I just realized that back when I first watched the Superman/Batman movie (The 7th of April 2016), I sent my thoughts to Marq as I was watching. I have now copied them and paste them below, typos and all, devoid of any context. Just rest assured that Marq didn’t know what I was talking about either. I went in fully knowing the movie’s reputation and about the Martha scene and stuff. I may refer back to these thoughts in a future Superman Thoughts post, but mostly this is just for posterity:

Is there any reason that Bruce’s employee “Jack” who gets blown up isn’t a version of Lucious Fox? I’m not saying that woud be better necessarily, but it seems like it might have been an easier way to play up the importance of the death to the audience of the last few Batman movies.

18 Months Later. One of those time skips that are always ruining comics from what I hear.

There’s no way this archaeologist or whatever is going to be Lana’s father is there?

I’m going to assume Lois is in the bathtub because it shows us how close she and Clark are. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Okay, this is where I’m starting to feel old already. I already don’t know what’s going on. Lois says the people at the hearing are saying something, Clark cuts her off saying he doesn’t care what they’re saying. I genuinely don’t know what they’re saying. Are they unhappy because Superman saved her? Because the terrorists got killed by those motorcycle guys? I’m not sure who is unhappy or why.

Batman brands people? Wasn’t that the schtick of one of the old pulp heroes? Nightraven or something?

Alfred’s really drilling the hatred of Superman into Bruce. Is this movie actually Alfred vs Superman?

So Lex Sr. grew up in East Germany?

At least the movie seems to be okay with using the name Superman, unlike Man of Steel with that damn cough joke I still don’t understand.

Wait, it’s only 18 months from the last movie and there’s already a statue of Superman? He really must have stepped up his game between movies.

Why did Lex just put a candy in a guy’s mouth? I tried to give him a chance, but I’m going to agree with the others who said this version of Lex is not great.

“Superman acted like some rogue combatant to rescue her” is the official problem the government has with Superman? I still don’t get it. Are they just upset that he doesn’t work for them, or are they saying Superman shot all those people? They do know that guns would be pretty unnecessary for him to use, right?

Affleck is one of the three actors I am most frequently compared to, and probably the handsomest of the three.

Gotham and Metropolis are across a harbour from one another? I think there are some Silver Age comics with that setup. But why, then, are they so acting like the heroes are so attached to their particular cities, then? Batman doesn’t fight crime if running water gets in his way? Superman won’t fly across the harbour to put out a fire?

I’m sure if wheelchair guy were being set up to be Metallo, I would have heard of it alredy, so I am sure he is not.

The action scene where Batman fights Superman soldiers and bug guys is absolutely free of quick cuts and shaky cam. I almost feel like someone listened after my opinion of the first movie.

The superheroes acting like jerks and the frequent dreams are more similarities to the Silver Age.

“He is not our enemy,” Alfred says. So, did I misunderstand what Alfred was saying earlier? Going back to check, Earlier Alfred said “Everything’s changed. Men fall from the sky. The gods hurl thunderbolts. Innocents die. That’s how it starts, sir. The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness. That turns good men cruel.” All said while showing images of Superman. I dunno.

Wilhelm Scream. Maybe they are willing to try to have fun? I mean, Wilhelm Screams are lame, but they’re also not super serious.

This car chase scene is pretty coherent as well. Are my memories of how bad the action was in Man of Steel flawed?

Oh, nobody told me the fight was over the fact Superman busted up the Batmobile. He deserves what he gets.

Seems like making a tracking device that blinks on the end that you’re trying to track is just begging for it to get noticed by the person you’re tracking.

“Does he act by our will, or his alone?” Okay, so I guess the whole problem is their uncertainty about his motives.

“The desert was a set-up. Someone wanted Superman to look guilty.” Oh, so they do think Superman shot all those people? Surely Lex could faked heat vision or something?

Ah, Lex’s skinny assistant is Mercy. Nice touch, I guess.

Well, at least they can’t say the movie doesn’t foreshadow its jars of urine.

Also, I guess Mercy is dead.

“All this time, I’ve been living my life the way my father saw it.” “Superman was never real. Just the dream of a farmer from Kansas” No! Jonathan Kent specifically told you to not help people because it would put you at risk! That’s the thing I most hated about the first movie!

So Pa Kent is in the movie after all (dream, I assume). Okay, scene over and he has not offended me. I’ll accept this Pa Kent appearance without complaint.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Lois Lane falling from a great height it one of the least suspensful things ever, so I am glad this one didn’t drag it out. He was there almost instantly.

And then the movie takes a break while Wonder Woman browses commercials for upcoming DC movies.

“If I wanted it, you’d be dead already.” The truest fact about Batman/Superman fights.

Luckily, we flash back to Bruce’s origin again. I had forgotten what had happened there.

Is there a reason that Kryptonian/Human mix is stronger than both instead of somewhere in between?

I hope that the R-rated version of the movie just gives Doomsday some junk.

Okay, Doomsday does get some bony protusions. I’m not big on him flying and heat-visioning, but it does fit this origin.

Bruce to Clark regarding Wonder Woman: “I thought she was with you.” You literally emailed her Bruce. Like two hours ago.

I think Wonder Woman just smiled! I don’t think superheroes are allowed to do that here!

See, if I were Clark, I might have, like, thrown the spear, or maybe even given it to Wonder Woman. I’ll just blame it on being a heat of the moment thing, though.

And here’s my problem with these movies, I don’t care that Clark is dead right now. I have no attachment to him. This version of Superman has barely had a consisteny personality for me to attach myself to. I guess I’m supposed to just transpose my existing feelings for the character onto this version, but I can’t do that. This Clark was never got past the cipher stage for me. This would probably have been helped if there had been a second movie, one that showed Superman becoming the beacon of virtue Lex claimed he was. One that showed why people were willing to build a statue to him. One that had ANY scenes of his relationship with Lois at all. One with Bibbo. Just because.

They shave Lex’s head. That’s something, I guess.

One thing this funeral is missing is mobsters attacking Jimmy Olsen while about three dozen superheroes are about ten feet away. Those were truly the smarted mobsters ever.”

I just watched Demon Knight. Movie Thoughts came into my head while I did so, so here they are:

First and foremost, I’ll point out that it was a perfectly serviceable schlock horror experience. I’d recommend it to people who have the exact taste in movies that I do.

But what set my mind a wandering during this movie is something that actually applies less to this movie and more to serious attempts at horror fiction. Demon Knight, being a Tales From the Crypt production, is presented with a framing sequence featuring everyone’s favourite cryptkeeper, the Cryptkeeper. It has that double layer of fiction. The Cryptkeeper is already a fictional character and he is relating to us another story, which is therefore Extra Fictional. You see what I’m saying? I’ll come back to that a few paragraphs from now.

One of the ways that I often disagree with Horror Discussers on the internet is that a percentage of them (it feels like a large percentage, but probably actually isn’t) want to feel like they are scared for themselves while watching the horror movies. I can’t relate to that. I’ve never got that feeling once that I can remember. What I want from horror movies is to care about the characters enough to feel worry that they may not make it through the story. This is something that horror movies often fail.

The people who want to feel scared by horror stories also tend to say they prefer non-supernatural horror, because that way it can be something could really happen. A ghost bear isn’t scary because ghost bears aren’t real, they say. A normal human killer with a knife is scary because one of those might break in and kill me while I’m watching the movie. Well that could happen any time, whether you’re watching a movie or not, so if you want to be scared of that, be scared of it. If I’ve knowingly put a fictional movie on to watch I’m not worried about either the ghost bear or the normal human killer in the movie, because they’re both equally fictional actually. And ghost bears would make for a movie infinitely cooler than a human with a knife.

Anyway, while watching the Cryptkeeper introduce Demon Knight I began to wonder if he, and other similar horror comic hosts, were introduced to allow a sort of distancing from the supernatural elements of the horror stories they presented. You don’t get to pretend the story isn’t fictional when the undead guy making terrible puns tells you right from the start that it’s a story. It’s like a gate that only lets in people who can accept the weird supernatural stuff. If so, good job, Cryptkeeper.

I watched Wind Chill. I had thoughts while I watched it, and here they are:

This is a supernatural horror movie, blah blah, whatever. The main thing I took away here was that I just did not care for the protagonists. Not at all. They were not people I wanted to spend time with.

The story begins when the one woman and the one man meet up to share a car on a trip or something. They bicker a strange amount for two people who ostensibly just met to share this car. I thought that they were supposed to be some former friends who had bad blood between them or something, but nope. That’s just how they are. And it turns out that the man is also basically a stalker. My main feeling while watching was that I didn’t want to be watching them. That can’t be the intended effect.

There’s a frequently occuring trope in horror movies, especially the slasher movies, to have the protagonists be unlikeable jerks so that we are all happy to see them all get murdered. I don’t approve of that line of thought either, though at least I understand their reasoning. They are thinking the point of those films is that thrill of seeing people get slaughtered and if they are unlikeable it is all the better. That is probably true for a large portion of the audience. It isn’t for me, though. What I like about such films is seeing characters I like, or at least am interest in watching, as they try to get through the bad situations. I want to be happy when they succeed and saddened when they fail.

But that’s slasher movies anyway. This isn’t one of those. This is a movie about two people in a car and I don’t like those people and it takes way too long to get to the supernatural stuff. This is sharing a ride with two annoying strangers and it takes to long to get where I’m going.

I admit, the story does try to redeem the characters, have them grow as people and maybe get better, but it all happened long after I cared if they got better. By the time the stuff I wanted started happening, I did not care about how these two reacted to it.

Anyway, that’s it.

I watched Whiplash. Here is what occurred to me while I did so.

This is one of those movies where everyone gets all worked up about a big competition that I, PDR, wouldn’t give a shit about. Often these are about sports. In this case, it’s about music.

Anyway, the move is fine. The actors are good. It’s shot well. All that stuff. But man, I don’t care if that kid wins the music trophy. But here’s what I do care about: This movie seems to endorse cruelty as a method of teaching.

The big bad music teacher of the movie is convinced that he needs to find the next best music man, and the way to do it is to torture his students. This, he feels, will weed out those students who aren’t fully on committed and will make the True Musician prove their worth by doubling down. It kind of sounds makes it sound like talent isn’t teachable, but is inherent in certain people and they are the only ones worth trying to teach. Seems like a dumb thing for a music teacher to espouse, but whatever. And this movie actually does paint this teacher as a bad guy. We see the negative effects this method of teaching has.

But then, in the end, main kid rises up against the cruelty and does a good music at the music championships. He seems to be doing it in an attempt to prove his bad teacher wrong, but this is exactly what his teacher wanted. Bad teacher was right all along. That sucks.

Anyway, being competitive must be awful.

Today’s Beekeepers are from the 2006 movie The Wicker Man. It isn’t a good movie.

Summersisle is an island in the Pacific Northwest which is home to an insular farming community. The big industry on the island is beekeeping. They don’t have a lot of connection to the outside world, but they do sell their honey and other bee-related products online. They make mead for their own use. There are some windows shaped like honeycombs and statues or hives and stuff. They also have “old ways” for treating people allergic to bee stings. In fact, they seem to just generally like nature, as almost everyone seems to be named after after flowers and trees and stuff. On the surface, the place seems absolutely quaint. But they sure are secretive. They just don’t plain like outsiders. So what is up?

It apparently “takes quite a few [beekeepers] to keep order around” Summersisle, but not everyone on the island is an active apiarist. Still, everyone there shares a belief system, so whole don’t intimately get to know any beekeepers, we know that the sort of values they’d have.

Summersisle is a matriarchal society to an extreme. They are, or at least claim, to be descended from Celtic ancestors who “rebelled against suppression of the feminine” and immigrated to America just in time to set up shop around Salem as the whole witch-burning things were going down. Sad to see oppression of women continue, they headed West until they found their current home. But their noble goals of equality have not worked out, because now, in the present, men on Summersisle are the oppressed ones. Male children aren’t educated, they grow up to only be used for manual labour, and they are completely unwilling, perhaps psychologically unable to communicate with outsiders. What does any of that have to do with the beekeeping? Well, it is implied that this is meant to be an evocative the dynamic in a hive, with the queen and all that. The “queen” of Summersisle is one Sister Summersisle, and apparently rulership is a hereditary thing. There’s a level higher than her, though, as they all worship a “great mother goddess” who they feel rules the island. And that’s where things get even worse.

The year before the events of the movie, the island had a failed crop. This is apparently a very rare occurrence, having only happened a few times in the island’s history, but they have a way of dealing with this sort of thing: A bizarre ritual sacrifice they get from a book called “Rituals of the Ancients” which they feel will please their goddess and make everything right again. It’s a dumb ritual. It requires them to find a male stranger who is connected to them by blood. They will call him the drone, for bee-theme reasons. They will run the drone through a dumb obstacle course of confusing scenes and motivations, with the end result that he will be a hunter who they will then hunt and he will come to them willingly. Or something. Outside of the fiction, the confusion is done to keep things mysterious until the end reveal, but within the story, why are they acting like that. It seems to me like it’d be considerably easier to lure the drone in without half the weirdness. How much of their weirdness is legitimate weirdness, and how much is them trying to make him suspicious? And even beyond that, they kill the pilot who brought him to the island because he betrayed them, but they wanted the drone to come to the island, so they totally set that pilot up to be killed. They’re jerks.

Look, I suspect they are decent beekeepers in general, but their belief in this ritual makes me doubt if they actually know what they’re doing.

2 Honeycombs out of Five.