In Which Our Father Is Ashamed Of Our Abilities

Pretend Time

by DICK CHENEY

Man of Steel
dir. Zack Snyder
over a thousand minutes

So I watched Superman the other day. It was a complete and total disaster. He drinks beer and watches football. Lois Lane is constantly saying, and this is verbatim, "Where are the toner cartridges?" (She can't operate a printer because she's a woman is the subtext there.) I guess they were trying to humanize him, although considering there's a 40 minute prologue based on Krypton, you would think at some point they would realize he's an alien.

In another scene (there are many scenes, Man of Steel is over six hours long, did you think Watchmen was long? Man of Steel makes Watchmen look like Un Chien Andalou) Lois Lane goes to her editor. She tells him she has an unbelievable scoop about this guy who healed her wound in the Arctic. Her editor is like, "Nah." She's like, "I quit," but he says she's under contract so she takes it to a rival blog. The blog is a loose parody of Talking Points Memo or maybe I Guess I'm Floating, not entirely sure? The blogger wears nerd glasses, because you see, he works on the internet. The actor playing the blogger is probably Jon Snow.

"you agree this looks like complete shit, right?" "yep"

In this prologue, Russell Crowe plays Superman's father. His mother is so gross they mostly focus on Russell. There's a governmental coup that is turned back, but that's beside the point since the planet is dying anyway. Russell has some bad blood with one of the actors from Boardwalk Empire, I think the guy who played Nucky Thompson or maybe the guy from The Wire who portrayed the gay drug dealer so tenderly? The Wire was a great show, a much better show than Man of Steel.

an inauspicious beginning for the career of young Dylan Sprayberry

In another scene (I think this came after the scene where Clark Kent first learned of interracial dating) some bullies came up on Clark. (This is all in flashback, because.) He's reading Plato. What the fuck would Superman read Plato for? Can you honestly think of anything less relevant to a man not of this world than the work of Plato?

But back to Lois Lane. They had a perfectly good Lois Lane right there, playing Tiffany Superman, Superman's mother. Her last name was even also Lane:

hopefully the subplot about her having unprotected sex with antonio banderas will appear on the blu-rayWhy Clark Kent couldn't have been interested in Murphy Brown, I'll never know. This was a casting fuck-up of major proportions. An older Lois Lane also would have made it easier to kill her off eventually — she could just die of old age and marriage wouldn't really be an option.

she reminds me of a human-sized grasshopper wearing an ugly wig

I don't want to say all these things in my head about Amy Adams. You already know how I feel about Isla Fisher, I'm pretty sure you can just apply that broadly to Amy Adams. Here's the thing — with Isla Fisher if I was maybe locked in a room with her, I'd grow to appreciate her personality. With Amy Adams, I know that's not going to happen, because all she cares about is toner cartridges. I would have accepted Teri Hatcher in this role, even if she now looks like your fingers do after you soak in the bath for an hour.

someone actually thought to themselves, "you know, this face should be seen by one or two other people"

Doing the Superman story in flashback is so fucking dumb, I don't even need to explain, do I? The only fun part of Superman is when he casually uses his abilities when no one knows about him. I was praying I did not have to watch the inane scene in the bar where the guys come up to the Terminator. Did you know James Cameron gets royalties every time this occurs in any fiction, even if you have a dream about it in the privacy of your own home?

"lois, your bangs are completely ludicrous and your reporting is substandard at best."

The actor who plays young Superman is also terrible, he looks gentile. The whole point of Superman is that he was Jewish, you can at least read wikipedia before making a movie about a super man. There's this super hokey scene where Clark saves a bunch of his classmates from a drowning on a school bus. They couldn't think of anything better than that and they were prescreening The Sweet Hereafter because they wanted to be reminded of what an actual creative project feels and sounds like.

you know he's in the media because he doesn't take care of his body and he can't dress himself

There is one black character in Man of Steel, J. Jonah Jameson. You didn't realize he was black? Do you even know how dumb it is for Superman to care about football, even if he was just pretending to have the same interests as his erectly dysfunctional human father? Even the score of this movie is like beyond saving, it's so bad.

"son, start dressing like riffraff. no one will pay the slightest bit of attention to you then."

I guess the scene in Man of Steel that probably bothered me the most is when Clark's really concerned human father, Jon Bo Superman (Kevin Costner), tells him that it is best he hide his abilities from the world. "Can't I just keep pretending to be your son?" is what Clark says in response. "You are my son," Jon Bo tells him, which is a lie. But worse, he doesn't even bestow the slightest praise on the teen for saving a bus full of his neighbor's friends. He doesn't care about them any more than he cares about Clark.

Superman is supposed to make us feel selfish for wanting to be all powerful, and wanting no one else to share in our new abilities. For if they did, then we would not be so unique and different from the rest of the middling, maddening crowds. But who would even desire to be this person? His girlfriend looks like she got picked up at a 7-11, his alien and human families aren't all that welcoming to him and he's a Raiders fan. To use a superhero as wish-fulfillment, he should probably have something we want.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Arrested Development. 

"Seven Hours With a Backseat Driver" - Gotye (mp3)

"Thanks for Your Time" - Gotye (mp3)

In Which They Are Taken From Us With Cause

Kill Lists, YouTubes, And Other Ways To Pass The Time

by ALEX CARNEVALE

It is always disturbing to find your own name on a kill list. In the case of this Washington mom, she found her daughter's name on a kill list. She immediately oriented herself towards the sky, spread her arms wide, and yelled like in Wolverine.

The first kill list was constituted in the early stone age, and the trouble wasn't in completing the stated intention, it was reading the handwriting of that period. From then on it was mostly girls in high school. No one ever said why they had to list the ways they would kill her. The whole point of a kill list is that the method is arbitrary. It is a distinction that maintains we still must do what we say, despite all evidence to the contrary.

A Pierce County mother says she's horrified by a cartoon video - posted online - that showed several ways to kill her sixth grade daughter. The cartoon was made off school grounds by some of her daughter's classmates, girls aged 11 and 12.

Titled "Top Six Ways to Kill Piper," it includes depictions of girls shooting her, making her commit suicide, poisoning her and even pushing her off a cliff. Beth Smith tells KING5-TV the cartoon was set to a Hannah Montana song called "True Friend" and posted on YouTube.

Her daughter Piper attends Elk Plain School of Choice in Spanaway, Wash., as do the girls who made the video. The little girl says it hurt her feelings.

A boy was recently expelled for an 18-name kill list. My reaction: He only wanted to kill 18 people? I feel for the little guy, because before the computer was around, it was totally status quo to make real world kill lists with pen and paper. I think we actually even might have carried some of them out. Let me check with Google.

"you're of different religions and colors. who would like to take a bath with me?"In Hawaiian Gardens, CA, of all places, a Latino gang was targeting black people outside of L.A.

Gang members take pride in their racism and often refer to the VHG Gang as the `Hate Gang,'" the main indictment said. "VHG gang members have expressed a desire to rid the city of Hawaiian Gardens of all African-Americans and have engaged in a systematic effort to achieve that result by perpetrating crimes against African-Americans."

the fact that gang members have facebook photos: good for both cops and bloggerThe indictment alleges a string of attacks on black residents, including a shooting into a home with eight people inside. The indictment does not say if anyone was hit.

Fortunately, according to the California hate crime law, only white people and black people can be arrested for hate crimes. Being Latino was ruled "a grey area."

another kind of kill listIn another instance, two gang members allegedly chased a black man, yelled a racist epithet at him and then beat him with a garden rake. The same man was later repeatedly stabbed by two gang members, according to the indictment, which charged them with his attempted murder.

For god's sake people, have you never seen John Leguizamo's one man show? Healing. It's about healing. And I think Jada Pinkett Smith is Latino, or the younger version of her that was on Star Trek. I'll have my research intern work on that one.

Killing people is totally wrong, but making a list of people to kill can be so right. In my time, that shit was different. This was before TLC dropped "Waterfalls." This was when Michael Jackson was black, when Jesus was a real person and had a phone number and stuff. This came first.

I just saw Terminator: Salvation and those guys really don't stick to their kill list. The people who made that movie have no idea how many contingencies a machine intelligence would plan for. Thus you have an enemy that is downright retarded and makes no sense. Guess what list of mine McG is on?

i know it sucks, but the poster was cool right?

Christian Bale is on a similar list, because he's a dick and can't act except by growling. The governor of the state in which this Latino hate-grudge grows was in the movie I watched. Mind-boggling stuff that even Marshall McLuhan didn't see when he took LSD.

marshall, you fucked us. what happened?Fortunately, the much-maligned Seth MacFarlane took care of Christian Bale so I didn't have to:

Before the machine — Cyberdyne, Apple, Jamba Juice, Rachel Maddow — comes to get us, let's see if we can't get off on the right foot this time. TLC had so much promise. I was really looking forward to the 2009 TLC album that would contain lyrics about a nude photoshoot that had been discovered in 2008. That's all I'm waiting for.

My friend Eleanor says we should all collectively agree to set the clock back to 1994. Date is arbitrary anyway. You know what they do in theater, right? Take it again from the top.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"Creep" — TLC (mp3)

"Take Our Time" — TLC (mp3)

"Waterfalls" — TLC (mp3)