Long Reads

“I’m here to fight for truth, and justice, and the American way.”

Superman (1978) is the greatest movie of the eighties.

I know what I said.

Yes, fine, there’s the number “1978” after the title but who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes? Superman for me is the starting pistol of that era of huge populist genre blockbusters (Indiana Jones, ET, Back to the Future, Never Ending Story et al) that roared into American cinemas as the stings of Vietnam and Watergate began to fade and America discovered a new Reaganite swagger, for good and ill. It is the harbinger of the cultural era that would climax with the collapse of the Berlin wall and the apex of American power and prestige, a victory so total that serious people were able to proclaim the end of history itself and not be laughed out of the room.

And it’s the ultimate eighties movie with regards to the logic that went into creating it. I can almost picture Alexander and Ilya Salkind (the father-son producing team behind the film) chomping on cigars as they hash out their vision.

“We’re gonna make a movie about the BIGGEST SUPERHERO OF THEM ALL!”

“Yeah, and we’ll spend MORE MONEY THAN ANY PICTURE IN HISTORY!”

“Know who we’ll get to write the script? MARIO PUZO, WHO WROTE THE GODFATHER WHICH IS THE BEST MOVIE OF ALL TIME WHICH MEANS HE’LL WRITE THE BEST SUPERHERO MOVIE OF ALL TIME!”

*pause for vigorous puffing of cigars*

“Yeah, and we’ll get the BIGGEST MOVIE STAR IN THE WORLD AND PAY HIM MORE THAN ANY ACTOR IN HISTORY FOR TEN MINUTES OF SCREENTIME!”

“And we’ll film the sequel SIMULTANEOUSLY! BACK TO BACK!”

“But Pop, what if the first movie’s a flop?”

“HOW COULD IT BE A FLOP?! LOOK AT HOW MUCH MONEY WE’RE SPENDING!”

“I LOVE YOU POP!”

“I LOVE YOU SON!”

“AND WE BOTH LOVE CIGARS!”

And when you think about it like that, it feels like it had to fail right? It’s like with the Titanic. Once people start talking about how God couldn’t sink this ship, you damn well know that iceberg’s coming. That kind of hubris can’t go unpunished.

And yet.

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Justice League Unlimited: “For the man who has everything”

I make fun of Alan Moore sometimes, but rest assured it comes from a place of purest admiration. He’s who I want to be when I grow up.

When I’m in my seventies I want to be a mouthy old beard engaging in magic duals with gender-ambiguous wizards, worshipping a snake god and complaining about everything all the time.

“That’s not true! I stop when I’m asleep, don’t I?”

And today, while hacking my way through this goddamn draft, I will take a break to briefly review what is (I believe) literally the only adaptation of Alan Moore’s work to receive his blessing, Justice League Unlimited’s second episode, For the Man Who Has Everything.

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Disney Reviews with the Unshaved Mouse #64: Zootopia 2

My friends, I ask you to consider a simple hypothetical:

Maybe we’re the assholes?

This meme did the rounds last year after Pixar’s Elio crashed and burned and someone at Disney had gotten into the hard liquor and had some feelings they needed to express. And while I do believe that 90% of the time creators blaming the audience for the failure of their project is the mark of a talentless hack so high off their own farts that they genuinely believe that the only way anyone could dislike their output is if there was something morally wrong with them…

Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

…you know what? I gotta give them this one. And I can say that, because I am actually one of the two people who saw Elio (Micro-Mouse is the other one). Elio is not a perfect film and I probably won’t watch it again. But it was charming, well animated, sincere and, yes, not a retread or rehash or cynical nostalgia bait cash grab and we all just left it to die on the road like a leper.

It’s one thing for Disney to complain that we didn’t give them a participation trophy for Strange World or Wish. When we said “we want original animated films”, the rider “…that aren’t absolute bobbins” should have been taken as read.

But with Elio, they showed up. They gave us what we said we wanted. Aaaaaand it turns out we were a bunch of lying hoors because we instead gave a billions dollars to this:

I’m acknowledging this exists. Enjoy it while it lasts because this is the only time.

Then again, this year saw the hugely succesful release of Hoppers, which was not merely good like Elio but genuinely excellent with a truly original premise, animation that actually innovates and shakes up the old Pixar house style and some great comedy. Well, I say “original”. Clearly they stole wholesale from Don’t Trust Fish.

But it doesn’t matter! Because the next Hoppers might end up like Elio. We can’t be trusted, and once you’ve proven you can’t be trusted no one will ever deal with you because they know you’ll never negotiate in good faith and now somehow fucking Iran has the world’s economy by the goddamn short-hairs.

I mean, that’s how we get Zootopia 2.

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“I’m going to give you one last chance to stop acting like Nazi stormtroopers.”

Between the Superman radio series’ colossal decade-long run, the Fleischer cartoons and two multi-part film serials, I have to wonder if audiences in 1951 were starting to experience superhero fatigue. Remember how people complained when we got the Ed Norton Incredible Hulk so soon after Eric Bana’s? That at least was a five year gap. Kirk Alyn had barely flown offscreen before George Reeves stepped into his bright red boots.

Now, you might be a little confused as to why I’m covering this. If I’m only doing the theatrical live action Superman movies, what is George Reeves doing here? Didn’t he play Superman on TV? Indeed he did. Reeves, as well as being the reason why everyone gets Christopher Reeve’s name wrong, was the star of The Adventures of Superman which ran for a mighty impressive 106 episodes in the fifties. However, this movie served as a pilot of sorts for the TV show and was released in theatres. Alyn was apparently offered the chance to return to the role but he declined for two reasons. One, like many movie actors at the time he thought that TV was a passing fad (incorrect) and two, he worried that being typecast as Superman would kill his acting career stone dead (sadly, right on the money).

And so, the mantle passed to George Reeves, a military veteran and B-movie player whose acting career prior to becoming Clark Kent had deteriorated to the point that he’d been forced to take work digging cesspools just to make ends meet. Reeves was a fascinating and admirable man who deserved so much better than his tragic and mysterious death. But, if nothing else, he was for decades THE definitive onscreen Superman.

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K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)

Heeeeey it’s me, Unshaved Mouse, your favourite writer/blogger who overpromises because he’s terrified of disappointing people and ends up taking on WAAAAY too many writing projects and then spirals and completely burns out!

So, as you all know I’m currently preparing for my first North American book tour at the end of this month while also facing a huge quivering mass of deadlines so this review is going to be shorter than the queues for Melania.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but I do have things to say about this movie.

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“Everyone keeps telling me how my story is supposed to go. Nah. Imma do my own thing.”

Sometimes, less is more. This is true with most things, but it’s especially true with writing. While there are definitely times when it’s fun to get fancy or even downright purple with your prose, the real masters know that when you want a piece of writing that cuts a reader right to the bone and leaves them wondering what the hell you just did to them, you keep it simple. Take, for example, the opening monologue of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Let’s do things differently this time… SO differently.

His name is Miles Morales.

He was bitten by a radioactive spider.

And he’s not the only one.

He hasn’t always had it easy.

And he’s not the only one.

Now he’s on his own.

And he’s not the only one.

You think you know the rest.

You don’t.

I thought I knew the rest.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t want to hurt him.

But I did.

And he’s not the only one

On paper the prose seems incredibly basic. But there is a cadence to it, and a power that comes from the constant repetition. It’s like a drum beat, growing in intensity. And, when given to an actor like Hailee Steinfeld who absolutely knows how to wring every ounce of emotion out of it?

Which is a weird point to start a review of this film with, because while less is sometimes more, more is also sometimes more. And Across the Spider-Verse is one of the greatest arguments for cinematic maximalism since Ben Hur.

This movie is HUGE. It boasts the largest animation team of any cartoon in history. It has a cast of hundreds of characters and stretches across six universe each with their own distinct artistic style. It is a truly epic work, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of animation as a medium.

And, fittingly, even its production problems were epic in scope. A writer’s strike. A global pandemic. Whatever the hell happened to Shameik Moore. And, of course, the now notorious levels of crunch and overwork that the animators were subjected to. I won’t say Spider-Verse 2’s doctrine of “biggest of all time” extended to the suffering meted out to those who worked on it because North Korea produces animation and they probably have that particular category locked up but STILL. It’s definitely something that shouldn’t be forgotten.

I mean, I’ll still watch it but I still watch The Shining and that movie damn near killed Shelley Duvall, you come to me for movie reviews, not moral guidance.

Jesus, I hope you don’t come to me for moral guidance.

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“If you still refuse to deal with me after that? I’ll reduce your city to dust.”

Considering the character kickstarted the comic-book superhero genre (asterisk, asterisk) Superman has always been the comic book character least beholden to that medium. In 2025, while it is accurate to call Superman a “comic book character”, it’s also incredibly reductive. Superman is more like Santa Claus. He doesn’t belong to one medium, he simply is. And, unlike almost every other comic book character, I would argue that virtually all of his most important and iconic stories took place outside of the medium of comics. Very early on, Superman expanded beyond the panels of the comic book page and appeared in radio dramas, newspaper strips, novels, cartoons, movie serials and TV shows, to the point that a vast majority of Superman fans aren’t even regular comic book readers.

Consider this: The years between the end of the second world war and the start of the sixties was marked by the near collapse of the superhero genre in comics. And yet Superman not only survived the implosion of the genre he’d birthed, in the fifties he was bigger than he’d ever been, as The Adventures of Superman became one of the first major hits of the television era. But we’re not there yet.

Before he get to George Reeves, we must see out the Kirk Alyn era in style. I won’t lie, I was a little apprehensive approaching 1950’s Atom Man versus Superman. Superman 1948 was a very pleasant surprise but crappy sequels aren’t a recent Hollywood invention and the very few reviews I was able to find (this is, almost certainly, the most obscure Superman movie to ever be put on the big screen) agreed that it was inferior to the first one. There was also the fact that serials from the fifties, the last dying gasp of the medium, are notoriously cheap and ropy.

So colour me shocked that I actually prefer Atom Man versus Superman to its predecessor.

Like, by a lot.

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Son of the White Mare (1981)

I will probably never watch this movie again.

Not because it is bad.

Because the experience of watching Son of the White Mare again could never top the experience of watching it for the first time.

And you know what’s crazy? This is…drumroll please…my final reader’s request. And the reason I left this one to last was because the requester simply asked me to review “something Eastern European” and I just chose this because it looked interesting. I picked this one almost at random.

And it ended up being…well, we’ll get to that.

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The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1983)

Back around the time the first eukaryotic organisms were developing on the Earth’s sea floor, I coined the term “Tar and Sugar Movies” to describe the earliest films of the Walt Disney Animated Feature canon. I chose the name in reference to the often jarring tonal shifts between cloying cutsiness and shocking darkness of those films. In retrospect though, I think I got it wrong. The true Golden Age of the Tar and Sugar aesthetic was not the late thirties and forties, but the nineteen eighties.

Here is the typical eighties cartoon experience:

“Golly Gee! This sure is a fun picnic! I just hope that mean ol’ Lord Hexxodrexx doesn’t show up to spoil everything.”

“I HAVE COME TO DEVOUR YOUR FUCKING SOULS!!! GRAAAAAAAA!!!”

And I think, with today’s movie, I may have found the ultimate Tar and Sugar movie. And, as in most things in this life, they do it better in Japan.

I don’t have to introduce Osamu Tezuka by this point, do I? Born in 1920s Osaka, created manga and animé as we know it, the Japanese Walt Disney, one of the most influential animators of all time you know all this. He was also quite possibly one of the most prolific creators in history, writing and drawing well over 700 manga series in his lifetime encompassing virtually any genre you could think of and targeted at every possible age demographic. The basis for today’s movie was the children’s manga Unico, about a cute little unicorn who has magical powers that he uses to bring happiness and joy to everyone he meets.

Well, I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly take a dark turn.

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Bats versus Bolts: The 2020s

Funny how these things work out. I was pretty sure I had run out of candidates for this particular feature and then look what happens! A Dracula* AND a Frankenstein movie arrive within a year of each other. Both critically acclaimed, big budget adaptations directed by genuine auteur directors. Bats versus Bolts is back from the dead like a…what’s a good analogy. A mummy? Sure, that works.

So join me in what promises to be a real knock-down drag out fight. Robert Eggers 2024 Nosferatu versus Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. FIGHT! (Oh, and spoilers past this point).

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