I am compelled to warn you here & now that if you have not seen Superman Returns, and do not wish to have salient plot points spoiled for you then you should turn back now. I am about to rip this thing a new asshole.
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The day was rife with geekdom.
My wife returned home early from the lab, so we talked out her morning, & put on a documentary about the National Spelling Bee, while I worked on inking a page of black super heroes (Black Goliath, Storm, Green Lantern, Luke Cage, & the Rocket Racer).
At 5 The Limey arrived to pick me up, and we headed out for Oakland to meet Ayize, grab a pint & see Superman Returns.
All pretty unremarkable, yes?
I mean, aside from the fact that this is the first time I've left the apartment for anything other than a chiropractic appointment in almost a month.
The Grand Lake Theatre is a beautiful piece of work. All gilded greens on the inside, with the original balcony intact.
That was the last beautiful thing to happen for two & a half hours.
Yes, that is correct. Superman Returns is two and one half fucking hours.
Two and a half hours of, "Where in the hell are people getting this madness about this film being some gay statement?" &, "How the fuck did Lois Lane wind up having a baby by Cyclops from the X-Men?" followed quickly with, "Are James Marsden & Bryan Singer dating?"
2 1/2 hours of miserable crap.
Let us begin with the gay rumours:
No. This has nothing to do with being gay. It is not a Gay Movie. It is not some Gay Fantasy.
The fact that Bryan Singer is gay has had, in my estimation, precisely no impact whatsoever upon the quality or subject matter of his films.
I mean, do you take The Usual Suspects to be a piece of Gay Cinema?
No? OK, let's move the hell on then. Unless you have something you'd like to tell us about your own sexual orientation.
Next on the list: While this is clearly not some Gay Fable, it is, in no subtle or tastefully undersated fashion, a Jesus parable.
The Saviour (the film's term, not mine) has disappeared, and suddenly returns, only to find a world far more chaotic & dangerous than the one he came to save in the first place.
Lois Lane has become the Nietzche of the story, decrying the supposed need for a saviour... right up until he holds her in his arms again.
Blah blah blah, it goes on like this for 2 1/2 hours. It's 2:20 am. I'm not going to sit here writing all fucking night just to tell you what a bizzare & lame piece of shit something is.
But to punctuate the matter, toward the end of this marathon of crap, Superman is plummetting to the earth, apparently dead, shot from above in a perfect cruciform.
All doubts are here laid to rest, along with the dignity and integrity of the filmmakers, and the character. The character who, I should point out, was created by two young men to stand as the archetype for the indominable will of the Jewish immigrants in the U.S.
Finally, and here's where it gets really fucking strange, the baby mentioned several paragraphs ago is young boy (five or six years old) names James. By the end of the film we have learned that James is not actually the son of Cyclops, he is the son of Superman.
So, if I understand the premise of this film correctly, it is meant to be a continuation of the Christopher Reeve Superman films.
In the Christopher Reeve Superman films there was only ever one bout of boot-knockin' between Lois & Supes, in Superman 2 (that was the one with Terence "Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert" Stamp). Superman 2. There were 4 Christopher Reeve Superman films.
This would mean, if my math is any goood at all, that Superman knocked up Lois, had two more movies worth of adventures, and Lois started sleeping with Cyclops, all before Supes disappeared or Lois was aware that she was pregnant.
Does my math check out?
OK, good.
So now what we are faced with is the Bastard Grandson Of Krypton, making this, in effect, the Action Genre's answer to The Omen IV.
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We then went to a bar, where we discussed comic books.
I am lame.
But not as lame as Superman Returns.
