My brother hooked me up with this. Perhaps you’ve all already seen it because the internet is really good at showing the same thing to every one you know without you being aware.

Anyway, here are The Vader Sessions, which start out unfunny but then get really really funny (YouTube, Quicktime). Sound most definitely required.

Well, kind of. You have to spend $2.00 to download tracks and they’re only Mike Nelson and you have to already own or rent the movie.

But hey, it’s still something. 

Kenny sent me the worst script ever. I was disgusted by it and didn’t plan to post anything, but I couldn’t believe the action text, so here are my two favorite parts (I’ll change the names on the off-chance the writer googles his own work constantly and wants to sue kenny):

1.

Cathy and Bobby eat and watch a movie. Then they have sex one, two, three times.

2. 

Two hours later Bobby walks in the house. He mistakes Tracy for Cathy on the couch. He wants to surprise Cathy and starts eating her out. Tracy wakes up.

                TRACY
    What the fuck is you doing to me?

Kenny, I hope you keep that script quarantined on your computer. Now let’s never speak of it again.

Aaron and I got distracted in the office today and briefly started work on the worst screenplay ever. I now present its brilliance (we didn’t save the original, I rebuilt this from memory):

 
          EXT. CORNFIELD - NIGHT
 
          Innumerable rows of corn stalks run off into the
          distance, eventually colliding with the distant
          twinkles of a starry night.
 
          The Lesbian Mothership hovers majestically over
          the field. From within, Lesbians are HEARD.
 
          BEGIN TITLES
          
          Several minutes pass, then a FAINT WHIRRING.
 
          Suddenly, without warning, except for the faint
          whirring, a rival lesbian mothership streaks
          across the sky, firing its mega photons in short,
          steady 3-shot bursts.
 
          INT. SECOND LESBIAN MOTHERSHIP - NEW YEAR’S EVE
 
                              COMMANDER KRIEG
                         (taking a drink)
                    Why is it we can promise never to hurt
                    others, but we can never promise to
                    never hurt ourselves?
 
                              GIANT TENTACLE MONSTER
                         (using its fifth and sixth mouths)
                    God not this again.
 
          JAYDEN HAMILTON (26 earth years) enters the room.
          He’s just as ruggedly handsome as you’d expect a
          super spy like Jayden Hamilton to be. Which is to
          say he’s very ruggedly handsome.
 
          He dives behind a table. He was born in Santa Fe
          to a childless couple, and as a boy he dreamed of
          being an astronaut, a congressman, or a secret
          agent. Little did he know he’d one day be all
          three and diabetic.
 
          Commander Krieg DISINTEGRATES Jayden with her MOON
          PISTOL.
 

 
          INT. SMASH HAMILTON’S BEDROOM - THREE YEARS EARLIER
 
          TITLE CARD: ONE YEAR EARLIER
 
          SMASH HAMILTON (29) wakes up in a cold sweat. It
          was all a dream … or was it?
 
          END TITLES

So I went to see Superman Returns with my girlfriend Anna’s family (see, Anna, I mentioned you on the blog).

I’ll try to keep this review both brief and as spoiler-free as possible (edit: Totally failed on the "brief" element). Cutting to the chase, I thought it wasn’t good and wasn’t bad. It was just there. Let us engage in bullet points!

• The movie was HEAVILY influenced by other superhero movies. Mainly Spiderman, but even though the film is supposedly set after the original Superman movie, the plot is so similar to the original movie as to be distracting at some points


• Brandon Routh was okay. I don’t know why people are picking on him so much. I agree he’s just doing a Christopher Reeves impression, but it was a decent enough impression and I thought he nailed the Superman voice quite well.


• Kate Bosworth’s impression of Natalie Portman in Star Wars was spot on. That is to say, she either can’t act or may be deaf and did not hear the director shout "Action!" at the start of each scene. Add to this the fact that she’s basically 14 years old and weighs under 100 pounds and is playing a 30 year old with a kid and this becomes one of the all-time "blah" casting choices.

A Brief Interlude:

Bryan Singer: Okay, Kate, in this scene, you’re upset. Superman is in trouble, and you’re unsure of both your and his feelings towards each other. And, ACTION!
Bryan Singer: CUT! Okay, Kate, see, what I wanted you to do, was pretend, or "act" as they say, like you were sad. What you did was remain completely motionless without changing your expression. Let’s try that again with some movement. ACTION! No, no, Kate, I don’t think a fake British accent will class this scene up. Yes, I loved Renee Zellwegger in that too, but let’s stick with this for now. Don’t worry about doing an accent or using human inflections or anything. People will love your flat line readings of every moment in the film.
Bryan Singer: (to stage hand) Maybe we could computer animate most of her scenes…

•  The film was not nearly fun enough. Now I’ll say this right now, I’m not a big Superman fan. I think he’s a really goofy superhero along the lines of the ones you make up when you’re 7 in the schoolyard. "Well my superhero is super strong and he shoots lasers and he jump really high and fly!" But the reason the Spiderman movies at least sort of work is that we not only like Spiderman as a character, but he always seems to come up short. It’s just like Indiana Jones. We love him because he does all this stuff just to make it through somewhere and then the idol gets stolen from him. And Spiderman gets the shit knocked out of him over and over again during every scene. But Superman is too strong for that, so all the action scenes in the middle of the film are just boring. He’s not in danger. They don’t really involve the plot, and they’re all CG. Many of the shots were slow and paired with big rising music, as if to shout to you "This is a big deal! This is Superman! This is a big deal!" It felt a lot like the modern Star Wars films in the way they were filled with self-important "look at me, I’m an important franchise!" moments.


• The action scenes were scarred by a fundamental problem: Seeing Superman push really hard while flying is meaningless. He’s not pushing off anything, and we have no visible indication of how he can fly harder, so it always seems like he just struggles for a while and then somehow flies harder and succeeds. They use this effect over and over and over again, and it’s just not that interesting.


• There were plenty of plotholes, but I don’t care a ton about that. I care that the movie felt slow and plodding at many points and that the ending dragged and felt unsatisfying. Even with the big soaring end, it felt like Superman was never tested and didn’t grow in the film. He acts like things have changed a lot at the end, but it feels somewhat false and hollow.


• The obsession with making this a franchise demanded an ending that wasn’t really an ending. The film is long but refuses to seriously change any of the main characters because all of them are under contract for a sequel.

Final Grade: 6.5 / 10

Certainly not awful, but not really good either. I could definitely understand someone really liking it, if they really liked the character, but for me it was just an adequate film that desperately wanted to be so much more than that.