I'll tell you who's Superman: John Schneider!  That dude has got to be pushing 60 these days, but I saw him recently on a Time-Life country music collection commercial, and he looks younger than me (I'm 39)!

@avclub-5bc6960dad8ab0694bb4d6ff884b0c1e:disqus , they could have even saved that scene by having Jonathan Kent not know the right answer.  Clark asks if he should have just let all those kids die, and Pa says, "Maybe."  I was hoping he'd pause, look down at his shoes, then say, "No."  Then shake his head and say, "I…

I'd just like to take this moment to say that Unforgiven did just about everything better than most movies ever made.  Damn, that's an unalloyed masterpiece of a film!  Even the child actors were great!

I'm a bit of a Costner apologist, but he certainly has limited range.  I read a review of Robin Hood (hey! Superman's two fathers in this movie have both played Robin Hood!) that said Costner is completely unconvincing as a leader of men, and I think that's spot-on.  He was great in the lonely first half of Dances…

We'd seen that same colonel talking shit to that chick earlier ("I don't care what you tell him"), so when he pulled out the knife, it was clear he was just a bad muthafucka.

That's precisely my response when people say that Superman is boring because he's invincible.  Sure, he is invulnerable, strong, etc. — but the people he loves aren't.  He has his hands full defending a bunch of clumsy, stupid, but ultimately (apparently) lovable Earthlings.

Low-carb Superman is worse than no Superman!

But there came a point in Byrne's cycle where the Kryptonian stuff asserted itself and even took over Kal-El for a while.  It had to do with that Eradicator thingy.

Yep.  Superman is another expression of the sentiments of Emma Lazarus's poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty.  We Americans like to think that where we fail on the global stage, at least we're aiming for moral heights.  I'd like to think that at least a couple of times in the 20th century, this really was the…

Best example ever: contrasting Star Wars with the prequels.

@avclub-2cfc7c2a1eabaff9fdcc09b009e8edad:disqus : that's also precisely what happened in a storyline in the comics c.1988, and it led to a pretty interesting self-examination from Big Blue, and a strange and wonderful trip through the cosmos.

@avclub-4a51fda79bbd54b4e7327dd6559b6c4d:disqus , it's sad news, to be sure, but when I heard the location and cause of this death, I thought, "Well, that's just about perfect, isn't it?  If they wrote the final episode of The Sopranos with that ending, people would say it was too spot-on."

@avclub-df106893a4574bccb7bce1ff66e788b9:disqus , I should add that my wife and I both found the racism in the North (Milwaukee, in particular) more troubling than anything we grew up with in Oklahoma (which was a Jim Crow state until the 1960s).  What we found was a level of tension and distrust between blacks and…

As far as I know, you're right, @avclub-7d3010c11d08cf990b7614d2c2ca9098:disqus .  The Northern settlement pattern has black people isolated in decaying urban centers, with white people (and, increasingly, Asian and Hispanic immigrants) in the inner-ring suburbs, and it tends to get progressively more white and far…

@avclub-ec26fc2eb2b75aece19c70392dc744c2:disqus , please tell me that somewhere along the line there has been a scene in a Star Trek movie or TV show where non-humans are politically agitating for admittance to Starfleet Academy, posting to ships of the line, etc.

@avclub-9bde0966a254ae14403aff3c9af2a06f:disqus : Guy Fieri is a time-traveler.  All the Amish look like him in 2513.

@avclub-e3f5ab7f02122f95b801e13e2c586d6a:disqus , oh yes, that's who I assumed you were talking about.

@avclub-64070488d259ab27e18091dc01340e3a:disqus , take a trip up to Milwaukee sometime, and you'll come back thinking Chicago looks a whole lot better.  I agree that there are Northern cities where race relations are, today, way more fucked up than they are, today, in many Southern cities.  In the Southern…

Nerds all over the world are going to audition for the needn't-be-fit roles!

@avclub-4f18f486a356810b3ef8008243bcba7a:disqus   Since history informs the present, I think it's totally relevant.  Besides, I was also talking about the present.  Also besides, I was agreeing with you, and giving some support to your assertion.  So…I don't know what more to tell you.