Everybody needs to step off Ben Braddock. He's one of my Insecure Jewish Woobies.(It's kind of retro of me, but he's on my List. What can I do? It's laminated.) And Lloyd Dobler could not exist in a Braddock-free world. And plastics are just too...plastic. And I still haven't seen the new Spiderman yet, so carry on.

Here's the thread policy:

Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.

Saw "Shrek 2" yesterday. Hurt myself laughing. The "Mission Impossible" sequence alone gave me hiccups. Geez, the John Woo doves flying through the trashed warehouse. Hubby and I played "Name that Movie Reference" for hours.

Anyway, Giant Gingerbread Man goes down in full "King Kong" glory. I'm assuming little gingerbread man's reaction of going after him is also from a movie, but I can't think which one.

"Do you still know the muffin man?"
"The one in Drury Lane? Sure."

Tep, that's funny! We clearly know our film clichés.

In re Spider-Man 2: the real problem with the whole el train in Manhattan question is not that [Lower and Midtown] Manhattan don't have an el train, but that the whole area looks exactly like Inner Loop Chicago. Like, if they'd taken plates of Midtown and pasted an el right into Fifth Avenue, it would have been more in the spirit of the movie's own fancifulness, and less jarringly "Wait, where the hell are we now??"

I mean, not if the el down Fifth ended at the East River, or anyway it would make New Yorkers just laugh harder, but the movie doesn't work as well if Spidey lives in Everytown. He lives in New York, even a fanciful New York, and he got no business rescuing poor dumb commuters in Chicago. Some other superhero can handle that.

May I ask why there is an Obi-Wan for Batman? Does every superhero get Obi-Wan now, like a gift with purchase? I am thinking, moreover, that Obi-Wan, as a trainer of superheroes goes, is sort of a bum deal for the superhero, so he should definitely come for free. Also, with an off button, for when he is haunting all over the place and the superhero has homework to do.

Batman needs to be haunted, though. I think it's in the contract.

But, like, whom would you hire to haunt Batman? The zombie ghouls of his parents, their brains drooling out of their ears? Or the dulcet tones of Alec Guinness, wafting gently through the landscape?

I think actually I would probably hire H. R. Giger to haunt Batman, or possibly John Wayne Gacy.

If haunting is defined as stubbornly refusing to let go of something even after it's long dead, I think Adam West is the perfect person to haunt Batman.

In re Spider-Man 2: the real problem with the whole el train in Manhattan question .... he got no business rescuing poor dumb commuters in Chicago. Some other superhero can handle that.

Not so. We have no superheroes here. Don't need them. We have graft.

I actually thought Badass was kind of a mess -- it needed to be either a straight biopic or a making-of mockumentary. (Or a straight documentary, even.) Trying to be both didn't really work for me. (Of the two, I'd have dropped the mockumentary stuff, because very little of the humor rang true to me -- it made the situations seem very trivial, which I don't think was the film's intent.)