Doom Patrol

The super hero movies of summer have been awful so far, X Men First Class feeling as rote as a instructions on how to  use make noise with a doggie chew toy, Thor turning Jack Kirby's peerless, dynamic design from the original comic book  into designs rejected from The Little Mermaid, and Green Lantern looking like a bad compromise amongst a handful of mediocre fan boys. I honestly don't hold much hope for the pending release of Captain America. I am afraid the unthinkable has happened to  Fan Boy Nation: WE ARE SICK TO DEATH OF SUPER HERO MOVIES, or rather, we are tired of discovering that the super hero adaptations are substantially sub-stellar, ie, not super . The irony of it all, it seems, is that as a teen reading my big fat share of DC, Marvel , Charleton comics, with occasional excursions into Gold Key and Dell titles, I read my comics as though they were movies and I was sitting ina theatre  during a Saturday matinee watching them; the artwork, the paneling, the crashes and destroyed cities were all perfectly fluid and dynamic, all the bombastic dialogue and simplistic exposition was perfectly plausible. The thrill of seeing "live" depictions of these tales comes down to little else than that the novelty has worn out, that there are not enough Sam Rami out the with the genius to make a comic book come alive on the screen with all the elements being seamless, balanced, without a worried conceit . We are perhaps simply tired of seeing directors try to shoe horn actors into fantastic bits of computer generated animation:  we wind up nagging about the surface details and miss everything of those old matinee adventures when the tale carried the rest of the afternoon. I wonder : why not just make a Superman reboot using nothing but computer animation? The technology is good enough.