I'll be skipping Man of Steel, I think.

I'm not even a Superman fan (I mean, I don't mind him, but I don't love him -- I'm a Batman girl all the way), and even I knew, reading the review that Tom linked, that the filmmakers made a Big Mistake.

Zack Snyder, maybe you're drunk. So go away.

I'm not opposed to Superman, though I like him best as part of an ensemble (although I suppose I'm basing that on comic books, not film), but the trailers for Man of Steel just never, ever grabbed me. So I wasn't really planning to see it. But Mark Waid's review just tipped me over into OH HELL NO.

I'll be seeing MoS tomorrow with a friend of mine. She suggested we see it at the local drive-in, and I didn't want to even though I love the drive-in, and then I realized, it's because I want to save the special experience of the drive-in for movies I know I won't hate.

Just got back from Man of Steel, and I liked it much, MUCH more than I'd expected based on advance reviews. The visuals were marvelous, and it hit exactly the right character notes to me for almost all the characters (Jonathan Kent being the one glaring exception). I think some of the choices of story flow were poor, but it engaged me well on an emotional level, and that had been my greatest fear going in. Clark, and Lois, and the villains, and Martha Kent felt much more right to me than in the last movie; Lois actually felt better to me than any version has since Noelle Neill.

I just read a post complaining about triggers in The End. Is violence to women played for more laughs than violence towards men? What about sexual violence--from the trailers it seems like little to nothing is handled with respect, but I'm curious to know if gender or sexual issues are worse treated.

If you say it's a problem that a woman dies in an apocalypse movie, you need to be a bit more specific about either how she died, or what you were expecting the end of the world to mean. There's a fucking zombie in the trailer.

So I saw Much Ado About Nothing tonight. The crowd was much older than I expected, frankly--I thought the geeks would be out in force, but instead it was the Shakespeare crowd. (Which of course can certainly overlap with genre geekery, no question.) Basically, it was middle-aged white folks, rather than people in their 20s in Captain America t-shirts.

I'm going to overuse the spoiler tag, since the only real spoiler is the production, not the content.

Anyway I found it quite charming and entertaining. It doesn't suffer too much by comparison with the Branagh-Thompson production, mostly because a lot of the stage business is different. For one thing, there's a lot more physical comedy, including a lot of wordless byplay that really conveys a great deal of meaning.

I was impressed by how good Denisof was at the physical comedy. I don't think his comic timing is as good as Branagh's, though: there were a couple of funny lines that didn't quite work for him.

Amy Acker was brilliant. Funny and fierce and lovely, and her "Oh, if I were a man" speech was stunning. I think she'll get a lot of attention for this role.

Fran Kranz was better than I expected as Claudio, in a role I think is kind of thankless, because he's really a shmuck. He believes a stupid lie, lashes out in the most vindictive and brutal way, and then never apologizes for his own actions, just claims he was misled. Same goes for Don Pedro, who I want to like, but at least in this production it's pretty clear that he comes off a bit tarnished.

I loved Reed Diamond, Clark Gregg, Tom Lenk, and Nathan Fillion, all of whom did really solid work. Fillion and Lenk were a riot together, again with a fair amount of silent stage business that had the whole theater laughing.

I have two minor complaints: 1) It's made explicit that Beatrice and Benedick slept together at one point, and that's part of the reason behind their antipathy. Which makes the whole Hero-isn't-a-virgin plotline really quite messed up by comparison. Why does it matter if Hero's not a virgin, when Beatrice isn't? The only way to avoid that contradiction would have been to change the Hero plot to be more about her betraying her fiance than about being a virgin, and they didn't. So it struck a false note by comparison.

2) Joss should just have cut the line about marrying "an Ethiope", rather than lampshading it by showing the one black guest at the wedding. Too awkward by far.

Finally: man, they do a lot of drinking in this movie, and wow, Joss has a gorgeous house. So pretty. There's a shot where I got distracted by the wooden floors under the actors.

I think Claudio wouldn't have cared if Hero wasn't a virgin, I think he cared that the one she supposedly slept with wasn't him.

I liked Man of Steel better than I expected, but there were a couple scenes that made me and my companion snicker that weren't intended to do so. Anvils fell like...like lots of other metal things falling. Maybe it's just me, but: the World Engine was the scariest thing I've seen in a movie in a long time.

Since last night I've been thinking about how really Zod was a hero. A hero who lost his cause and lost his mind, a tragic hero who could have gotten everything he wanted if he'd been willing to talk, to listen, to negotiate, to wait a little bit longer. Sometimes the hero loses, and goes mad, and tries again, and loses again, and somewhere along the line he becomes the villain.

Man of Steel collateral damage estimates: [link]

but what about in the Indian Ocean?

We saw less of that, but that had to be really really bad. Not to mention Smallville seems effectively gone.