It’s been a while since I’ve posted a movie review. I suppose that’s in part just because of my general decline in posting to this blog period, but it is also because I’ve not really felt any reason to share my thoughts about most of the recent movies I’ve seen. I just don’t think I have much to add to the commentary already expressed.

So why am I reviewing “Man of Steel?”

I dunno really. There are just a whole lot of things about the movie that have gotten under my skin enough that I feel a need to vent, and this is the best place I have to vent.

This movie is at best schizophrenic and at worst it is incomprehensible in any symbolic, metaphorical or morality play perspective. Whether this is intentional or simply due to a creative team that simply could not figure out what story they actually wanted to tell, I have no idea. And that’s odd because I usually feel like I can figure out the motivations of most writers, directors or producers based on the end result they create.

Not this time. This movie is an impenetrable fog of contradictory moral lessons, incomplete story lines, conflicting ideological platitudes and, perhaps worst of all, some of the worst acting and camera work I have seen in a long, long, long time.

And yet there is something there that is still worth seeing. Fragments of momentary brilliance and clarity that shine amidst the muck like pearls cast before swine.

I’m not a Superman fan. When I was a very young boy I read Superman, but I lost track of the comic book man of steel when Jack Kirby rewrote him as a flawed and conflicted reduced version of Superman and I never really picked it back up again. I watched a few of the Superman movies, and thought the first Christopher Reeve version was a watchable movie, although nothing I would miss if I never saw it. The main reason I don’t really care for Superman as a concept is because the only way to provide Superman with a challenge worth turning into a story is to create something even more implausible and fantastic than a man who can fly, shoot laser beams out his eyes, move entire planets and cannot be harmed by virtually anything except the ridiculous notion of kryptonite.

By the way, there will be spoilers.

So why did I even go see this movie when I skipped the entire last series of Superman movies and never even saw all the Christopher Reeve movies? I dunno. Because I was tired of working day and night on the house and wanted to escape and relax for a few hours I suppose.

So there I was, in the theater when Jor-el, Superman’s Kryptonian father, attempted to convince his rulers that their world was about to implode gravitationally because they had exhausted its natural resources. The sheer physical impossibility of what they were describing was already making my eyes glaze over when suddenly all of Krypton, on the verge of utter destruction, was thrown into violent civil war by General Zod.

But it wasn’t long before the absurd notion of gravitational collapse of the planet’s core seemed the height of reasonableness as Jor-el maneuvered from one wholly absurd event to another, culminating in Jor-el revealing himself to be some sort of combination of Rambo and Albert Einstein. All of this gave plenty of opportunity to showcase the awesome computer generated landscapes in the act of being torn to bits by whatever mysterious forces the Kryptonians had unleashed by tapping into the energy of the planet’s core. A core that seemed more than energetic enough in spite of having been depleted for thousands of years.

The sheer length of time the movie spent on this extraneous, implausible and wholly ridiculous destruction of Krypton was only made worth watching by the remarkable, and perhaps completely unintentional, presentation of the Kryptonian world-state as a dysfuntional nanny state on steroids with Jor-el and his wife rejecting thousands of years of Kryptonian state planning by choosing to have a natural born child in an attempt to regain some remnant of the vigor and purity long ago swallowed up and forgotten by the imposition of central planning and social engineering.

I’m sure it was unintentional. But there it was.

Of course their natural born son was to become Superman, and for some bizarre reason a world that once colonized half the galaxy could no longer even make a spaceship large enough for two adults and a child. But hey, they had to work with the material they were given, and as ridiculous as it most assuredly is, the only option Jor-el had was to send his newborn son into the unknown in the interstellar equivalent of a foundling basket. Oh well.

Then we get to earth and spend another half hour bouncing back and forth along several timelines involving Superman of several different ages, but all of whom are lectured over and over again by “Pa” Kent about how the world is not ready for his secret to be revealed, even if that means young “Clark” has to act like a craven coward instead of even once standing up for himself. In fact this lesson is so important that Pa Kent even allows his son to be bullied by a gang of punks in broad daylight just a few yards away.

But again, buried in the confusing flotsam and jetsam of confused morality and ludicrous notions of how to deal with bullies, we discover that Pa Kent is a remarkable man. A man of unusual pragmatism, and one whose ideals are so firm and ingrained that he is not only willing to die for them, but he suggests that it might in fact be best for a schoolbus full of children to die for those ideals. A truly unusual reading of the Pa Kent I remember. A cold and calculating man who has run the numbers in his head and decided that for his “son” to truly realize his ultimate destiny as mankind’s champion and savior in the long run, some sacrifices simply have to be made in the short run. Then, after this steely utilitarianism is revealed and reinforced, Pa Kent eventually gives his own life to save the family dog.

As I said, pearls before swine, jewels embedded in swill. Unfathomable. Schizophrenic.

And we haven’t even gotten to Superman himself yet.

We get to see Superman grow into his powers. The purpose of this is to suggest that Superman has to adapt to earth’s environment and customs before he can master his powers. And that this adaptation achieves Jor-el’s goal to have Kal-el (Superman’s Kryptonian name) merge the best of both worlds into one superior whole. Smart man that Jor-el. Although it is never revealed how Jor-el knows so much about earth and humankind.

The big Maguffin of the movie is that Jor-el has somehow managed to embed the DNA potential of the entire kryptonian race into Superman’s cells. And for that reason General Zod tracks Superman to earth to retrieve that potential, called the “codex” in the movie. Or I think it was called the “codex.”

From that point on the movie goes from incomprehensible to utter chaos and insanity. Nothing makes any sense. Superman is supposed to be the key to reviving the race of Kryptonians, but there’s a whole friggin spaceship full of Kryptonians in stasis on earth already. Not only is the potential for the revival of these Kryptonians utterly ignored, but in the final battle, the ship is used against Superman, resulting in the destruction of all the in stasis Kryptonians on board. Then, once they are destroyed, General Zod bemoans that with the destruction that he just ensured, there is no longer a race of Kryptonians to serve, somehow forgetting the whole Maguffin plot point that Superman has the codex still embedded in his cells.

So they have a big climactic final battle where Superman eventually manages to prevail.

But again there are these odd moments of clarity and brilliance. Having Amy Adams portray Lois Lane is a downright inspired casting choice. Amy (a Colorado resident, btw) is perhaps best known for her turn as the ditzy singing cartoon princess banished to our mundane and unpleasant world in the movie “Enchanted.”

Amy gives us a Lois Lane that is down to earth, a bit frazzled around the edges, less than glamerous and, again, strangely pragmatic, in some ways reminiscent of Pa Kent. This Lois is no hard-bitten, hard-driven reporter willing to do anything for a scoop. Nor is she a damsel in distress looking to be saved by the hero (although, of course, she is). Of all the characters in the movie, Amy manages to give us a nuanced, multi-dimensional version of Lois Lane. Which is all the more obvious in contrast with her muscle-flexing screen partner whose “man of steel” appellation could just as well refer to his acting style as his role.

In the end Superman wins the day and the world somehow cheers his efforts in spite of the fact that the entire city of New York was reduced to rubble simply because his father decided to send his baby to this planet instead of some other planet somewhere.

So if you want to spend a few hours shaking your head in consternation and befuddlement with moments of sudden, inexplicable clarity, you could do worse than watch this movie.

No, not our actual street, but it’s close enough. Maybe I’ll post some actual photos of our house, I dunno. I posted enough photos of our old house…

Anyway, here are my thoughts after almost a week of living in the suburbs.

1. It’s a lot quieter than I expected. We have some doves that roost in the neighborhood and you can hear them quite clearly most of the time.
2. The neighborhood seems to be a very nice and friendly one. We have met several neighbors and one actually volunteered to mow our lawn while we were unpacking. Really nice folks.
3. There is something quite wonderful about being able to get to the grocery store in less than five minutes.
4. Bicycling is actually a reasonably efficient way to move around.
5. Since when did they stop delivering mail right to my door?
6. The nearby park is a really great little place to go goof off and kick back.
7. Twelve minutes from my driveway to my work parking lot.
8. Twelve minutes.
9. Yes, you heard that right. Twelve minutes.

Talk about a life-changing move.

Last Tuesday we completed the official closing on both of our houses, selling the old mountain home and purchasing the new suburban home. This was part of the process of moving that started months ago when we decided to put the house up for sale, and has not truly ended yet since we still have boxes unpacked in the house. Here’s a short description of our move, with all the ugly warts that expose how incompetent I can be sometimes.

We have been wanting to move for a while. Two years ago we first started actually working with real estate agents, but until this year the market was so bad that we simply could not make enough selling our old house to make a decent down payment on a new house. The main incentives in selling the old house were time and money. After thirteen years the reality of living 40 miles away from “real” civilization had grown old, and the benefits of living in the woods had grown less appealing due to advancing age and the fact our kids had mostly grown up and we simply didn’t go camping and hiking anything like we used to. Also, spending over two hours every day in the car just to get to and from work was really starting to get to me.

In examining our spending habits it was also clear that our gasoline expenses alone would almost have paid for another house payment. Add to that the difficulty and expense of keeping a huge old house comfortable in the winter, plus the horrible connectivity of our internet and phone service and it all added up to a significantly reduced quality of life for our family.

But as I said, until this year we were more or less “trapped” in our home, unable to come up with a reasonable way to afford moving. But with the unexpected rise in the housing market in the Denver area, the last real estate agent we talked to was confident that we could get the price we needed to make a move possible. So we began the process of selling the house.

Even so I wasn’t really convinced it was going to happen, which played into some of the events which transpired in the past week. The Cosmic Wife was much more positive and did her best to keep us optimistic and working to make the move happen. We rented a storage unit to clear out the house so that it looked more open and clean, and we got rid of some really nasty furniture and replaced it with some cheap but attractive furniture.

The first month it was on the market was more positive than I expected, we had several showings and even a couple of re-showings, but even so I wasn’t convinced that anyone was actually going to make an offer. But then we got an offer. It wasn’t a great offer, but it was at the very bottom of our acceptable range. Even so we counter-offered with a higher price and that sale fell through, which made me feel like we had missed our one shot to sell the house.

But surprisingly, within a week, we had another, better, offer. More in the middle of our acceptable range. We counter-offered with a price that was exactly in the middle of our range, and was what I had privately set as my own expected sale value of the house, and that was accepted. Suddenly our house was “under contract.” Meaning we needed to find a new house.

Things then shifted into high gear. We found ourselves in a daily grind of fulfilling the contractual obligations of the sale, and discovered that the housing market in the Denver metropolitan area where we wanted to live was so hot that houses were rarely staying on the market more than a week or two. The best houses were selling in days.

So when we found a house that was very close to what we had set as the “ideal” house, we immediately put an offer on it. I was expecting that to be rejected, or at least to find ourselves in a bidding war, but we also put a high “good faith” amount in the deal, and that seemed to be the kicker that got the seller to accept our offer.

Now things shifted into overdrive. We not only had to deal with all the issues of selling our old house, which included fixing a number of things found in the inspection, including putting on an entirely new roof, but we also had to deal with the other side of that issue with the new house, setting up inspections, finding a loan provider, working out the details of the move, etc. We basically had about three weeks to do all this, and that pretty much meant working every day to get some deadline met.

In all that rush I sort of let the issue of actually packing things up slide. I set aside the weekend prior to the move for packing, and then a day to load the truck so that we could be out of the house by closing.

Wow, talk about poor management, poor planning and poor estimating. I rented the largest truck available, a truck I was assured would hold as much as any reasonable four-person family with a four-bedroom house could expect to have. I wasn’t particularly worried that it wouldn’t hold all our stuff because we really don’t have much furniture at all, plus we weren’t taking the stove, refrigerator or some other appliances (we did take the washer/dryer). Plus we had spent weeks previously loading up stuff and filling a storage unit in town in preparation for the move.

But I had neglected to comprehend how much JUNK we had collected and tucked into the many nooks and crannies of our huge house over the course of almost fourteen years living there. Also I had neglected to understand the size of our son’s “collections”.

So about 4:00 am Tuesday morning, the day of our 11:00 am closing, I was forced to accept that the truck we had simply was not big enough, and that we still had huge amounts of junk to pull out of closets, cubby-holes, nooks, crannies, etc.

To make a long story short, we had to extend our deadline to move out of the house by almost 30 hours, which cost us more money than I want to reveal here. We ended up having to rent another truck and the move eventually took one load from a 26 foot Penske truck and two loads from a 16 foot Penske truck (that doesn’t count the half-load of the 16 foot truck when we emptied out the storage unit).

But, as of Wednesday evening, we had everything we owned at the new house. So, with the garage stacked to the gills with boxes, and a few mattresses on the floor in the bedrooms, we went to sleep with me finally grasping the rather unbelievable notion that we no longer lived in the mountains and that we were in our new home for better or worse.

So, today is Tuesday. Wednesday evening we had all the stuff at our house. So by now you’d think we had everything unpacked and set up at our new house, right?

Well, if we had anything like a reasonable amount of stuff, that might be true. Unfortunately the new house simply won’t hold all the stuff we have. Not in any livable sense. We focused first on getting the Living room and bedrooms set up, but even then we all have too much stuff to fit into the rooms. So we are still living out of boxes. Also, I had built custom in-closet storage for all of the rooms in our old house. That was great at the time since it meant we had maximized the use of our space (meaning we just had more room to put more stuff in the house), but it also meant that we didn’t have anything to use to hold our clothes and stuff. In the new house we just have closets with clothes hanger rods. No drawers, no shelves, nothing but empty space.

Plus our daughter’s old room had some built-in shelving that she had used to store her library of books, and her new room is much smaller and lacks any such shelving, so her two bookshelves are woefully inadequate to hold her books. She’s got half a dozen boxes full of books still in her room with nowhere to put them.

One of the selling points of the house is that the master bedroom has an attached workspace that my wife thought was ideal to use as a sewing room. But again, it has no storage space, no shelves, no closet, nothing but walls and a window. So now that is full of boxes of stuff that used to fit in a huge custom shelf space I had built for her in the old house.

And then there’s my stuff. I honestly didn’t realize how much stuff I had. Guitars, gaming stuff, telescope stuff, books, knick-knacks… I spent pretty much all day yesterday just unpacking the stuff that is going into my “gaming room”. I had to buy a couple of cheap shelves just to hold some stuff off the floor. And all of my guitars and shooting stuff is stuck in a closet until I figure out how to store it.

And that doesn’t even count the sitting room, which is now full of all the boxes we brought back from the storage unit. Since this has been in storage for months, it clearly is stuff we can live without, but we have to figure out what to do with it anyway. We can’t keep using our entry room as a storage locker.

I figure we’ve got several days of work just to unpack and decide what we will keep and what we will sell, donate or send to the dump.

Isn’t moving fun?

I’ve not been paying close attention to the Tim Tebow saga lately, for a lot of reasons. But what I have heard is summarized below:

After being released unceremoniously by the Jets, Tebow has kept a fairly low profile. There were multiple rumors floating around about his future, mostly centering on a potential Canadian Football League career, much like Doug Flutie ended up pursuing. However, even that was considered to be unlikely by many and no news reports surfaced about any actual contract offers for Tebow from any CFL team.

While many considered that to be the final nail in the coffin of Tebow’s career, others suggested that Tebow and his agent were quietly floating the possibility that Tebow could accept a switch in position (usually rumored to be either fullback or tight end) to remain in the NFL. Also competing “experts” reported both that Tebow would probably end up in New England and that New England would NEVER offer Tebow any contract due to the “circus atmosphere” that followed Tebow.

Since the announcement that Tebow would be in the Patriots mini-camp starting today, the same rumors about him switching position have come up, but the “official” word appears to be that Tebow is joining the team as a QB and will compete for the backup job.

The other interesting news about Tebow in the past few months comes from a couple of ex-NFL QBs who have been working with Tebow on his throwing accuracy and those reports claim that Tebow’s much-maligned “throwing motion” and accuracy problems were diagnosed to be the fault of poor footwork, not any mechanic of his actual throwing. I can’t recall who the QBs were who were working with Tebow, but I think it was Vinny Testaverde and someone like him. According to that report, once Tebow’s footwork was corrected, his accuracy and consistency dramatically improved.

I suppose we’ll see. I still root for the guy. As I’ve said before, I like to see Tebow succeed because his success pisses off all the sorts of people I like to see pissed off.

It took a day longer and a lot more money than we planned, but we are now city dwelling flatlanders. When I get my internet working, I will post a message on the experience. Rough, rough couple of days.

While Cosmic is busy relocating to suburbia I thought the blog could use a little eye candy to help with the transition. It’s been a while. This gift to MANkind is Hungarian supermodel, Barbara Palvin. Enjoy…

So… I’ve been working hard for months to make this move thing happen. But I don’t think I ever really believed it was going to happen. We’ve lived here for thirteen and a half years. Our kids basically grew up here. It is a beautiful house in a beautiful mountain town with cool mountain breezes and the weekends are soooo quiet and peaceful…

But we can’t afford it. We never really could. I hate to think what other aspects of our life we have neglected in order to pay the high cost of living fifty miles from town.

Well, the last real issue to deal with was the hail-damaged roof. The roofers just packed up and left, the inspector has been here and approved the roof, so it appears that we are good to go.

It looks like we are going to be packing for the next few days.

Wow, I find myself somewhat bemused by the whole thing. Is it really going to happen? Really?

Tune in next week, when I should be posting from my new suburban location.

Some of the few readers this blog has left might be wondering why I have not been commenting on the avalanche of revelations that are now coming to light about the depth and breadth of the corruption that is and has been rampant in the Obama administration.

The reason I haven’t been commenting is because none of it is anything new to me. It’s all old news. It’s all exactly what I’ve been saying about Obama and his Chicago gang from day one (and even before).

This is what you get when you elect an incompetent, narcissistic ideologue to be President. I predicted all of this and more. This is the most corrupt administration in the past 100 years. This group makes Nixon look like a choir boy.

But most of the press will continue to carry Obama’s water and spread his lies. The only question I have is if there is just enough of a tattered shred of journalistic integrity in our nation’s media elite to have someone finally, finally start looking at what this man and his cronies DO instead of falling all over themselves over the platitudes and never-intended-to-fulfill promises he spouts.

Time will tell I suppose.

Roof repair. No, that isn’t our roof. They haven’t actually started working on it yet.

In the end our insurance covered the complete replacement cost for our roof repair, minus our $1,000.00 deductible. Which was the best possible result I could have hoped for. They have already sent us a check for about 70% of that with the remaining amount to follow upon completion of the repair itself.

We hired a local company to do the repair, a company recommended by our real estate agent and one that has been in business for almost a decade. I hope they do a competent job. I don’t want to be getting any nasty messages from the new owner that the roof wasn’t done right.

The final cost of the repair was right at about $10,000. The amount the insurance covered was about $13,000. The adjuster said we would be receiving checks for that amount even if the repair was more or less. In our case it seems to be less. And we are replacing the roof with an upgrade to the type of shingles. Hope we made the right call. The determining factor in choosing this company was that we have to have the roof done by closing on June 4, and they can start next week.

This is the last major issue to resolve in selling our house. I am hoping that now it is all over but the pounding on the roof and the lack of access to our driveway for a few days as they put the new roof on.

This is actually starting to look like it might actually happen.

…. at work that is.

Our company just had a fairly major re-organization. Or I should say is in the process of completing a fairly major re-organization. The re-org is supposedly not including any “lay-offs”, at least not officially, but the end result has been quite a few job force reductions in several areas.

Including mine.

But so far I seem to still be employed. I met with my boss today and she informed me that unlike most of her team, my role will not be changing and that our more-than-year-into-the-future plans have not, so far at least, been affected by the re-org. Which is a bit of a surprise with the scope of changes going on around here.

So at least for now it appears I am still employed. More and more I am starting to appreciate the benefits of avoiding layoffs. Even though I have a fairly reasonable separation package, I prefer being employed to not being employed. At least financially.