DVD.  I think this movie plays a lot better on video than it would have in the theatre.  It’s no Academy Award contender, but it’s worth watching. Notorious is a satisfying dramatization for fans, but where it really succeeds is as a Biggie 101 program for newbies. With all of the teenagers getting interested in golden age hip hop, Notorious could evolve into a valuable tool for giving those new fans a sense of the world that Christopher Wallace’s art emerged from.

Read my review of the concert on dopealot.com! Click right here!

It’s bad.

It’s really, really horrible. I gave the screen the finger on my way out, that’s how bad it was.

I tried really hard to give this movie the benefit of the doubt in the lead-up to it’s release, but now I’m letting it all out.

I never liked the casting from the get-go. Brandon Routh looks college-aged, he’s too young to play Superman. Christopher Reeve was the same age when he first played Superman (26), but he pulled it off. Brandon cannot pull it off, and that’s all there is too it. Everything about him from his looks to his voice to the way he carries himself says “boy”. He does not have Superman inside him. The casting of Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane was even worse. She’s 23 and her Lois Lane looks like a high-school student, but we are to believe that she’s a single mother of a five-year-old who also maintains an award-winning career as a journalist. As for the kid, what the fuck is he doing cluttering up the movie?

I liked the idea of Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor from the start, but I did not enjoy watching him in this movie. Parker Posey and James Marsden play two characters who just plain don’t need to be there (Parker is Lex Luthor’s trophy girlfriend and James Marsden is Lois Lane’s fiance) and it’s very interesting because had they cast Parker Posey as Lois Lane and James Marsden as Superman, you’d have the beginnings of a swell Superman movie.

Basically, it plays as though it’s a sequel to Superman 2, but Superman The Movie never happened. Except for the first forty-five minutes of Superman The Movie on Krypton and in Smallville, and we have to pretend that Marlon Brando as the father, not Sarah Douglas as the mother, spoke and gave guidance to Superman throughout Superman 2. And that Superman & Lois Lane were 18-21 years old. Now the first forty-five minutes of Superman The Movie and then all of Superman 2 make up the part one, and Superman Returns is the part two to that. The advance word on this movie had me believing that Superman Returns would be essentially a third installment – another crack at a Superman 3 – but that’s impossible because the plots are so similar that this can only be a full-on remake of Superman The Movie. There’s been much made of how this movie pays homage to the 1978 original, but there is a difference between homage and being too lazy to come up with your own movie. My only guess is that the producers talked the money guys along by selling the thing as an homage to the ’78 flick, but then the creators got down to the wire for time and just hashed out the first thing they all came up with in an evening. Either that or Bryan Singer was just too stubborn an asshole to tell Warner Brothers “I got nothin’!” when they first asked him to think about doing the movie. What’s wrong with this movie goes all the way back to the very conceptualization of it. They took a wrong turn at the brainstorming stage and never got on track after that. If the ’78 movie was a smooth Frank Sinatra ballad, Superman Returns is a dirty, revved up cover version performed by a really shitty punk band.

This is not Superman for a new generation. In fact, I shudder to think that kids are going to see this movie. Avi Arad, exectutive producer of all of the movies based on the Marvel stable of characters (Spider-Man, The Hulk, Daredevil, Ghost Rider), once said of the first Spider-Man movie that they went in with the understanding that it had to be a right, moral story for kids. Sam Raimi, the director, explained that the responsibility when handling a character like Spider-Man is to remain true to the spirit of the thing, being that the audience goes in already carrying the hero on it’s shoulders. The movie can be adult but the story, on a thematic level, has to be right and moral. This is even more true for Superman than it is for Spider-Man. I posit that this is more true for Superman than for any other fictional character, period. At the very least, it’s more true for Superman than for any other comic book superhero. Calling something ‘adult’ conjurs up certain images and attitudes, but something can be aimed at an adult intellect and still be right & moral. Superman Returns is anything but right and moral. It’s the Superman movie for The Usual Suspects audience. It’s Superman done dark and dirty. Lois fucked Superman when she was 18 and got knocked up, and now she’s shacking up with the boss’ nephew and nipping up to the roof at work for a smoke whenever she can. Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen go drinking. Maybe I’m square, but that’s not right for a Superman movie (please don’t get at me about how Lois Lane smoked in Superman The Movie. You know as damn well as I do that that was a long time ago and the social code has changed). They’re not going to make a Harry Potter movie where the students of Hogwarts are fucking and partying, you know what I mean?

Part of the what makes Superman Superman is the image of the bright primary colors blazing across the sky as Superman is off to the rescue. Superman is supposed to be high adventure, not high melodrama. This movie is really dark. You know something’s wrong when the Batman movie is brighter and more joyful than the Superman movie. There’s a lot of times when we’re supposed to be awestruck by the grandeur of mighty Superman carrying some unbelievable weight aloft. It works when it’s Superman in his blue suit and bright red cape with the big bright sunshine sky behind him, but here his costume is so dark that the red on Superman’s cape and chest emblem almost looks black a lot of the time. This is not helped by the fact that whenever we’re seeing Superman, it’s either night or we’re in dark, stormy surroundings. It’s dark in both the look and the tone. The movie starts out really serious and heavy at the beginning and just stays there. It never gets fun anywhere along the way.

I should be able to say that at the very least, the action pieces are good. But they’re not. I never quite bought the flying, as it looks like they got Brandon Routh to stand tippy-toe and look at the ceiling and then tilted the camera on it’s side. And the action is so dark you can sometimes barely make out what’s happening. It might have been easier if Superman’s costume was still bright, juxtaposed against the darkness of the scene, but it’s not. This movie will probably play better on DVD than in the theatre, but only from the point of view of making out all of the details in Superman’s wind-flapping cape.

OK, so Superman’s been gone for five years, blah blah blah, now he’s back. He stopped an experimental rocket launch from crash landing, and now Lex Luthor’s growing a continent that’s made out of some crystal shit from the planet Krypton that Luthor stole out of Superman’s arctic hideout. Superman’s gotta save Metropolis before Luthor’s growing contintent shoves all of the ocean water onto the city. There’s no rhyme or reason for much of what goes on here, except as an excuse to show us Superman lifting shit, blowing super-breath, and using heat vision. Then Luthor and Superman have a face-off. Uh oh, this whole continent thing is made out of Kryptonite! Luther kicked Superman’s ass! Everything’s black or really dim, except for Luthor’s white coat! Blah blah blah, Superman lifts the whole continent up over his shoulders and hurls it into outer space. Now we’re ready for the big final showdown.

EXCEPT THERE ISN’T ONE. I’m serious, THERE IS NO CLIMAX to this movie. They made a superhero movie with no action in the whole third act. That continent is made of Kryptonite so Superman hurls it into space, falls to Earth, lies in a hospital bed in a coma, wakes up and goes and delivers one of the lamest speeches in movie history to his and Lois’ son, and then flies off, roll credits. There is no ending. From Superman falling to earth, through the whole hospital shit to what lame ending there is, is like half an hour or something with no payoff. Maybe the creators wanted to really tease us with the idea that they’d kill Superman off in this movie, but we don’t buy it for one second. We know that Superman will make it through. It’s not supposed to be about the question of if he makes it, it’s supposed to be about how he makes it.

I was really bummed last night because I really wanted to like this movie. I spent most of my early childhood with a red cape around my neck and my Superman underoos on, so you know that I go in predisposed to liking it. And even with that being the case, I’m still saying that Superman Returns is horrible. Not just disappointing, but totally not even worth watching. A complete waste of time. I wanted to go home about an hour and a half into it. But the bloody thing is two and a half hours long and instead of playing like a grand epic, it plays like a morose, self-serious, over-long drama. I said to one of my friends that I saw it with that it’s a $200 million practical joke.

All of this from me, the guy who’s always the last one still finding the good in everything when it’s all gone to shit. Me, forever the optimist and bright-sider, I’m telling you that Superman Returns is so bad that it is an affront to me. There was once a time when I would have, like most who seem to like it, been happy with whatever it was. Seeing Superman in action would itself have been enough to warrent a positive review. But now I feel ripped off not just for the $13 I spent on the ticket, not even just for all of the time and energy I spent being excited to see Superman Returns, but for all of the years spent calling Superman my hero.