Okay, forget all those negative reviews of "The Lone Ranger" you've been reading everywhere, I'm gonna explain to you why Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer & company are far and away better than the Superman pic. (OR any other summer movie so far this season.)

Prologue: let me warn you, this blog is going to be all over the place, even more all over the place than my usual screeds. We're gonna jump from topic to topic and story to story with very little regard for linear sense. Any of you have ever tried to listen to me tell a story will understand. (Example; I'll start to tell you about Watershed at the Arts Festival a coupla weeks ago and inexplicably wind up at babbling about Jimi Hendrix at Vet's Memorial in 1968.)

First off, "The Lone Ranger" is great because it's the most anarchistic, anti-capitalistic, white-men-as-purveyors-of-genocide movie that will EVER have the name Disney attached to it. It's also either the most heartrending blockbuster summer movie action-adventure picture ever or the most exciting heartrending movie ever filmed. I'm quite serious. I have seen a LOT of movies in my 61 years on the planet and I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie this funny, this action-packed and simultaneously this sad ever. (I was THIS CLOSE to tears twice, and I'm a big, tough guy.) (HA!)

Come to think of it, that's probably what's bringing about all the bad reviews. I'm not sure anybody knows what to make of this movie: Is it a summer movie popcorn flick, is it a treatise on corporate greed, is it a scathing indictment of the treatment of American Indians that quite literally caused them to lose their birthright? What IS this movie?

This movie is Johnny Depp bringing his intellect, social conscience and star power to the summer movie genre and NAILING it. It's so much better than its summer blockbuster competition it's almost not fair to compare.

I saw "Man Of Steel" within a week of "The Lone Ranger" and they're just not in the same league. All the early hype was that "Man Of Steel" would do for for the Superman mythos what the Christopher Nolan "Dark Knight trilogy" did for Batman. That's just a laughable proposition. First, without a Christian Bale, a Heath Ledger, or an Aaron Eckhart, you're just NOT gonna build a great comic-book movie. (By the way; for those of you scoring at home, the three greatest comic-book movies of all time - "The Avengers," "The Dark Knight," and "Iron Man 2," the last largely on the strength of Mickey Rourke's villain portrayal.) (Also by the way, "Man Of Steel" wasn't even as good as this summer's "Iron Man 3," and that movie wasn't all that great.)

The problem with "MOS" and "IM-3" was that there was no real HEART to them. For all the talk of "Man Of Steel" portraying Superman as the last living member of his race, hopelessly alone on Earth, a man out of time & space, the film undercut its own point by introducing as villains six or seven OTHER surviving inhabitants of Krypton. (Not to mention the INTERMINABLE living-hologram flashbacks of Russell Crowe as Jor-El, Superman's Kryptonian father. If part of the pathos and premise of your film is that you've lost every living inhabitant of your planet, including your parents, you don't get a series of paternal do-overs.)

Plus the big-summer-movie-finale showdown in "Man Of Steel" was hopelessly derivative of the big-summer-movie-finale showdown in "The Avengers." (And let's talk about summer-movie collateral damage: How many innocent bystanders would have been killed in the "Man Of Steel" skyscraper-toppling battle royal, with nary a nod or blink from the filmmakers? The massacres that take place in "The Lone Ranger" actually REGISTER the loss of human life, you FEEL it in the pit of your stomach. If you can watch this movie without being affected by them, I don't wanna hang out with you at the movies, or anywhere else.)

And let's face facts; when director Gore Verbinski cues up and cranks up "The William Tell Overture" and Armie Hammer starts riding his stalwart stallion Silver ON TOP OF and THROUGH railroad cars, it's a pretty cool payoff to a great summer popcorn movie.

In short, go see "The Lone Ranger" RIGHT NOW and wait 'til "Man Of Steel" shows up at Carriage Place where you can catch it for a buck or two. - Ricki C. / July 7th, 2013

(Next time on Ricki C. Takes All The Fun Out Of Comic Book Movies - Stan Lee can take all of his millions from Marvel Studios and go to hell while Jack Kirby, who died in 1994 with maybe a few thousand bucks to his name, is barely remembered today, let alone credited for all of his comic book innovations.) (For the comic book-uninitiated who know rock & roll - This situation would be roughly akin to The Beatles not being particularly popular while they were together, but thirty years after they break up their records go HUGE and make MILLIONS and Paul McCartney gets to keep all the money while John Lennon and his heirs get NOTHING.)

Why the World Needs Superman...

I hate when people say they don’t like Superman. It’s like saying you don’t like Elvis. You might as well say you don’t like the first, best idea of something. Every rock and roller who came after Elvis has a part of Elvis in them – they couldn’t exist without Elvis. There are no Beatles without Elvis, no Springsteen, no nobody. Likewise, there are no other superheroes without Superman.

Superman, where superheroes are concerned, was the first best idea. Two guys from Cleveland said, hey, what if there was a dude who could do almost anything? They created Superman. The very next best superhero idea was Batman, who is the exact opposite in that he doesn’t have any powers at all. Every superhero creation thereafter was, is a variation of Superman or Batman.

But what’s really galling are the people who don’t like Superman because he’s not… dark; because he’s earnest, honest, and pure.

This is the why of Superman.

Superheroes are spurred to action, driven, or compelled by some motivating event or force. Batman is motivated by the murder of his parents and Spiderman is motivated by the murder of his uncle, but Superman – he’s merely an orphan from another planet. Here on Earth, he just happens to be extraordinary. He was raised and loved by two adoptive parents. There’s no vengeance lurking in his character, no deep seated need to set things right.

So, why does Superman do good, why does he save people? You ready for this one? Because he can. He could rule over the Earth, make little puny, chump-ass, Superman-butt wiping slaves out of all of us, but he doesn’t. He’s motivated only by benevolence. He doesn’t have to lift a superfinger, a finger by the way that could effortlessly flick our heads off, but he does.

And what makes him all the more extraordinary, is that he does this in spite of human beings being total assholes.

When I was a kid there were two moments in the first Christopher Reeve movies that are seared into my brain that I believe formed, partly, who I am today - or, at least, who I'd like to be.

The first comes in the great scene in which Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane interviews Superman on her balcony. The no-nonsense reporter asks Superman why he’s here, meaning on Earth, and he walks right into it: “to fight for truth, justice, and the American way,” he says. She rudely snickers at this seemingly naive answer. Superman turns suddenly very stern, locks eyes with her, and replies, “Lois, I never lie.”

Boom! Shut your cig hole Lois!

I’ve never forgotten that. And it still holds true today – that the minute you show people some raw earnestness they’ll try to slice you open.

The second moment is in Superman II during his epic battle against General Zod and Zod’s two other fellow Kryptonians, the three of whom all have the same super powers as Superman. It's three against one in the heart of Metropolis (a thinly disguised NYC) but it’s pretty much a stalemate until Zod stumbles upon Superman’s Achilles’ heel, and no, it's not Kryptonite. “I’ve discovered his weakness,” Zod informs his crew. “He actually cares for these… people.”

Wow. What a punch to the gut. You can hurt him by hurting people?! Heavy. Again, just because he cares. And, then, in a stunningly dark assessment of human nature, the citizens of Metropolis turn against Superman, calling him a coward when he flees Metropolis to draw Zod away from them. He cares even when he shouldn't.

The Clark Kent / Superman Alter Ego Conundrum

The other thing that gets under my skin is when people say “Who wouldn’t be able to tell that Superman is Clark Kent? He’s only wearing glasses! Blah blah blah, I’m typical blah blah, I don’t think about anything interesting and I have no insight blah blah, I’m a dunce. Blah blah.”

Clark’s “disguise” really shouldn’t be an issue. It’s not that people can’t see that Clark is Superman; it’s that they don’t want to see it. His humility blinds them from it. People don’t want to see greatness in the quiet, unassuming guy sitting next to them at work. In fact, they downright refuse to see it.

The very fact that people point to the so-called “lameness” of Clark’s disguise only points up their own lameness.

In Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 2, David Carradine has a great monologue about Superman in which he, and I’m paraphrasing, observes that “Superman’s costume isn’t a costume. Those are his clothes. Clark Kent is his costume. Clark Kent is how Superman sees us.”

I think that’s great, but not entirely accurate. Clark Kent is Superman’s way of showing us who we should be: honest, ethical, good, humble.

That we can’t see that simple truth is our problem. Each of us needs Superman to remind us to be our best possible self, to be good, to do good without the promise of reward, simply for the sake of good, even when it seems like other people don't deserve it.

You can learn more about Johnny DiLoretto by visiting our contributors page here.

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