In 2025, Superman Once Again Takes to the Skies and Grapple with His Human Dilemmas

July 10, 2025

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He doesn’t look like a bird or a plane from this angle (CREDIT: DC/Screenshot)

Starring: David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegi, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Isabela Merced, Pruitt Taylor Vance, Neva Howell, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Beck Bennett, Mikaela Hoover, Christopher McDonald, Sara Sampaio, Alan Tudyk, Terence Rosemore, Frank Grillo, María Gabriela de Faría, Michael Ian Black, Pom Klementieff, Bradley Cooper, Angela Sarafyan

Director: James Gunn

Running Time: 129 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Some Bloody Blows and Foul-Mouthed Critics

Release Date: July 11, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: The Big Blue Boy Scout, aka Superman (David Corenswet), aka Supes, aka Clark Kent, aka the Man of Steel, believes deeply that he’s been sent to Earth to protect the human race. That idealism is a big part of why his Daily Planet colleague/girlfriend Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and so many of his fans have fallen for him. But not everyone is so sure that an alien from Krypton should be their guardian. Especially not Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who’s waging a disinformation campaign to erode the public’s trust and orchestrate a war-profiteering scheme. His evil plan also includes imprisoning Supes in a pocket universe, a risky move that threatens to tear the entire fabric of Earth apart. Fortunately there are already some other superpowered folks in this world who might just be willing to help Clark out.

What Made an Impression?: Can Clark Kent Afford Therapy?: With James Gunn behind the camera and the screenplay, it appears that the biggest threat to Superman in 2025 is … social media troll bots! And not even particularly clever trolls. The biggest difference between this Clark Kent and all other previous big screen versions is surely his fragile ego.  It’s more than a little jarring seeing him so petty and vulnerable when his predecessors have been so unfailingly upright. But it’s also kind of endearing.
Clark Wants to Be a Punk Rocker: Assuming that this Clark Kent is about the same age as the guy playing him (David Corenswet is 32), then he definitely feels like a millennial whose personality was shaped by the Gen Xers driving culture in the 90s and early 2000s. People like James Gunn, perhaps! (Or people like The State alum Michael Ian Black, who plays a just-asking-questions-style “journalist.”) Corenswet Clark is like the guy who tries to be cool by emulating the indie rock crowd from when he was a kid and doesn’t get it quite right. But Lois still loves him anyway!
Gizmos and Galaxies Galore: In addition to being the most short-circuited and vaguely punk rock version of the character, Gunn’s Superman is also easily the nerdiest big screen iteration we’ve ever seen. This movie is filled to the brim with the sorts of gadgets and phenomena that sound like they’re based on a kernel of real science but are stretched out to ridiculous comic book sensibilities. Nanites, hypno-glasses, antiproton rivers: imaginations have certainly been let loose.
A Promising Forecast: Superman 2025 features some spirited acting, a cast of colorful characters, kinetic action sequences, a clear and unapologetic sense of its own identity, and a super-duper canine. And it also features some fantastically pleasant weather. There are several moments throughout the movie of a news broadcast with a forecast on the ticker informing us that the temperatures in Metropolis range between 62 and 65 degrees (presumably Fahrenheit) for the entire week. No wonder everyone’s in a good enough mood to fulfill their heroic destinies!

Superman is Recommended If You Like: Comic Books; Or, Your Loved Ones Who Enthusiastically Tell You Everything That Happens in Their Favorite Comic Books

Grade: 3.5 out of 5 Justice Gangs

‘Bill & Ted Face the Music’ and They Also Face the Weight of Years’ Worth of Anticipation

August 27, 2020

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Bill & Ted Face the Music (CREDIT: Orion Pictures)

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Samara Weaving, Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays, Kristen Schaal, Holland Taylor, Anthony Carrigan, William Sadler, Hal Landon Jr., Beck Bennett, Kid Cudi, Jillian Bell

Director: Dean Parisot

Running Time: 88 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for “Some Language,” Apparently

Release Date: August 28, 2020 (Theaters and On Demand)

Bill & Ted Face the Music is about the crushing expectations of destiny. It’s kind of like the Bhagavad Gita in that way. From a gnarlier perspective, it’s also about how time travel doesn’t make any sense, and won’t ever make sense, but that’s okay, because we can still be excellent to each other.

When we first met the Wyld Stallyns during their first excellent time-hopping adventure thirty years ago, we learned that their music would serve as the inspiration for a utopian society several centuries into the future. And now it’s finally time for them to answer that call. If they don’t, the time-space continuum will totally be ripped apart! But in 2020, the biggest live music gig that Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Alex Winter) can get is the wedding of Ted’s younger brother to Bill’s former stepmom. How then can they possibly live up to what Fate has asked of them? How could anybody, really? The premise worked well enough in Excellent Adventure, as it remained theoretical and fantastical, but now disappointment feels inevitable.

But fortunately Face the Music isn’t really about the promise of that world-saving composition. Rather, it is about the shenanigans that lead up to that point, naturally enough. Facing a profound case of writer’s block and a terrifying time limit of only 78 minutes, Bill and Ted figure they might as well visit their future selves and steal the song they will have already written by that point. But that proves to be fruitless no matter how far in the future they go, which begs the question: are they only able to travel into a possible future in which they’re not successful? But how could that be if they’re able to visit the utopian far future when they will have necessarily been successful? And why is there a time limit anyway? If they fail, can’t they just get in the phone booth and go back far enough in the past to start over? The stern visage of Holland Taylor (who plays the future’s Great Leader) assures us otherwise.

There’s a sanded-down quality to Face the Music that can happen when you try to resurrect old beloved characters. Bill and Ted are still plenty charming, but they’re far from as dopey as they were when they were teenagers, even though they still talk in the same surfer bro SoCal cadence. Meanwhile, there’s a trickier sort of alchemy attempted with their daughters (Brigette Lundy-Paine and Samara Weaving), who are basically gender-flipped carbon copies of their dads but they’re also actually geniuses, at least when it comes to music theory, history, and composition.

Face the Music struggles to get a handle on how ridiculous the Wyld Stallyns and their loved ones and collaborators are supposed to be. They do live in a ridiculous reality after all, as they must contend with a depression-prone killer robot (Anthony Carrigan) and a Grim Reaper (William Sadler returning from Bogus Journey) who mopes about not being allowed to deliver 40-minute bass solos. That’s often the trouble with returning to a kooky world. The base level of kookiness is already so high that any new bit of kookiness just feels like chaos. There’s a nice degree of heart here that sometimes shines through in the cacophony, but there’s nothing quite as sublime as “Bob Genghis Khan.”

Bill & Ted Face the Music is Recommended If You Like: Midlife crises, Millennia-spanning supergroups, Just-go-with-it time travel

Grade: 3 out of 5 Princess Wives

‘Greener Grass’ is the Next Great Surreal Masterpiece

October 25, 2019

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CREDIT: IFC Films

If you asked a group of outer space aliens to observe humanity and then recreate suburbia on film, Greener Grass would be the result. Just about everything that is said or done in this movie are words and actions that real people say and do, or at least could do, but pitched ever so slightly off. When added up together, those many off beats result in a stunning new surrealist vision. Being purposely surreal for a feature length amount of time is a tricky task, as you run the risk of being too bizarre to handle without ever being clever. But Greener Grass has perfected its formula. Each strange decision and every little deviously outrageous bon mot is delivered with such perfect timing.

This is the work of Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, who co-wrote, co-direct, and co-star as devoted soccer moms Jill and Lisa. They have given us a sort of domestic fantasy in which all the adults wear braces, the candy color scheme is lusciously hot pink-heavy, golf carts are the only transport that anyone needs, a weird dad can lick a popsicle made from frozen pool water, and a woman can stick a soccer ball up her dress and declare that she’s pregnant and everyone will happily go along with it. You get the sense that DeBoer and Luebbe are saying, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could live in this world?” And honestly, if we all really wanted to, we could! As far as the laws of physics are concerned, everything that happens is theoretically possible (save, perhaps, for one delightfully golden twist halfway through). Gandhi said (or was misquoted as having said), “Be the change you wish to see in this world.” Greener Grass shows us the power of doing so.

Greener Grass is Recommended If You Like: David Lynch, Tim and Eric, John Waters, Too Many Cooks, Beck Bennett and Kyle Mooney’s sitcom parodies, John Carpenter music

I give Greener Grass My Full Stamp of Surreal Approval.

SNL Recap March 7, 2015: Chris Hemsworth/Zac Brown Band

March 9, 2015

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SNL: Chris Hemsworth March 2015 Monologue (CREDIT: YouTube Screenshot)

This review was originally posted on Starpulse in March 2015.

It might just be pointlessly quixotic to ascribe a thesis statement to an episode of “SNL.”  Any detectable patterns may have just been accidental.  When the host and musical guest do not bring in a whole lot of baggage, that truth becomes emphasized.  Chris Hemsworth was host two months before the release of the next “Avengers” movie.  Zac Brown Band have new music, but they are not dominating the mainstream conversation.  This was certainly an episode that happened.  There were highlights, there were lowlights, and it will lead to a multiplicity of opinions.  Here’s one: it was cray-cray.

A Message From Hillary Clinton – Kate McKinnon made it clear that should Hillary Clinton run for president, she will not back down from the challenge of taking on this legendary impression.  This sketch was essentially a character piece, when it could have focused on sharper satire about whether or not Clinton’s e-mail correspondence is a legitimate controversy.  But as a character piece, it was encouraging, managing to imbue the tired “old person e-mail gag” with specific personality. B

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