Letters to Holly

Tuesday, May 2

Look! Up in the sky!


The full Superman Returns trailer went online yesterday, and it looks brilliant. Action, humor, romance, the duality of Clark and Supes, the raw evil of Luthor. They wisely used the John Williams theme and hired Kevin Spacey to replace Gene Hackman. Now I love Hackman. Hackman can do very little wrong and he was dead solid perfect as Luthor, but that was thirty years ago. To restart the franchise, they had to get new blood. I'd love to see cameos by the surviving 1970s cast – Hackman, Kidder, Perine – but this new cast ain’t bad. As with Reeve, they went with a virtual unknown to wear the cape. They again confound me with a Lois that isn't immediately lovely; I have yet to see a Lois on TV or film that was anything other than "eh." Kate Bosworth is supposed to be a decent actress but I could have sworn Hugh Laurie ("House") was going to be Perry White. Not that Langella is a bad pic, but Laurie would have been yet another bit of brilliance. The guy who has to carry the film as the movie star is Spacey, and he'd clearly got the chops for it. I haven't seen him this openly malevolent since Seven. But, truly all a Superman movie needs is the recognizable elements and great special effects. I don't see anything here to complain about so far, and only the most bitter of asexual, nitwit comic nerd trolls would bitch about the film at this point.

Long story short, I cannot wait to see this film.

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A snippet of the new X-men movie was played on “The Tonight Show” last week. I missed it because I don’t watch Jay Leno. Nor should anyone with a working forebrain. The clip revealed something not well known about the film: It includes Sentinels. These are the evil giant purple robots that target our heroes. They’ve been around since the mid-1960s, and X-Men fans have been clamoring for them to appear in the films. But no official word mentioned them at all. The clip also included the fan-favorite maneuver called a Fastball Special, wherein the strong guy picks up the short guy with hand claws and throws him at bad guys. These two things within one thirty-second clip officially make me go nuts to see the film.

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The teaser trailer for Casino Royale is online. What little we see looks pretty good and nicely low-key compared to the production excess of the last few Brosnan films. I like the direction they’re going here in restarting the franchise, but Brosnan deserved a shot at this new take. I spy some parkour, the French urban extreme sport of running and jumping from building to building. I thought it had peaked about three years ago, but here it is.

Thank God, Hendersonville got a stadium-seating theatre so we don’t have to drive all the way to Greenville for these movies.

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Your Sister left work lat last night, and we ate at Juan’s place. With the days remaining before Valerie arrives, I need to work on the lawn a bit so we don’t look like hicks. Juan closed his restaurant Monday to attend the May Day immigrant march. My new favorite theory demonizing illegal immigration: the Vatican won’t denounce it because Mexicans spread evil Catholicism into the States.

In the news
Virtually all soda sales to schools will stop following an agreement made between the American Heart Association, the largest national distributors, and The Bill Clinton Foundation. While I can understand the good intentions, the free-market side of my brain flinches a little. I needed that soda to get through class some days. If health matters are such a concern, mandate sport activity. Everyone gets to pick three sports they want to try, and team size dictates who gets on what team.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. Great call on all the movie excitement, and the superman pic you found is nice. I am a little hesistant to agree with your lackluster Lane cry... Terri Hatcher was fantastic in the TV Lois and Clark.
To celebrate my test being over, I took a solo movie night and caught American Dreamz. I should've known by its PG13 rating that the comedy wouldn't have been nearly as clever or as biting as it could have been. Just lots of cheap shots at American culture, politics, not the witty satire I had hoped for. Bits were incredibly funny, and all in all, smarmy Hugh Grant almost makes this worth seeing.
Thanks for taking care of the Bullock family ranch this coming weekend when mom and dad come to graduation. I can't even believe I was able to talk them into staying an additional day to hang out. So, thanks, big guy.

Gregory said...

Sad to hear about American Dreamz. I had some hope for it. Mandy Moore, Hugh Grant, and Willem DaFoe are very watchable folks.

I never got into 'Lois and Clark' either as a TV fan or a comic nerd. I'm also that tiny minority that finds Hatcher annoying. She and Lisa Rinna were the banes of my 1990s TV viewing.