To the readers: In my last post I mentioned that the kind of movie super-hero I’m interested in would be “disrespectful, ironic, self-indulgent, cynical, lascivious, amoral, mendacious.” In response Kim just called me to suggest we go see Hancock, which is about a super-hero who is disrespectful, ironic, self-indulgent, cynical, lascivious, amoral, mendacious. A great idea, I thought. And one I wish I’d thought of. And one I’ll take credit for months from now when nobody’s looking. (This, by the way, is an example of why Kim is a successful, highly paid editor and I’m a poor freelance writer forced to choose between paying for vital medications and buying pants.) So we’re going to take a few hours off from posting to go see the movie, and then we’ll be back at our computers to discuss it. Expect her comments sometime in the mid-evening hours. Expect mine at about the time your garbage collector is crawling into bed. In the meantime, though, one quick comment about our ongoing side-bar discussion of the works of the late, great (or just late) Alfred Hitchcock: Kim, you’re right about our classic-movie tangent: Mainly I’m worried we’re using up all our topics for next month’s I Love Hitchcock/I Hate Hitchcock edition of Film Fight. If we keep this up we’re going to have to spend an entire week talking about li’l Ronny Howard’s performance in The Trouble With Harry: “Genius!” “Garbage!” “Genius!” “Garbage!” In your last post you asked me where my sweet spot for a movie ending was – somewhere “between the ingenious and organic, pre-MacGyver plot twist of a camera bulb flash and the big-budget razzle-dazzle (but often just as character-motivated) climaxes of comic book movies?” you wondered. As an answer, I’m providing this clip: a perfect example of a top-notch climax, full of old-Hollywood character significance and subtle Freudian catharsis and big-budget, big-hero, big-action, big-gun razzle and dazzle. John Wayne, by the way, would never have been caught dead in tights. Montgomery Clift … I’m not so sure … (Starts at about 4:40):

Since you touched on a less conventional (and also pretty funny, pretty filthy) representation of superhero-dom, I'd like to urge you 1) to watch an episode of adultswim's Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. He's a pompous, third-rate superhero who tries to keep other superheroes out of the clink. And 2) Listen to this This American Life episode from way back when (#198: How to Win Friends and Influence People), in which (my secret, sighing crush) Jonathan Goldstein imagines what it's like to be the guy who dates Lois Lane when she's on the rebound from Superman. Good stuff. You can listen to it for free on the site -- it comes in around the 44 minute mark: "At first, I was a novelty. In the beginning Lois would kiss my forehead and tell me she loved how squishy my arms were. 'In a good way,' she'd say. 'They're so easy to fall asleep on.'"

Someone in our comments board yesterday asked for clarification if we were discussing comic book adaptations or superhero comic adaptations? It's an important distinction, and one I've let you slide on, Josh. Until now. When we kicked around this idea, your thesis, as I remember, was simply "I hate comic book movies, let's talk about that." So did you mean strictly superheroes, or does your disdain also cover non-superhero comic and graphic novel adaptations, too – like American Splendor, Ghost World, Persepolis, The Road to Perdition? What about comic strips that have transitioned to screen – like my beloved Peanuts, or the often-wickedly funny The Boondocks? Does everything touched by comic books get thumbs down? What about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay? That one's all about men in tights (or rather, the men who draw the men in tights), and it didn't win the Pulitzer for nothing. I suspect this will be nonstarter argument – because, really, how could you blanketly write off a movie just for the manner in which its source material was printed – but I figured it was worth mentioning.

At the risk of beating this tangent to death: The two endings you point to from Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much work brilliantly because they are entirely motivated by character. Doris Day – trapped in front of an audience of dignitaries, knowing her captive son is somewhere in the house – sings as loudly as she can "Que Sera Sera" (a wonderfully corny song we've previously seen her bonding with her son over). It's like a mother bird warbling to her lost baby to find his way back home – and so he does, by whistling it just as loudly back, thus clueing them into his whereabouts. It's clever, circular, entirely satisfying. Jimmy Stewart's L.B. is a wheelchair-bound photographer, so when the bad guy shows up, L.B. reaches for his camera – the thing that got him in trouble in the first place, and the thing that's going to get him out of the mess. (Well, with another broken leg.) It's genius! But I take it you think it's silly ... so somewhere between the ingenious and organic, pre-MacGyver plot twist of a camera bulb flash and the big-budget razzle-dazzle (but often just as character-motivated) climaxes of comic book movies – somewhere in between there is your sweet spot? Jesus, you're hard to please.

One: Damn! It is, it is, it is! It’s the tights! I admit it; that’s what kills me. The tights! That and the masks … and the capes … and the ridiculous nicknames … and the endless pontificating … and the mindless car chases … and the repulsive moralizing … and the laborious descriptions of exotic compounds and magic stones and laser-guided missile systems … and the ubiquitous prudishness … and the preponderance of thin-as-tissue-paper villains … and the pompous psychoanalyzing … and the thinly veiled social criticisms … and the awful one-liners … and the lousy jokes … and the sight of James Franco straining for gravitas while saying things like “Kill Spider-Man, and I'll give you all the tritium you need. On second thought, bring him to me … alive” … and the realization that no matter what I say the number of super-hero franchises waiting in the wings is probably boundless and therefore the chance that there won’t be four new super-hero movies next summer and four more the summer after that and four more the summer after that - all ready to explode with their candy-colored stories of disaffected lily-white man/boys locked in mortal struggle with their own divided souls - is exactly nil. (Sorry, I think all these comic-book movies I've been watching are starting to mess with my head.)

Oh, Josh, you’re breaking my heart. Just as I find it bewildering that you’ll casually write off the whole comic book movie canon, it is nothing short of flabbergasting – not a word, I don’t think, but work with me – that you thumb your nose at the collected works of the master of suspense, the original Weird Al, one Alfred Hitchcock. You wanna talk about “reality”? That guy got about as real as you can get – tapping in, exploiting, fully flogging our most primal fears… and quite often doing it with a deliciously sick sense of humor. What makes us most human? How about the fight or flight instinct? That’s his bread and butter. The terror of things that go bump in the night, or shriek in the shower? He’s your man. Obsessive love? He cornered the market… especially when icy blondes were on special.

The “rules of reality”?*** What do you even mean by that? First: I think this might be an instance in which our lack of comic book knowledge comes into play. I think in fact that rules of reality do exist – rules according to the worlds created in these comic books. But for us lay people, I think it’s safe to say: Superman abides by a set of fast, immutable rules – à la Kryptonite kills. They’re not making this shit up willy-nilly: The effective comic book movies – just like all other effective films – establish the rules of their universe early and stick to ‘em. Moving on: While I get a kick out of your impressive distillation of X2, what you seem to think is a whole lot of gobbledygook reads – and more importantly plays – like a riproaring actioner to me: a riproaring actioner with very significant detours into source myth, tragic love, government-sanctioned racism, gay allegory, and the unholy – but complex and identifiable – vengeance sought by those powerfully, systemically wronged. You know, if I took the time to similarly detail all the ins and outs and improbabilities of any Indiana Jones flick (“Eat your burning heart!”***), it, too, would sound like so much gobbledygook – which is in no way a diss on Indiana Jones. I loved him just as much as you (or at least the first three outings with him – missed the last one yet, and it’s not on the to-do list), and I’m not sure I see such a clear delineation between Indy and our comic book friends. Where’s the disconnect for you? Is it the tights? The occasional horns sprouted?

Sorry, I didn't notice your 1:51pm entry, Suspense (With a Little Suspension of Disbelief), until just now. This is the price we pay for conducting an online debate, I guess. That and the fact that anyone can jump on his or her computer and see that I only won 15% of yesterday's vote, which, I'd like to say, is yet further proof - along with the recent dust-up in Zimbabwe - that democracy doesn't work. What we need is some kind of Film Fight plutocracy, a voting class I can stack with all my landed friends. Anyway, I wanted to slip in two quick comments before you make your post-work, wine-soaked, Kim-Jones-after-dark entry and I'm left to ruminate on it until 5 in the morning: 1) Alfred Hitchcock is the most overrated director in movie history. 2) Anyone who saw The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull knows that Indiana Jones should have been put out of my misery a long, long time ago.

What I’m saying is why waste your time eating Brussels sprouts when every time you eat Brussels sprouts you’re miserable, and meanwhile there’s a great huge, heaping dish of chocolate over here, just begging to be eaten? (The answer, of course, is that for some reason you’ve agreed to a week-long cyber-argument about the relative merits of Brussels sprouts and there’s no turning back now and it’s your duty to convince anyone reading at home that, not only are Brussels sprouts painful to eat, they are – contrary to everything you may have been told by doctors and nutritionists and parents – actually quite bad for you. Possibly even poisonous. Deadly even. And so Brussels-sprout eating must go on.)