Sunny

Went to the beach on Sunday. I haven’t been to the beach in years, I actually have trouble remembering the last time I did so. It was great though, the perfect way to spend such a lovely, albeit incredibly hot, day. There was much throwing of frisbess and losing of beach balls. In fact I think my overriding image of Faith now is her slowly chasing a beach ball as it gently drifts into the distance. The whole day was fun, but extremely tiring fun.

Yesterday morning I tried my hand at baseball in a sort of baseball driving range. Needless to say I was amazing. Well, not really but at least I managed to hit the balls hurtling towards me reasonably often. Buggered up my hands though.
As for yesterday afternoon, I sort of vegged out and watched a few downloaded movies. First up was Hellboy, a film I’d sort of seen before but wasn’t really watching. This time though, it was actually something of a disappointment. The premise was good, the cast seemed perfect, but there was something missing. Maybe it was the lacklustre acting or the terribly obvious wirework action scenes but it was nowhere near as good as it could or indeed should have been.
5 beer bottles out of 9 And 1 That’s Gone A Bit Warm.

Next was Superman. I’ve never really liked the Superman franchise; what’s the point in having the hero of the piece be completely invincible, vulnerable only to one rather contrived plot point (this is of course excluding the mid-90s televisual treat, The New Adventures of Superman which was great)? Needless to say I didn’t like this effort at all. The actors were miscast (especially the wishy-washy 23 year old Kate Bosworth as the supposedly hardened reporter Lois Lane) and, for the most part, were completely unremarkable. Brandon Routh, playing Kent/Superman, was completely charmless and utterly unsympathetic. Towards the end of the film, director Bryan Singer tries to make us feel sorry for this Man of Steel, something that even a helmsman as talented as he fails to pull off. He’s Superman! Who cares if he got beaten up, he can fly for Christssake!

The story too was rather pants and the one hope I held out for the film, Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, was nowhere near as good as the trailers hinted he would be. In fact, his only passable scene is the “Lemme hear you say it.” dialogue revealed in even the earlier teasers. Perhaps the best word to describe him in this is “flat.” Granted it’s not him insomuch as it’s the scripts he’s given to work with but still, he does little with the few decent lines he has. The supporting cast are barely worth a mention, terrible as they are. They made little impression and served less purpose.
Good points? Well the one serious action scene of this (2 and a half hour) movie was the plane rescue and it was indeed impressive. Some critics have hailed it as the best bit of action since Lord of The Rings however, and I think this is a little off. Perhaps the main reason the scene stands out so much is that the rest of the film is desperately lacking in similar set pieces. There are a few more bits of action, a bank robbery, a scene where Superman gets his required comeuppance, but nothing else is even slightly remarkable.

The biggest flaw though had to be that the film took itself far, far too seriously. As far as I’ve heard and can remember, the original Superman films benefited from Christopher Reeve’s gift for comic timing; they were funny films in places. After all, the comics the films are based off are hardly crusty tomes of moral comment. But this movie was exactly that; it was almost religious in its message of self sacrifice and righteousness. This was offset by a man in his underwear flying around the planet and the two opposing images jarred me completely out of any cinematic experience that might have been there otherwise.

3 noses out of 10

Anyway, enough about that. Until next time.


The beach where we went. Yay.