Threshold Returns

Okay, you had to know it wouldn’t last.
After all, who wants to read about my life being a series of non-events that inspire impotent rage and my half-baked ideas that I abandon almost immediately because of laziness/lack of discipline/self-esteem issues without the full weight of my sparkling yet self-effacing wordplay?
Certainly not the upwards of five people who come here every so often. That half-dozen or so people come here with certain expectations, and one of those expectations is pointless and unnecessary verbosity as I focus the microscope onto the minutiae of my trite and meaningless existence, mining each dust mote experience for some tiny piece of comedic or observational gold.
Or something.
The point is, for someone who once aspired to be a writer, I really don’t do a hell of a lot of actual writing other than what you see here, and so even though there isn’t a lot of substance here, I feel the need to cram it chock full of style (such as it is).
So feel free to skim to your heart’s content as you search – in vain – for that little gem of profundity that may be (but probably isn’t) buried somewhere under a mountain of excess verbiage and metaphors that are so mixed up that they’ve come to resemble that grayish mass that multiple colors of Play-Do become once they’ve been mashed together too many times.
Or something.
In any case, let’s give a warm welcome back to the standard Threshold entry, shall we?
This morning found me, awake, lying in bed trying to not be.
Awake, that is.
I really didn’t feel like getting up, as it was my intention to make this day the most spectacular waste of time since…well, since yesterday, but the point is that I was going to try to sleep as long as possible and to accomplish absolutely nothing.
As I was lying there drifting I became aware of the sound of my cell phone ringing somewhere off in the distance. I got up to answer it, even though I was fully expecting it to just be that weird Spanish recording I keep getting (I got that about an hour later on my VoIP phone).
The Caller ID said it was Scott, but it turned out to be Stacy, who proceeded to bully me into agreeing to see a 10:00 showing of Superman Returns tonight with Scott.
I really didn’t want to go see that movie. Despite the fact that it looks to be visually stunning (retarded gay version of the costume aside), I just don’t see why Brian Singer felt the need to make a sequel to movies that, quite frankly, weren’t that good to begin with, especially considering the tremendous amount of material that’s been published in the 20+ years since Superman II (this movie ignores III and IV, and rightly so), most of it vastly superior than the cheese-fests that were the two Richard Donner movies.
That II apparently wasn’t the movie that Donner wanted to make, and that he’s not credited as its director is largely irrelevant, though it’s my understanding that Singer made this movie almost as though it were Superman II, though he did pick and choose those concepts from II that had the Donner seal of approval.
From everything that I’ve read, this movie is the cinematic equivalent of Singer getting on his knees and giving Donner a long, sloppy blow job.
Given that the character is nearly 70 years old, has been re-imagined and reinvented countless times within the comics, and has had some kind of incarnation in every conceivable media, it’s impossible to say that there is any one canonical version of Superman.
The basics, though, have always been there, in pretty much every version: rocketed as infant to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton, raised by simple, decent farm folk who instilled an innate sense of right and wrong in him, has powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way, and so on.
Did the original movies have those basics covered? Sure, which, by extension means that this “sequel” should as well.
But it’s what they did in filling in the blanks left by those basics that bothered me, and knowing that that same filler will be back nearly 30 years later (indeed, much of it, including the role of Jor-El, is lifted directly from the movies) really, really bothers me.
What’s even more bothersome is that Singer used the movies as the only source material. Period. Putting aside any complaints I have about the content of the movies, which are a matter of personal preference, it seems to me that such short-sightedness is a slap in the face of every creator outside of the movies who has left a mark on the character and his mythology.
Not only is that disrespectful to the creators, it’s disrespectful to the fans (like yours truly) who have a strong investment in and love for the other versions of the character (For the record, “my” vision of Superman is the one from the late 80s to early 90s, with John Byrne’s basic ideas – which greatly simplified the character and adapted him to the times – later fleshed out by the people who took over for him.) .
I might not be so bothered by this if it were a matter of him creating is own vision of the character, but he’s not doing that; he’s attempting to recreate one person’s vision of the character.
*Sigh*
I’ve gone on about this way too much, and yet I could go on and on and on. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the whole Lois being a single mother thing, and I could really go on (and off) about that particular desecration of a beloved character (For the record, I’m not finding fault with single mothers, I’m just finding fault with turning Lois into one.)
Ordinarily I’d try a little harder to keep an open mind about something like this, but the problem here is that Superman really is important to me (And I don’t care how that sounds or what anyone thinks about that), and everything I’ve heard and read is telling me that this is just another disservice to the character.
Which is why I wasn’t going to see it until I was tricked into agreeing to do so while I was still half-asleep in a bit of super-villainy worthy of Lex Luthor (the real one, not the smarmy joke of a Luthor played by Gene Hackman, whom I’m sure Kevin Spacey had a blast channeling in order to play a cheesy, over the top character. For the record, I like both Hackman and Spacey and respect their skill as actors, but the movie version of Lex…yechh.). Curse you, Stacy and your early-morning hypnotic powers!
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have (a lot) more to say about it after I’ve seen it. In the meantime, I’m sure it’ll look cool (except for all of the cheesy plastic crystals and the recycled Brando footage and the gay, retarded costume), and if I shut my brain off and gag my inner fanboy I’ll be able to enjoy it for the visual elements.
After all, I will admit that it looks really cool in the trailer when the bullet hits him in the eye and flattens and bounces away and he doesn’t even blink…
Some time ago I heard that the ideal way to sleep is along the North-South line of the compass, with your head to the North.
Do I believe this? Not really, as I can’t see what possible difference it could make, but after years of sleeping with my head either to the East or to the South and feeling like crap most mornings when I wake up, I figured it was worth a shot.
The only problem with that was the fact that in my bedroom the North wall is where my closet is located.
Still, I wanted to give it a shot, and realizing that there’s no one who will be likely to see how stupid it looks, it didn’t really matter if I had my bed set up in the middle of the floor not against any wall.
The verdict? I’m not sure that it makes a difference. I’ll give it a few more nights before I decide.
The one real advantage, though, is that the window is directly below me, so when there’s a cool breeze (as there was last night), I get the full benefit of it. Lacking a breeze, I can set up my box fan in the window, so that much of sleeping along the Cardinal directions in this fashion is beneficial.
At this point you’re probably beginning to miss the condensed entries, so I guess I’ll wrap things up by mentioning that Scott has moved his MySpace blog onto Blogger.
Check out his blog, My Inanity.
(What a loser. He doesn’t even know how to spell insanity. What? Oh. Never mind. At least that picture he has of himself is pretty cool. Some artistic genius must have done that for him. I bet it cost a fortune!)