In spite of the many reservations I had, I allowed myself to go into Man of Steel with an open mind.  In spite of the fact that I thought Zack Snyder was a terrible choice to direct a Superman movie, and that hiring the duo that revitalized Batman (David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan) to write Superman – thematically Batman’s polar opposite – also seemed like a bad idea, I let my hopes rise because some of the recent commercials looked cool.

Those hopes were dashed around the one-hour mark when I realized the movie was going to fail to find a pace. Poorly edited, the tone of the movie will wildly go from a scene of two people having a simple conversation to people yelling and explosions exploding in very little time. Poorly written, the dialogue is a collection of military mumbo-jumbo and generic inspirational phrases (“You were destined for greatness.” “I believe in you, Movie Protagonist.” “You know what they always say, [insert a saying no one ever uses].”). Poorly directed, the acting is mostly too straightforward to be memorable and the shakiness of the camerawork is too distracting (I wanted to throw the footage into After Effects to stabilize it).

There is very little character development. Scenes meant to have emotional weight crumble when you realize that we barely know these characters. For example, when Jonathan Kent is swallowed up by a tornado, it’s at first heartbreaking to see Clark’s reaction as he watches his adoptive father die. But we’ve seen them onscreen for so little, there’s not a strong enough bond between them to warrant the emotional reaction. It doesn’t help that Pa Kent’s end is brought on himself when he goes back to free the family dog from their car. I have a dog. I love my dog. But that’s how he went out?

All of the emphasis in the advertising is placed on Clark’s fights with General Zod, and rightfully so. His plan to terraform Earth takes up the second half of the film, and his climactic fight with Superman is a stunning display of computer showmanship. A real joy to guess just how many computers it took to render all of the debris and glass and falling girders free from the burden of worrying if there’s anyone actually in the buildings Zod destroys (Metropolis in general doesn’t have many extras populating it).

At least Zack Snyder refrains from his traditional slow-motion. I gotta’ give him props for that, if for no other reason that it exposes that yes, even without his more gimmicky filmmaking techniques, he’s still not a good director. But David Goyer’s screenplay deserves equal criticism. It’s thin and explores no new aspects of the character that haven’t been explored in other mediums several years ago. Superman in the film has little personality, and the most interesting thing done with his character is when he commits genocide, but it’s brushed under the rug and never mentioned again.

This comes just seven years after Superman Returns, a movie America collectively shrugged at and went, “Eh.” Twenty years earlier, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace smeared theatres. And until trailers for Man of Steel showed Superman punching the hell out of people in black suits, most people were writing the movie off as WB’s obligatory attempt to catch up to Marvel.

This all begs the question: why the fuck is it so hard to make a good Superman movie? Why do people like Bryan Singer, David Goyer, Zack Snyder, and the producers of Superman III and IV keep getting attached to make the Man of Steel into movies? At one point during the 90’s, Tim Burton was attached, and his version was as fucking weird as you’d expect it to be. In the early 00’s, names attached to Superman included Brett Ratner and McFuckingG.

Why? Fucking why?

There have been great writers that have worked on Superman, in the comics and on television. I love Kurt Busiek’s Superman: Secret Identity, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son, and Bruce Timm’s Superman: The Animated Series. The restrictions of television ended up defeating the early-nineties show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, but I loved creator Deborah Joy LeVine’s take on Superman.

There’s good Superman work out there. Read Alan Moore’s Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? John Byrne’s Man of Steel. Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come.

I know a lot of people criticize Superman for being boring, both because he’s often portrayed as a goody two-shoes boy scout and because he’s very powerful. He flies around in bright primary colors and wears underwear over his pants. Yeah, he’s goofy. But you’d think once you’ve filtered out those people, you’d be left with the people that buy into it. The folks that go, “I know it’s crazy, but I’m going to stick with it because I like the idea of Superman.” These folks never seem to be the ones that get to make the movies, at least not without warping the character by turning him into an absentee father/stalker/Chris Reeve impersonator.

You can see how frustrating it is for me, because I know the character can be great. He can be interesting. He can be relatable. Written correctly, the line “You will be an inspiration” can actually be accurate without sounding cheesy (I lied; it’ll always sound cheesy) if Superman is a character that isn’t written as a pre-destined good guy. He’s every good deed and decent human being – the ones the feel-good pieces on morning TV are about – rolled up into a cape and tights. If you buy that he has the most boring origin of any superhero ever invented – he was raised properly by loving parents – then you can buy that he’ll always do the right thing. Suddenly it makes sense that he’s the ultimate good guy. And you’re incredibly thankful that it’s him with the power to leap tall buildings and outrun speeding bullets.

We have our Punishers and Batmen. We have tons of Iron Men. We have Watchmen and Hancock. We have the antiheroes and morally-conflicted superheroes down pat and in abundance. Let Superman be the opposite. And then find good director to take a good script and make that.

You can call up any of the people I’ve gushed about already. They get it.

Last night I had a dream I was back at my high school outside one of the trailer classrooms with some friends and we found a newborn kitten. It was crying, and a cat we assumed was its mom came and picked it up like it was carrying it home. Instead it took two steps and then ate it like a snake eats a mouse.

Then later the same day, my friend who works at the zoo showed me a picture of a baby pigeon followed by a picture of a cat. I can’t help but feel like it means something.

regretsivehadfew:

A contest so you will…

These things have been sitting on the shelf for about a year and half. And my boss decided to put them on clearance. So I bought them. I am giving away 1 per person.

Here are the rules… Reblog and like. That’s it!

Winners will be chosen at random on April 3rd, 2013. All will be notified by a personal message.

Oh yeah… And if you can’t tell. They all light up.

Only 9 people will win 1 of these.

Good luck.

Update* I can assure you all the this isn’t some stupid April Fool’s thing. I chose April first because it gives people a whole month to reblog this. I am a man of my word. 

Update ** I have changed the cut-off date to April 3rd, 2013 so people will stop asking if this isn’t some kind of sick joke. 

Kick Start My Heart- Motley Crue

Most of the issues I have with Cloud Atlas are fundamental, because it’s a fundamental-heavy movie. It presents six seemingly-unrelated stories, each different in tone, subject material, setting, & theme, and proposes that these stories are linked because the universe says so. Also, love.

It suggests that the cause of deja vu is an experience we’ve lived in a past life. It suggests that once we bond with someone in one life, we are eternally linked with them, destined to continue falling in love with them. As several characters explain in the movie, “Our lives are not our own.” But the movie does a very poor job convincing you of these things if you don’t already buy into them. For example, one of my least favorite concepts in fiction is the whole concept of destiny. I find very little appealing in the idea that, just because a worn piece of paper or a mystical, disembodied voice says that something is going to happen, it will. If even the knowledge of a future event and the free will to change it isn’t enough to stop a pre-destined event from happening, then what are the stakes?

While Cloud Atlas is not that kind of movie (there’s no prophecy or anything like that), it falls into another category of fiction that rubs me the wrong way. By suggesting that the lives of people are not truly their own, their free will is taken away, and by taking that concept to its logical conclusion, they’re not even people at all. They may make choices, and it may be that their choices are not predestined but in fact simply influencing the choices of future generations, but the film doubles down and introduces themes of reincarnation. Characters make choices and react based on feelings of intuition that are a result of their past lives. So if you’re like me and believe that your existence is defined by your experiences, you might be miffed to find that the movie throws that idea out and asserts, “You could be in a different social class, or a different race, even a different gender, and yet somehow, you will make choices based on what happened to you in a different life that you don’t remember.”

To give an example, in the story set in the 70’s, a corporate thriller, Tom Hanks’ character meets Halle Berry’s character. Afterwards, his narration explains that he’s somehow fallen in love with her after just one meeting. The implication being their lives have been linked across generations. And yet, their characters hadn’t met in any previous chronological incarnation, though they meet and fall in love again in the future. And to me that (plus Hanks’ line, “Do you ever feel like the universe is against you?”) implies that all of the characters’ connections go beyond the idea of simply recalling experiences from past lives. The movie hardly ever feels religious to me, but it was very spiritual. So the universe just wants those two to be together, without explanation. And that, as an idea, is uninteresting to me.

But if you were to strip the movie down to its essentials, it’s still mostly a misfire to me. When you tell multiple, loosely-related stories, it’s rare that you can manage to make them all equally interesting, even if they’re presented as equally important. So it’s no surprise that there are long stretches where the movie lost my attention simply because I was more invested in some of the stories than others. And for such a information-dense movie, that’s dangerous. It made already-boring stories even harder to follow because I’d either tuned out and missed an important piece of dialogue, or more frequently because so much time had passed that I’d forgotten what had been happening in one of the stories. The concept of reusing actors in the different stories to support the reincarnation theme at first sounds like a good way to anchor the audience from the burden of being flooded with so many characters. But in practice, cutting between the different stories so quickly and so often simply has the effect of making you forget which character any given actor is playing at the moment. You forget what their goals and motivations are.

On a technical level, the film is pretty to look at. The cinematography is lush and the special effects are top-notch. You get a sense that the $100 million budget was spent well and strategically. The movie is edited so that at times, long stretches are devoted to one story, while action is often intercut between the stories. I have to admit that this is pretty effective at keeping the momentum going. It’s only when the writing itself for a story is lackluster that the movie started to drag for me. The actors are often hampered by make-up of varying quality, so while I struggle to think of anyone who did a bad job, no one other than Tom Hanks sticks out positively in terms of performance. All this to say that I don’t really expect any less from the directors of Run, Lola, Run and The Matrix. I did like director Tom Twyker’s stories (the ones set in the 30’s, 70’s, and present), because they felt the most rooted in human emotion. This is definitely a film that, as a whole, is weaker than its individual parts. While I feel a strong sense of animosity towards Cloud Atlas days after seeing it, there are small moments and aspects of the film that I really respect and enjoyed.

To me, the biggest fault is that the movie as a whole feels like a hypocrite. In the introduction to the five-minute trailer on iTunes, the directors insist that the movie is really about the human experience and human emotions. For most of the movie, that’s really not the case at all. The two stories set in the future, for example, fall in the common sci-fi trap of using characters as puppets to serve a larger story about revolution, the survival of the human race, etc. The characters stop acting in their self-interest to spout drivel about fighting for a bigger cause or chasing the “magical cure” that will ensure humanity will survive another day. Up to this point in history, change has been the result of many people working together for long periods of time, not two people saving the world in two hours. And when you settle on the latter, you’re really going for the antithesis of the human experience. There’s only one story in this movie that felt like I was watching actors pour the heart and soul into recreating the raw emotions that all of us, as human beings, have probably felt at some point in our lives, and it’s the story about four senior citizens trying to escape a nursing home.

Which, incidentally, got left off the poster.

Among other things, Karter likes to skateboard. It is his 8th passion, after baking. Once, Karter took a wrong turn and accidentally arrived in Seattle. Karter’s 501st passion is cars, but he only has 500 passions, which means he doesn’t know much from cars, so he didn’t understand why the car stopped moving when the needle reached “E.”

“‘E’ for “Excitement’ - let’s go, you metal behemoth!” cried out Karter, but alas, the plastic Ford Fiesta did not go.

And so, Karter stepped out of the smoking behemoth and into the crowd of people that had gathered round. Half of them were in shock, tears rolling down their cheeks as they looked at the motionless bodies on the ground behind Karter’s Ford Fiesta, but the other half was looking north.

 Karter followed their gaze, where he saw a man on a wooden board with four wheels attached to the bottom rolling up and down a giant structure that resembled a PVC pipe cut in half. Instantly, Karter thought, “That strange contraption that man is on resembles my skateboard!” Karter was, of course, referring to his own skateboard, which in fact was a wooden board with four grocery-cart wheels sloppily glued to the bottom. “I must investigate.”

So investigate Karter did, for that’s what Karter was known to do when he was not trapped behind the wheel of his Ford Fiesta. He pushed his way through the dense crowd, fighting through the stink of PBR and tapioca. He reached the bottom of the giant PVC pipe, looked up, and exclaimed, “YOU, SIR, ON THE STRANGE SKATEBOARD!”

He was ignored, at first, but after ten minutes of solid yelling, the man on the board, which for legal reasons I shall now note that he was also wearing a helmet, came to a halt at the bottom and asked, “Dude? What’s your problem?”

“Where did you acquire that device?” bellowed Karter.

“My board? It’s custom, man.”

“So, what, Home Depot?”

The man on the board rolled his eyes and resumed his tricks, rolling up and down the sides of the pipe and using the momentum to launch himself into the air and spin.  Karter was mesmerized. He raced back to his Fiesta and opened the trunk, hitting the back of someone’s head in the process, and retrieved his skateboard.

“Ow!” cried out the man who’d been hit by Karter’s trunk door.

“Allow my vehicle ample space, man!” warned Karter.

“I’m here treating the people YOU ran over, you lunatic!” retorted the injured man.

“Yes, they did not heed my warning either.”

Karter slung the board over his shoulder and ran back to the PVC pipe. Two burly men in black T-shirts with nonsense written in white letters across the chest tried to grab Karter, but Karter had spent weeks developing and modifying his board for dual use as a weapon. Karter swung the board frantically, practicing a style he’d seen on the street, striking them both on the head. The burly men decided to retreat. This gave Karter the perfect moment to leap onto the PVC pipe with his board in hand. Once he’d climbed up, he looked back at the crowd and raised his arm. They all raised their arms too and cried out, either in fear or ecstasy, Karter couldn’t quite tell. He was just doing what he’d seen in a movie once.

Karter stepped onto the board with one foot and used the other to kick the ground, propelling him forward. He’d discovered this one day when he felt too lazy to carry his board back home from the bottom of the hill he lived on. Even the man on the other board seemed impressed at Karter’s strong calf muscles. Or perhaps angry. Again, Karter couldn’t quite tell. When he reached the top of the PVC pipe, Karter looked down, closed his eyes, and breathed in. He could hear some of the cries from the crowd now.

“Get off the half-pipe!”

Yes. The crowd wanted him to go, just as the other man leapt off and rolled up and down the pipe and made cool jumps at the ends.

When he opened his eyes, Karter noticed that the other man had gotten off the pipe. “Good,” Karter thought, “It might’ve been dangerous if we were both rolling up and down the pipe. These boards are unsteer-able.”

Karter released his breath, put both feet on the board, and leaned forward. He let the mystical force that pulls everything but birds and planes down to Earth work its magic on him, the rickety wheels making all sorts of horrendous noises that he usually tuned out. Karter felt a rush he hadn’t felt since driving the Fiesta over a crowd of people that hadn’t listened to his warning to get out of the way. It was exhilarating.

But Karter noticed something was wrong when he heard a loud “thud” noise, which was accompanied by the world suddenly tilting left and to the front a little bit - more so than it had when he’d leaned forward about a second earlier. Karter looked in the direction the world had shifted and saw a barrage of sparks flying out from underneath the board. He looked back and saw a tiny grocery-cart wheel bouncing off the pipe and into the crowd of adoring fans. “Hmm. Someone else must’ve ripped the wheels off a grocery cart,” thought Karter.

Karter realized something else was wrong when the world evened out, tilting slightly toward the right, and forward even more. His feet were no longer firmly on the board. You might even describe it as a feeling of nothingness underneath them.

But it wasn’t until Karter’s face hit the bottom of the pipe not a second later that he grasped the severity of the situation. His board had fallen apart from beneath his feet, and that mystical force kept pulling him down because he wasn’t a bird or a plane. And he’d started from a good distance above the ground, so hitting the bottom of the PVC pipe really smarts. His body soon followed, rolling over several times before the remains of his skateboard landed on him.

Several hours later, Karter awoke in a white room on a white bed wearing blue paper. It had bar handles on each side, his back was slightly elevated, and there was a TV on the ceiling across from his bed. Also, there were silver shackles on his right wrist and ankle.

“Oh good,” thought Karter. “I didn’t know how to get home from the PVC pipe.”

I started to type “How do you…” into Google and the first thing that popped up under suggestions was “How do you get pregnant.” First one. And I don’t know what weirds me out more: that “How do you get pregnant” is apparently one of the most popular “How do you…” searches, or that the first Google result was a link to “How To Get Pregnant Fast, Infertility Treatment.”

The next three options were, “How do you know,” “How do you resurrect in temple run,” and “How do you get pink eye.”

I remember when I was at my first job, where I did clerical work at a customs broker’s office, one of my co-workers handed me an envelope on my birthday. It was a small office and I’d been working there for about six or seven months, so I thought, “Aw. Everyone got me a card and signed it!” Inside the birthday card though was a bunch of well-wishes and “Happy birthdays!”s from people I didn’t recognize or had even heard of in my life. After a few moments, I realized it was from the corporate office. I’d never spoken to or had contact with anyone from corporate. I wasn’t even a full-time employee. But I guess they have some calendar there with everyone’s birthdays from every office. And I guess at the end of every week they just pass around cards for upcoming employees’ birthdays and sign them. Didn’t get any cards from my co-workers…

Still, I guess it’s awfully nice of corporate to do that.

Today, at a different office and company, I got handed a card I was supposed to sign for one of my co-workers. Almost everyone else had signed it by this point so it was already crammed with messages of well wishes and hopes for the best (she’s moving). I thought back to the card I got from corporate, signed by people that never saw or met me. This co-worker sits about ten feet away.

But I didn’t know what to say so I drew a smiley face and signed my name.

Shame - I love films about self-destruction. This one’s a quiet drama about a sex addict (Michael Fassbender) living in New York City who has kind of a scummy boss (James Badge Dale), a dependent sister (Carey Mulligan), and a huge porn collection. At first, it seems like being a sex addict isn’t half-bad, since Fassbender’s dashing good looks allow him to bed a healthy amount of women (though admittedly, some of them are hookers). But soon it’s clear that being a sex addict is like being any other kind of addict - it consumes his life and makes having relationships almost impossible. The problems begin to come in with the script, which isn’t focused and has moments that don’t make sense. Though Mulligan and Fassbender are both great in this film, I don’t buy them as siblings. The pace is slow; and while I can appreciate a character study that takes its time, director Steve McQueen feels like he’s self-indulging at times.

Young Adult - Jason Reitman’s highly-anticipated follow-up to Up in the Air and Juno comes in the form of Diablo Cody’s script about the author of a YA series who decides to visit her hometown after receiving a birth announcement from an ex-boyfriend. Like Shame, this film features a strong performance from the lead, but the script is also aimless at times. Charlize Theron’s performance, as good as it is, is also a detriment to the film - the character is unlikable and the film fails to make a compelling argument for why the viewer should care about anything that happens to her. By the time the audience realize they’re supposed to be rooting against her, the film pulls the rug from underneath them and fails to deliver a satisfying ending, settling for, “Meh.” An accurate portrayal of real life? Sure. So why the hell did I spend $11 to see it in a theatre?

The Artist - Michel Hazanavicius (try saying that three times in a row) re-teams with his wife Bérénice Bejo and OSS 117 actor Jean Dujardin in this story about a silent film star who falls from grace after the stock market crash of 1929 and the introduction of talkies. What’s more impressive is that he does it as a silent film in and of itself that feels authentic. Jean is remarkable as silent film star George Valentin, and Michel manages to get equally impressive silent performances from the rest of the cast. However, at 100 minutes, it begins to feel like it’s dragging on for too long in spite of all of its charms.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - Snoozeville. I have no idea what was happening for most of the film. Robert Downey Jr. seems content finding more outlandish ways to make Holmes appear out of touch and just plain odd. He feels less like the master detective from the first film and more like a trickster that specializes in making life unpredictable. In this film, Guy Ritchie introduces Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis. He feels less like a nemesis and more like a guy that shows up every twenty or so minutes to twirl his mustache. The last fifteen minutes feel more like the first film, with surprising twists and tense dialogue between Holmes and his rival, but by then it’s too little, too late. Oh, and Holmes’ brother shows up, played by Stephen Fry. He doesn’t do much.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol - Apparently I’m at odds with the rest of America when it comes to Tom Cruise’s latest IMF outing. Despite some entertaining action pieces, I found it hard to take the shenanigans seriously because of the weak script, unmenacing villain, and some cartoony physics. It has none of the tongue-in-cheek ridiculousness of the second film, nor any scene as suspenseful as the famous scene from the original. Simon Pegg sticks out like a sore thumb. Though funny, his character passes the line of comedic relief and ventures into, “Hi everyone, I’m Simon Pegg. And you like me.” However, I seem to be in the minority on this one.

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn - Steven Spielberg discovers a new bag of tricks in the form of motion-capture animation to pleasant results. Tintin is a fun romp that harkens back to the childlike wonder of Spielberg’s earlier films. The world of animation seems to unlock new areas of imagination, as evidenced by some creative and inventive action sequences (the best one involving Tintin’s dog, Snowy). Perhaps most satisfyingly, Spielberg excellently uses Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as a pair of Interpol agents without overdoing it. The weakest aspect of the film is probably the script. The story is nothing revolutionary and each scene is basically just meant to set up the next action sequence.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - David Fincher takes a crack at Stieg Larsson’s material and brings Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig along for the ride in this story about a disgraced reporter, a punk hacker, and a forty-year old mystery. Fincher’s version is gritty, stylish, and dark. Any fears that Hollywood would tone down the violent material from the original can be put to rest. However, it doesn’t deviate much from the Swedish version aside from Mara’s dirtier take on Lisbeth Salander. Apropos, it suffers from the same hour-long denouement as the Swedish version, making you wonder when the film will end long after the tension from the climax has disapated.

My Week With Marilyn - This charming piece from Britain tells the story of Colin Clark’s experiences as a 3rd Assistant Director on the film The Prince and the Showgirl. Like The Artist, part of the film relishes in the glory days of Hollywood studio filmmaking gone by. There is a loving sense of nostalgia prevalent throughout the movie. Unfortunately, it’s hampered by a script that doesn’t know what to focus on and has extraneous elements like a prop girl (played by Emma Watson) that Colin dates for a couple of scenes. Even Marilyn Monroe’s scenes (where she’s played well by Michelle Williams) feel dragged out of a movie about her instead of about someone around her. Occasionally, Colin even disappears, further calling into question what story the filmmakers really wanted to tell.

While absent-mindedly surfing the Internet one day, I went to Hulu and saw an episode of 3^rd Rock From the Sun being promoted.  3^rd Rock is a show that I’ve caught episodes of here and there and for the most part enjoyed.  Not wanting to waste my subscription to Hulu Plus, I started to watch from the Pilot (later I realized Netflix also had the entire series commercial-free – but that’s beside the point).  Immediately I realized two things:

1) Holy crap, that’s a young Joseph Gordon-Levitt!
 

2) Dick Solomon (John Lithgow) is an asshole.  He is frequently insensitive of other’s feelings, highly vain, and one of the most selfish people I’ve ever seen on television.

I don’t take television very seriously.  That’s why I still haven’t watched Breaking Bad or The Wire and that’s why I can catch an episode of Two and a Half Men and chuckle at the juvenile jokes and pandering writing.  I’d never admit those things in public, but full disclosure is probably necessary for the rest of this piece.

After watching roughly two seasons of 3^rd Rock From the Sun (hey, the episodes are only 20 minutes long), I really had to evaluate why I was still watching.  That lasted about two minutes before I wondered why anyone watched.  The jokes are sophomoric, broad, sometimes telegrammed far in advance – things that CBS comedies are frequently criticized for now.

I digress.  One of the things I find fascinating about the show is John Lithgow’s ability to act out this character that is, as mentioned, an asshole and yet have moments where he plays a victim pretty well (a result of being from another planet and oh so confused by Earth customs).  But as written, the character is despicable.

This is strange to me because I usually like this kind of character.  In fact, if the character wasn’t an extraterrestrial and lived in New York, he more or less could’ve fit in with the cast of Seinfeld, a show with nine years’ worth of characters acting horribly to their fellow man (and also starred Wayne Knight).  Larry David’s successor to Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, also features a selfish lead that speaks his mind, often at the expense of others’ feelings.  Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean is often remembered for his odd manner of speaking and his bumbling buffoonery, but he too displays streaks of selfishness and maliciousness towards others at times.  The dysfunctional Bluth family of Arrested Development rarely attempted to perform any act of kindness during the short time it was on the air.  Even the socially inept Michael Scott of The Office would sometimes bring other characters to tears despite claiming to want to be loved by everyone.

Though unlikable because of some of the heinous things they’ve done, we continue to watch these characters for a few reasons.  They’re not entirely inhuman.  Not everything goes their way, which they often interpret as an excuse for continuing to pursue their selfish goals.  Their acts have consequences, or they’re so often the unluckiest victim of life that we give them a pass for trying to get something to go their way, even at the expense of others.  They also do occasionally perform acts of kindness so long as it doesn’t require that they exert themselves too much.  Sometimes the people they’re being mean too are every bit as mean (or sometimes even more so) than themselves, so the viewer allows it.  Also, for Pete’s sake, this is comedy!  It’s okay if you don’t entirely like the characters because there’s a distance between you and them.  You’re watching them perform for you from within the confines of your television set.  Characters doing unlikable things are also almost like a loophole around the adage, “Comedy equals pain plus time.”  In their case, comedy just equals the pain they inflict on others.  And I guess plus the time before they get their comeuppance.

And yet Dick Solomon continues to infuriate me.  Perhaps it’s John Lithgow’s over-the-top delivery.  Perhaps it’s the fact that the people he’s most often cruel to are the people closest to him and have done nothing to deserve it.  Poor Harry is the most socially-awkward of the alien crew and he receives constant abuse from Dick.  He continually refrains Sally from pursuing Earthly activities that he himself engages in.  Despite the fact that the alien posing as Tommy is actually older than him, Dick almost gets a sadistic glee from making him do his every bidding because he’s posing as his father – and then neglecting to even find out what being a father entails for more than the plot of one episode.  Dick’s excuse for all of these behaviors is that he’s “the High Commander” and yet you’d be hard-pressed to blame the crew if they ever mutinied against him.  He’s every bit an ineffectual, incompetent leader.

The writers did try to humanize Dick at various points – the most obvious is his unwavering puppy-dog love for Mary Albright, which is constantly undercut by occasional acts of meanness towards her.  His poor leadership results in the crew quickly losing respect for him and doing whatever they please as long as he’s not around.  And he does often get his comeuppance whenever he is particularly cruel to someone.  Oh, and of course, he’s an alien, so nothing’s really his fault.  He just doesn’t get our ways.

Maybe that’s what I can’t get over.  With the other unlikable characters, you get the sense that they’ve reached the point in their life where they’ve defined who they are and are unlikely to ever truly change.  I’ve often said that the comedy from their antics is derived from the notion that they won’t learn a lesson at the episode.  But Dick Solomon’s mission as dictated by the Big Giant Head is to assimilate into human culture so that they can learn everything there is to know about the human experience and history – they even spend the last scene on the rooftop of their house contemplating the events of the episode and reflecting on what they’ve learned.  Yet Dick doesn’t learn despite that being his sole purpose for being on Earth.

Or maybe I’m thinking too hard.