Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon

1975 was smack in the middle of one of the best decades for film ever and this list certainly proves it out – Beatty, Nicholson, Hackman, Spielberg, Lumet, Pacino, all at or near peaks. Enjoy the extravaganza of some of my favorites films from that year and feel free to disagree in the comments!

26. The Fortune

Given the pedigree of the stars involved and the point in their careers The Fortune should be some kind of classic but the weight of expectation and masterworks from both stars within the same years render this enjoyable romp an obscurity. A period piece (the 70s were really obsessed with the 30s) with real-life buds Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty playing conniving friends and romantic rivals alongside Stockard Channing, this is due for a re-evaluation.

25. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother

It’s often forgotten that Gene Wilder co-wrote Young Frankenstein with Mel Brooks, and here he attempts the classic satire feat solo with Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective hero. Though it may not reach the heights of that previous film much of the cast is replicated including the wonderful Marty Feldman, and much agreeable lunacy ensues.

24. The Return of the Pink Panther

Blake Edwards and his star Peter Sellars would return to this well many, many times, as would their studio. As downright awful as these outings can be this initial return after a several  year layoff is one of the best. David Niven is swapped out of the cat burglar role for Christopher Plummer but this sets the template for the series formula.

23. The Eiger Sanction

Tongue-in-cheek sub-Bond adventure with Clint Eastwood in the lead, this is good dumb fun. It’s also directed by an up-and-coming director who would gain acclaim much later in his career, a fellow named Clint Eastwood. Along to chomp on the mountain scenery are Jack Casady and George Kennedy.

22. Cooley High

Low budget and full of heart, this is like  American Graffiti from the black perspective. A slice of 60s life enlivened by Freddie “Boom Boom” Washington in one of his best non-Sweathog roles.

21. The Sunshine Boys

Another product of the Neil Simon hit making factory which ruled Broadway in the period and was colonizing screens large and small with stuff like the Odd Couple and Plaza Suite. Walter Matthau plays older and George Burns plays younger as members of an estranged vaudeville team reunited for TV. Jack Benny was set to play the Burns part but backed out with terminal illness, recommending Burns who hadn’t starred in a film since before World War II. Burns won an Oscar for Supporting Actor for this role.

20. Switchblade Sisters

This film doesn’t involve Sir John Giulgud at all, and it likes it better that way. The ultimate tough girl film, this got an enthusiastic re-release under the auspices of Quentin Tarantino in 1996. This is no John Hughes vision of High School – the mean girls here are the Dagger Debs and they mean it – to the point of getting thrown into juvie . Every B-movie cliche is embraced with gusto.

19. Farewell, My Lovely

For whatever reason filmmakers in the 70s were fascinated by film noir of the 40s and this Raymond Chandler adaptation goes so far as to grab one of late noir’s breakout actors, Robert Mitchum, to star. Mitchum is both the strength and the weakness here: Too old for the part yet with tremendous charisma. Matching his laconic style, the film is unhurried in rolling out its detective story.  Stunning sets and photography make it time well spent.

18. A Boy and His Dog

Before Sonny Crockett was partnered with Tubbs, he was partnered with a telepathic dog in this dark sci-fi classic. There’s a touch of Dr. Strangelove to the proceedings leavened with some humorous interplay between man and beast. Man finds food for dog and dog finds ladies for man. In theory everyone wins but in practice Don Johnson’s johnson leads him astray one time too many.

17. Deep Red

If Hitchcock were an Italian splatter film director, he would be Dario Argento. Cheesy, scary and bloody, this was the film that crossed Argento over to midnight screens in the United States and no doubt helped kick off the wave of slasher movies by Americans that were to follow.

16. The Great Waldo Pepper

Re-teaming George Roy Hill and Robert Redford for a third go-round probably seemed like a slam-dunk, so maybe it was the lack of Newman that led to the relative failure compared to Butch Cassidy and The Sting. Witha  strong Willaim Goldman screenplay and plenty of period action and humor, it’s a very underrated film. Also, dogfights!

15. The Man Who Would Be King

Great imperialist fun with two of Britain’s finest, Michael Caine and Sean Connery and you get Christopher Plummer as Rudyard Kipling. John Huston directs with a wink at Gunga-Din but there’s no getting around the queasy all-too-now reality of two foreigners getting up to their eyeballs in trouble by scheming in Afghanistan.

14. Rollerball

Clearly the future will undergo a great craze for 70s style decor judging from this cheeseball classic. You can make the argument that they got malaise-era government bankruptcy right, as well as reality TV and extreme sports.

13. The Wind and the Lion

Utter historical bunk with just enough truth there to be subverted, but it hardly matters in a film this entertaining. The usually bellicose John Milius turns in a surprisingly anti-Imperialist and questioning towards America’s foreign policy. Sean Connery does a Berber chieftain by way of the highlands to perfection, with Candace Bergen as the comely kidnapped American. Brian Keith as Teddy Roosevelt is not to be missed.

12. Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s ethereal tale about missing schoolgirls brings to mind Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides in its gauzy Hamilton-inspired cinematography and allegorical nature.

11. Death Race 2000

Almost as camp as Rocky Horror – Casanova Frankenstein is a character name in this gleeful poor taste festival that posits a future in which road racing is combined with road rage and points are given for mowing down spectators and pedestrians. Avoid the crap remake.

10. Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Beloved of A/V geeks the world over, the Monty Python troupe made the leap to TV with this historical romp which features rampant silliness, coconuts for horses, and French-style rudeness. Accept no substitutes.

9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show

This gender bending musical spectacular pioneered the midnight movie scene. Unsuccessful in wide release it became a perennial for outcasts to check out at late night showings, eventually spawning its’ own culture of dress-up and call-and-response to the screen that neatly prefigured  today’s dress up for ComicCon culture.

8. Night Moves

One of the most underrated films of the decade, Arthur Penn’s take on noir (a genre that merited much revisiting in the 70s)   finds just the right Bogart stand-in with hard bitten everyman Gene Hackman. Then there’s Melanie Griffith typecast as she was in this period as jailbait and a skeevy James Woods in a bit part.

7. Jaws

One of the most influential films on the business of movies, Jaws ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster. It’s also quite good. It’s easy to forget Spielberg’s verisimilitude with everyday life but the texture of New England island resort living helps to permeate and elevates the underlying b-movie origins of the plot. Richard Dreyfuss is the cocky egghead stand-in for Spielberg himself – a new generation with new gear and imagination against the old school represented by Robert Shaw’s salty Quint. The male bonding scenes between Roy Scheider and the two other men help make the film, grounding the monster movie horror in real humanity.

6. The Passenger

Antonioni had something to prove with this, his last great work. Only able to get financing with a big star attached he got Jack Nicholson at the peak of his career. Ostensibly a thriller of sorts about an American reporter in North Africa, it not surprisingly plays out as an existential fable with tendrils that reach all the way to David Lynch’s Lost Highway.

5. Three Days of the Condor

I was never a huge fan of the late director Sydney Pollack. In fact I’m on record as preferring his acting to his directing. That said, this is one of his best films. A solid contender in the paranoid Watergate thriller sweepstakes so popular in the 70s, it’s an oblique commentary on how detached citizens can become from the real doings of their governments dressed up as a sub-Hitchcock adventure. Redford is just teh right side of believable as a bookish CIA analyst seemingly far removed from the action and Max Von Sydow is phenomenal as an assassin. The only bum note is a shoehorned romance with Faye Dunaway but it’s not enough to kill the mood.

4. Nashville

Whether you consider this Altman’s masterpiece or not, it’s a remarkable film and the one that sets all the touchstones  for calling another movie “Altmanesque.” In addition to the overlapping dialogue that was already his trademark there is the sprawling cast of characters centered loosely around a place, an event and even an industry – in this case the Nashville music scene.  The remarkable cast is a treat, especially Lily Tomlin. The plot can seem a bit schematic by the end but it’s a story worth experiencing.

3. Shampoo

The knock on Beatty was that he was a vain, emptyheaded cocksman more consumed with his image and the perception that he was doing great work than anything else. Shampoo allows him to play a parody of himself that lives up to all of these assumptions and undercuts them first with comedy and then with tragedy. As a horndog hairstylist he fools women’s husbands into thinking he’s gay and beds their wives but his ambition and his desire for something more with Julie Christie begin to tug at him. Goldie Hawn has never been better as the woman who loves him in vain.

2. Dog Day Afternoon

The quintessential American film of the 70s, this masterpiece directed by Sidney Lumet challenged audiences to sympathize with Al Pacino’s bankrobber, a character who keeps testing your ability to stick with him. Yet both the audience and other characters in the film find themselves feeling for the guy, perhaps in part out of a sense of his own scrappy ineptitude. It was a time when the old ideas of authority were being upended – the chant of “Attica! Attica!” shorthand for a society that felt more like rioting inmates than wardens.Yet Pacino finds that being a symbol is a lot easier than being a complicated human being with motivations that might be tough for outsiders to understand.

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Some films that win Best Picture at the Academy awards seem like lame-o compromises, but in a strong year for film this was a powerhouse. Staying true to Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking novel, Milos Forman’s film features one of Jack Nicholson’s most indelible performances. Produced by Michael Douglas and originally intended to star his father Kirk, the long delay in production led to the perfect casting of Nicholson as the anti-hero McMurphy. Louise Fletcher’s Nurse Rathched has become equally iconic as a figure of cold implacable authority and a terrific ensemble including Danny DeVito, Vincent Schiavelli and Brad Dourif. An unforgettable tour de force.

Hoffman, Noonan and Williams

It’s hard for me to remember a film with as divergent a critical response as Synecdoche, New York which made many reviewers best and worst films of 2008 lists at the end of the year. I can sympathize with those who didn’t enjoy the film – to its credit it never even tries to meet a mainstream audience halfway. Though it’s production values are on par with the best Hollywood has to offer this bears as much relation to a Summer blockbuster as as orangutan does to an aphid.

Instead what we get is a delightfully rich, touching, funny and tragic exploration of what it means to be alive and to create. It’s a surreal and magic world of that comes from the mind of acclaimed screenwriter and first-time director Charlie Kaufman. In tone it’s a mixture of Kurt Vonnegut‘s wry desperation and Thomas Pynchon‘s matter-of-fact abstraction and head-case humor.

Kaufman has already shown himself to be a screenwriter with a rare vision, and the themes he explores here have their roots in his breakthrough films Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, all of which asked similar questions on the very nature of why we are who we are. Not bad for a guy who started out writing episodes of the Thomas Haden Church/ Deborah Messing sitcom Ned and Stacey.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech that uses a part of something to represent a whole (ie saying “I count ten heads” rather than “ten cows”. ) It’s what Kaufman tries to do with his film, represent the whole crazy quilt of life for 2 hours onscreen. It is also, in turn, what Philip Seymour Hoffman tries to do as playwright and stage director Caden Cotard.

At first I felt dread at seeing Hoffman give a mumbly deadened portrayal of a man ground down by life – I’d seen it already in Happiness. Yet Hoffman adds layer after layer until his character becomes moving in his lostness.

“I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here. That’s what I want to explore. We’re all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die, each of us secretly believing we won’t…”

This is what he becomes obsessed with, particularly after winning an unexpected MacArthur Genius Grant after his wife (played with her usual whip-smart edge by Katharine Keener) decamps with possible lover Jennifer Jason Leigh and young daughter Olive for Berlin.

He uses the grant to build yet another synecdoche, a replica of New York City inside an enormous warehouse which eventually includes another warehouse within which resides another replica and so on. He similarly populates his replica city with replicas of himself, and his would-be lover played by Samantha Morton in a breakthrough performance.

So used am I to seeing Morton’s big eyes and delicate features to project gloom in such films as Minority Report that seeing her as a flirty, implusive fun-lover comes as a revelation.

It’s important to note that the movie starts off somewhat realistically with a painfully real accounting of Hoffman and Keener’s marriage and becomes more and more unhinged in time and reality once she takes off.

17 years pass in the blink of an eye, and not even Hoffman seems to realize it. There are hints that what transpires might all be his fantasy of his life while he waits for his wife’s return – A Wizard of Oz like ascent to unreality where the needy female lead of his revival of Death of a Salesman (a tricky role effortlessly handled by Michelle Williams) becomes his second bride, and his couples therapist morphs into an oddly omniscient self-help author (Hope Davis, with a  twinkle in her eye.) There are also hints that he may even be dead already.

It can be hard to tell since all linearity is seemingly throw out the window. Scenes that play as funny and offbeat have payoffs deeper into the movie as you realize that some of the odd disconnect comes from descriptions of later events.

On the other hand, the film is entirely linear. The early scenes are poop, piss and blood obsessed, a Freudian glossary of childhood. Appropriately enough they often center around Cotard’s daughter Olive who is alternately fearful and fascinated by what goes into and comes out of the human body.

As the film progresses so does decay – Hoffman’s body, the giant sets he creates, even Morton’s house. It’s an inspired and for some, off-putting touch of surreality when she buys a new house that comes complete with fire – but not in the fireplace. It’s the kind of visual wordplay Kaufman revels in – she is something of an old flame after all. It’s also a visual link to site specific artwork like that of Andy Goldsworthy who creates things like symmetrical leaf trails knowing that they will decay and return to nature. Part of the art is the transience of it.

So rich and loaded is Synecdoche, New York with symbols and meaning that it seems churlish to try to capture it in a mere blog post, just as Cotard and no doubt Kaufman strain against the limits of their means of expression to represent the fullness of what it means to be alive. I’m painfully aware that I’ve barely hinted at the great performances within from the likes of Tom Noonan (more than 20 years after his brilliant turn in Michael Mann’s Manhunter), Diane Wiest, and Emily Watson.

Then there are the special effects that create a warehouse big enough to house a dirigible in the sky, and the breathtaking cinematography by Frederick Elmes who also shot Blue Velvet.

This is a film that may be seen as a flop and even a career killer for Kaufman, one that didn’t even make back half of it’s paltry $21 million box office. Twnety years from now however I predict it may very well be remembered as one of the best films of the century’s first decade.

Like it’s title, The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford can feel like too much on the plate, let alone the movie theater marquee. Truth be told, on my first attempt to watch it the sonorous narration, beautiful photography and leisurely pacing conspired to lull me into a sound sleep. Not a good omen.

Fortified by some strong coffee however and in the right frame of mind director Andrew Dominik proves to have a bracing tale to tell indeed, if a long-winded one. The aforementioned narration is a bit of crutch, papering over some storytelling deficiencies in some places and telling us things we can intuit by watching in others but this is a forgivable flaw in a film that is capable of casting a powerful spell, one that works as both a stimulant and a narcotic depending on mood.

In essence it’s a movie about pairs, beginning with the brothers James played superbly by Brad Pitt as Jesse and Sam Shepherd as Frank. They are twinned with the Fords, good-time Charley played to squinty perfection by the always-watchable Sam Rockwell, and Robert, a singularly unlikable pasty faced fellow in a justly Oscar nominated performance by Casey Affleck.

What the Academy missed though in falling all over Benjamin Button is Brad Pitt’s best performance to date. Combining everything Pitt has learned (he’s surely grown into a fine actor rather than arriving fully formed), his Jesse James is by turns terrifying, funny, soulful, pitiable, and devious. His charisma is undeniable but then so is his unpredictability. Every other character save brother Frank is a little off-step when Pitt enters a room, constantly weighing what his reaction to what they do or say may be. It’s Pitt’s cleverness to play his character as fully aware of this affect, sometimes exploiting it and other times pretending ignorance.

Pitt in essence plays the isolated star, someone who can expect to hear a distorted version of the truth from everyone he meets. Affleck is the starfucker – wanting to both be Jesse James and to annihilate him.

Affleck bravely makes his character a mealy mouthed weasel, a creepy little sycophant and yes, a coward. He and Jesse are ultimately paired just as the sets of  brothers were, fated as fan and object of fandom to live and indeed die together. It’s a disturbing and real symbiosis that finds echoes in time with Mark David Chapman and John Lennon, John Hinckley and Jodie Foster, and the countless celebrity obsessives who never quite get to the dangerous stage but come awfully close.

The supporting performances are uniformly excellent from testy Jeremy Renner, always keeping an eye on randy ladies man Paul Schneider as the comically named Dick Liddel. The women, including the very talented pair of Mary-Louise Parker as Mrs. James and Zooey Deschanel are given short shrift and some of the stunt casting (James Carville as the Governor and Nick Cave as a wandering troubadour) threatens to distract.

The whole is set off by Roger Deakins’ masterful cinematography, with burnt umbers, ashy whites, sepia tones and mud so richly brown you can almost smell the horse dung mixed in. It’s a breathtaking film to look at, reminiscent of Terence Malick’s great 70s classics like Days of Heaven in the love of sheer poetic imagery – a little girls empty shoe in the grass for instance. The totality of the visuals conspire to feel totally authentic – so this is what it was like to live in these times.

Thankfully these reveries are the connective tissues between some fantastic scenes – a nighttime train robbery, a sequence of menacing playacting between Jesse James and Ford that find’s Pitt enjoying the taste of the words in his mouth like he’s savoring a fine whiskey, Ford re-enacting the assassination on stage for hundreds of performances with his brother made up and wooden as James’ stand-in (just as happened in real-life.)

Like many a rich meal it can be hard to finish Jesse James without falling asleep at the table, overwhelmed by the repast. In this case, it’s worth showing up hungry.

CGI vs. CGI in The Incredible Hulk

Marvel Comics has a habit of adding nifty adjectives to it’s characters names – The Amazing Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, the…uh, Fantastic Four. So it should be noted that the movie The Incredible Hulk isn’t necessarily bragging about it’s own quality relative to Ang Lee’s still warm Hulk. It is the better film though, despite running out of steam and morphing like it’s titular character back into mere mortal form.

Director Louis LeTerrier, a Luc Besson protege best known for The Transporter, is certainly less the auteur than Lee but he does seem to have a firmer handle on the material. There are plenty of references to the late 70s TV show including cameos by stars Bill Bixby (on a TV set from beyond the grave) and Lou Ferrigno and a very clever reworking of the infamous “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry line.” The music even echoes the plaintive piano plinking that used to sound as Banner would hitchhike from town to town alone and destitute.

It helps that mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner is portrayed here by Edward Norton who has a deeper well of acting tricks and just plain charisma than the previous film’s Eric Bana. Thrown into the mix is William Hurt and his brush mustache which gives him the right look to play General Ross, the Hulk’s main adversary for much of the movie. Hurt dials down his recent  scenery chewing a tad which is actually a little disappointing – he’s an expert masticator in films as diverse as Mr. Brooks and A History of Violence.

Liv Tyler improbably plays Hurt’s daughter and though she ranks about a 5 on the hot scientist scale (with Elisabeth Shue in The Saint at 1 = Not at all believable and Michelle Meyrink in Real Genius at 10 = fully believable) she does bring a solid emotional intelligence to the role.

Finally, Tim Roth plays a military man who becomes fixated on beating the Hulk, partly out of pride and partly out of envy. Roth’s ferrety charms get spent fairly early in the plot and his arc is the least satisfying of the film.

Still there is a lot of welcome humor on display as well as some fine filmmaking including a comic book paced prologue and a lengthy opening sequence set in Brazil. The foreign backdrop is bracing in the same way that that the first section of Batman Begins (set in an Asian mountain range) was, announcing a corrective to audience expectations.

Indeed Peter Menzies Jr.’s cinematography is at it’s best here, lulling the viewer into a character driven film about a mysterious American on the run in the tropics. Alas, he does return and though the movie tries, it never quite recovers from the fabulous opening.

There are some well-staged action sequences, particularly a siege on a  college campus, but like Lee’s film the big green guy never seems anything less than an animated character onscreen. The CGI is about as good as it can be but the character design just can’t escape seeming like an angry Shrek.

At best they seem rubbery, and I say they because an even bigger, badder hulk shows up to tangle in New York by film’s end. At this point the film gets bogged down in the mechanics of fully-animated battle and like Spiderman 3, it suffers for it.

It was the Incredible Hulk’s curse that it is in fact quite enjoyable for most of it’s screen time but happened to be released in a summer that includes two of the best ever superhero flicks, The Dark Knight which brings delicious ambiguity to the anti-militarist themes that infuse this version of Hulk and Iron Man which takes raffish charm and humor beyond what Norton has time or inclination to do.

Farrell and Gleeson

In Bruges finds its central metaphor in a Hieronymus Bosch vision of purgatory, a crazy mishmash that’s beautiful, disturbing, funny, and ultimately a way station to the next plane of existence for those depicted. As is Bruges itself in the skewed vision of writer/director Martin McDonough, reteaming Brendan Gleeson, star of his first feature Six Shooter.

Gleeson, whose jug-handle ears and bluff features give him a world-weary mien as a well-seasoned hit man is teamed with a never-better Colin Farrell. Farrell’s bushily questing eyebrows seem to run the gamut from outrage to despair all on their own, aided and abetted by his soulful eyes and rangy body language.

At heart, In Bruges is a shaggy-dog allegory that fuses the Tarantino shoot-‘em-up with a dollop of rom-com and a dash of travelogue. Gleeson and Farrell play hit men who are asked by their boss to lay low in Bruges, Belgium after a botched job. The city is a beautiful setting, the renaissance architecture and medieval streets photographed lustrously by Eigil Bryld. Still, as much as Gleeson insists on the wonders of the town Farrell glumly insists on it being a “shithole” despite the presence of lovely Clemence Poesy as a local working on a film crew.
The chemistry between she and Farrell and Farrell and Gleeson is undeniable, and works to make little character quirks like Farrell’s fascination with midgets pay off. Eventually we do meet the boss, played to clenched teeth perfection by Ralph Fiennes. He captures a man who has a strong sense of code if only the barest of control on his own aggression.
In Bruges doles out it’s character information in interesting and surprising ways. The only flaw here is that the need to wrap everything up in the end feels a bit forced. It’s almost as if they could have ended the picture several different ways and decided to try them all.

Nevertheless the excellent acting and breathtaking scenery combine to provide a fetching view of limbo, even if the good times end eventually.

"Hope you like my casserole"

Watching the Richard Donner version of Superman II, a film long credited to director Richard Lester who took over partway through filming, is to step into another era of film making. The effects are transparently cheesy in many places and there are logic lapses that are big enough to drive an ocean liner through.

People are able to talk in the airless expanse of space (I don’t give a shit if they are from Krypton, sound doesn’t carry in a vacuum), neither the north pole or the atmosphere seem to chill Lois Lane in the least and English is the universal lingua franca.

But enough nitpicking – this is what comic book movies were like before the invention of angst, and the sprightly romp of a screenplay co-credited to Mario Puzo (!) is often amusing and diverting.

The re-cut seems to move things along a faster clip than the original version, though that may just be memory talking. The biggest, most obvious alterations are at the beginning and ending of the story.

The original film opens with a lot of business involving terrorists at the Eiffel Tower (which led to a great exchange between Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent and Jackie Coogan’s Daily Planet editor Perry White – Kent: “That’s terrible!” White: “That’s why they’re called terrorists!”)

That’s all excised, as is a drawn-out sequence in which Lois Lane throws herself into Niagara Falls to prove that Clark and Superman are one and the same. On the whole Margot Kidder’s Lois comes off better in the re-cut – it’s easier to see what Clark/ Superman find so attractive about her when she’s throwing herself out of windows (the replacement ploy) rather than being waterlogged. It helps that in this version she finally proves her case in a clever way – shooting Clark.

What the movie doesn’t quite explore is how all-fired turned on she is by the guy in the red boots and cape and how hot-to-trot she ain’t by presumed mere mortal Clark. In mid-movie when Superman decides to forego his powers due to his love of Lois, one has to wonder whether the thrill is gone for her. Does she love him or that Superman guy? Reeve brings a decided edge to his Kent portrayal every time the flying guy comes up in conversation with Lois – it’s fertile territory as Tim Burton showed in the decidedly more fetishistic Batman Returns.

Again, though, no angst please. Which makes the new ending rather harder to swallow. In effect it’s a re-run of the footage Donner shot in the first Superman film when he circles the globe fast enough to make time run backwards (all you physicists can grab the nearest sharp object and poke it into your temporal lobe – Lost this isn’t.) In the first film he does so in anger, and it’s a powerful image juxtaposed with thinnish Marlon Brando as Jor-El admonishing him.

The second time around there is simply no set-up, it’s just a conceit to figure out how to reset the clock and have Lois forget who he really is. Only she’s going to ask the same old questions again and those three disco out-fitted, English speaking villains are presumably still hurtling towards Earth.

About those villains.

Terrence Stamp, who looks like he’s guesting from a road show production of Starlight Express plays General Zod, a man who has a prediliction for asking other men to “kneel before Zod.” At times he adds the charming gesture of a hand out, palm flat and moving downwards. What he seems to really need is a good blowjob. But hey, this is a PG film.

"Kneel before...well you know.."