Culture Snob It was with great horror (okay, mild annoyance at myself) that I returned to comments by Dan Jardine at Cinemarati and saw a striking resemblance to some ideas I expressed on Superman Returns.
Modesty is a rare commodity in the world of rock and roll, but Delbert McClinton thinks it’s an essential element of writing a good song. “Being a songwriter, you have to know humility, and embrace it,” he said in a recent interview. “In songwriting, there’s what we around here call good stupid and bad stupid.”
As I predicted more than a year and a half ago, high-definition DVDs have flopped. That’s the premature but likely accurate conclusion of this editorial, which echoes some of my (18-month-old) comments and adds a few more nails.
Superman will soon be leaving us, and not a moment too soon. After racking up an impressive opening week with his latest adventure, Superman Returns, he got his ass kicked by some dead men’s chests or somesuch. So let the man go away for a while. Five years at least, maybe forever. We don’t want him around. Lois Lane got it right in her Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial the last time that loser left Earth: The world doesn’t need Superman, or at least this one.
Movie studios have been struck with the brilliant realization that predictably bad reviews for self-evident shit such as The Benchwarmers can be silenced by not showing the movie to critics! Here’s another blinding insight: Movies that aren’t released at all never get bad reviews! (Sorry. Wishful thinking on my part.)
It’s admittedly unfair to want more from Slither than it’s willing to give, but I found the horror comedy from March too slight for the praise it got. Put simply: Slither lacked an agenda. Plus: Ginger Snaps, a horror-comedy hybrid that finds the right balance.
What movie have you seen the most? What does it mean to you? That’s the premise of Slate’s puzzlingly titled “The Movie I’ve Seen the Most” from last week. Spike Lee offers West Side Story without explanation. Peter Farrelly says Something Wild.
At Scanners, Jim Emerson is running a series on the opening shots of movies. In his introduction, Emerson writes: “Any good movie – heck, even the occasional bad one – teaches you how to watch it. And that lesson usually starts with the very first image.”
In Slate.com, Hua Hsu concisely articulates my boredom with Sonic Youth’s highly regarded (and moronically titled) new record, Rather Ripped.
If we’re comparing Superman and Christ, let’s not ignore what seems a fairly blatant artistic reference in the current campaign for Superman Returns, to Salvador Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross and Crucifixion.