Honestly, sometimes -especially of late- the idea of leaving the world behind to live on an isolated island and write a manifesto on how much society sucks sounds pretty appealing. It is not a good idea. But evidently it is what German Friedrich Ritter did in 1929 with his wife Dora, who both lived on the uninhabited Floreana Island in the Galapagos archipelago for three years before their solitude was interrupted by newcomers, some looking to do the same, some with their own designs on the island. What happened to the small collective on this island, which was conspicuously reduced by 1933, is a curious mystery that has never been definitively ascertained -even by those who did survive and whose descendants continue to live there. Ron Howard’s fascination with the madness of isolation and survival in the south Pacific was glimpsed in In the Heart of the Sea , his mostly forgettable film from ten years ago about the shipwreck that possibly inspired Moby Dick ; and Eden -h...
For more than a decade now, the people of superhero movies have not mattered. Not the superheroes and villains -they are extraordinarily important- but the everyday people the heroes are at least theoretically there to protect. Apart from immediate family, friends, or love interests, civilians don’t factor at all into the modern superhero equation -even though they are a critical part of what makes superheroes work as a concept. And so, when the major first act action set-piece occurs in James Gunn’s Superman , involving the titular character along with a handful of other heroes fighting a kaiju monster in the middle of Metropolis, it is notable that the emphatic focus of this Man of Steel in contrast to his colleagues is on getting civilians out of harms way. He even stops to rescue a squirrel, he cares that deeply about all living things. That this is treated with astonishing controversy by some or with quaintness by others speaks to how far this movie genre has gotten from its first...