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The teaser for Superman Returns, which hits theaters next summer, is out. You can see it here.) I’ve watched it half a dozen times now, and it still gives me goosebumps.

For the informed, Superman Returns is being directed by Bryan Singer, one of the most talented young directors in Hollywood right now. His credits include the recent X-Men movies as well as The Usual Suspects, which is one of those lots-of-plot-twists character pieces that I enjoyed immensely but, because of the violence and profanity, can only watch once.

Superman Returns also has an unknown actor in the lead, one Brandon Routh (rhymes with south), who looks so much like Christopher Reeves in some of the publicity photos that it’s a little eerie.

As for the story, suffice it to say that Superman has been away from Earth for a few years, and when he returns, he finds Lois Lane with a child and engaged to be married. Plus Lex Luthor has some diabolical plan, I’m sure. Oh, and I think there are aliens involved. Anyway, it’s a departure from the previous Superman films, which is good considering the third one co-starred (wince) Richard Pryor and the fourth one was about nuclear arms proliferation. Ugh.

Oh, and I’ve always despised Margot Kidder (Christopher Reeves’s Lois Lane). She has this raspy smoker’s voice that makes me cringe. Plus I don’t find her the least bit attractive. (Call me shallow but if I’m going to stare at a face for two hours, I’d prefer it be easy on the eyes.)

So the new Superman movie will be different in some ways. But not in all ways. As the teaser suggests, there is some elements of the last few pictures that will carry over to this one. And it’s here where Singer shows his genius.

The Score
John William’s score from the first Superman movie is arguably one of the best film scores ever composed. It’s certainly one of the most memorable. Luke, who’s only seen about five minutes of the first Superman movie can hum some of the tune. That’s how catchy it is. I love the score. It’s nostalgic. It conjures up all these great memories that I associate with the wonder and magic of Superman. And that’s because it SOUNDS like Superman. It’s majestic and powerful and suspenseful and everything that is the man in tights.

Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando, who played Jor El, Superman’s Kryptonian father in the first Superman movie, is back as well. But how can that be, you ask? Brando has been dead for, what, a few years now? The answer is simple. When filming the original Superman, Brando recorded a lot of voice over for the film, much of which wasn’t used. So Singer has mined these recordings and plugged a few of them into the new movie.

But this is where the trailer trips up a bit. There was a REASON why these recordings weren’t used. They’re condescending.

In the trailer, Brando (Jor El) explains why he sent Kal El (Superman), his only son, to Earth. And it’s a little insulting. According to Jor El, we earthlings “lack the light” needed to live peacefully. And we have a “capacity for good,” but without Superman to guide us, we’re lost sheep.

The “Superman as Savior” angle works only to so many degrees. And this is overkill.

Perhaps you think that harsh criticism. After all, Singer and his writers didn’t pen the voice over. They’re just using what was available. But the point is they used it. They didn’t have to. They chose to.

Superman is a hero. He saves people from danger and stands for truth and justice. But he doesn’t teach us what good is. We know what good is. That’s why we admire him. He’s a superhero, not a God.

This isn’t to say I don’t have high hopes for Superman Returns. Quite the contrary. It looks amazing. The footage for the trailer is stunning. I particularly enjoyed one over-head shot of citizens of Metropolis all frozen in wonder, staring up into the sky at, what we can assume is, Superman.

In fact, I felt the same way about the trailer: I stared in wonder. This is going to be good, folks. I’ll forgive Brando and the original writers for their touch of overkill. As far as I’m concerned, Superman Returns is THE movie of 2006.

I’m not one to use superlatives often. Call everything “the best” and people will begin to place a lesser value on your opinion thinking you’re won over too easily. But here I can say with confidence that this is indeed the best book I have read in many years. In fact, it might very well be the best book I’ve ever read, or at least one of the top three or four. In other words, I can’t say enough about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke.

What’s amazing to me is that this is a debut novel. It took Susanna Clarke ten years to write it, but it’s her first. Set in pre-Victorian England during the Napoleonic wars, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is part Jane Austen, part historical fiction, and part Lord of the Rings. It tells the story of the two titular magicians who rise to stardom in England centuries after English magic is all but forgotten and decayed. Magic used to be prevalent in England, thanks mostly to the long reigning King of the North and first great magician, The Raven King.

But practical magic eventually ceased, and England was left with theoretical magicians, scholars who studied magic but who had neither the skill nor the inclination to actually DO magic.

Enter Gilbert Norrell, whose goal it is to bring about the restoration of English magic, but whose paranoid disposition prompts him to horde all the books OF and ABOUT magic and then prohibit anyone (including his only pupil, Strange) from reading them. Strange, for his part, is a tall, somewhat arrogant gentleman who learns much of his craft by trial and error. (He’s forced into this method since Norrell won’t relent the books filled with spells and enchantments.)

I don’t want to give away too much of the story. You’ll have to experience it for yourself. I knew hardly anything about the plot when I began reading and that, I’ve decided, is the best way to approach it. I would do you a great disservice by revealing more here. All I can say is that you won’t regret picking it up. Of course, you may find it a bit heavy; it’s 800 pages long and at first glance seems a bit daunting. But trust me, when the last page is turned, you’ll be begging for a thousand more.

It’s terribly cliche to say so, but this book is pure magic.

The film has been out for more than a year now, but Lauren and I just caught it on DVD. It tells the true (or mostly true) story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, who, eleven years ago, during the genocidal atrocities of that country, turned his hotel into a refugee camp for more than a thousand people, in effect saving their lives from the murderous Hutus who were killing every Tutsi tribal member they found. More than a million men, women, and children were brutally murdered in a mere three months time. Sadly, the rest of the world turned a mostly blind eye.

The film is a hard one to watch, and despite its political potency and eye-opening account of a horror that went mostly unnoticed elsewhere, I can’t recommend it. It’s just too disturbing. The PG-13 rating is questionable. I’d push this more into the R territory, not because the violence is gratuitous — it isn’t, it’s real — but because the subject matter is too painful for any teenager to witness.

In one scene, Don Cheadle (who plays Rusesabagina and earns the Oscar nomination his performance garnered him) tells everyone staying at the hotel to call their friends in other countries and plead for help. “Make them think that if they hang up with you and do nothing, you will die,” he says. “Shame them into helping us.” And in a sense, that’s precisely what Hotel Rwanda does, it shames us. It reminds us that as a community of world citizens, we’ve ignored Black Africa. We’ve shrugged at their problems, however horrific, and, as one reporter in the film states, “gone back to [our] dinner.”

That sounds like a damning statement, but there’s some truth to it. Had these atrocities occurred in Europe, US troops would be called to aid immediately. But Black Africa . . . well that’s different.

The reasoning for this negligence is NOT, I don’t think, as the film suggests, because Black Africans are black. It’s because we, the rest of the wrold, are ignorant of their circumstance. Their society is totally foreign to us. The word “tribe” conjures up a certain primitive barbarism that we, the average, Westerner simply don’t understand. In short, we’re ignorant, stupid in fact. We see the problem as something distant and unintelligible and, because we feel powerless to the evils causing it, we do nothing.

After the film was over, I felt deep sadness and shame, meaning that Hotel Rwanda achieved precisely what it set out to do: move its audience from ignorance to social awareness. But I also felt grateful. Suddenly my own problems seemed minute and insignificant.

Will I watch it again? No. Am I glad I saw it once? Yes. Definitely. Should you watch it? Well . . . that’s up to you. But be warned. It won’t be a pleasant experience.

I’m a sucker for comic-hero team-ups, which is why I’m ga ga for the five issue Magnetic North storyline currently running in Ultimate X-Men. It features both the Professor X’s band of super mutants and the Ultimates — the latter being led by the quick-to-spark Captain America. It doesn’t have the bite of Ultimate War, which featured the same heroes and ran two years ago, but it’s worth the read. The whole plot revolves around Magneto’s elaborate scheme to escape from the Ultimate’s inescapable prison for superhuman bad guys. It sounds very silly and cliche, yes, but Brian K. Vaughan, one of the smartest writers in comics right now thanks to Runaways, stirs up the action without it feeling stale.

What’s got me head scratching however is a story element that’s been running in several issues now: In an effort to feel contemporary (or perhaps to appease a growing gay, comic-reading audience), a few of the X-Men are now homosexuals. Colossus, the steely muscle of the X-Men, is the most well known (and tormented) of the bunch.

It all feels very forced to me and untrue to some of the heroes’ origins, but there you have it.

The English might not be the best cooks in the world, but they sure produce the best writers. Dickens. Tolkien. Austen. Rowling. Lewis. And now another: Philip Pullman. I’ve just finished listening to Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, Book Two of the His Dark Materials trilogy. If you’ve never heard much of Pullman, you will soon. The first book of the series, The Golden Compass, is being made into a film by New Line Cinema, those guys who gave us a little trio of obscure films entitled The Lord of the Rings. The idea, I’m hoping, is that New Line will adapt the whole Dark Materials trilogy into three seperate films.

Incidentally, it was the announcement of the films that attracted me to the books; I read about the deal in Variety, the daily trade journal for Hollywood. Pullman has already made a splash in Britain, winning a slew of awards for the trilogy, including one Carnegie Medal and the Whitbred Book of the Year Award in 2002, the first children’s book to ever win the prize.

Of course, I wouldn’t call these children’s books for the same reason I don’t call the Harry Potter books children’s books. As far as I can tell, the only distinction between young-adult fiction and adult fiction is the age of the hero. If the hero is a child, then the publishing world considers it young adult. If the hero is an adult, it’s adult fiction. Orson Scott Card’s novel Ender’s Game is sometimes wrongfully categorized as young-adult fiction for this reason. I think it silly.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point is: These books are fascinating. Pullman has an imagination as rich as Rowling’s and is a master of prose to boot. The man can write. And I mean beautifully. But not for beauty’s sake. This is knuckle-down, teeth bared action and suspense. No whimsical literary bouts of simile or metaphor for academic’s sake. This is a full-out page turner, both enchanting and gut-wrenching at the same time.

The story revolves around a young girl (twelve, I think) named Lyra Belacqua, whose world is starkly different to and yet in other ways very similar to our own. In Lyra’s world, all humans have a demon, which is a talking animal that is part of the human it belongs to, just as much as our hands are part of our bodies. Except the demon is not attached to humans. It moves and thinks independently of its master. And yet they are one. When the human dies, the demon dies. And vice versa. Children’s demons change form at will —from a bobcat to a moth to a German Shepherd — always to assist the human it belongs to. If Lyra is in danger, her demon, Pantalaimon, will become a leopard to protect her. Or a wolf hound. Or a fox. And if the demon needs to conceal itself, it will become a grasshopper and stay hidden in Lyra’s pocket.

But demons are only one of the magical creatures found in the trilogy. It’s full of a world . . . well, actually multiple worlds, so intriguing and full of fantasy that one begins to hope such places exist.

I didn’t read the first two books, rather I listened to them on my iPod, via the CDs at the library. Much like the Lord of the Rings cast recording done several years ago by the BBC, the Dark Materials trilogy features a full cast of stellar performers, who breathe life and suspense into the story, as well as a narrator, whom I was floored to find out was none other than Philip Pullman himself. He does amazingly well, giving each narration just the performance it needs, without detaching the listener from the characters and the action around them. It’s very unobtrusive. In fact, I think I recommend the recording more than the books themselves simply because there’s gut there I’m not sure I would have find in the text. Either way, you must get your hands on it. I myself can’t wait to listen to Book Three.

A word of caution: His Dark Materials isn’t for everyone. Pullman has been called the opponent of C.S. Lewis, having spoken out against the former author’s trumpeting of Christian ideals. In fact, some even call His Dark Materials a rebuttal to The Chronicles of Narnia. You see, in Pullman’s trilogy, the villain — the most dishonest, cruel, horrific organization in all the worlds that exist — is “The Church.” It’s not the most fair of labels, but it doesn’t bother me. This is fiction. Pullman is no advocate for evil, although some Christian groups may label him so. In truth, Pullman isn’t attacking Christianity, he’s attacking all religions that oppress. Some apparently don’t see the distinction. I, for one, love the series and find that my faith has not diminished as a result of reading it . . . or rather, listening to it.