The Rake Magazine

Superman Returns, 2006. Directed by Bryan Singer, written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris. Starring a cast of undead that includes Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, the usually inspired Kevin Spacey, Frank Langella, James Marsden, Parker Posey, Sam Huntington, and, briefly, Eva Marie Saint and the disembodied voice of Marlon Brando.

What a movie this new Superman could have been: our caped hero's starship landing in the deserts of Gaza, in war torn Darfur, in the slums of Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro, where some impoverished family raises the boy to right the wrongs of his people. This Superman would find food for the starving, try to see what his x-ray vision could do for the AIDS epidemic, maybe pull the rotting hulks of nuclear warheads from the bottom of the Baltic.

Of course, Superman is only summer popcorn fare, so it's also a cheap thrill to see the guy pull heroics like, say, single-handedly lift an island the size of Cuba out of the water and hurl it into space. This actually happens. Unfortunately, this Superman also manages to take on the role of a somewhat misguided Christ figure, standing as if on the cross while hanging above the skies. The poor fellow--all he can hear are the cries of the world, begging for a savior!

Somewhere in the glistening halls of the major movie studios, shiny, overly manicured people with lots and lots of income sat around trying to figure out yet another summer blockbuster. Naturally, they turned to the comic books, whose adaptations have become commonplace each and every summer. This year, one of these hacks got it through their head to make this new Superman movie, which is itself not so strange as it was a popular comic, and a successful movie over twenty five years ago. What is strange is that some faceless executive or fanboy director got it through their money-addled head to not only reproduce, for a quarter of the picture, Richard Donner's utterly mediocre original, with Christopher Reeve. And then, someone decided that it was high time the comic book movie set aside much of the action, focus instead on the intense relationship between Lois Lane and Superman, and in the process make him a figure of almost religious significance.

Freaky. I take that back--freaky would have been the original choice, Nick Cage, mixing in with his earnest crusader a bit of his Peggy Sue Got Married shtick to go with his Oscar-winning drunk, tough guy from The Rock, and maybe even his hang-dog look from Adaptation. No, Superman Returns falls as hard as a Superhero with a stiletto of Kryptonite in his gut.

Superman Returns is long. It is tedious. It is filled with a cast of some of the most bland actors on the planet, including, at its center, a hero so woefully dull that he succeeds in making the tragic Christopher Reeve seem like a beacon of charisma. Kevin Spacey, unbelievably, is unfunny, going through the motions on the way to financing some theater production or art-house flick. Parker Posey is wasted in a role that demands that she do nothing more than whine, and I have to say I've seen her whine more professionally in other films. Frank Langella keeps his voice low, bizarre considering he's supposed to be the boisterous editor of the Daily Planet, not a head librarian. There are other characters, but they, too, are filled with actors and actresses who can hope and pray for roles in syndicated television or Midwestern dinner theater.

There is little plot, and what exists is virtually the same as Richard Donner's much more spirited original (and let me add that this film also succeeds in making a prime hack like Donner come off as a genius.) In this film, Superman has been gone for five years, off to examine a chunk of the planet that has been discovered floating around in space. He's a curious boy, eager to see if Krypton holds any secrets about his past. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor (Spacey), has been sprung from prison by a wealthy dowager, a woman he seduced and who dies right off the bat. With her inheritance, Luther quickly invades our hero's private space, venturing north to roam about the Fortress of Solitude, that great crystal palace where you can find footage of Marlon Brando earning a million dollars for ten minutes--and obviously proving that Brando is burning in hell, forced to see this footage again and again. Luther discovers that the magic crystals from Superman's home world can be tossed into the drink and make new land! So he takes a handful of dagger-sized pieces and heads back to Gotham (Metropolis? I can't recall and don't really care). And what do you suppose he'll do? Something nefarious, and something involving kryptonite and the end of the world.

And therein lies the inherent problem with Superman: he's a square, so powerful only kryptonite can stop him, and unless you're blessed with imaginative screenwriters, the story's dull. Superman can quite literally do anything, anywhere. He can save kittens from trees, women from mashers, car bombers from roadside cafes, presidents from lying... I guess there are some things even he can't do. My point is that there's little surprise in a Superman plot, unless of course you manage to bring some heavies from his home planet, as they did to mild success in the second entry of the original, some twenty years ago. Without that, you have worthless bad guys unable to do anything without the green rock. Unlike Batman, say, who has actual skills (as opposed to powers that vanish with the elements), Superman is either super or he's a dud. So he's a normal man on an island of Kryptonite? Well, how is it this beefy guy can't beat aged Lex Luthor, with or without superpowers? Does it matter? No... because Luthor's plan, which lacks any wit or irony, is foiled, easily, in ways that only serve to augment Superman's newfound status as religious icon.

Bryan Singer goes through all the motions: he hauls our hero back to the Daily Planet, where Jimmy Olson wears his bow-tie and is played by a kid who would probably make you ask for a refund at a high school play. Then comes Kate Bosworth, as Lois Lane, a blank slate compared to the madwoman who played her in the original.

Even more confounding, the frustrated romance between Lois and Superman is what drives this film. Superman pines for Lois, who now has a lover, played by James Marsden, who is also the father of their son and another dim bulb. He's jealous, but supportive. There are long talks between them about her feelings for Superman. Superman, as usual, flies around watching and listening, and pining. Many more references are made to his being a savior, and we get the same scene from the 70s film with Superman carrying the girl around New York City, making us feel like we too can fly. Later, there are more references to Superman's near-divinity. And then many, many references. We see him in pain hovering above the earth, and later, Superman ends up in the ER, in a scene so embarrassing I still cringe.

Director Bryan Singer obviously looks at Superman as literature of the highest order, and treats it as such. We're supposed to not only root for the guy, as we did in Spiderman, but worship him as well. But he's no underdog, and its no longer even a thrill to see the man flying. Richard Donner had a much better sense of Superman's speed with the crappy effects of '78. Here, a scene with a crashing plane is tossed in for good measure and it's utterly lifeless, leaving me wishing Bugs Bunny were on board to use the old air brake joke. At the end of the scene, in which our hero brings the crashing plane down to a ballfield, ends with a joke about how air travel is still safer statistically--a joke told verbatim by Chris Reeve. As are the credits and score. What's missing is the fun.

It's difficult to say what went wrong, because everything is wrong in this muddled film, which commits the cardinal sin of being tedious.

Ages ago, the Comics Code Authority did an number on the industry, doing their level best to 'clean' it up. They succeeded only in paving the way for uptight squares like Superman to thrive. While the Authority eventually relaxed, in the vacuum it created, superheroes thrived. As the world becomes more complex, we seem to be turning to these simpleminded stories: we've seem to have fallen in love with these people (men, usually) who typically don't work for their abilities, instead getting bitten or mutated or tossed here from other planets. They fight criminals that are nothing like any in real life, in cities that look like fantasies from 1946. The Daily Planet is virtually all white, the cities the same. Here we are today, in an age of CGI, and comic book flicks are so devoid of reality you wonder what their real purpose is (or rather, to what is their purpose real). Is it to keep us in the dark? A simple diversion? There's nothing wrong with diversions, but Superman tries to take a high road, just as X-Men did, the result being that they're ostensibly supposed to make you think, and entertain, and ultimately, in Superman, failing miserably to do both. In the press kits, Singer makes many mentions of his love for Donner's Superman, but he forgets how well that super hero fit into the 70s--Superman was the total square in an era of long-hairs and wide collars, gaping at the new phone booths, rolling his eyes at the hip girl Lois, and trying to fit in, succeeding because he could fly without a hit of acid. Perhaps Singer wants his Superman to do what the last one could not: take us to a time back before the 70s, before 9/11, when evil geniuses like Lex Luthor were easy to destroy, and there truly was Truth, Justice and the American Way. Which didn't include Iraq, or any other messy truth.

For those of you who cherish your brain cells, the moguls in Hollywood have chosen to cut us a break this weekend, leaving the big-budget extravaganzas alone, and giving us... well, virtually nothing. There's a lot of movies around town, but I think your best bet's at the Walker Art Center. If it were me, I'd take my honey out to my favorite restaurant, go for a stroll through the sculpture gardens (just to check out the approaching sunset and have some good conversation time), and then go for a major wig-out with the Diane Arbus exhibit. Arbus is perhaps my favorite photographer. Our own DeSmith had an intriguing observation about Arbus--I can't wait to come up with my own.

It'll also be a trip down memory lane. When I was an impressionable youth, I used to pore over a book of Arbus' photos that my Pop had. They freaked me out to no end, and gave a sad kid with freashly split folks a sense that maybe being f'd up kept you in good--if not interesting--company. In fact, I used to try to look like a so-called freak in the mirror, hoping that I would somehow appear just weird enough for an Arbus to photograph. A lack of sleep helped with the bags under the eyes and a woeful countenance. Nowadays I can achieve the effect with too much gin and an early morning.

Anyway, after that, I'd probably haul my girl to see Zero For Conduct, playing every hour on the hour in the Walker's Auditorium. Zero is the harrowing story of a rebellion in a boy's school in France, directed by Jean Vigo. Vigo only lived long enough to make this and L'Atalante, one of my all time favorites. Like Arbus, Vigo had an eye for the beautiful and the grotesque--just look at Michel Simon and his barbarous sailor, and Dita Parlo is at turns ravishing and disturbing. I expect no less of Zero and all its angry children.

Life has kept me from making my way in to see Zero, but I will this weekend, the last time before I head to the deserts of Saudi Arabia. If you're desperate for my reviews (which would make me worried about your mental health), I'll have a few coming while I'm gone, from Superduperman Reruns to A Scanner Darkly, the former god-awful, the latter pretty good. But go see Diane and go see Zero; you deserve to treat yourself to something truly amazing for a change.

Pinocchio, 1940. Directed by Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen, written by Aurelius Battaglia, William Cottrell, Otto Englander, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears and Webb Smith (all that for an 88 minute film!). Featuring the originally uncredited voices of Cliff Edwards, Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Walter Catlett, Charles Judels, Evelyn Venable, Frankie Darro, and Mel Blanc.

I'm a jerk: this title isn't even available on DVD. You can rent it on video at any major chain or check it out at your public libraries.

What do we give children today to help them keep in touch with their melancholy nature? They can't go to movies anymore, not with such sunny fare as Cars and Over the Hedge. They can't read new books, as they're now penned by the likes of Madonna, a woman trying desperately to recapture a childhood she likely never had. Maybe children go to the museums to ponder life and death, their own frustrations, to cringe at the intense sunlight and lonliness in a van Gogh, as a three-year-old friend of mine once did.

Fact is, I don't have a clue--recently visiting children weren't interested in reading E. B. White or Saint-Exupery, and mother warned that Pinocchio is too scary. Too scary? When I was young, the menace and the emotional reaction were just what I needed to help me grasp the perils of real life.

Pinocchio opens with Cliff Edwards' rendition of "When You Wish Upon A Star", a jolly tune that is here pensive and not the upbeat crap you hear at Disney's themeparks. We see Jiminy Cricket, a depression-era grasshopper, with holes in his gloves, his shoes coming apart, looking for a place to crash for the night. He ends up in Geppetto's toy and clock shop, a dark place, where strange faces loom in the shadows, everything lit by the dying embers of a fire. It is at once warm and mysterious--it is the perfect hideaway for children.

We all know the story: poor old Geppetto and his silly cat, Figaro, and sexy fish, Cleo, live by themselves in the toy store. Geppetto makes a little wooden boy, a puppet he names Pinocchio. As he readies for bed, he wishes on a star that Pinocchio would become a real boy, and, of course, in the night the Blue Fairy descends and makes the wooden boy come alive. There's a bonus: he can become a real boy if he proves himself Brave, Truthful and Unselfish. Thus begins Pinocchio's adventures with Jiminy Cricket, who has been given a new suit of duds and has been designated his Conscience.

The film is episodic and really bizarre, with horrible climaxes building and building on one another. Pinocchio tries to go to school, but is intercepted By Honest John and Giddy, a fox and cat who are nothing more than petty criminals looking to score some quick dough. Singing "An Actor's Life For Me!" the pair convinces Pinocchio, the innocent, to go with them, where they sell the boy for a pittance to a horrible, bellowing man named Stromboli.

This whole time, the sun seems barely to have broken through the clouds in Pinocchio's world. His Conscience, Jiminy, is a man of vanity, yearning for a gold badge that states he's the conscience, and a bug who ogles after the girl puppets in his charge's show--a sexually charged scene that includes can-can girls, cute milkmaids, and svelte Russian ladies who wiggle their behinds and coo "I'd cut my strings for you!"

All this captured with probably the finest animation in history, backgrounds fraught with detail, the steps of buildings sweating in the humidity, faces everywhere, the grain and scratches on wood surfaces reflecting the dim light. And children have probably never been given a main character whose clumsiness is as touching as Pinocchio's--you can see the boy discovering the limitations of his physical body, and his utter confusion in trying to figure out the path between right and wrong.

But what makes me believe that Pinocchio is the greatest film for children is its underlying message: that evil cannot be defeated, that it lurks everywhere, and that only through the love of friends and family can it be endured. The stakes only get higher and higher for our poor hero--from the goofballs Honest John and Giddy, to the bullying Stromboli, to the Coachman whose goal is to harvest children, hauling them off to Pleasure Island. With its giant pugilists and solemn-faced wooden indians hurling cigars at the kids, Pleasure Island is not just a playground for truant children, but a taste of the adult world as well--and I suppose you could argue that when the kids get turned into donkeys, for sale to the salt mines, it's a metaphor for the life of toil that faces the uneducated.

The film culminates in a vision of biblical evil, with Pinocchio fighting a giant whale named Monstro, who has somehow swallowed Geppetto and his fishing boat. The underwater scenes are mind-boggling, but even more, they're scary--the film is relentless in what it puts its young audience through. Eventually, Pinocchio saves his father, but not before we're treated to an image of the boy face down in a tidepool, dead.

I will grant you that Pinocchio has its odd moments, its weak parts--as usual, Disney doesn't trust women, giving us only the virginal Blue Fairy and the whorish puppets who are stand ins for actresses in general. Mothers are never present in old Walt's films, for whatever reason, but then again, Geppetto is a strong case for the power of single parentage.

But Pinocchio has always haunted me, through my formative years and even into adulthood, this cartoon of shadows. It scared me when I was a kid, and it scared me a bit last night when I watched it again. I think about it when I'm worried about the world; I think of it when I'm worried about children. And I think of it when I see adults who act like children, who seem to want to retreat to Disneyworld and forget that there's a world out there--perhaps that's their own little Pleasure Island.

An Inconvenient Truth, 2006. Directed by Davis Guggenheim. Created by and Starring Al Gore (and, yes, today's politicians are stars).

An Inconvenient Truth has been marketed, without a hint of irony, as 'the most terrifying film you'll ever see'. There's some truth in that, though not, I think, in ways the filmmakers intended. For myself, watching Mr. Gore speak with passion and eloquence made me wonder just where this guy was back in the year 2000, and what this country would be like today had he emerged six years ago. To me, that's terrifying.

An Inconvenient Truth serves two functions: to warn people about the dangers of global warming and to spring Al Gore back into the public eye. It succeeds quite well in both accounts, although I can say that, for myself, virtually none of Gore's information was new. The film is terrifying if you've had your head in the sand for fifteen years or have gleaned all your news from Newsweek.

For a movie that claims to be bi-partisan, Truth clearly serves to jab at the current administration (no argument here) and gives us quite a personal bio of Mr. Gore--in fact, it often appears similar to those patriotic bios they show at conventions.

What concerns me is that An Inconvenient Truth, in my mind, has no place on movie screens. I don't know quite how we reached this point, where our nation's theaters have become marquees for what really amounts to propaganda--lest we not forget that propaganda is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if we agree with it. But does it belong in a movie house? Look around, and now we're seeing documentaries taking up tremendous amounts of space in our art-house theaters. There's Michael Moore's films, Super Size Me, The Yes Men (horrible), and the forthcoming Who Killed The Electric Car? and The US v. John Lennon... all of these films could be shown on PBS--Ken Burns does it, after all, to greater success than many of these movies--and leave the little space we have for foreign and indie films alone. By showing Truth in a theater, you're really only attracting those people who are willing to go out of their way to see it. And those people are pretty much in your camp, anyway.

Gore is still his stiff self at times, and I've heard from not a few critics and friends how he still hasn't got it, as in how Al Gore still couldn't hold a crowd like, say, Jeb Bush. Which is sad, really: it shouldn't matter whether a guy can't come off as being someone you'd want to have a beer with, or whether he can do the job. At times Truth veers into the bizarre, such as when there are animations of polar bears and cute frogs. "You've got to save the frog," Gore laughs. But then there are a few arresting images to go along with his portents of gloom and doom, such as giant fishing boats rusting in the nearly barren Aral Sea, an image of startling and terrible beauty. Perhaps someday Gore's message will finally sink in; perhaps when he is someday president. An Inconvenient Truth seems aimed at both goals.

X-Men: The Last Stand, 2006. Directed by Brett Ratner, written by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn. Starring Hugh Jackman, Halle Berry, Ian McKellan (still the best reason to watch this series), Famke Janssen, Anna Paquin, Rebecca Romjin, Kelsey Grammar, Patrick Stewart, James Mardsen, Shawn Ashmore, Aaron Stanford, Ben Foster, and character actors Josef Sommer, Anthony Heald, Michael Murphy, and Bill Duke.

X-Men III is a decent picture, a comic book picture, which is two strikes already in my book. The X-Men franchise has fascinated me predominantly because of the complexity of Magneto's character. As played with great relish by Sir Ian McKellan, this Holocaust survivor is easily the most fascinating person in the whole franchise, someone you can relate to as well as hope for defeat.

As usual, the humans mean absolutely nothing, and it strikes me as the greatest weakness of the series that a relationship between a human and a mutant was never explored. Humans are so weak in these films that inevitably the plot always comes down to battles between the mutants, which leads me to wonder why in the hell is earth even in the picture? You could put the whole kit and caboodle on another planet, and you wouldn't lose anything.

Once again, discrimination is the name of the game, and supposedly the X-Men series is a great lesson on the perils of prejudice. Hogwash. No one who cares watches X-Men for anything other than brain candy, and those who could stand to learn something about bigotry don't learn from a comic book movie. In this episode, there's a strong gay subtext: the father of a mutant seeks to 'cure' his son, who is about as homosexually iconic a character as I have ever seen in a mainstream film: young, with blonde locks, bare chested and in tight jeans, with angels wings. It's as if Tony Kushner wrote the damn thing. Again, nothing's wrong with this, except that this character has virtually no purpose except to fly around and save his father from peril.

X-Men has been rightly criticized for its ham-fisted direction, although I'll say that Bryan Singer isn't much better--a decent technician with little emotional connection to a plot. Brett Ratner just lets the thing fly, lots of explosions, lots of overacting that's not kept in check (it wasn't under Singer's hand, either). There has been much worse fare this summer.

Nacho Libre, 2006. Directed by Jared Hess, written by Jared and Jerusha Hess and Mike White. Starring Jack Black, Hector Jimenez, Ana de la Reguera, and Darius Rose.

Mexicans sure are funny. This was hammered into my cranium about ten minutes into Nacho Libre. Early on, we see Jack Black serving grotesque meals to poor orphans, all the while talking like Speedy Gonzalez, that icon of Hispanic thespianship. Wrapped in sharp cinematography and a smart soundtrack and featuring a cast of bug-eyed, gaping children--all of whom are cute as buttons--Nacho Libre looks good, but could be the worst film I've seen this summer (were it not for some tight competition in the guise of Mission: Impossible, Poseidon, and The DaVinci Code). I'm not Hispanic, so I can't say that this film insults my race; I can say that something this monumentally unfunny and mean-spirited insults me as a person.

Oddly enough, since I endured Nacho last Wednesday, the film has been widely praised as 'sweet'. This is baffling. Nacho Libre dislikes many of its characters and has an outsider's view of a culture, lazily researched. It's ostensibly for kids but without a strong child character, just a selfish man in the character of Nacho and the actor Jack Black, who plays him. The plot is fast and loose, seeming more along the lines of one of those awful Saturday Night Live skit movies (Superstar, Stuart Saves His Family, etc.) and utterly without character. The humor as broad as Jack's waistband, and I think there might have been ten laughs total in a packed theater.

The facts: Jack plays Nacho, son of a Mexican priest and a Scandinavian missionary, orphaned at a young age. Since losing his parents, he has been in charge of cooking hideous meals for the other orphans, basically green gunk that gives the priests diarrhea (thus begins the first of many unfunny bathroom jokes). Nacho loves the Lucha Libre wrestlers, those masked, caped buffoons who throw each other around in the ring, and who supposedly made some groovy films in the 70s, which this film utterly fails to pay homage to. Anyway, Nacho decides to become a Lucha Libre in order to get some glory and raise money so that the orphans can have something decent to eat.

Admittedly, you don't need much of a plot to make a good comedy about Lucha Libre wrestling. Perhaps you don't need a Hispanic playing the lead role, either--after all, Chuck Heston played a Mexican man in Touch of Evil, weakening a tremendous film (in Nacho, I yearned for the talents of the apparently too-thin John Leguizamo, or for side-kick Hector Jimenez to helm the thing).

"I pulled a Meryl Streep," Black said, explaining his training for the role of Nacho. "I worked hard to perfect my accent. I wanted it to be kick-ass, but it was not easy." That's probably because it's hard to be kick-ass like Streep when you're a mediocre actor. Black is funny, but his ego demands to be center stage in this film, barely allowing other actors to breathe. And the film has its moments of thinly veiled disgust: Jack's character is never humiliated to the extent of his pal Esquelito, who has shit smeared in his face, his hair pulled out, and is chased by a tremendously fat woman who has to crawl on all fours through tunnels like a sewer rat. It's apparently fun to show this woman as being grotesquely fat, whereas Nacho is simply fat and fun, a man of eventual dignity.

Both the Hess' Napoleon Dynamite and Mike White's The Good Girl are rife with moments of loathing for characters unlike themselves-- Dynamite still bewilders me; I thought it was fun to watch but filled, at times, with moments of unnecessary cruelty. And the girlfriend in White's School of Rock is the one sour character in an otherwise charming film.

Perhaps I'd ignore much of this if the damn thing had just had a laugh or two. But the comic timing is leaden, and the scatological humor is so thoroughly out of place that the kids in the crowd didn't even respond to it. Nacho Libre has the appearance of a movie that was fun to make, something that, had I been a member of the cast or crew, I'd have fond memories and a ton of belly laughs. Unfortunately, none of us were on the set, so we're treated instead to an inside joke that barely registers a smile.

Nacho Libre is mercifully short, and when I emerged from the theater in my grumpy mood, I wondered to myself if white culture has ever had its movie equivalent, of people with goofy accents and a dumb plot with lame, insulting jokes.

Maybe it's The DaVinci Code.