I have a long history with Superman on this website. Well, really, it's more like a three-post history. Twice I wrote about how every time I try to rent anything about the Man of Steel, the DVD is broken or the player falls apart or my house catches on fire or whatever, leaving me unable to enjoy anything about the character. Of course, I'd seen Superman: The Movie several times in my youth, so it wasn't a truly terrible problem, but it was still frustrating. On another occasion, I reviewed the direct-to-DVD animated feature Superman: Doomsday. I began that review by relating a discussion I'd been having with a friend of mine: "A friend and I had an argument recently. This argument was about whether Superman movies were awesome or terrible. We indulged in a bit of mature back and forth on the subject—”You’re an idiot, Superman rocks!” “No, you’re an idiot!”—but when all was said and done, I came away having learned three very important things: I was right, he was wrong, and Superman is great." Today, I was finally able to rent a working copy of Superman: The Movie, and watch it again for the first time since my innocent youth. ...

It's bad enough that the first team to lock a spot in the playoffs is the freaking Yankees. I mean, with news like that, what else could go wrong? Oh, how about a seventieth anniversary rerelease of The Wizard of Oz, in theaters for one night only and I didn't know about it until it was too late for me to go. I don't know that I've ever been quite as sad about anything as I am about this missed chance for big-screen Ozzy goodness. Ozzy goodness?I really wish showing old movies in theaters was a standard practice. Yeah, I realize what with the home video market and the fact that nobody except me watches old movies anymore anyway, there probably isn't a lot of profit in running regular revivals down at the multiplex. But I don't care! This is about me, and I want to see movies in the theater, dammit! Who doesn't want to see Gregg Toland's breathtaking cinematography for Citizen Kane up on a giant screen where it belongs? Who wouldn't want to get lost in the lush Technicolor glory of the dances in Singin' in the Rain? Come on, people! That stuff would be friggin' great! But I'm not exactly ...

In the documentary that comes with the Jaws DVD, Steven Spielberg tells a story about the construction of the scene where the shark first pops out of the water. He wanted to first have the audience laughing, so they'd be totally off their guard when the scare came. Thus, Roy Scheider as Chief Brody delivers those immortal words: "I can go slow ahead. Why don't you come down here and chum some of this shit?" Then, KAPOW, shark. As Spielberg explains, in the more innocent cinematic times of the mid 1970s, saying "shit" was an easy laugh. Nowadays, alas, with our anything goes ways, shit doesn't even make us crack a smile. But I don't think that's quite true. Even today, shit's an underused word. Sure, we say basically anything we want in movies now, but as a result we tend to go right for the Big Bad Word, blowing straight past Shit Towne in our headlong rush to Fuck City. Sure, using it like in Jaws, in the context of "some of this shit," may not make us laugh anymore. But let's look at some other examples from Spielberg's other work. Take Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. That was almost ten years after ...

This may seem odd coming from someone who ostensibly writes a website about movies (though I manage pretty handily to never actually talk about movies), but I don't even like movies anymore. I mean, have you seen some of the movies out there? They suck! Every trailer you see is for a picture full of loud noises and no shots that last longer than 2.8 seconds and unconvincing digital effects and even, saints preserve us, Will Ferrell. Okay, you see about two trailers a year for movies that aren't like that, but those movies are always about self-consciously quirky characters trying desperately hard to convince you how ironic and hip they are and have long titles like Millie and Gaspar and the Blue Ocean Rhumba and ugly posters that look like they were drawn by fifth grade girls who got bored during social studies. They cost millions of dollars and spend every last one making it look like they didn't spend any, which raises the question: if you wanted to make it look like you didn't spend any money, why didn't you just not make a movie. I do that all the time, and it doesn't cost me a dime! My favorite ...

I wouldn't like it to be said that I, as fifty percent of the staff here at Melted Reel, don't care about protecting the environment. I don't, of course, but I wouldn't like it to be said. Lots of times I hear environmentalists talking about deforestation, and what a terrible thing it is. But I just can't understand what they're getting at. See for yourself: He's awesome, Jim How could anything that increases the supply of Deforest Kelley be bad?

As a person who learned long ago that it would be impossible for him to form meaningful emotional attachments to real people, I've made movies my primary way of coping with and thinking about the world. As a result, almost everything I experience reminds me of a movie in some way. Storylines, scenes, snippets of dialogue, they're all constantly running through my head. When I wake up in the morning, I don't think I wonder what Friend X is doing today, I should call him up and see if he wants to hang out; I think  man, that scene in Lady Killer where Cagney drags Mae Clark across the room by her hair is soooooo awesome! What did I tell you? So even though my brain is constantly bombarded by moments I've seen on the silver screen, they rarely prompt me to actually do anything. I stand in line at the bank and am reminded of The Bank Dick, but I don't feel irresistibly compelled to rush home and have a W.C. Fields festival. The sight of a shopping mall never fails to remind me of Dawn of the Dead, but I'm not overcome by the urge to shamble around eating human flesh ...

I've long been a fan of Pinky and the Brain, whether on Animaniacs or on their own show. And I've long been a fan of Orson Welles (despite the way I feel about him around my birthday), whether he's making movies or being hilariously uncooperative. So what I don't understand is why I never knew that this Pinky and the Brain cartoon existed. Is that not incredible? And while we're on the subject of "people pretending to be Orson Welles at times when he was famously difficult," enjoy this awesome video, too. Haha! It's funny because his career became a joke!

I read a recommendation of the book My Custom Van and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face by Michael Ian Black, and it was persuasive enough to get me to look into the matter further. The book's title was appealing, but as far as I knew I'd never heard of the author. Then I saw the cover. Wait a minute, I recognize him! That's that dude with the posture of a gay man from all those VH1 shows! This realization gave me pause.I wasn't sure how much I wanted to read a book by a professional maker of wry comments. As nearly as I could tell, the extent of this guy's routine was just doing the same thing you do when you hang out with your drinking buddies: "Hey, remember that thing from when we were eight years old? Wasn't that awesome / stupid?" But the book is more than just VH1-style too-cool-for-school ironic detachment. It actually features, you know, funny stuff. It's true that some of the essays don't live up to the promise of their comical titles, but most of them do. And when the book his a home run—as with "Vampires – Good ...

Hey, cats, see if you can guess what! That's right, my birthday is this weekend. And if there's one thing I like to do on my birthday, it's drink Pabst Blue Ribbon until I can no longer stand or maintain bowel control. The Breakfast of ChampionsBut if there's another thing I like to do on my birthday, it's not think about Orson Welles at all. At most times of year, I think about Orson Welles basically nonstop. Remember that awesome thing he says about cuckoo clocks in The Third Man? The tracking shot in Touch of Evil? The "standard rich and famous contract" from The Muppet Movie? Whether he's writing and directing or just acting, Orson Welles is just about my favorite person in the history of entertainment. But now that my birthday's coming, I just don't want to think about him at all. Why? Well, by the time Orson Welles was my age, he'd already done the War of the Worlds broadcast and was at work on Citizen Kane. That's right, at my age, this dude had already created the Greatest Of All Time in not one but two different media. I, on the other hand, have a dumb website that doesn't even ...

Far be it from me to ever feel bad about anything I say or do. As a general rule, I'm a bitter, thoughtless man with no regards for the emotions and sensitivities of any other living soul. And of all the people I don't care about, the sort of people I don't care about the most are people who have become fake celebrities because they have shows about their lives for some reason. All that said, I'd sort of like to clarify a remark I made in an earlier post. This is what I said: "Futurama is emphatically not a show about a soul-devouring harridan, her emasculated husband and their brood of unexceptional children." In case that comment was too subtle for you, I was referring to the family on TLC's Jon & Kate Plus 8. First of all, the part about Jon being Kate's husband is in the process of being rendered legally untrue, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I stand by all this remark, I just want to clear part of it up. I don't feel bad about saying "a soul-devouring harridan [and] her emasculated husband." Jon and Kate are adults and these are the personas they've projected ...