Obvious joke, I know, but I couldn’t resist.

There’s something similar, I think, in the comparison between Raimi and Webb: Webb has an eye for modernity where Raimi, God bless ‘im, is primarily nostalgic. And nostalgia makes superhero movies into something superhero comics never were — at least, that they never were until about 2005 — which is turgidly sentimental. Not that sentimentality has no place in a soap opera or romantic comedy or even an SF adventure, but it can’t be too turgid without making these things not what they started out as. Thinking of “Superman Returns”, for me the most casually horrid thing in it was the sight of Superman’s boots neatly stacked against the wall as he lay in his hospital bed…that level of sentimentality (“oh no! His poor boots! THE BOOTS OF THE CHRIST”) is where the ritual becomes a fetish, and the process an obstacle. And Raimi’s about a million times better-suited to making superhero movies than Singer is, admittedly, but he still cares for their supposed “iconic” nature a little too much, and icons make for crap characterizations, I think?

Man, I hated liking this as much as I did! But I’m grateful Peter didn’t have a moneygrubbing landlord named Mr. Ditkovitch, too, so I suppose it all evens out…

I would call it “a good movie”!

it’s an interesting question to ponder — the idea of some hoaxster at the Kremlin during the waning days of the Cold War drawing inspiration from old-timey Animal Man comics is an appealing one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell_hoax

I wonder if someone happened to remember Strange Adventures #180 from their childhood when they devised that story.