Two (Extremely) Late-Night Observations

Off with his pajamas, I say!

One:

Damn!

It is, it is, it is! It’s the tights! I admit it; that’s what kills me. The tights! That and the masks … and the capes … and the ridiculous nicknames … and the endless pontificating … and the mindless car chases … and the repulsive moralizing … and the laborious descriptions of exotic compounds and magic stones and laser-guided missile systems … and the ubiquitous prudishness … and the preponderance of thin-as-tissue-paper villains … and the pompous psychoanalyzing … and the thinly veiled social criticisms … and the awful one-liners … and the lousy jokes … and the sight of James Franco straining for gravitas while saying things like “Kill Spider-Man, and I'll give you all the tritium you need. On second thought, bring him to me … alive” … and the realization that no matter what I say the number of super-hero franchises waiting in the wings is probably boundless and therefore the chance that there won’t be four new super-hero movies next summer and four more the summer after that and four more the summer after that - all ready to explode with their candy-colored stories of disaffected lily-white man/boys locked in mortal struggle with their own divided souls - is exactly nil.

(Sorry, I think all these comic-book movies I've been watching are starting to mess with my head.)

By the way, have you seen this?

Or this?

That is a super-hero I can get behind: disrespectful, ironic, self-indulgent, cynical, lascivious, amoral, mendacious. In other words, something we all would probably be if we woke up one day to find ourselves blessed with super powers. I’m not saying we wouldn’t stop the occasional out-of-control train or save the odd city, but even super heroes have to acknowledge from time to time the little blessings their powers afford them.

Two:

I know my distaste for Alfred Hitchcock disappoints you, but in order to be considered a great filmmaker, I say you’ve got to be great from beginning to end, from pillar to post, from opening fanfare to closing credits, and if there’s one thing Alfred Hitchcock could not do, it’s finish a movie.

In fact, I’d argue that Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much feature two of the worst endings ever put to film. I can’t decide which one is more ridiculous: Jimmy Stewart fending off a homicidal Raymond Burr with just a camera flashbulb or Doris Day and her son singing their way to reunion and safety. Singing “Que Sera Sera,” by the way, which is the very height of mid-Fifties middle-American pop soullessness, and therefore forcing us to listen to it is an act of the highest cruelty on Mr. Hitchcock’s part.

And for that reason alone, he doesn’t deserve a spot in director heaven. John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Billy Wilder will just have to find another fourth for their bridge game.

Might I suggest Brett Ratner?