The Three Musketeers (1974)

Now I know The Three Musketeers was originally written for the Beatles, and so its madcap humor is supposed to work in a particular way, but the trouble is I just didn't think any of this was really very funny.

The costumes are very, very cool. Honestly. But the rest of this thing just didn't really work. Its humor was sort of lost on me, and I really thought that both Michael York and Raquel Welch were boring. My lord Welch is beautiful, but she is truly terrible in this movie.

I've been curious to see this film (and its sequel The Four Musketeers) since I read in Faye Dunaway's autobiography that the actors thought they were only making one film. (You can read about this, but the actors sued, and now there is a clause in every SAG contract that the actor is only making a single film.)

Reading reviews of this movie, I feel like maybe I missed something – like maybe the jokes were just going over my head...? Perhaps they were. I will probably watch the sequel too. Maybe I'll start to understand Richard Lester's humor when Faye is onscreen more.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

Meh. This film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is fun, but it isn't really funny. Although the film's style is fairly clever, they've cut a lot of the songs. I liked the music-video quality of many of the numbers – "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid", especially. But the actors playing Hero, Philia, and Dominia are all underused.

Superman II

Man of Steel's trailer was awesome. I loved it. But the movie itself is actually absurd.

(My friend Walter reminded me that the trailer for Pearl Harbor was good, too.)

And it isn't just that Superman is rather a boring character (he is) or that the plot doesn't actually get started until at least halfway into the movie. I think it may be that Zack Snyder doesn't really know what he's doing. (Obviously a Michael Bay fan, Snyder one-ups Bay's falling skyscrapers in Transformers 3 by including at least three falling skyscrapers in Man of Steel.) Snyder alternates between explosion-filled setpieces and sententious scenes about "doing the right thing", and this is, basically, all he's got for us. In fact, somehow the movie manages to be about 90% exposition.

The sententiousness is provided by Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner – and more often than not only the sonorous tones of their voices (both fine in the movie, even though their characters are absurdly crafted). The content of this sententiousness is Snyder's usual generic mix of USAmerican patriotism, love of violence, Christian imagery, and pro-militarism. Yay America! Fun game: try to count the number of American flags in Man of Steel. Yay Jesus! Kal-El tells the militarized U.S. government that he is thirty-three years old. Since Henry Cavill was only twenty-nine during filming, it seems a rather blatant reference to the age of Jesus Christ when he was crucified. Yay military power! There are no democratically elected leaders in the movie; only fascist dictators and military leaders. But adolescent Clark, while getting picked on but refusing to punch the bully in the face, is reading (for pleasure, apparently) Plato's Republic. Some people, Man of Steel says, ought to have more power than most. It's okay if someone has a great amount of power as long as it's the right man who has the power. It's okay to break laws made by the majority, as long as you know you are doing the right thing. This is, of course – like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (Nolan was a co-writer on Man of Steel) – an apologia for dictatorship, increased government authority, and (not to be alarmist but) the police state.

It sounds like what I really object to in Man of Steel is its politics, but it's the movie that is bad: the politics are only incidental. Still, there are lots of cool things in the movie. Because it is setpiece after setpiece, I really didn't get bored until the last half hour of the movie (and I prefer a movie with this much action to a snorer like The Avengers, where I just kept waiting for a setpiece.) The art direction is Alien-inspired and looks really, really cool. If Amy Adams is miscast as Lois Lane (someone with less "pluck" and more gravitas would have been my choice), it was nice to see Clark and Lois as grown-ups as opposed to the teenagers who played the pair in Bryan Singer's Superman reboot from 2006. And Henry Cavill is just... so... pretty. Even more than he was when he was in his early twenties. I mean, his face is perfect. He's not so much sexy as he is adonic.

Still, the movie is almost not worth watching. And that's Zack Snyder's fault. Because while Snyder knows how to blow things up and create a visually enticing setpiece, he simply has no idea how to have any fun.