Quick Review: Man Of Steel

This is a not-so-quick read, actually.

If you've read this blog in the past, back when I used to post a lot more (and yes, I'm going to keep making the point that my lack of posts has been an abysmal failure of mine), you know that I am wayyyyyy into Superman. The comic books, the animated films and series, the TV series and, of course, the movies. The comic books, lately, I've put aside. My disdain for the changes foisted upon Superman's character by DC Comics when they rebooted their entire universe caused me to pretty much stop buying the books. That's not to say I haven't bought any comic books; there are the Simpsons and Futurama titles, and other things I've dabbled in, including some other DC titles. (I'll have to summarize all of that somewhere. There's over a year's worth of purchases so I won't really summarize them as I used to.) But as for the main Super-titles, I haven't purchased them.

Still, I am all for Superman, when done right. So geeked was I for Man of Steel, the latest big-screen attempt to cash in on Kal-El's popularity, that I not only purchased a ticket in advance (which I never do), but I spent the extra cash for IMAX (well, the faux-IMAX that they have at the AMC at Franklin Mills Mall).

There's another reason I mention the whole DC Comics reboot. As with every iteration, the individual creators tend to make changes to suit their needs. (And at times those changes get into the comic books. The 1940s cartoons had Superman fly for the first time, instead of leaping from place to place; Kryptonite was introduced in the radio serials in 1943; the list goes on.)

Quick Review: The Fighter

It seems sometimes that when you've seen one boxing movie, you've seen them all. The main character has to overcome stuff and then get a shot at redemption in some way. "The Fighter," starring Mark Wahlberg as a real-life fighter, "Irish" Micky Ward, is no different. Ward has to overcome his family. There's his brother Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale), a former boxer who is now his trainer, but is also a drug addict, and his mother (Melissa Leo), who serves as his manager. Not to mention his seven loud, obnoxious sisters, who apparently travel everywhere in a pack. They're sending his career down the toilet until he stands up for himself with the help of his new girlfriend (Amy Adams). It is well-acted, and I particularly enjoyed Adams' performance. There's some Oscar hype for this movie, but it's not quite at that level. And I hate when a biopic takes liberties with the real story and "The Fighter," according to this article, took quite a few. My grade: B.

Quick Review: Leap Year

I can't wait until same-sex marriage becomes commonplace nationwide. Why? Besides the obvious reasons, it's so that maybe we'll see the gay equivalent of movies like "Leap Year," in which Anna (Amy Adams), a woman with her own successful career and a four-year relationship with a seemingly good man goes nuts when an anticipated marriage proposal doesn't happen. Yes, goes nuts. How else to explain why such a woman would, on a moment's notice, fly off to Dublin (where her boyfriend is conveniently at a conference) to ask him to marry her, because her father (John Lithgow, in little more than a cameo) told her about an old legend that every February 29th in Ireland a woman can propose and the man can't refuse? I mean, we're now in the year 2010. From what I've heard, there's nothing to stop anyone of either gender from proposing to their beloved at any time. Unless, of course, both are of the same sex.

Anyhoo, Anna's flight is diverted by bad weather to Wales. She hires a boat to take her to Cork, but the boat is also affected by the storm and she ends up well off-course and needing a ride to get to Dublin before Leap Day. Declan, an Irish innkeeper in need of money (Matthew Goode), agrees to take her. There's a whole series of misadventures; they bicker the entire way but...well, you see where this is going. It's hard not to like Amy Adams, and Matthew Goode lives up to his surname, so to an extent you can understand why Declan and Anna would eventually start falling for each other. But Anna's so nuts because of the whole proposal thing, at some point any sane man would have left her on the side of a road somewhere. And Declan's continuing jabs at Anna ought to have driven her to find an alternate route. Then again, if people in these movies acted sensibly, the films would be really short. My grade: C.

Quick Review: Julie & Julia

According to Philadelphia Weekly this is the first movie based on a blog. Julie Powell decided to cook each of the 524 recipes in "Mastering The Art Of French Cooking," the first cookbook from Julia Child, in the course of a year and blogged about the process and its effects on her life. The blog became a book, which, along with Child's autobiography, was the basis for "Julie & Julia." So technically, it's not directly based on a blog. No matter. It's lots of fun. The film depicts both post-WWII France -- when Julia Child and her husband Paul, a U.S. diplomat, lived in Paris and Julia learned to cook at famous cooking school Le Cordon Bleu, and began the collaboration that led to that first cookbook -- and 2002 and 2003, when Julie Powell began her project in the tiny Queens apartment she shared with her husband Eric. As the film shifts back and forth, we see how both women's projects develop over time, and how events impact their marriages.

Meryl Streep continues her recent string of performances that are not only fine, but fun, and she and Stanley Tucci, as Julia and Paul, have great chemistry. Amy Adams, as Julie, is also fine, but she seems just a little too nice. At one point, during a rough time with her husband (Chris Messina), she asks her friend, "Am I a bitch?" Julie's friend says yes, and Julie agrees, but the bitchiness isn't really apparent at all. It's a very minor quibble, though. My grade: A-minus.

P.S. Coming soon...well, eventually...to a theater near you: The Joe In Philly Experience: The Movie!