The Rise And Fall Of The Unbreakable Man

Warning:
Contains spoilers for Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense, The Happening, The Empire Strikes Back and Swimming Pool.
Plus, some dodgy opinions regarding Zooey Deschanel

For many, The Sixth Sense is a truly great film. It's a tightly woven masterpiece where everything hangs together like silk bedsheets. The twist - that Bruce Willis is actually a ghost for much of the film is clearly signposted for the keen-eyed viewer. Like all good twists, it reshapes the movie before your eyes without deconstructing it. It makes you want to go back and revisit it with the knowledge of what the twist is so you can soak up all the clues.

For myself, I twigged to the twist about halfway through the film. It's when Brucie goes to visit his wife at dinner. He sits down in the restaurant, but the chair has already been pulled out some ay. He doesn't touch it when he sist down (obviously his arse makes contact, but he doesn't actually handle it). It's a little bit of an odd thing and the first time watching The Sixth Sense, it jumped ut at me. Of course, it helped that I knew there wasa twist and was actively looking for it. Had I not known abut it, like the twist at the end of Charlotte Rampling/Ludivene Sagnier starrer Swimming Pool, that Sagnier is actually some sort of spectral echo of Charles Dance's lover from the early eighties, it would have been even more devastating.

However, The Sixth Sense, a hugely elaborate piece of celluloid sleight of hand that it was, was a huge success. But then Shyamalan fell into a trap. He became The Twist Man. Unbreakbale ended with the revelation that Samuel L Jackson's Mr Glass was Brucie's nemesis and that he had engineered dozens of accidents purely to find the Unbreakable Man. It remains Shyamalan's best film, and the most original superhero movie ever made. At its heart it never forgets about the human element, always a strong factor in any Shyamalan film. It's not really about saving the world, it's about two people who have forgotten how to communicate.

Signs, however, is where it all falls apart. Like The Happening, his latest offering, Signs is all about the invasion of the everyday. In The Happening, it's malevolent plants, in Signs it's amore prosaic alien invasion. For some reason it's a movie which is inexplicably popular with the mainstream crowd. For them, this is probably how an alien invasion would occur. And I will admit to being impressed by it when I was in the pictures. However, it's one of those movies that, as soon as the lights come up, you start to question elements of the film. Unlike The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, it falls apart in the analysis. They find a way of defeating the aliens and don't immediately broadcast it? They have an extremely violent reaction to water but are harvesting humans who are something like eighty percent water?

Of course, it's perhaps not so much about the logistics of an alien invasion as it is Shyamalan's comment on the all powerful nature of God (or a movie director). But even that metaphor is delivered in such a ham fisted manner that it would shame a sixth form student. Everything is laid out in such signposted terms (no pun intended) that a five year old child with learning difficulties would understand it. Unfortunately Signs had a 12 rating.

In fact, Signs so upset me that I still haven't been able to watch The Village all the way through (my patience wears thin at around the forty minute mark, by which point pretty much nothing has happened - in his first films Shyamalan's mannered and elegiac pacing was a virtue, a glorious antidote to the overpumped plotting and relentless pace of most other movies, now it just seems dull) and although I do own a copy of The Lady In The Water, I can't work up the interest to watch it, not even with the ever-delightful Bryce Dallas Howard as the eponymous Lady.

But I went to see The Happening at the pictures. It's one of the benefits of having an Unlimited card; I can go and see pretty much anything I like and if it's dross it doesn't really matter because it's not like I have spent six and a half quid on a ticket to see it. Of course, the two main reasons I went to see it were A) Nobody seemed to have a bloody clue what it was about; the best theory I could come up with from watching the trailer was that it was some kind of Jericho-esque movie about the end of the world and a whole bunc of characters being stranded somewhere. And B) Zooey Deschanel was in it. Not only is she absolutely gorgeous and possessor of the most amazing eyes you will ever see, but she's also a truly talented actress. Now that Maggie Gyllenhaal is spoken for in the DC Comics world, can I suggest Zooey as a replacement for Lois Lane?

So I goes to see it. It's about plants producing a gas which makes people kill themselves. Alright. Fair enough. I'm a science fiction/fantasy fan. I can buy that. It's a bit of a stretch to have people kill themselves in such a controlled manner (one early, brilliant, scene has people just walking off the edge of a building - this I can dig, but then we have people slitting their wrists, or a cop shooting himself in the head, then someone else picks up the gun and shoots themselves in the head and so on - it's a little too much to believe that this gas which makes people go crazy would also allow them to act in such a premeditated manner).

There's a lot made of mobile phones going off (this is a big thing in the trailer, hence my theory of end of the worldness). But it's never explained. In fact, during the film, mobiles work when it's convinient for them to work. So, Luigi off of Super Mario Bros. can't contact his wife, necessitating a trip to Princeton, but once he's there, a woman can contact her daughter just long enough for Marky Mark to find out that everyone's dead.

Yes. Everyone. Even though he's only spoken to one girl, who is inside her house, he concludes that 'everyone' in Princeton is dead. And it's not a small place. In fact, according to some sources, Princeton has a population somewhere approaching 30,000. Has she gone and knocked on all the doors? Or is Shyamalan engaging in cheap info-dump tactics so that Marky Mark will know that Luigi is dead?

It's the latter of course. This is one of those movies where the world outside the frame doesn't exist (apart from those moments of pure amatuerishness where a boom mike bobs about in shot, once for at least five long seconds). It's exactly the opposite school of film-making to something like Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings where the world building (a massively underrated factor in creating a believable world that is not our own) suggests that what we are seeing is just a teeny weeny fraction of what is out there.

And the ending. Endings are difficult, especially to apocalyptic stories. Here, Shyamalan wipes out most of the East Coast in a laboured metaphor relating somehow to environmental issues (it's ironic that a movie that is so concerned with the environment and the threat mankind poses to nature should spend so much of its running time in green fields) and yet, at the end (after of course the gas has simply disapated, leaving our heroes alive, a deus ex machine of the worst kind, one that is both undramatic and blatantly telegraphed) 'three months later' as the caption informs us, everything is back to normal.

As if.

Seven years after the events of 9/11, an event that is probably one of the sources of The Happening's genesis (the first 'attack' is centered around Central Park in New York and is initially reported as a terrorist attack, something that brings to mind the WTC with a bitter taste in the mouth), we're still feeling the aftershocks. Surely something of the nature of The Happening (and just a quick word about the inanity of that title, it's so vague as to be absolutely pointless - it wouldn't be so bad if it was used in an ironic sense, like Jospeh Heller's superlative novel Something Happened, but you know, I suspect that Shyamalan doesn't have a sense of humour, the one moment of comedy in the entire movie - Marky Mark having a conversation with a tree before realising that it is in fact plastic, is tellingly his best best of acting in the movie, and we all know he can act, Boogie Nights taught us that, it's just that he needs a great director to coax the performance out of him and Shyamalan isn't that) in which millions of people surely died (the first incident occurs in New York City, home to about, ooh, ten million people on an off day) the entire country would be devastated, both socially and economically. But that doesn't quite fit in with the story that Shyamalan wants to tell, which, at it's rather illshaped heart is the maturation of Mark Mark and the triumph of the family unit, even if the aforementioned unit is thirty-three percent adopted daughter. So there's a happy ending. It's like ending a romantic comedy with the two lovers finally getting together and admitting that they are made for each other and then having one of them jump in front of a train. Except not as dramatic.

Peace out.

A Whole New World

It's a strange world out there. From fetishes about eyeball licking to the career of Billy Ocean, there's something for everyone. And so it doesn't come as much of a surprise that pretty much any man you care to ask who will be honest about it will admit to fancying a cartoon character at some point. Most lads' first crush is a cartoon character.

I'll be ridiculously honest here and admit that I still kinda fancy some cartoon characters. We've moved on from She-Ra, Princess Of Power and Ariel the Little Mermaid and we're now on Lois Griffin from Family Guy, Hayley from American Dad and Cortana from the Halo games.

Actually, that one is even more disturbing because she's not even human(ish). It's like that episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Ashs To Ashes when a supposedly dead crew member comes back to the ship having been transformed into an alien. And as an alien she's a babe (I think it's something to do with the contact lens they have her wearing) but as the Doctor helps her revert to her human appearance, she gets less and less appealing. There's something about alien babes, which is kinda like fancying cartoon characters because there's an added air of artifice. So, step up Trance from Andromeda, Chiana from Farscape and Illyria off of Angel (stretching the definition of alien, being that she's actually a God, but the principle remains) and that's leaving off those alien babes who are superficially human like Deanna Troi and Seven of Nine and Aeryn Sun.

The question is why?

It's not a question I feel comfortable with answering because I can only speak for myself and it's a can of worms (issues of the fact that they aren't real and therefore pose no actual threat of hurting/abandoning me and my whole obsession with adventures in the male gaze starting with my first crush being She-Ra, therefore every woman will be compared to something that is blatantly unrealistic leading to something approaching a Mother Complex but wearing golden armour and carrying an enchanted sword (Good God, now we're on to phallic symbols, next I'll be talking about how Castle Grayskull, which is the Sorceresses bastion of power is a vagina dentata and that Skeletor (literally a walking bone) is constantly trying to penetrate it) and then we get into whole tracts of psychoanalysis dealing with my reluctance to deal with the real world - I'm a writer for fuck's sake, avoiding reality is something I do on a day by day basis - which is really a subject I should be saving up for my trip to counselling next week). So let's just leave it at that and I'll say that as soon as I hit puberty, I transferred my allegiance to a combination of Kimberly, the Pink Ranger from Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All (and then later Sabrina when Melissa Joan Hart became legal and started wearing ridiculously shirt skirts) and Clare Buckfield in 2.4 Children.

Peace out.

Kong - A New Breed Of Terror

The 1976 John Guillerman King Kong. It's a bit shit isn't it? I mean, yes, it's one of the last glorious gasps of the 'man in a monster suit' genre, and there are some brilliant bits when he goes on the rampage in the Big Apple, and yes, Jessica Lange was extremely fit back in the day. And Rene Auberjonois is always good value for money.

But it's still bobbins. Whoever thought Jeff Bridges was leading man material (he's a good actor, but his is the domain of character roles, he's too low key to be a star) was nuts.

Oh yes. That would be Dino de Laurentiis, wouldn't it, responsible for, among others, Conan, Barbarella, Flash Gordon, Red Dragon and dozens of other films of highly variable quality. Always after the big bucks was Dino.

And King Kong Lives, despite a brief appearance by Linda Hamilton's boobs, is even worse. I hired the video out of the store way back when it first came out and for years was convinced that I had somehow made it up because I could never find it again. The same thing with The Garbage Pail Kids, which I still haven't managed to track down a copy of.

Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the subject of this blog: Forgotten movies.

Not movies which have gotten lost n the mists of time, but those half-remembered movies from when you're a kid which stick with you. For me the list includes Howard The Duck (a fifteen year quest to track down a copy of that film), Supergirl (a strange one because it's got none of the weird shit in it tha most of the other films in this list have, but it never seemed to be on telly and you couldn't get a video of it for love nor money), Jaws 3-D, Brides Of Dracula, King Kong Lives, Child's Play (traumatised me as a kid that one, I now own a copy but haven't quite got up the nerve to sit down and watch it - 21 years after seeing it, forced to watch it by my sister, I still remember the nightmares I had about Chucky, and the scene from Damien - The Omen 2 where that woman gets er eyes pecked out by the Devil in the form of a crow and then wanders right in front of an articulated lorry, which is strange because I remember watching all three Omen movies with her and now, watching them as an adult, there's much more disturbing stuff in them than that - the death of the nanny ("It's all for you, Damien!"), the kid who gets trapped under the ice and for some reason the whole scene where Gregory Peck digs up Damien's real mother and finds a jackal skeleton disturbs me immensely). It's mainly stuff that I probably shouldn't have been watching at that young and impressionable age.

There was a video shop in the next village over (we weren't posh enough to have a video shop, hell, we didn't even have a proper newsagents until a few years ago) and because the guy who ran the shop knew me and he knew my dad, he tended to let me get out what I wanted. Sounds awful now I know, but my mam used to send me round the shop for her tabs and they would sell me them. My sister bought her own first tabs by saying they were for our mam. But it was a more innocent age. I suspect that if I had tried to rent out Nine and a Half Weeks or something he would have had something to say. But I wasn't interested in sexy movies. In fact, I got a little nervous when they came on. I was watching The Terminator with my gran and the sex scene came on. I got a little nervous - you don't want to look too interested in case they notice you getting excited, but you don't want to make your apparent disinterest too obvious. Needless to say, when Kyle Reese kicked the bucket, I was over the moon, because it meant that there wouldn't be any more awkward sex scenes. Of course, my gran was a very strange woman. When I was ten, shortly before she died, I went over to her house. She was watching Fatal Attraction and bade me to come and sit down with her while she watched it. That's another movie that's stuck in my mind, and put me off Glenn Close for life.

My Gran was always the first port of call for movies in my life. My mother never really took me to the pictures (in fact, I can only remember two occasions - Superman 4: The Quest For Peace and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze, the latter of which I had won free tickets for and I can only remember her ever mentioned going to the pictures another two times - for Top Gun and Grease) but my gran would always take me. She would always fall asleep halfway through the film, but she took me. We would go to the Cannon in Sunderland, or the Empire Theatre, which has a small screening room and would tend to show slightly older films. After her death, I only remember going to see Jurassic Park at the Cannon. It closed down shortly afterward, stood derelict for the longest time then reopened while I was at university as a nightclub. Not that I've ever been in. Even when I was in the depths of my degree I still went out in Newcastle.I can't remember a single occasion when I actually have gone out drinking in Sunderland. Sure, I've had a few quiet drinks in the pubs round there (The Transporter, now sadly changed hands and name, The Royalty, Chesters, the Manor Quay) but Sunderland as a night out has never quite appealed. The Empire doesn't show movies anymore, at least, not that I'm aware of.

My first experience of a modern multiplex was when my sister took me to see GoldenEye at the Warner Village in Newcastle (a complex which no longer exists, they knocked it down some years ago to make student accomodation). I'd skived off school for the day, with my mother's persmission amazingly enough. It was the beginning of December and our Clare took me out to Newcastle Christmas shopping. I bought some Doctor Who books in Forbidden Planet - this was at the very beginning of my love affair with that shop. We argued and Clare almost didn't take me. But take me she did - our Clare has always had a very high tolerance for my idiocy - and I was amazed. The Cannon had two screens, obviously the bare minimum that it could have to qualify as a multiplex. The Warner Village had twelve. It was an eye opening experience, let me tell you. But that wasn't the big shock. The big shock for me was the fact that there were only around seven people in the screen with us. Now I was used to packed houses. I didn't believe that they could justify screening a film for this few people, but screen it they did (and I have subsequently been to screening with even less people in attendance, including when I went to see Shrooms and I was the only one in the theatre) and so my affair with modern cinema began.

And in a way my childhood ended then. Before GoldenEye, movies at the cinema were a transient, special treat, with the advent of my pilgrimage to the Warner Village, they became something that I could do whenever I want to. I was the master of my cinematic destiny, and I haven't looked back since.

Peace out.

You Can't Get There From Here

WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR
"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL"
AND ALSO, GRATUITOUS USE OF THE PHRASE
"THE EIGHTIES WERE THE GREATEST ERA OF FILM EVER"

Indiana Jones - or, as the adult, grown up version has him, Henry Jones, Jnr - is back. It's been nineteen years since we last saw him, at least properly. In the long hiatus, we've had the TV series but it was like a Stepford version of Indy, bereft of the thrills and matinee joys that made the original trilogy so damn entertaining.

Nineteen years. It's a long time, especially considering that Harrison Ford was not a young man even when they did Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It's also strange when you consider that Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is very much a final act. It even has them riding off into the sunset at the end, father and son reconciled, evil defeated. So, while it's always nice to catch up with an old friend, sometimes it's better to leave the memories where they belong. Some fires should not be rekindled.

In the nineteen years since Henry Jones and Henry Jones, Jnr rode off into the sunset movies have changed immeasurably. CGI has risen swiftly, gone from its brash youth like a bull in a china shop to being a valuable tool in skilled hands. Superstars have burned brightly and then faded just as fast (and speaking of which, isn't it sad that all three of Indy's girls - Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and the divine Alison Doody - seem to have faded into obscurity following their adventure). The global political scene has changed; the Cold War has finished, new enemies have emerged...

So Indiana Jones is a relic of a bygone age. And cleverly, they play with that notion in the film itself. It's nineteen years after the events of The Last Crusade. Indy is still teaching, but Marcus Brody has passed away, as has Henry Jones, Snr. There is a lot made of Indy's war record - apparently he worked for the Secret Service during the war - but at heart he's the same man, although older and crankier and he has the same zeal for archeology. And bringing Indy's dislocation into sharp focus, we have that young rising star, Shia LeBeouf, as a young greaser, looking exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One when we first see him.

The plot plays almost like a replay of The Temple Of Doom, but with better villains (the gorgeous and talented Cate Blanchett) but with the Roswell aliens/Erich von Daniken progenitors/The Mysterious Cities of Gold as the plot McGuffin instead of some borderline offensive Hindu mythology. It's a glorious hodge-podge of a dozen or so ideas that almost - but not quite - fits together perfectly.

It's probably no secret now that Mutt is Indy's son. Hell, it was no secret before the film came out. The rumour mill had been going full tilt and it would have been a surprise if Mutt hadn't been Indy's son. It's one element of the script that seems a little shoe-horned in. Sean Connery's role in The Last Crusade was thematically relevent and expertly woven into the plot. Mutt just seems to be there to fill in the youth demographic. One surprise is Ray Winstone's character. We all knew he would betray Indy (this is one area where the film differs from Temple - that film is the only one where he is not betrayed by a friend) but then he comes out as a double agent. It's a brilliant move and is only trumped later on when he reveals he was lying and actually has betrayed him after all.

Despite all of this, Indy IV is very much a film out of time. It tries to recapture the glories of the 80's action movie, because as we all know, the eighties were the greatest era of film ever, especially for fantasy films. And running along the spine of the 80's were the Indiana Jones films. Raiders was there in 1981 at the start and The Last Crusade made its bow in 1989, sandwiched in between them are some of the greatest fantasy films ever - Labyrinth, Star Trek 2, American Werewolf, Supergirl, Gremlins, The Fly, Terminator, Aliens, Blade Runner - it's the birth of modern fantasy movies.

Simce then we've had the rapid maturation of the science fiction movie followed by a rediscovery of its innocence with the rise of the superhero movie. Film has become aware of itself. In a very real sense, film has eaten itself. So much of film these days is post-modern, not in the breaking of the fourth wall sense, but in the sense that most movies are aware of their place, chock full of references to past efforts. It's a movement that gave Quentin Tarantino his entire career (even Jackie Brown is built on seventies blaxploitation). Indy IV doesn't do this.

And maybe that's a good thing.

It's kind of like a throwback. It wouldn't work for every film. Hell, it wouldn't work for many films. Indy gets away with it because of its heritage and the fact that despite his occasional misfires - naming no names but Hook, The Lost World, Amistad - Steven Speilberg is perhaps the greatest director of all time (and coming from a hardcore Scorsese fan, that's a funny thing to say) and if anyone can pull it off, it's the 'Berg.

So, four out of five for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, losing points for a slightly pointless McGuffin (the previous three films were all about saving the world, Indy IV doesn't have anything like that focus) and for Cate Blanchett's slightly wandering Russian accent and the fact that she wears overalls throughout the entire film and doesn't get into anything more... alluring, like Alison Doody in Last Crusade.

Advide to George Lucas though: Let the franchise lie. It's a happy exercise in nostalgia, but like Star Wars and James Bond, it's time to let it rest or to reinvent it into something new and exciting. But with Indy, I'm not sure that would work, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be the Indiana Jones we know and love. In a way, Indy IV is like a love letter to the 80's (and it's ironic that a fil which is so rooted in thirties chapter serials and fifties B movies - no doubt an Indy film set during the forties would draw upon war movies and film noir - is so adoring towards the eighties). And that is a thing of beauty.

Peace out.

Questing For Peace

Okay. Superman.

In a way, he's the ultimate personification of the American Dream. He's the definitive alien immigrant. And I love him.

It's a long seated love, mainly rooted in the Christopher Reeve movies rather than the comics, because growing up as a kid in the north of England, the only place that I went to regularly that sold comics was the chemists in the Galleries at Washington. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, and even then, the whole history of comic books seemed to be far too complicated to just dive right in. It's a hobby that requires a lot of time, effort and most importantly, money. I briefly tried to get into the whole comic book nerd scene, but I was spending about fifty quid a month just to try and keep up with the core DC titles (those relating to Batman and Superman) and even then I felt like I was missing out of a whole load of stuff. So mostly my comic book love comes from graphic novels, where you can be sure you're getting the whole story and there's no worry that you're going to go to the comic shop and find out they've sold out of Part 5 of a six part story. It's not a bad way of going about things. You still get the quality stories (Watchmen, The Death Of Superman, A Death In The Family) without all the stress. So I'm laying my cards on the table here because whereas I would call myself a fan, I'm not hardcore.

So let us tal about why Superman is the greatest hero alive.

When I was a kid, I preferred Batman. Seriously. I mean, Superman was all well and good, but he was invulnerable, whereas Batman was dangerous and real and he could be hurt. And Tim Burton's Batman is a great movie.

So what happened? Well, when I was a kid, I thought that the best Star Wars movie was Return Of The Jedi. Now, I think it's The Empire Strikes Back. But by that rationale, my favourite Star Trek movie (The Wrath Of Khan in case you didn't know) would have changed as well, and it hasn't, and Blade Runner has been my faourite film since I was fourteen (the same age I was when I as espousing the opinion that Jedi was the best Star Wars film). I think a lot of it does have to do with growing up though. What you think is cool when you're a kid is not necessarily what you think is cool when you're grown up, and vice versa. If you'd told my eight year old self that in twenty years he'd not only own several Elton John albums but also actually enjoy listening to them and advocate him to his friends he'd have laughed in your face and then probably run off to listen to Kylie Minogue (again, some things never change, Kylie still rocks) or that he'd still love Mary Poppins and ET and Choose Your Own Adventure books and he wouldn't believe you. So, opinions about some things change and some things stay the same.

Somewhere in between Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (a tiny screening room at the Sunderland Empire, one of only two times my mother took me to the cinema, summer 1987) and Superman Returns (Gateshead UCI, probably by myself aged 25, summer 2006) Superman became my hero. Batman Begins (and like it or not, Batman's legacy was far more ruined by Batman and Robin than Superman's ever was by The Quest For Peace) had come out the previous year and was loved by me but in that nineteen year gap I had read The Death Of Superman (and watched and enjoyed four years of Lois and Clark and also a whole bunch of Smallville, which remains one of the most peculiarly paced of modern TV shows).

The Death Of Superman, originally published in 1993, at about the same period of time that Batman was getting his back broken, leading to one of the biggest shake ups in DC comics history (well, post Crisis on Infinite Earths history), is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and certainly my favourite graphic novel with a hero like Superman at its core (the others, like Watchmen are limited series, as opposed to part of a serial comic). It was that book which allowed me to finally understand just what Superman is all about.

Not to cheapen Batman, but he does what he does because he feels he has to. He's driven to fight injustice by the murder of his parents. He is, in a sense, a psychopath himself, because he has these deep rooted psychological drives. Superman does what he does because he can. What he does, no one else can so he feels he has a duty. He has an obligation to serve and protect.

This duty is at the core of The Death Of Superman. It features the villain Doomsday, a raging, animalistic creature of mysterious origins. In the first issue he appears out of nowhere and immediately goes about trashing the place. The Justice League try and stop him and get collectively trounced. The entire Justice League. Some of them are hurt, badly. So Supes comes in and, after a long fight, manages to defeat Doomsday, but only at the cost of his own life. He gives so much to protect Metropolis (and Lois in partcular) that he dies. He sacrifices himself to save the city. And he does this without a second thought. . He doesn't even think about anything else. He only thinks to try and stop Doomsday, by any means necessary.

There's a moment in Superman Returns which perfectly captures this sense. It's near the start of the film and the bi action set piece with the plane. It's hurtling towards Earth, promising certain death for all those aboard (which, incidentallhy includes Lois). He grabs hold of a wing, but it comes loose, sending Supes reeling. As soons as he gets his equilibrium back, he's flying back down towards the plane as fast as he can. Naturally, this involves flying in a straight line. Unfortunately, that path is slightly occupied by the wing that's come loose. No matter, Supes just steels himself and flies straight through it.

It's a completely throaway moment, and if you want to be a pedant about it, we know he's Superman, a rogue airplane wing isn't going to bother him. But it's a moment in which you know that Bryan Singer knows and care about Superman. There's a lot wrong with Superman Returns (a lopsided dramatic structure, Kate Bosworth's complete lack of charisma, the whole Son of Superman subplot - which might become problematic if the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, which has Supes erase his love affair with Lois by turning time back, a la the first movie as opposed to the original version with its 'magic kiss' becomes the default version, which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, given that the HD release contains only the Donner cut, with the theatrical release relegated to the bog standard DVD - and Frank Langella's phoned in performance as Perry White) but its heart is in the right place. If Singer stays on board, and can get over his relentless hero worship of the original Donner film, the franchise is in safe hands. They've already made moves in the right direction, promising a more villain led plot and the recasting of Katie Holmes' soporific Rachel from Batman Begins with the sublime Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight is an indicator that they (that is, DC and Warners) are not afraid to admit to their mistakes and get rid of cast members that didn't gel.

Peace out.

"Why Don't You (Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone?)"

Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.

At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.

I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.

While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.

She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.

No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?

Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.

So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.

Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.

In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.

But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?

I'm really getting too old for this shit.

Lovers Town Revisited, or My Adventures With Girls Not Named Natalie

It's Sunday. Again, and like pretty much every Sunday for a long while now, I've had the day off. I may hate working every Saturday, but at least it gives me the Sunday off. Not that I'm generally appreciating it at the moment.

Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.

You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.

This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.

That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.

So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).

I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.

You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.

Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.

The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.

The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.

It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).

Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.

I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.

Fuck.