Superman’s character makes for a difficult movie. He fights for truth, justice, and (more controversially) the American way, he never lies, he’s essentially invincible, and he’s well loved by society. Other than his alter ego’s bumbling awkwardness, he has no character flaw and has only one weakness: kryptonite.

So how do you go about making a meaningful movie with such a two dimensional character? The only inner conflict at our disposal is Superman’s departure and return (implied by the movie title) and the possibility that he gets fed up saving the world every time Hollywood calls upon him to do so.

Below there be spoilers.

The typical plot arc is as follows, and I’m sick of it. Superman saves Lois, Lex Luthor thinks of a way to rule the world and keep Superman out of the picture, Superman almost dies, Lois saves Superman, Superman stops Lex. Everyone smiles.

So how do you make a meaningful Superman movie? Let me tell you how. You give Superman a son, but keep both Superman and Junior ignorant of the child’s heredity. Ideally, Junior would be a teenager with a bit of a dark side, but an innocent kid would work too. Superman leaves earth to search for his destroyed home world of Krypton, only to return years later despondent with the knowledge that the planet really is just a graveyard.

Junior begins to develop superpowers as he gets older. As the two interact (both via Clark and Superman himself), Junior starts to realize his true origins and what those origins might mean for his future. He rebels against this doom and, in so doing, inadvertently brings about conditions under which Superman must sacrifice himself in order to save the world. Superman dies.

We see Junior facing the death of his biological father and clinging to Superman’s memory and iconic superhero costume. In Junior’s newly held conviction to fight for all his father stood for, we discover the true meaning of the movie’s title: Superman Returns. The world in mourning sees a new champion.

Now that is an awesome concept for a Superman movie. And guess what? The movie Hollywood chose to make does something completely lame instead.

Superman Returns follows the standard plot arc and is devoid of any real self reflection by anyone but Lois Lane’s boyfriend. Lois Lane’s boyfriend, Cyclops.

Weak.

Lame plot and static characters aside, the movie was reasonably entertaining. There were a couple great scenes, some awesome visuals, and an odd few Batman references. Brandon Routh did an admirable job playing Clark’s innocent dorkiness and Superman’s unrealistic goody-goodiness, though Kate Bosworth‘s Lois wasn’t great. Oh, and the score was a little uninspiring.

On the whole, I give it a “worth seeing”, but you might wait until it comes out on DVD.

It’s just sad to me that really good franchise movies can be made and can be made as blockbusters (witness X-Men, X-2, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), but Hollywood still decides to put out shallow, money-making crap (X-Men: The Last Stand, all the other Harry Potter Movies).

The story chronicles the life of the witty, dreamy and affable (see the similarities already?) character of Carter as played by _Adam_ Brody and opens with the final death throws of Carter’s vapid and one sided relationship with his model/aspiring actress girlfriend. Looking for solace in his now bleak and miserable world, Carter picks himself up from his LA career as a soft core porn writer and moves to Michigan to take care of his increasingly senile grandmother. There he becomes bosom buddies with the family across the street, having sex with the mother, making out with the fifteen year old daughter, duping the himself-unfaithful father and accepting plot narration from the younger, precocious daughter. I mean, that’s… me. One hundred percent.

The unfortunate thing about the movie is that although they get the details of my life straight, they tell my story in such an uncompelling way. The relationships are totally devoid of emotion, the writing and editing aren’t tight enough to tell any story, let alone one as complicated as mine, and the direction and artistic style are inconsistent enough to be some film school sophomore’s attempt at being ‘indie’ but having watched too many movies with the likes of Meg Ryan or Freddie Prinze Jr. to make that possible. Plus, they ruined the ending.

All in all, ‘In the Land of Women’ has nothing to recommend it other than a few good one liners. At least they won’t be making much money off of me.

That movie rocks. If you’ve not seen it, do so at your earliest convenience. Perhaps the best thing about it from a geek perspective is that the entire situation was not cause by bad science (though one could pick nits there), but rather by bad programming!

Take that CompSci!

It’s really an amazing story. Here are these kids that live in a brothel; about twenty people all living in one apartment, each family with its own little room. When their mothers work, they pull a curtain across the bed, so the children don’t see anything that goes on. The sounds, I imagine, are harder to filter out. To escape, the kids go play on the roof or in the streets, but they themselves work most of the day too: washing dishes, going to the market, cooking. These kids are like ten years old and they work long days, see there mothers abused, beaten or burned to death, (more or less) go to school, and still manage to have fun. They play games, fly kites, laugh with each other. That’s what amazed me most watching the movie; there were times these kids were genuinely happy. I probably would have withered away a long time ago if I’d grown up in similar circumstances. Maybe the ones like me already have, and we’re only left with the strongest. It really shows how resilient little kids can be in terrible conditions, but makes you wonder just how psychologically damaged they’ll end up.

Photography, for some of these kids, is their way out of their abusive, drug riddled environment – a way out of prostitution. Through photography and the monumental efforts of their teacher, many of them were able to attend boarding schools (that is, were able to leave the red light district) and pursue a real education in a healthy environment. What’s sad is that this woman spent years of her life with about eight kids (at least that’s the story of the documentary). Eight. There really needs to be massive organizational change in order to help more than handfuls of children at a time.

Holly speaks more on these issues. I’d suggest going to her site for discussion.

The only problem I have is Philip K. Dick/Ridley Scott’s vision of the future; There’s way too much petroleum being burned and filth being tossed about. Holly and I were talking the other day, and I told her about my biggest paranoid fear: a world without oil. (Trite, I know. Get over it.) As with any paranoia, some of what follows is a little half-baked, and some stuff may be inaccurate (what paranoid is going to do real research?). Feel free to correct me where appropriate.

It’s not the energy issue that scares me. When it’s economically favorable to produce energy through alternative means, it will happen, and there’s some kickin’, clean sources in the works. What scares me is the depletion of our best source of organic material.

Remember in The Graduate when the business man wants to say one word (just one word) to Dustin Hoffman? The same word comes to mind to me now: Plastics.

Look around. How much can you see that is neither made from some plastic nor produced by anything that is? Not too much. I know that there’s alternative sources to making plastics (or materials that behave like plastics, materials I’ll call ‘plastics’). Nanotubes, plant matter, silcon based materials, etc. are all promising but are still expensive and inefficient. Plus, the carbon source for nanotubes is often (yup) petroleum products.

Another word comes to mind as well: Pharmaceuticals. Natural product synthesis is typically more practical than grinding up the natural products themselves, and any organic synthesis involves petroleum products. If you like your psychopharmaceuticals, analgesics, or even your crystal meth, you might consider buying a hybrid.

In my vision of the future, oil (and coal?) will be used only as a hydrocarbon source, not for energy. Huge, trash mining factories and corporations will be built to reclaim all the useful materials from dumps and landfills. These corporations will be powerful and rich; I imagine people like Xaosseed will put there good skills into making them so. New York and New Jersey will find yet another reason to fight over Ellis Island.

Every piece of the buffalo will be used, only by ‘buffalo’, I mean ‘anything with organic bits in, on, beside, around, or vaguely near’. And what better place to find biologically active compounds than in biological things? I’m talking about grinding up dead people Matrix style. Heck, we might even discover an efficient way of mining carbon from the atmosphere, thus reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (how many ways can we find to screw around with the carbon cycle?).

That’s what I see. No towering, flaming power plants. No plastic bags blowing around the street. I see fusion, refuse mining, and the chance of some creepy societal shifts à la Logan’s Run.

Good times. And I’ll be around to see them.

It’s a martial arts flick with a hint of a plot, absolutely no love interest, and the most freakin awesome unbelievable ass kicking ever put on film.

Tony Jaa was absurdly good: no wires, no CG, just sheer, unadulterated badasstitude.

Everything from the one hundred percent nongratuitous triple takes on every action shot in the entire movie, all the way through to the at-least-three-out-of-four-limbs-in-the-air-in-every-frame sequences, from the complete lack of deleterious effects other than sliding backward a few feet after being kicked in the chest with enough force to collapse an elephant lung, to the new definition of “throw some elbows”, this movie had me – utterly had me.

Apparently, Mr. Jaa is filming a movie currently, and Aaron speaks of a project with Jackie Chan. I’m in – all the way.

But that was all right. We tried to tell ourselves we were having a fine time chatting amongst ourselves (Paul.za, Mom.za, Greg, Heidi, BJ and Adam), and that we might even get free passes to see something else if we were refused entrance. Plus, many more people lined up behind us, so we got to assume smug little grins of our own.

I am, of course, referring to our chance to see a screening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And we were, of course, wrong; we did not get free passes to see something else when we were refused entrance.

We were granted entrance.

Aside from a few in college, I’ve been to one movie screening before. It’s sort of an interesting process involving three tickets, two (or more) security screenings, at least one questionnaire, several warnings about the legality of recording any part of the screening, and a free popcorn and drink.

I’m sure by agreeing to screen the movie, I had accepted conditions which included, but were not necessarily limited to, not revealing to the public anything about the movie’s plot, not reproducing any dialogue, narrative or imagery from the movie, not describing in any detail how the movie differed from the various, previously published tellings of the story, and, under no circumstances revealing any surprise bits such as the removal of one head and some (undisclosed) number of his arms (two).

I’m sure I can mention, however, that Alan Rickman was truly the perfect choice to voice Marvin, the paranoid android, the interesting coincidence that the two actors playing Marvin (the above mentioned Rickman and Warwick Davis) both play professors in the celebrated Harry Potter film series, that the film is neither Mos Def’s nor John Malkovich’s best performance, and that Zooey Deschanel has a standing invitation to come over and subsequently leave after finding out I’m not really as interesting as I sound.

Overall, the movie was “pretty good” even though it left out some of my favorite quotes (as surely it had to), and made references to things that it never fully explained (peanuts, for example). “Would [I] recommend it to a friend?” Sure, it’s just zis movie, ya know?

You decide.