I fell asleep last night watching Total Recall.
I guess the jackhammer could explain why Quaid looks like a bodybuilder.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why the bald guy puts his hand in the air and says "Recall, Recall, Recall." For some time I've suspected he was meant to be singing the commercial jingle only the jingle hadn't been recorded yet at the time of filming the scene so he had to improvise. I think about these things sometimes.
I'd planned to watch the season finale of Doctor Who last night but for some reason it didn't go up on Disney+ as early as it has normally been. So I watched it this morning and it was worth the wait. I thought it was terrific. It was pure ice cream for a long time Doctor Who fan but, again, I have to say that the hypothetical young new fan would be totally lost between all the plot dependent references to old episodes and an extraordinarily complicated plot with fast pace dialogue. Just like the clear political bias, it's something I can appreciate, even though it seems perfectly obvious this is all dooming the show to minuscule ratings and almost certainly a hiatus.
Spoilers ahead for the episode.
I expected the title of "Reality War" to make this a sort of allegory for the ongoing global, cultural/political war between the various shades of right and left. And it kind of was. Maybe it'll seem even more so once I've had time to digest it. I liked the conclusion of Conrad's story, not only because it was less politically polarised but also because it saved Ruby from looking like a complete idiot for falling for Conrad pretending to be her boyfriend. There was something real in their relationship and Conrad did have something more than just smug spite in his heart. On that note, I also liked the more nuanced dialogue between the Doctor and the Rani as the two bonded over being the last of the Time Lords.
With all the timey whimey plot stuff, the episode still managed some truly satisfying emotional beats. The strongest being the thread about Poppy--and Ruby being the only one who could remember her. I loved how Poppy vanished, her jacket, as it's being folded, slowly transforming into a handkerchief before disappearing entirely.
I thought Poppy was going to end up being Susan's mother. But then we never even got an explanation to Susan turning up in the past couple episodes. I guess they didn't want to overwrite that Eighth Doctor audio play after all.
The reappearance of Anita from the Christmas special was good and I liked her visiting the Eleventh and Third Doctors instead of it being yet another reel of every single previous Doctor. The moment of her finding out the current incarnation is gay was a nice character moment though, considering he spent a year with her and certainly wasn't keeping his sexuality a secret, it's hard to believe she didn't know already.
I kind of appreciated the appearance of the Thirteenth Doctor although it didn't make any sense. Maybe it was just nice because she got such a raw deal. Jodie Whittaker never gave a bad performance.
She seems to have taken the spot usually occupied by the current Doctor's former companions who all make appearances when a Doctor regenerates. I'm so glad Davies didn't do another bigeneration, though it may be a pretty clear sign that Ncuti Gatwa really wanted to get gone. He only lasted two seasons. Anything less than three is a sign of unusual circumstances. Eccleston stayed for only one season because that was the plan from the beginning and he was a big movie star there to just help kickstart the show (and, it turns out, there was a lot of bad blood between him and the producers). Notably, Colin Baker only got two seasons because he was so terribly unpopular. Gatwa's departure, given the fact that it was preceded by abysmally low ratings, seems like it was certainly a sign of some form of dissatisfaction with the current state of the show.
I wondered if we would even see the Doctor's new face. Just like the 14th Doctor, it turned out to be someone not so new. I have to say, I'm not pleased with the choice. It really feels like Davies is cannibalising his own work in a desperate attempt to slow a free fall. I don't think it's going to work, at least not for ratings. I can appreciate a fan service fest and Davies is able to inject even that with stimulating ideas. But the show desperately needs a true regeneration.
Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ everywhere else.
The Ally McBeal episode I watched last night was "Out in the Cold" from January, 2000, a time when people still generally believed homeless people in the U.S. were mostly mentally ill. In this case, Ally is intrigued by a homeless man who shouts some surprisingly insightful things at her. The two end up bonding over the fact that they both have hallucinations. It sounds more comedic than it was, the show actually takes it very seriously. It certainly plays very differently to-day when many Disneyland castmembers are reportedly living out of their cars.
I like how writer David E. Kelley seems to make writing pivots based on (presumably his own) critical appraisals of the show. Ally's visions were just a comedic effect in season one, then they became vaguely spiritual before finally settling on being an actual, serious mental health issue that she's avoiding taking medication for. And Billy coming off as slimier than originally intended seems to have led to him being an outright creep. I'm still digging that.
Ally McBeal is available on Disney+.
X Sonnet 1941
No reading horses fled the burning barn.
So many bookends burned to keep the books.
No equine readers stayed to read a yarn.
The common hay was held with simple hooks.
McAfee scams disgraced the common box.
No virus worth its bytes was fooled for long.
The vaunted 'lectric ghost was just a fox.
No A nor I exceeds its scary song.
A paper door could never shut at night.
No warming breeze could staunch the dream.
A question ends before the answer's right.
No cookies marred the taste of sweetened cream.
Please send a coffee up for me to drink.
No mighty brew or blend would make me blink.
It was a nice mall and I was pleased to see their grocery store had Guinness stout. I've noticed that the quality of the beer selection is inversely proportional to the quality of the liquor selection in most stores here. If they have a good selection of beer, they have a weak selection of whiskey. If they have a good selection of whiskey, they have a weak selection of beer. I tend to enjoy beer only on hot days and it was a cool, rainy day, so I didn't buy any, opting instead to pick up some Tullamore Dew at an excellent nearby liquor shop (which has a weak selection of beer).
Rounding out my nostalgic Saturday, I stopped at a nearby Starbucks and ordered a tall drip coffee for just over 400 yen, roughly comparable to the average three dollar price in the U.S. Nowadays, if I get a coffee when I'm out, I tend to opt for a vending machine, where it's usually around 150 yen. But a sparsely crowded Starbucks on a rainy day is invaluable. I stayed there reading Marius B. Jansen's Making of Modern Japan, published in 2000, the year of its author's death. Marius B. Jansen shares a birthday with me, April 11, though he was born over fifty years earlier, in 1922. Born in the Netherlands and raised in the U.S., he was a professor of Japanese history at Princeton and in the aftermath of World War II had a role in the Occupation of Japan. He was the first foreigner to receive the Distinguished Cultural Merit Award from the Japanese government.
The book, as its title suggests, is fundamentally teleological, constructed in such a way as to explain why Japan is the way it is to-day (or in 2000), beginning with a narrative of history starting with Sekigahara, a battle in 1600 that began the Tokugawa era. I've been surprised how useful the book's insights are to my own life and situation and, in descriptions of Japanese customs and behaviour in the 18th and 19th century, I've been gaining a better understanding of the culture I interact with daily.
I first heard of the book from a mysterious YouTuber called Apostolic Majesty who has a number of really good lectures on his channel on history, The Lord of the Rings, and Bethesda games.
Maplespice is the creator of Remiel, an extremely popular follower mod and certainly by far the best one I've ever installed. Many reviews and forum comments on Remiel are about how amazingly lifelike Remiel's dialogue is. The average follower mod tends to be an embarrassing female simp who becomes obsessed with the player character in dialogue and then is overpowered in battle so that oftentimes it feels like the computer is playing the game for you. Sadly, I think this speaks volumes about the average heterosexual male fantasy these days; a hyper competent girl who's capable of doing any and all of the work and who for some reason rapturously adores you. Remiel, meanwhile, can get knocked down pretty easily (follower characters usually can't die) and, although you can start a romance quest line with her, it's more satisfying to avoid it. Here's some dialogue she has with another mod follower called Thogra gra-Mugur:
It still amazes me all these great mods, into which people have put so much work, are still totally free.
So far, Varinia isn't quite as amazing as Remiel. Remiel feels more well rounded and I wonder if it was the mod author's inexperience that led to Remiel being loaded with a wider range of ideas. Varinia is a spy/assassin character, better suited for evil playthroughs. Maybe it's the narrower focus that makes her less satisfying. Though I wonder if the mod creator is afflicted by a problem I often think about affecting artists, which is a fear of the vulnerability inherent in creation. Art is about communicating something about our humanity and it takes guts to do that, or possibly a lack of awareness of just how vulnerable we're making ourselves. I think this is what often leads to a progression in careers in many media in which artists do their most popular, intimate work earlier on and somehow make progressively less satisfying media even as their skills are refined. Maybe Tim Burton would argue all day that Big Fish is actually a better film than Edward Scissorhands or Francis Ford Coppola would argue Megalopolis is better than The Godfather. On the other hand, I would say his Dracula is better than The Godfather so maybe there's hope for us old artists yet. And I haven't played that much with Varinia, maybe she improves.
An enterprising lad goes from shining shoes to ruling Harlem in 1973's Black Caesar. Fred Williamson gives a charismatic performance in this decently written blaxploitation film.
Tommy (Williamson) starts his way up the ladder when he grabs hold of a man's leg while he's shining his shoe so a gangster can gun the man down. From there, Tommy gets courier jobs before finally taking the initiative and killing someone wanted dead by the local mafia boss. In return, he asks for control of part of town.
The argument is pretty clear; the oppressed black man becomes the oppressor once given the opportunity, a sad, fairly common commentary on the cyclical nature of tyranny. Williamson's performance is good and impressively vicious and the film has a score and songs by none other than James Brown.
Black Caesar is available on The Criterion Channel.
In a post-apocalyptic, post-gender world. a young woman follows her destiny as the "seventh son" of a genealogy of ramblers in 2025's O'Dessa. Sadie Sink is the captivating star of this film which is an entertaining adventure, though not really much better than the kinds of Mad Max knock-offs I remember from MST3k like Alien from L.A., City Limits, and Warrior of the Lost World.
The movie follows modern American leftist ideology so perfectly I was able to predict many things from scene to scene. When a priest shows up, I knew he'd be a villain. When an MC starts introducing a singer about to perform a sexy dance of veils, I knew the dancer would be a guy, and not even a strikingly beautiful guy. Much like the live action Cowboy Bebop adaptation, the movie sets out to be transgressive but can't help putting its gender non-conformists into boxes. So the gender fluid guy has to be a burlesque singer, again.
I assume Sadie Sink does her own singing and she's really good at it. The songs aren't bad at all and I like the willow design on her guitar. From a basic filmmaking standpoint, it's well made and the politics don't get in the way of the storytelling. I was genuinely interested in the fate of Sink's character and was rooting for her. The visuals were typical for the post-apocalyptic genre but not bad, especially if you're a fan of the genre, which I am.
O'Dessa is available on Disney+.
Somehow, movies from the 1930s and '40s seem to do a better job portraying the experience of living in a foreign country. One terrific example is 1937's Pepe le Moko, directed by Julien Duvivier and starring Jean Gabin. Gabin plays the titular gangster, a Frenchman hiding out in the Casbah of Algiers where he has the foreigner's peculiar experience of being welcome and rejected at the same time.
Pepe has a strange friendship with Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), the man intent on arresting him. So long as Pepe remains in the Casbah, Slimane is unable to do so and the two carry on a cold but puckish friendship. Fate finally puts the finger on Pepe in the form of a woman, a tourist named Gaby (Mireille Balin) from Paris. Pepe's conversations with her revolve around reminiscences of Paris. In bed with her, Pepe remarks that for all her loveliness and the fineness of her clothes and jewellery, he values her for how she reminds him of the Metro. She seems to recall for him an old familiar world from which he has long been separated.
Pepe's local lover, Ines (Line Noro), is jealous of Gabby but is more frightened of the vulnerability Gaby creates in Pepe. Slimane spots the same vulnerability and exploits it, manipulating both of the lovers. This leads to a remarkable scene where Pepe, at home, believing Gaby has abandoned him, listens to another exiled Parisian as she sings along with herself on a recording from decades earlier, a song about a past and a better life that is forever out of reach for her. I love how there's no reaction shot of Pepe for the whole scene. Her song is so clearly suited to his mood and situation that to show any reaction would be somehow redundant and cheap.
Pepe le Moko is available on The Criterion Channel.
The new Doctor Who was decent, if you happen to share Russel T Davies' politics. And I do, but I can't help lament his decision to take the show further into marginalisation. I mean, does anyone think the show would be converting anyone?
I think maybe the Conrad guy is based on Tommy Robinson. I don't think the simplistic, belligerent character is going to draw away any Tommy Robsinson devotees. I really liked the Rani's ship, though. I liked how everything seemed to be made of bone and those aliens collecting doubts reminded me of the medical alien from Farscape if it were designed by Gerald Brom.
The concept behind the episode, called "Wish World", is of reality transformed by someone seeking a return to a past that didn't really exist, a pretty typical form of political cycle most recently and starkly in evidence from the "Make America Great Again" crowd. But I was also reminded of reading about Japanese history yesterday and how the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century was not really a restoration at all but a radical transformation of the country into something it had never been before, despite many participants being motivated by "kokugaku", a Japanese academic philosophy emphasising the superiority of Japanese culture in earlier eras. You could also look at the Restoration in England in 1660 which certainly didn't return things to the status quo of the 1630s. It's a nice template for the Doctor and Belinda to be trapped in a reality that inevitably has flaws. The guy in the office freaking out because the Doctor called him beautiful could only be aware of homosexuality since, in the time when awareness of homosexuality was less prevalent, it wasn't out of order for a straight man to call another beautiful at all. You can't be constructive when what you're concerned with is destruction at heart.
I was also reminded of the first story featuring the Rani, 1985's Mark of the Rani, in which she takes advantage of 19th century Luddites. I have to say Archie Panjabi falls far short of Kate O'Mara's portrayal. I even prefer Anita Dobson ("Mrs Flood") who at least avoids all the pathetic teeth gnashing.
The scenes with Ruby and the group of disabled people was really, really awkward. It wouldn't surprise me if that scene alone was the cause of many televisions being shut off or channels changed. In any case, I don't think the show's downward trajectory is going to be righted any time soon. But "Wish World" wasn't so bad.
So I switched to the original, 2000 X-Men film that introduced Hugh Jackman's Wolverine to the world. What a difference. How good that movie remains. It still feels fresh that it spends time introducing Wolverine, Magneto, and Rogue in very natural, earthly circumstances.
The recent news from Marvel is they're shaking up their release slate in the wake of disappointing box office performances by Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts. It's really a shame because Thunderbolts is actually quite good. I could've told them it wouldn't do well, though. Florence Pugh is very pretty but she looks like a little boy in all the posters. Everyone wears boring black costumes. I remember months back when Grace Randolph was comparing Thunderbolts to Suicide Squad she called Yelena, Pugh's character, the Harley Quinn of the film. Margot Robbie's sexiness as Harley Quinn in the original Suicide Squad movie single-handedly made it a hit and redoubled the character's cultural icon status. Florence Pugh's dowdiness seems to have drawn no-one to the cinema. The sexy Harley Quinn made the otherwise lousy Suicide Squad a hit, so I think it's fair to say the aesthetically unimpressive hair and makeup on Yelena sank the chances of the otherwise well made Thunderbolts. Yeah, you can turn your nose up at the fact that sex sells. But you do so at your peril.
Japan's ramen is legendary all over the world and I've had a lot of amazing ramen since coming to Japan five years ago. But by far, one of the best restaurants I've eaten at is Makotoya.
Their signature ramen has a beef bone broth. Nowadays, ramen generally comes in four kinds of soup bases; salt and soy sauce are the two traditional bases and the popular newcomers are miso and pork bone broth. Pork bone is typically my favourite kind but Makotoya's choice of using beef bone broth is an excellent alternative. As you might expect, it has kind of a milky quality, which is nice for someone like me whose gut no longer likes to digest milk properly. A basic bowl of their beef bone broth ramen without egg is relatively cheap at only around 750 yen, which I think comes to around seven dollars. For a hundred yen more, you can get their 赤辛牛白湯 ramen, a red spicy variant.
The place never seems too crowded and I can always get a seat at the bar with space for my book so I can read while eating. There are a lot of restaurants I want to try around here but it's going to be hard tearing myself away from Makotoya at lunchtime.
What is the central gag of 1987's Spaceballs? It's Star Wars but everyone's regular schlubs from Canada and New York, mostly Jewish (John Candy was Catholic). The 80s was a time of great Jewish comedies. Nowadays, we still have Larry David and Mrs. Maisel but the time of the Jewish comedy superstar is over. Well, comedies in general tend not to be box office hits now.
A lot of Spaceballs' comedy also comes from literalising. Chewbacca was always based on George Lucas' dog, now John Candy is playing a literal half man, half dog. The Millennium Falcon was like a mobile home, now it's actually a Winnebago. There's more to this comedy than simply unmasking creative concepts; it divests the concepts of the poetry of the fantastic and makes them mundane. It's a joke on the characters because that's the joke played on everyone in real life. No-one's ever going to have the Force. You're more likely to be stuck with Schwartz. But, hey, that's life. The vile gangster is more likely to be a pile of pizza than a giant space slug.
It's a galaxy of puerile motives. Everyone is thinking about sex all the time. The pretty female officer smirks at the camera after seeing President Skroob's exposed genitals. Joan Rivers' version of C3PO's primary mission is to protect the virginity of the princess. That actually brings her a little closer to the mute servant girl in Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (隠し砦の三悪人), the movie that was a primary influence on Star Wars. The characters that provided the basis for R2D2 and C3PO were much earthier, much more focused on bodily needs than Lucas' version of the low caste, point of view characters. Maybe Andor introducing sex to the Star Wars universe is a precursor to getting something closer to The Hidden Fortress in a way. I'd say it would need at least fifteen years to develop and I'm not sure Star Wars is going to be financially viable for that long.
We've come all this way and it's still hard to talk about sex without making it a joke. But something like Spaceballs can feel like a breath of fresh air. Or at least canned air.
Spaceballs is currently on Amazon Prime in Japan.
I finally watched the first episode of House of the Dragon season two last night. It's certainly not as splashy an opening as season one but it's nice to be back in that world of beautiful costumes and dark, mediaeval locations. I appreciated some greater level of detail in this one, especially the scene at the docks where you can see men scraping barnacles off a ship.
I guess the show hasn't reached the heights of Game of Thrones. It seemed like everyone on Game of Thrones started turning up all over the place, especially in big budget movies, but the only star who seems to have come out of House of the Dragon so far is Milly Alcock, who was in less than half of the first season. I guess the legacy of Game of Thrones' rushed final seasons continues to haunt the franchise.
"A Son for a Son", the season two premiere episode of House of the Dragon I watched last night, certainly didn't feel rushed. We spend a lot of time with Rhaenyra grieving for the son she lost at the end of the previous season, setting up her motive for revenge. Writer and showrunner Ryan Condal also takes a moment to lampshade one of the more egregious missteps in season one's writing, when Rhaenys, for no apparent reason, refrained from killing the opposing leadership when she had the chance. I'm sorry to see the writer of that notorious episode, Sara Hess, wrote a few episodes of season two.
Still, even on its worst day, House of the Dragon is a cut above most shows.
So I didn't watch Psycho. I tried to watch Ally McBeal a bit but the episode, a Thanksgiving episode in which it turns out Ally's father had been flirting with Georgia, was filled with too many lame coincidences and I couldn't keep watching. So I just drifted off to sleep watching Valerie and Her Week of Wonders again on The Criterion Channel. What a wonderful colour palette that movie has.
This morning I woke up to see Natasha Lyonne visited the Criterion Closet practically naked. She chose Mike Leigh's Naked and David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch among other movies. Maybe she was protesting Cannes' recently announced prohibition on people showing up nude on the red carpet. Maybe she just wanted to remind people she's not exactly like Peter Falk.
I realised she's almost exactly my age. She was born the same year and the same month--she was born April 4, 1979 and I was born April 11, 1979. She's definitely aged better.
X Sonnet 1940
Where citizens were nothing more than pies,
The shop was selling cakes and sticky rolls
Of upper crusts, the best were kept with eyes
Obscured in tanks of fish with shaky goals,
Accrued for foggy syrup, placed within,
A filter's clog, to make a sweetened life,
To quickly ravage thoughts of idle sin,
And check the dance of someone's drunken wife
Before the crew of new cadets could dream
Of something bigger, pulling up parades
Above the heads who just escaped a stream
Of molten rock as music now invades
The sound of happy morning coffee beans
Stampeding down a hill of leafy greens.
I forgot all about Doctor Who on Saturday, which says something. But when I finally did watch it on Sunday I was very happily surprised to find it was a pretty good episode. I'm surprised to see many review quotes saying the episode feels "rushed" because, to me, it was the first story this season that didn't feel rushed. In particular, I liked that writer Juno Dawson gave some space for Belinda to panic over the apparent death of the Doctor. It was the kind of human reaction to a dangerous and scary situation the show rarely seems to get around to anymore. It was one of the things that made it feel like a classic series episode.
Dawson has written a number of books, including This Book is Gay, which ranks as the tenth most banned book in America, surely an admirable distinction. Her Doctor Who episode, "The Interstellar Song Contest", features gay characters and possibly a reference to transgenderism (Dawson is transgender). When one character, Cora, is revealed to be a member of species that faces persecution across the galaxy, her partner accuses her of dishonesty. This conceptual conflict tends to crop up more in arguments over trans issues than it does over hidden ethnicity. I thought Cora was an effective enough character, particularly when she was being gracious with Belinda.
I'll go into more significant spoilers for the episode now so, be warned.
Maybe the most notable aspect of the episode, for fans, is a pair of revelations that point back to the classic era. We finally learn who Mrs. Flood is--it turns out she's none other than the Rani, a Time Lady from the Sixth and Seventh Doctor eras originally played by Kate O'Mara. In this episode, she "bi-generates" and becomes Archie Penjabi. I like Archie Penjabi and it's nice to see her getting work though the show's going to have to do some work to distinguish her from Missy now. I also still really hate the idea of bi-generation. I have a bad feeling we're just not going to get an explanation for the Rani's bi-generation. I wonder if it'll eventually be revealed to be a biological response to a diminished Time Lord population. In any case, the Doctor's claim to be "last of the Time Lords" gets weaker and weaker.
Particularly since the episode features another Time Lady, none other than Susan Foreman, with Carole Ann Ford reprising the role she first played all the way back in the show's 1963 premiere. For decades, fans and people working on the show have wanted to see the return of Susan and the fulfillment of the First Doctor's promise to one day come back to her. That actually did occur in an audio play starring Paul McGann and Carole Ann Ford and I always thought this was why it never happened on the show, that the makers of the show wanted that audio play to be canon. Maybe it still will be. In any case, I wonder why Russell T Davies chose now to bring Susan back. Ratings were slightly up for this episode but they're still well under the norm even for the 13th Doctor era. Maybe, despite his optimism in interviews, it's an acknowledgment by Davies that this really is the end for Doctor Who, at least for a few years. The Doctor's reunion with Susan would make for a good bookend.
Doctor Who is available on the BBC iPlayer and on Disney+ everywhere else.
I finally finished watching The Magicians last night, the SyFy series that started in 2015 and ended in 2020. I'd watched every episode and stopped before watching the final episode about four years ago. Why? I don't know. I did the same thing with A Touch of Frost. You'd think watching a whole series would make me want to watch the final episode but for some reason I didn't really feel motivated with either of these shows. But I was recently poking around American Amazon and remembered I'd actually bought the last episode for around three dollars several years ago.
I couldn't completely follow all the various plot strands in the last episode, I couldn't remember everything that was happening, but I enjoyed it.
It's a very cosy show. Something about the fact that, due to its low budget, it's almost entirely filmed on just four or five sound stages, even though it's a story with a scope covering alternate dimensions and timelines and city locales, makes it feel like a group of friends playing pretend in a large house. It also has a true serial feel to it, like a picaresque or the original Flash Gordon. There's no three act or any other kind of structure. It's just; this happens then this happens then this happens then this happens then this happens . . . Maybe that's why it didn't feel appropriate to watch the end. It was kind of an inconclusive ending, anyway. I wonder if the cast and crew expected to get another season some day, somehow. It doesn't seem likely now though, looking at their Wikipedia pages, it doesn't appear the cast has had much work in the past couple years.
It was a good cast. That was what first attracted me to the series. I saw them all live at San Diego Comic Con and they had such a great rapport that I was compelled to watch the show. I was pleased enough by the show which quickly outgrew some initial soap opera water weight to become a leaner Buffy style fantasy adventure with quips. It's good. And Olivia Taylor Dudley is really hot.
The new Superman trailer premiered a few days ago. It's supposed to be the first full trailer though it seems like we've already seen an awful lot, mostly involving the dog, Krypto, which has been effective. This trailer finally gives us some Clark and Lois interaction and I'm disappointed to see she already knows his secret identity. It seems like that fun dynamic hasn't lasted long in any superhero film since the first Christopher Reeve movie. I suppose people feel like it prevents the characters from having meaningful dialogue. I would recommend those people watch the popular anime Spy Family in which two characters have identities they keep secret from each other and it's loads of fun. And it has a kind of nuance because a secret identity can stand in for the inevitable depths and complexities about another person which we're unable to understand however open the person is or however much we might pry into their personal lives.
This is the first time David Corenswet really came across as Superman for me but, sadly, it was when he wasn't in the costume and his muscles were allowed to show through a simple white button down shirt. This Superman costume is all wrong. The high collar looks military and it makes him look smaller. It's thick, too, like Batman's armoured suit. The costume shouldn't look like it's something he needs for protection.
Rachel Brosnahan is pitch perfect as Lois.
I love the saturated colour palette, which is one thing that definitely shows James Gunn was the right director for this material. He usually does go for a rainbow over the more standard two or three key tones. It's more difficult to work with so much colour but the rewards are worth it.
I really hope this movie is good. We need more media demonstrating that altruism is cool. There are too many fucking savages out there, including the big orange one squatting on the White House.