A mild-mannered post--or is it . . . ?

This is a quilt of several posts I never got done over the summer.

Prologue: I keep waiting for someone to cash in on this, but apparently people are finding war, corruption, and whither-habeas-corpus too distracting. So (with a hat tip to Sam for bringing it to my attention) let me point out that scientists have located and unearthed a giant meteorite buried beneath the farmland of Kansas.

Scientists located a rare meteorite in a Kansas wheat field thanks to new ground-penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.

The dig Monday was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples also were bagged and tagged and organic material preserved for dating purposes.

Those "scientists," we are now able to reveal here at p3, are in fact under contract to Lextron, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the communications and defense contracting conglomerate LuthorCorp. And the meteorite itself has disappeared. Lextron and LuthorCorp have not returned calls on the subject.

Which gets us down to business:

Here's a piece of advice that would have been useful at the beginning of the summer, although not so much now: If you go see Superman Returns in a theater, for the love of god don't go see it in IMAX. I thought it would be a wonderful experience--all that flying and soaring, in the high-definition, tilted-dome screen IMAX format . . . fantastic!

Not so much, actually. It may have been distributed in IMAX format, but it's clear no one ever gave the slightest thought to creating images that would actually work under those viewing conditions. In particular, any interior scenes were largely ruined by the forced-curvature of the IMAX screen: Imagine the Daily Planet offices filmed inside a giant glass and chrome yurt. And don't even get me started on the experience of having to turn your head from side to side to see all of Kevin Spacey's nose.

In sum: "Superman Returns" in IMAX: Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Even at my local cineplex, though, I'm not sure the film would have left me with much to rave about. Readers old enough to remember the experience of standing in line to see "The Empire Strikes Back," only to say to themselves, "Wait a minute--this is it? They're blowing up another freakin' Death Star?", will appreciate my disappointment here. The much-touted rationale behind "Returns" was that it was to pick up the story after "Superman II," wisely pretending that "Superman III" and "Superman IV, The Quest for Peace" never happened. (Much the same decision, in that respect, that loyal Star Trek enthusiasts reached about "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.")

Yes, well. It's one thing to pick up where the earlier movies left off; it's another thing to recycle their gags and signature moments, in some cases nearly verbatim, and to appear largely unaware that the Superman myth existed before them. A friend of mine in the movie biz occasionally grouses that scripts submitted to the studios are initially screened by people so young they'd be astonished to learn that American cinema existed before the John Hughes oeuvre. Much the same, I fear, could be said about "Superman Returns," at least one of whose script writers was not born until a year after "Superman: The Movie" was released. Mario Puzo, unlikely as he might have seemed as first choice to draft the script for "Superman: The Movie," nevertheless knew the difference between a Big Story and a Big Comic Book. Anyone who grew up on "Superfriends" should not be trusted with the tradition. No, it's not fair, but it's true.

And as long as we've got the quarterback down, let's pile on. Christopher Reeve was an unknown when he was cast in the 1978 movie, it's true, but he didn't stay that way. Meanwhile, the capital-U Unknown cast as Superman/Clark Kent this time around--wait a moment while I get the fellow's name from IMDB . . . ah yes, Brandon Routh--remains as forgettable after "Returns" as he was before. But give Routh his due: he managed to play despair, heartbreak, satisfaction, anger, and tenderness with the same Xanax'ed deadpan look--the very model of dramatic efficiency. And I felt his drowning scenes were quite believable.

And there's no way, or reason, to avoid it: Margot Kidder's Lois Lane and Teri Hatcher's Lois Lane (to say nothing of Noel Neil's and Phyllis Coates's Lois) could--and should--beat the crap out of Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane, a demure soul in the tradition of House M.D.'s Dr. Cameron, and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning article, the Hamlet-esque "Does the World Need a Superman?", stands shamed by Kidder/Lane's first Man of Steel scoop: "I Spent The Night With Superman."

And what the hell, as long as I'm at it: Circa 1979 or 1980, I atended a presentation by the fellow who animated the swooping title credits for "Superman: The Movie." The process was insanely time-consuming and laborious: Each card, mounted on a track that swept down toward the camera, filmed backwards and then matted onto a star-filled background. Interesting and unusual in 1979; old hat when re-created digitally in 2006. (The same might be said for the John Williams score.)

That's probably enough. It would be too much to also mention, for example, that "Returns" takes the Old Testament "Moses" story built on by those nice Seigel and Schuster boys in Cleveland in the 1930s and trowels on a layer of New Testament messiah in-jokes (much more than in the first Reeves movie) like Miracle Whip on a bagel.

But to be fair, "Returns" had its moments. Two moments, in fact.

First, the look of the film, including the super-suit itself, is chromatically darker than the bright and sunny Reeve films. A lot of key action scenes are at night, or under dark clouds, or in storm-drenched waters, or above the top edge of the atmosphere--dimly lit, with muted colors, away from direct or reflected light. In theory, the dark palette is to reinforce the sense of melancholy the film is meant to convey (yes, just the thing we want from our superhero films, by the way). I'd like to think it was by design, but whether by design or luck these scenes were also reminiscent of the beautiful, rotoscoped Fleischer animated shorts of the early 1940s, which were also usually set inside torch-lit castles, underground lairs lit by molten metal, ancient tombs, abandoned streets at late hours, and such.

(It's a cliché now, by the way, so much so that "Lois and Clark" made good sport of it over a decade ago--why doesn't Lois just take off Clark's glasses? By pointing back to the old Fleischer rotoscopes, "Returns" reminds us why--before he was bedding Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, he was a mysterious character who appeared, saved the day, and was gone before anyone could even get a good look at him. Unlike the tabloid over-familiarity of contemporary Lois Lane headlines, those of the early days were more often along the lines of "Saboteur Plot Foiled: Superman Mysteriously Disappears.")

Second, Eva Marie Saint got a few moments in as Martha Kent. There's a dissertation in American Cultural Studies waiting to be written on how Martha Kent has been moved farther and farther from her Whistler's Mother beginnings in the last two decades: K Callan's Martha was feisty and flirtatious, a great match for Hatcher's Lois; Annette O'Toole's Martha is a radiant earth-mom, and Eva Marie Saint . . . well, coming on 50 years after "North by Northwest," she still does it for me. Full disclosure: Saint is the only Movie Star (capital "M", capital "S") I've ever breathed the same air with (as opposed to "media celebrities," what we mostly get nowadays). I didn't meet her, strictly speaking; that would be pushing it. But I heard her speak before the screening of a lovingly-restored version of "My Fair Lady" about 10 years ago. It was part of a big restoration process then underway by the AMC cable channel (back when it was still associated with classic movies, rather than "Smokey and the Bandit III"), and she was there to promote that project--and to charm us with stories. She talked about making "North by Northwest" with Cary Grant and "Mr. Hitchcock." The totally hot red dress she wore in the art-auction scene? Hitchcock took her shopping the day before and showed her that dress, which just wowed her. "You're wearing it tomorrow," he pronounced to her. The audience was eating out of her hand that night, and for the first (and maybe last) time, I got it--this is why they once were royalty.

Oddly enough, this summer produced two "Superman" movies, although one of them kept its true identity hidden like . . . like . . . hang on, the analogy will come to me. The second, of course, was the strange and fascinating "Hollywoodland." That movie is also split into two separate characters. One is George Reeves (played by Ben Affleck in a career-resuscitating performance), a modestly talented actor with great ambitions, trapped in a TV series he thought was beneath him. The second is a sleazy Hollywood detective (played by the if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing Adrian Brody) hired by Reeves' mother to prove that his suicide was actually (ready?) murder. In the same summer when the definitive true Hollywood murder mystery, The Black Dahlia, came out on film, it's not surprising that most of the box office oxygen got sucked away from "Hollywoodland," but it's worth it just to see some fine performances by Affleck and Diane Lane.

In fact, let's go out with a little gem of a scene with Affleck and Lane.