Alright. It had to happen eventually: I have watched the new Superman movie. Overall, I enjoyed it. I went in with high expectations, I think. I’d heard good things and I genuinely found myself thinking “I may wind up having to change my repeated claim that Superman has never had a movie that was more than ‘good’ in quality level.” Well, I don’t have to change that claim. This is a ‘good’ movie. It did not move me in the way I want a Superman film to move me, but it is good. I enjoyed it. It was a fun blockbuster movie. This movie gets 5 out of 6 pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. I have to reiterate this stuff because I will, when you say Superman has never had a movie reach “great” status in your mind, people will act as if I’ve said all of his movies are bad. I never said that! Geez! I just said LOTS of his movies are bad.

Seriously, though. I liked this one at a level I can compare to how much I liked Superman II as a kid. That was my favourite Superman movie back then, so I guess this is tied for my favourite Superman movie. With that cleared up, now I can pick it apart!!!

Presenting a disordered list of my first thoughts, including spoilers:

• Good portrayal of Clark. He gets treated like a person. In fact the whole movie seems to be willing to treat its characters like people.
• Good treatment of Superman as a genre, if you will. The movie is never embarrassed that it is a Superman movie and therefore doesn’t feel the need to mitigate its fun to get respect.
• I went in knowing that it would have a bunch of other DC characters so I had calibrated for that. This movie is being used to launch the company’s latest iteration of a shared cinematic universe after all, so of course they’re leaning on those. And I am fully willing to admit that they made some of these characters work well enough in the story being told here, but that’s because they wrote the story being told here. If a Superman movie ever reaches “great” status in the eyes of PDR, you know it won’t have that kind of corporate synergy woven into it. Heck, even Kara, a character I gladly welcome in Superman stories and whose scene I found amusing, just made me think that it was setup for something else.
• Good portrayals of Lois and Jimmy and Perry. I’d definitely have liked to have seen more journalism on display (it’s basically limited to discussions about interviewing Superman and Jimmy calling a clingy ex for information), but I honestly don’t go into any Superman content expecting I’ll get the amount of journalism content I want. I’d be a fool to expect them to actually commit to that. Someday they may, but that was not today.
• Speaking of the Planet cast: Steve and Cat and Ron get to be there! They don’t do much, and Steve is relegated to a joke the way he always has been post-Crisis. Ron, I think, doesn’t get a line. But they’re there.
• I’m very happy that they chose to make some political commentary in there. Not a lot, certainly not as much as I would’ve liked, more than I probably would have bet on. And even this minor amount led to idiots on the Internet decrying it as too woke? I could write you a Superman story so woke you’d cry, you losers.
• Good Luthor, and perhaps more importantly, a Sydney Happersen so comics accurate I could tell it was him just from looking! They put Happersen in there for me alone, clearly.
• Related to Lex, I found the scenes in his pocket dimension prison kinda stupid. The prison design aside, there’s a Luthorcorp employee who, I guess, is just required to stand there holding a baby forever? And when it is extremely clear that Superman is about to start the escape, he doesn’t have the ability to contact anyone or anything? Dumb.
• There’s a couple of mentioned of “Hope” as a concept, but they don’t overplay it so I was perfectly capable of just letting them slide by without affecting my mood.
• Superman’s costume looks uncomfortable to me. It looks like it would bunch up and annoy me, especially around the collar and sleeves.
• The Fortress of Solitude still looks like garbage inside. Just another icy room. Get a frigging rug or something, Clark!
• There was another thing that was spoiled for me, so I was able to calibrate myself before going in. And thank goodness it was because it would have had a negative impact on me: this version of Jor-El and Lara sent Clark to Earth specifically AND they did so with a message telling him to conquer the locals. The movie has about three characters tell us this message is legitimate, not faked by Lex, and that means this has to be my least favourite thing going on here. My preferred take has always been that baby Kal-El was sent into space as a last ditch effort to save him and he just happened to wind up on Earth, rather than it being Jor-El’s plan all along. But more importantly, they’re basically saying that this character who is famously a refugee has parents who sent him here to rule over the people in his new homeland. Clark rejects this, sure, but the insinuation that this is what refugees are like is bad enough to me.

Anyway, I may develop deeper thoughts later, but those are my fresh-from-the-viewing thoughts. Now to catch up on 11 episodes of various podcasts I have been putting off until after I saw it.

When I first learned we were getting an action movie called The Beekeeper, I had to wonder if I had somehow willed it into existence. After all, I’ve been reviewing fictional Beekeepers as action heroes since this post in 2014, and I have been advocating for Beekeepers to be in such a role since the era of Pirates vs Ninjas debates on the Internet. This movie feels like the culmination of my teachings. Now, I have no interest in reviewing the quality of the movie (what kind of loser cares if movies are good or not?), but I have to know: how does protagonist Adam Clay rate as a Beekeeper?

Adam Clay, this name is just his current alias for the record, is a Beekeeper in more than one way. He does actually keep bees and cares for them and give honey as a present to his friends and all the stuff I consider basic Beekeeper stuff. This alone would rate him a 2/5.

But is he an action hero? Well, I should say so. Clay is retired from a secret extra-governmental organization that call themselves “Beekeepers”. They are given unlimited resources to train these incredible secret agents who act outside the bounds of the law, with the idea that they will do what is best to protect society’s weak and vulnerable (Ah, to live in an imaginary world where those with power want to protect the weak and vulnerable. Must be nice). As a former agent of this group, Clay is highly trained in combat, armed and unarmed, and is a resourceful strategist and talented tactician. He can create bombs and rig up traps with improvised items. At times he seems as much like a slasher killer taking out his targets as he does an action hero. Suffice it to say, the guy can fight. That’ll move him up to 3/5.

But, beyond the standard set of Action Hero skills that strain plausibility, he has no supernatural abilities. He can’t talk to bees or control them or any of that. One could make up for a lack of supernatural abilities by being really on-brand. If you dress up with a picture of a bee on your chest or wear exclusively yellow and black striped shirts, that impresses me. Clay doesn’t do that, but he does talk an awful lot about Beekeeping and protecting the hive and all that. So he doesn’t lose points, but doesn’t gain any.

But how about Beekeeper Rage? One thing I’ve noticed in doing these reviews is that a lot of Beekeepers lash out when they get angry and that usually costs them some points. How does Adam Clay do here? Well, when his friend’s life is ruined and his own hives are destroyed, Clay does indeed lash out. But, perhaps it is is training with the covert organization, he lashes out in the right direction. He intends to avenge his friend and protect other weak and vulnerable people by cleaning out the corruption in the hive that is our society. He attacks the right targets. Heck, any time he’s not working in self-defence he even gives his targets warning so they can flee and swear off doing evil. He intends to kill, but he’s not indiscriminate. Honestly, if everyone’s anger was so well controlled, we’d be better off. I say Clay loses no points for Beekeeper Rage and, in fact, it looks good for him:

Four Honeycomb out of Five. A high quality Beekeeper. Could a sequel come along and improve it? Well, I’m certainly willing to write one, Hollywood! Let’s have Adam Clay ride around in a helicopter designed to look like a giant bee! Let’s do this!

There are other “Beekeepers” in the movie, it’s worth noting. There’s a whole organization, right? We’re told that the organization decides to stay neutral in the conflict, with the exception of Clay’s direct replacement, who is described as a “lunatic” and he takes her out with relative ease. We’re never shown if she actually keeps bees at all (though she does have a book about beekeeping in her car and there are hive around her base). Are all members of the organization actually apiarists in addition to using the metaphor? Probably. Maybe. Who knows? Anyway, they’d surely, as a group, rank somewhere around Clay.

For a long time I’ve had a vague memory of a movie or episode of some anthology television show in which a woman was cursed so that any time she said “I love you” to someone, they would turn into a doll. The way I remembered it was that, at the end of the story she was fixed and realized that she could say it finally so she jubilantly shouted “I love New York” or “I love this town” which I thought at the time was reckless. But anyway, I had this memory, but never thought much about it.

On a whim I tried to search Google for it tonight. I got nothing. I could only find episodes about evil dolls and the like. I was flummoxed. I was sure I’d seen this thing. I assumed it was some episode of Outer Limits or Amazing Stories or something, niche sure, but mainstream enough that it’d be talked about online.

I reached out to other people I know to see if they remembered it and with their help I eventually seem to have found it. Really Weird Tales seems to be the answer. The thing is, the woman in Really Weird Tales (played by Catherine O’Hara no less!) does NOT turn people into dolls by saying “I love you” to them. What she does is if she loves someone (whether she says it or not) they explode. That’s in the same ballpark, but it’s a different game. But I kept watching and at one point she feels affection for a doll and it explodes. So is that it? My childhood mind conflated that with turning people into dolls? NO! There’s more. In an attempt to cure herself she has to go on a date with someone she finds repugnant, so she does that, but it goes poorly. That said, we do get the “I love New York” scene that was so embedded in my memory. AND THEN it turns out that the repugnant guy has a thing where if he hates someone, they turn into a doll! So the movie has the love thing and the doll thing, they’re just in different people than I remember. Clearly this is the movie I saw as a kid, my memory just got some things twisted.

But it gets weirder, because during my search I was led to a Reddit post by someone else trying to find the movie and that searcher ALSO remembered it as her turning people into dolls. Memory is weird.

Somehow, the broken remnants of capitalism and copyright laws have led to an announcement that I could not ever have anticipated. The Hypno-Hustler could become the star of a movie.

This is fascinating to me. I’m aware that Sony is limited in which Spider-Man characters they can use to make movies, but I feel like they’re scraping the bottom of a barrel when there’s still lots of other stuff in the barrel they could be using. Spider-Man has a thousand villains and fellow heroes that I would have predicted could be chosen before Antoine. Heck, realistically, I would have thought Rocket Racer had a better chance and I didn’t really think he had a chance at all. And somehow the Hypno-Hustler gets it.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have thought I was among the biggest fans in existence of Rocket Racer’s friend with the guitar, but it turns out that someone out there is clearly a bigger one (or at least they are a similarly-sized fan with more ability to do something about it). And it feels like good news to me because clearly the only way this could happen is if someone actually cares about Antoine.

A movie like this could actually turn a joke of a character into a rounded out human. I’ve always thought that making Antoine into a three-dimensional being that audiences cared about would be one of the earliest writing challenges I would tackle given the chance, and now someone is probably gonna beat me to it. I’m thrilled, but admittedly jealous.

There are multiple ways this can go wrong:

• It’s possible that the movie could fail so hard that the character is seen as unworkable. This is the one I fear the least, because the character is already considered bad and I don’t think anything they could do would make that worse. I’d actually be more worried about this for a Rocket Racer movie, where I feel like the character actually has a little bit to lose. Antoine has nothing to lose, and the fact the creators must care about him makes me think this isn’t going to happen.
• It’s possible this could only be Antoine as I like him in name only. Heck, they might call him “Hypno-Hustler” and not even keep the Antoine Delsoin identity. Just rebuild him entirely from scratch. Look at how the Prowler seen in Miles Morales stories is not the Prowler from the comics that I liked (though the other Prowler is admittedly pretty cool in Spiderverse). But even so, the article above mentions that the musical aspect of the character is important to the project, so even if you call him Buddy Thrummer or something other than Antoin Delsoin, you’re going to have a music-based hypnotist who presumably does crime, it’s going to be closer than I ever would have expected.
• It’s also possible that the movie could become too successful and that would ruin the character for me. If the Hustler becomes a hot new property, and starts showing up in every Marvel comic every month and he pals around with all the superheroes and does the same quips they all do, he would lose the characterization I like. One problem I have with the Marvel stuff is how small their universe feels these days. I remember after the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy movie I saw comics about the Guardians hanging around Earth so they could team up with all the heroes there. I hated that. The Guardians are supposed to out in their own cosmic corner of the Marvel Universe, but they had to hang out with Captain America and Deadpool, so their specialness was thrown away to make them a cog in the machine. If Antoine suddenly becomes one of the “important” characters, I’d lose interest him as one of the loser. I always choose the losers over the big important people. But this I also don’t fear too greatly, because my mind just can’t comprehend a world in which the Hypno-Hustler becomes important.
• The movie might not actually come to pass. This one seems like the most likely possibility. I do believe that they are honestly working on this thing with intent for it to come out, but many things can happen that would stop it. Another pandemic? Character rights shifting to another company? Economic collapse? Any of these options or more could stop this movie in its tracks. And even then, we’d just be back where we started with the character.

So even with the bad outcomes, there is nothing TOO bad. I have no reason but to be excited for this movie. So let’s all be excited for the Hypno-Hustler.