Man of Steel

I confess, I have a bit of a soft spot for Superman. I grew up on the TV series and the Christopher Reeve movie. I quite enjoy the shared fiction we've all decided to adopt that glasses are a disguise that will protect your secret identity from investigative journalists. I miss the phone booth.

But wow, this new movie is...long. Really. Long in a way that left me time to wonder if maybe the Fab Five wouldn't have time to drop in for a quick intervention. (I would pay good money to see Kyan do away with that spit curl. I can see him now, kicking back and watching Sup get ready for his big date, sipping a photogenic cocktail and saying, "See, this is why I told him to always start applying the product from the back." When Lex Luthor has better hair than your hero, that's not a good sign.)

And I understand that Lois needed some updating. Uncle Bonsai did a great song about what Lois would have done if she'd known Clark was Superman. I really love that song, because Lois strikes me as sort of shallow. Motherhood alleviates that somewhat in this film, but really, I ended up feeling pretty sorry for the poor idiot who's stuck with her (poor James Marsden, second-best-man in two comic movies this summer). Superman, meanwhile, gets to fly off into space and be manly, having dodged more than one bullet by the end of the film.