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.”
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.
Jim Emerson directed me to this fascinating article from The Journal of Religion and Film. The piece is remarkable less for its topic – a comparison of Superman to Jesus Christ – than its approach. In its analysis, the thorough, sometimes smart, and often laughable article uses the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies as its text for the Man of Steel. That’s akin to using the movie The Last Temptation of Christ as the authoritative source on Jesus’ life.
Two movies live in Shopgirl. One is a creepy but strangely touching May-December romance between Claire Danes and Steve Martin. The other stars Danes and Jason Schwartzman in a screwball comedy, with an intrusive, superfluous voice-over. The first of these movies is surprisingly good; the second sucks. Plus: Silent Hill, another schizophrenic film.
Both Brokeback Mountain and Munich are patient, well-made genre movies that strip most of the politics out of charged subjects. Sadly, both are also botches.