It's always a time problem with these blockbusters. Occasionally, you'll get a summer movie made really quickly that's really good, but I don't recall that really being the case since 1982's "Wrath of Khan," which benefitted from a lower budget and exactly what is suggested for the "SR" sequel -- a whole new crew, including a new director. With something like Superman, with so many effects, when they rush it like they did with "Returns" almost alll the schedule is dedicated to getting the effects shots done and the story winds up being a poor retread with minor but obvious differences. Granted, there had been "a" Superman movie in the works for over a decade, but "SR" was a take on it that was decided on way too hastily from someone the WB trusted probably because they saw him as the father of Marvel's recent successes being the unofficial first to translate a popular Marvel title like "X-Men" in 199-2000. I knew from the previews that if "Superman Returns" did well it would ONLY be because of the enormity of the public's fondness for the late Christopher Reeve, which the movie kind of milked shamelessly, almost cheapening the memory of a man whose contributions to society were greater than any of his acting roles including Superman. As corny as the show can be a lot of times, I almost prefer "Smallville," which actually had a similar storyline for its season 5 finale and did it BETTER in terms of suspense and character development: Turning Earth into Krypton VS. creating a Kryptonian island on earth = destroying the U.S.) I want a Superman sequel, and I'll even accept what's-his-name in the role now, but I agree with the sentiment above in that they'd better switch gears in a major way.

I agree, this is a great idea, but one I think few people could pull off. Fortunately, I think Spielberg can, and I've always admired his devotion to core filmmaking techniques and mediums, ie, minimal (or no) CGI and ALWAYS shooting on film instead of video. I just hope it's a good movie. Seeing a big, gray-haired Harrison Ford riding behind a Fonzie-esque LaBouf (did I spell that right?) looked kind of silly and I wonder what they'll do now that Connery has turned down the project and yet, as far as I know, their script as Indy's father in it.

"...Bill O'Reilly and his friends will be picking apart the smallest details as attacks on mainstream American culture." As well they should! Conservatives have been attacked relentlessly by Hollywood for decades.

The one tricky thing about stereotypes and their negative reputation is that stereotypes, like cliches, are usually only around because there's more than a grain of truth to them. I guess the reason so many people hate stereotypes is that they hate the truth. I think we're all stereotypes in one way or another (I KNOW I am -- likely more than one) and that to oppose them is ridiculous. Even if this is a "stereotype yuk-fest," more power to you, Disney. Afterall, white men have been stereotyped as greedy, corporate, Fascist types [which a (very) few are, hence truth in stereotypes] enough times and nobody ever really complains about that -- why not stick it to someone else?

So, given everyone's love of "Heroes," the way to make a great superhero show is to make them a massive group of seemingly disconnected people with superpowers that all wear street clothes and advance the plot with dialogue consisting mostly of cryptic, broken sentences. I guess it all seems realistic and believable because the truh is that so few can manage to get out a complete and correctly structured sentence while talking anyway. Some might read that and say, "Well, duh -- nobody ever TALKS in complete sentences." WRONG -- Orson Welles did and I try to (similarities end there). I skipped the finale because I was non-plussed by the shows I had alread seen. Call it bad taste -- most probably will -- but ethnic diversity and avoidance of genre cliches still doesn't make this particularly groundbreaking. Besides, setting it in New York -- or making the big apple THE PLACE to save -- is practically a cliche in and of itself. It's funny how I don't hear anyone complaining about THAT cliche or piece of predictability. Almost everything in comics and related movies is set either in New York, LA or fictitious versions of one of the two cities. I guess heroes only grow up in the Midwest (ala Superman) and there just aren't any in the South, right? I mean, really, if you're going to be a hero, you're obviously going to move to a blue state. Nevermind that if your heroic ideology matches the state's politics then you represent a minority of the people in the country -- and it's not a racial or sexual minority, either. Yeah, I'm intentionally being an ass, but the points I make are sincere. You guys seem to think that you're worshipping the golden goose of all things fresh and new in this genre, but it's nothing more than old cheese with the mold sliced off the edge. I really don't care what people's tastes are, but declaring a show or any piece of literary or motion picture entertainment inherently superior is just stupid, especially with so many things indicating its equality or even inferiority to similar properties based on a widely used set of criteria.

The following is an opinion, but one that I firmly believed can be backed up to the point at which it almost becomes verifiable fact. OPINION: Hitchcock mastered filmmaking and was a perpetual audience-pleaser because he balanced the art with the craft, unafraid to take artistic risks but always with the audience's overall entertainment and understanding of the story in mind. That seems obvious, but considering how easily we tend to fall for mediocre movies because the films can't catch up with marketing departments; ability to churn out slick promotions, I doubt we're always aware of how important and relevant that achievement is. Nowadays, too many films are either really great pieces of art, but not very fun to watch, or are fun to watch on a spectacle level but resonate very little on emotional and intellectual levels and ultimately wind up forgotten by most that see them. While not all of Hitchcock's movies struck that successful balance, the longevity of so much of his work seems to owe a great deal to that very difficult balancing act, one that wasn't always appreciated in Hitchcock, either. "Vertigo," arguably his intellectual best alongside "Rear Window," was slammed by critics, and in the seventies there was a real resistance to Hitchcock (even while he was alive) because he was seen as having invented and then as representing the status quo of filmmaking, cow-towing to the un-discerning audience, which many filmmakers avoided like the plague once the censorship of the Hays Act was no more and studios were suddenly run by executives that gave younger filmmakers a fighting chance. As it may have already been pointed out here, this balancing act may have come more naturally to Hitchcock than it would to most in his position, in part because unlike many filmmakers, Hitch never actually set out to be one. His original interest was in engineering, and while he supposedly loved theater, he was known to sleep through most of the plays he attended. When asked later in life why he was a filmmaker, he responded by saying that it was the only thing he knew how to do, and in other interviews extolled the virtues of his regimented directing and administrative style. He was more an administrator, perhaps, than an artist, particularly since he relied heavily on his crew knowing how to do its work rather than succombing to the avid filmmaker's natural tendency to micromanage and have a hand in everyone's pot and every facet of the production -- even though Hitch knew from having worked in almost every facet during his training in England. On "Psycho," he so implicitly trusted screenwriter Joseph Stefano that the two never talked about motivation, and his trust in those he employed very famously irritated his actors because he just expected that interpretation of "the character" on any level not relating directly to his camera was the actor's job, and unless the actor was really having trouble and doing poorly, Hitch would barely communicate at all. Lastly, while this article rather awkwardly commemorates the 27th anniversary of Hitchcock's death, his lifespan is perhaps another indicator of why he was so successful at his work. While it seems crude and disrespectful to point out, anyone of Hitchcock's weight and stature is likely to suffer from heart disease, hypertension and diabetes, just to name a few ailments associated with obesity. While Hitchcock did definitely struggle with this and had health problems because of it, his 81 years of life unfolded in a time long before the diagnostic and surgical technology of modern medicine as we know it. What I believe accounts for Hitchcock's unusually long lifespan -- for his time, anyway -- is what I believe also accounts for his success in film and, in coming full circle, the balancing act to which I originally attributed such success. His cool temperament and objectivity, which people rarely achieve by anything other than genetics, made him saavy in his work and likely warded off or offset such weight-related ailments such as hypertension, high blood pressure and even heart disease, all of which is now known to be affected almost as much by someone's temperament and attitude as by their physical lifestyle.

I consider msyelf a film buff -- I like Ridley Scott's movies (at least a little...) and am a fan of Johnny Depp -- but the half-joke about preferring that people were "out to lunch" to the possibility that they had not seen the Ridley Scott movies irked me. It seems to be a tendency on these movie sites, however tongue-in-cheek, to sort of stick it to anyone that hasn't seen the batch of movies so beloved by the site, which in my experience tends to be pseudo-pornographic movies with hard R ratings, backwards story structure and directected by a select few directors (Tarantino, Rodriguez, Roth, Smith, etc.). To say there's something inherently WRONG with what I just said going on is a bit ridiculous, but equally ridiculous I think is the situation itself. I've seen all of the Ridley Scott movies mentioned, for example, but most of them only once and, you know what? I'm not extremely fond of any of them! By extension, I'm not that big a fan of Ridley Scott's work. Yeah, he shoots beautiful looking movies, as Hudson Taco rightfully points out, but so do a lot of directors. Since when did "looks" alone cut it for a web site with reputable film critics? Looks certainly matter -- we are talking about motion PICTURES, afterall -- but compare the imagery in Scott's work to the usually dull and subpar imagery from the early but still beloved works of Quinten Tarantino and Kevin Smith and the preference is really lopsided. 'You want to profile directors that matter? Try profiling the ones that taught these guys how to make movies in the first place: DW Griffith, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles... Those are only the most famous -- there are a lot more out there either never get mentioned or only get mentioned for establishing filmmaking practices which today are labeled "old" and "cliched." They're usually only cliched because however often they're used, they work. I suspect that the reason these guys get little or no coverage has less to do with intentions than with just plain ignorance. I've not been to film school, but I've trumped film school graduates in conversations about film history when I should have been the one to get trumped, especially since the rumor I always heard was that film schools focus on theory and history. I still like the sites -- you guys have great movie news coverage. I guess I just find it strange that with so many movie buffs, on these sites and in general, what happened sixty years ago seems to matter when picking which political party to support (for example -- never say politics doesn't enter movie criticism), but not when picking which movies to review or directors to profile. Sure, one's a LOT more important than the other, but if your living is in analyzing and critiqing the movies... Well, I'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that my intended point isn't completely lost here. Oh, and for Mania.com's sake, just to prove I've been paying attention, profiling Spielberg and Lucas for movies made in the seventies doesn't make up for virtually ignoring Griffith, Ford and Welles simply because people consider the movies from the seventies "classics."

Predictable... Robin Hood and his merry band of thieves face extinction at the hands of the "evil rich corporations" they've spent their lives robbing. If only POTC didn't think it had to be yet another, crappily subtle liberal message piece. Of course, nobody seems to see the irony of a movie like this, with corporate villains, NEEDING one of the oldest, largest and richest corporate film companies in existence (Disney) to make it. I'll see this, yes, for the spectacle and because I firmly believe that Johnny Depp is the late Marlon Brando's likely successor, albeit without an Oscar yet or some tree-hugging personal agenda to keep him from accepting an Oscar. Look at the similarities: From a comparably young age he has been a consistently versatile actor -- and successfully so -- that can do both "intellectual" and "popcorn" flicks, improving both with his mere participation and name in the credits and never having one put his career in jeopardy.

As much as I'd like Mr. Maguire to stay in the role, I get the sense that most of us have forgotten just how lucky we all were that he took the part in the first place, especially given the spotty quality of the first film, whether we were Spider-Man fans or not. He's been in the business steadily for at least a decade or more, Oscar-nominated and beyond being an accomplished actor was actually RIGHT for the role of Peter Parker and Spider-Man rather inherently. We should all count our movie-going blessings that he's done this many Spider-Man films and respect whatever he decides to do about any future entries. In any case, however long the comics have lasted, I'm not sure I want to see a 30 year-old Peter Parker / Spider-Man swinging through the streets with no Aunt May, MJ or Harry to interact with out-of-suit.

I'm not familiar with "24" except in its concept, but it just occurred to me, seeing his picture, that if it is dared, Mr. Sutherland might make a decent, "young" Captain Kirk in JJ Abrams' "Trek" movie. That is IF it is dared -- which I don't believe it should be regardless of actors.