Power Trip

Film: Superman (2025)
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

The problem with Superman as a character is that it’s difficult, at least on the face of things, to make him compelling. When you have a character who can essentially do everything and whose weakness is extremely rare, how do you craft a story where that character is challenged? It’s been tried a number of times, of course, most recently by James Gunn in the rather simply named Superman. Gunn has proven himself to be a smart filmmaker and an equally smart screenwriter. I went in relatively cold but with a good deal of hope.

And it paid off. As I said, Gunn is a smart filmmaker and a smart screenwriter. The problems with Superman are mainly around giving him a compelling challenge. That’s hard to do physically, and in the case of this film, that does feel like a bit of a cobble. Other challenges, though, are probably more interesting. Public opinion is mutable, and becomes one of the mina problems in the film (although more could be done with it). We know that Supes is eventually going to defeat the bad guy, but how does he overcome bad press and failing in the court of public opinion?

Off Script: Slither

Film: Slither
Format: Streaming video from HBO Go on rockin’ flatscreen.

Mashing up a couple of genres is at best a risky proposition. Most of the time, it’s simply not done well and the film, rather than being a blend of two good genres, turns out to be not enough of either of them. Slither is how it’s done. This isn’t a film that really goes for scary as much as it goes for straight-up gross out. It’s not scary, matter of fact and it is really gross. It’s also really funny. It’s not merely funny in a few scenes; there are jokes here that play with the expectations of the audience and that throw back to classic horror movies of the past several decades.

Slither is sort of a blood-soaked version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a little bit of the John Carpenter version of The Thing. A more honest comparison is probably with Night of the Creeps, although writer/director James Gunn’s horror roots go quite a bit deeper than this. A meteor impacts the planet near a small town somewhere (Arkansas?) in the rural American South. Attached to the meteor is a life form that infects local rich guy Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) and turns him into a creature that a) wants to eat a vast amount of meat, b) can turn other creatures into meat-craving breeders that eventually explode into a giant swarm of slugs, and c) can use those slugs to turn people into acid-vomiting zombies that mainly are used to bring meat to the breeders.

They're Guarding Their Box Office Receipts

Film: Guardians of the Galaxy
Format: AMC Showplace 16.

When I first saw the trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, I thought pretty much what everyone else did: this is going to be the best superhero movie ever made or the biggest piece of garbage since Battlefield Earth. In truth, it’s neither, and fortunately for the movie lover and kid in all of us, it comes a hell of a lot closer to the first option than the second one. A hell of a lot closer. I don’t go to the theater often, but this one was absolutely worth the price of admission. (And more, actually. You’ve gotta love $5 matinees.)

Despite the fact that everyone I know has been singing the praises of this film, I have to say that for the first 20 minutes, I was pretty worried. There’s a boatload of back story here, and if you’re not a comic book fan (and I am not), it’s pretty opaque. Assuming that you know even less than I do and that you can’t keep your Skrulls straight from your Kree, expect the exposition portion of the film to be extremely confusing.