Top ten sequels to best picture winners

It's been a minute on this blog since I've sat down to do some sort of top ten list. What was once the bread and butter of this blog has taken the back seat (to mix metaphors) as I have taken a more "catch as catch can" approach to blogging over the past, I don't know, decade. (My second son was born a little more than a decade ago. This could explain it.)

But the release of Gladiator II prompted me to decide to get back in the driver's seat, to return to the second part of my mixed metaphor. (Or to start slathering butter on the bread, to return to the first.)

So I decided to go through and look at all the sequels to best picture winners that I've seen, and decide which were the worthiest and least worthy. Or more correctly, to isolate the worthiest, meaning the least worthy will get shut out of discussion altogether.

Sorry Gladiator II. No spot on this list for you. 

(So if you want substantive discussion of Gladiator II, you can check out my review.) 

I ran into a tricky issue right away. While it would probably not surprise you to know that the vast majority of best picture winners have no sequel, there's one that has -- count 'em -- eight sequels, all of which I've seen. 

How to handle all the offspring of the 1976 best picture winner, Rocky?

Ultimately, I did include them all separately for consideration. If I only included one, I might not get to a top ten at all. 

First, though, just to give you a bit of an idea what we're up against.

I wouldn't say that I am familiar with all the possible sequels that may exist for the more obscure best picture winners. But as far as I can tell, no best picture winner had gotten a sequel until 1944's Going My Way had The Bells of St. Mary's come out the following year. I haven't seen The Bells of St. Mary's, so it won't be up for consideration on this list, and I didn't even know about it until I started research for this post.

It then takes all the way until 1967's In the Heat of the Night for there to be another BP winner to get a sequel, which is They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! -- making it the first BP sequel, chronologically, that I've seen, since I watched it only this year for my Blaxploitaudient series. The phenomenon becomes a little more common after this, but still not especially so. The French Connection in 1971 gets a 1975 sequel, which I also have not seen, and then of course The Godfather follows the next year, and we know what happened there.

One thing to clarify before we get started. I don't consider Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy to function as a sequel to the 2003 best picture winner Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It's a separate franchise and in any case, it wasn't solely the success of the best picture winner that prompted its existence.

So I have to say I started writing this post before I knew how many options there actually were to choose from. As I have now done that tally, I have seen 15 sequels to best picture winners, more than half of which are Rocky movies. 

So let's just make it a top 15.

15) Rocky V (1990) - The worst Rocky movie is easily the worst best picture sequel (that I've seen). No two ways about it.

14) The Godfather Part III (1990) - Nineteen ninety was a bad year for best picture sequels. It's likely Godfather III is not as bad as I remember, but I'm not eager for a second viewing to find out.

13) Gladiator II (2024) - I have to admit I came in a little biased against this film, because my former colleague at ReelGood told me beforehand that he hated it and would give it a 0/10. Having watched the film, I don't understand where that sort of vitriol comes from except this guy is given to extreme dislike (not so much to extreme like) and that he's younger than I am, so the original Gladiator was a foundational movie for him. But I don't think it's great. 

12) Hannibal (2001) - I remember the first sequel to Silence of the Lambs (I've only seen the two Hannibal Lecter sequels that feature Anthony Hopkins) having some unforgettable material -- like, the appearance of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger is permanently burned into my brain -- but that overall it's a bit all over all the place.

11) Creed II (2018). I'm not sure if the first sequel to Creed (which of course is itself a sequel to Rocky) truly belongs outside my top ten, but I am putting it here in deference to two other films that have just one sequel and therefore likely would have made my top ten, for the sake of variety only, if I had been going for only ten movies. Given my affection for the first Creed, I really wanted to love this movie, but it just pales in comparison.

10) The Evening Star (1996) - One of only two sequels on this list that we would not consider to be part of a franchise. The sequel to Terms of Endearment was fine, as I recall. I think I may have seen it before I saw Terms of Endearment. 

9) They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! (1971) - The other non-franchise sequel. This really has nothing to do with In the Heat of the Night, as it only features the main character, Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), spun out into a blaxploitation progenitor that takes place in San Francisco. It's pretty good, not great.

8) Red Dragon (2002) - I do not have significant memories of the second Silence of the Lambs sequel except that I remember I thought it was better than the first.

7) Creed III (2023) - Creed III may not be four slots better on this list than Creed II in terms of real-world quality, but there's an indistinct middle section here where the difference is negligible between the movies. A slight improvement on Creed II, it still convinced me that we don't need any more Creed movies.

6) Rocky IV (1985) - That this movie ranks as high as it does is an indication of a) how few good best picture sequels there actually are, and b) how this movie has gained in cultural cache over the years. I still think I've only seen it once, and I think about it more for its gloriously absurd extremes than for actually being a good movie.

5) Rocky II (1979) - I only saw this for the first time in the past few years, and in fact, it was the final Rocky movie I saw -- or close to it anyway. (I can't remember if I saw it just before or just after Creed III.) I think this movie gets sort of retrospective respect applied to it because it was the movie that likely allowed this series to continue as long as it has. If the first sequel had not worked, that might have been the end of it. And so it paved the way for three Rocky movies still ahead on this list.

4) Rocky Balboa (2006) - It seems unlikely that the sixth Rocky movie is quite as good as I remember it. After the disaster that was Rocky V, I didn't prioritize seeing this in the theater and eventually caught it on a plane. But I really enjoyed it on that plane, and it might be the Rocky movie I am most interested in revisiting just to interrogate that reaction.

3) The Godfather Part II (1974) - Blasphemy. Utter blasphemy that this would not be #1, you are probably thinking. But here we take a big jump upward to a truly beloved top three. Then again, maybe I can't quite call the second Godfather movie -- itself a best picture winner -- "beloved," which is why it does not beat out the two movies ahead of it. Infamously, the first time my wife and I watched this movie -- neither of us had seen it as recently as the late 2000s -- we watched it out of sequence, putting in the second DVD before the first. I eventually saw it correctly sequenced, but I think by then I had already missed the boat on loving this movie. What can you do. I can only ever give you my true perspective on the movies I see.

2) Creed (2015) - My #2 movie of 2015. I eventually watched this four times, including twice in the theater. It did lose a little bit on each viewing -- not a lot, but a little bit -- so it failed to scale the heights to the top of this list. 

1) Rocky III (1982) - If you put Rocky III and Creed up against each other in a duel on Flickchart, I might pick Creed. In fact, Creed is currently ranked #243 on my Flickchart while Rocky III is at #268, though I suspect they have never actually had a face-to-face duel. Creed is definitely the "better" movie in all the traditional ways you define the craft of cinema. But Rocky III is the movie I watched on repeat on VHS in the mid-1980s, and it has so many beats that I love. Creed will continue to diminish by small amounts if I go much beyond my current four viewings. At 10+ viewings -- though granted, only about one this century -- Rocky III has not yet lost any of its luster. The one this century was enough to confirm that. 

So was it worth writing a post tagged to the release of Gladiator II that just effectively became a ranking of Rocky movies?

Perhaps not, but at least it's done now.

2 many

While there are a lot of movie franchises out there, there's also the perception that there are relatively few properties on which audiences will reliably spend their money, which is why Hollywood vastly prefers continuing with existing franchises than trying to create new ones.

The logical conclusion from that, then -- and what I think every time summer rolls around -- is that this will finally be the summer that catches these relatively few franchises at exactly the wrong point, the summer when there will finally be no new tentpoles to support the movie season.

That's always wrong, of course, as we are now getting more and more fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth movies in series. That used to be just the territory of Friday the 13th. Now, respectable franchises will go on and on into cinematic oblivion without batting an eyelash.

What does seem to be the case, though, is that we would expect each summer movie season to be propped up exclusively by films that have reached that far end of the sequel spectrum. Which is why it's all the more surprising how many movies I've seen in 2018 that are only the modest second in their respective series.

Nights like Friday night tend to accentuate that, as I watched a double feature of the second Paddington movie and the second Pacific Rim movie. Both new franchises, obviously, but based on known properties (a beloved children's book) or types of movies that have historically been successful (giant creatures fighting each other in urban landscapes).

Both were movies I meant to watch last weekend, both rentals from our Fetch box (kind of like OnDemand). But Pacific Rim was going to take too long to download, so I couldn't watch it Saturday night like I'd planned (I scratched that itch, so to speak, with the regrettable Battleship), and Paddington was rejected by my kids on Sunday night, though they ultimately did watch it Friday night, sort of because I forced them to -- it was going to expire if I didn't. They liked it okay. (I liked it much better, though not at the "freshest tomato on Rotten Tomatoes" level.)

But these were far from my only second movies in 2018. I'd noticed the trend long before Friday night. In 2018 I have also seen:

Super Troopers 2
Deadpool 2
Incredibles 2
Ant-Man and the Wasp
Sicario: Day of the Soldado
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

You could, of course, argue that Fallen Kingdom is the fifth Jurassic Park movie rather than the second Jurassic World movie, but the rebranding makes the opposite argument easier to make.

Perhaps one of the reasons it's been easier for me to notice, especially as I've scanned my in-progress movie rankings, is that a surprising number of these movies have actually used the number 2 in their titles. That's something studios have been dropping -- see Sicario, Jurassic World and Pacific Rim -- as they've thought it's been in their interest to deemphasize the idea that it's a sequel, preferring to make it "just another adventure in this world." So they want us to know we're consuming the next installment in these franchises, but not that it's that icky word "sequel." Quite a complicated mental game they are playing with us.

But Super Troopers, Incredibles, Paddington and Deadpool have all pushed back against that trend, sometimes for reasons of self-deprecation (Deadpool) but mostly just for simplicity of marketing. As Paddington 2 is a consummately uncynical movie, it stands to reason that it would also not try to trick us with a title like Paddington: Resurgence. Which also functions as a bit of a compliment of our intelligence.

Of course, I have to mention the exceptions. This year I've also seen the third Hotel Transylvania movie, the third Avengers movie (do we even think of it as the third in that series anymore?), the third Cloverfield movie (loosely connected) and the fourth Ocean's movie. I guess I've just seen almost every sequel this year, whether it was the first, second or third. I did pass on the third Fifty Shades movie, having also passed on the second.

Two more #2s are also being released this week, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and The Equalizer 2. I'm out on the second Equalizer as I haven't seen the first, and actively passed up Mamma Mia! on Thursday night in favor of The Gospel According to Andre. I did have a moment when I was watching this humorous Onion review of Here We Go Again when they said it was a sequel to the 2008 movie. There's no way it feels like ten years since Mamma Mia!, though I did review it for my old site and I stopped writing for that site in 2011, so I guess it makes sense.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the bunch of second movies I'm seeing this year is how good they are. Not only do I like the second Deadpool, Paddington, Ant-Man and Incredibles movies better than the first in those series (a marginal preference with Incredibles), but all those movies are currently in my top 11 for the year. (Paddington, the most beloved of those, currently sits at #11).

When you come right down to it, though, my experience with sequels this year is probably only notable because I happened to notice it. Probably, I could write some version of this post every year. That's the thing about Hollywood. Even when we look at what's coming out and see it as just more of the same, Hollywood has figured out how to surreptitiously insert new properties that we quickly forget haven't been around forever.

Which I guess is a good thing, sort of?

Series I've abandoned

Another Jason Bourne movie comes out this week, reminding me of how much I dislike Jason Bourne movies.

"Dislike" is a strong word. The better way to describe them is that they don't do anything for me. When everyone was falling all over themselves getting excited about The Bourne Identity, I shrugged and thought it was "pretty good." A general dislike for the spy genre probably contributed to those feelings, but even as action I only thought it was "pretty good."

I tried to get myself in the Bourne groove with The Bourne Supermancy, hearing good things about that as well. That also left me non-plussed. It was fine, nothing more.

Since then, I haven't felt the need to watch any more Bourne movies.

And that got me thinking about other series I have abandoned, and that it might make for a fun blog post.

In order to qualify for consideration here, I need to have seen at least two movies in a series and then stopped keeping up with it. I can't, for example, call Madagascar a series I abandoned, because having watched (and obviously not liked) only the original, I never agreed to get on board for the series. There are numerous examples of that. Jason Bourne is a bit different because I came back for more, but still felt myself underwhelmed.

I'm also not including series where I've watched two or more movies, but not in order. I only saw the first and third Friday the 13th, for example. But I can't really say I "abandoned" that series, according to the way I'm currently defining it. I was never really working on it anyway.

Without further ado ... my abandoned series:

American Pie - It probably goes without saying that I didn't follow this series into this umpteen straight-to-video Band Camp movies, but neither did I see American Wedding or American Reunion.

Beverly Hills Cop: There was a Beverly Hills Cop 3, but I didn't see it.

The Crow: Do you count the later Crow movies? I don't really even count the second one, though I have seen it.

Final Destination: Final Destination 4 -- otherwise known as The Final Destination -- killed me. Sorry, Final Destination 5.

Hannibal Lecter: This is a bit of a weird one as the movies made about Hannibal the Cannibal have not had a consistent artistic guiding hand and have seen multiple actors play Lecter. But because I never got around to watching Hannibal Rising I suppose I should include this.

Harold and Kumar: Somehow I watched two Harold and Kumar movies, despite hating both of them. I believe there's some Christmas one I didn't watch.

Iron Man - I wasn't opposed to Iron Man 3, but I just never bothered.

Karate Kid - They stopped numbering these movies but I didn't see The Next Karate Kid or the recent reboot. I guess that counts.

Mummy - Wasn't there a movie called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor? Yeah, I didn't see that.

Night at the Museum - Wasn't there a movie called Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb? I think it's already been established I don't watch third movies in series with the word "tomb" in the title.

Paranormal Activity* - You'll note the asterisk. I didn't watch Paranormal Activity 4 but I did return for The Marked Ones. But then I didn't watch The Ghost Dimension. I'm all over the map on this one.

Pirates of the Caribbean - On Stranger Tides was a bridge too far.

Police Academy - Just because I abandoned it a long time ago doesn't mean it doesn't count. I only saw the first two of an eventual 26 of these movies.

Poltergeist - I'm told there was a Poltergeist 3 in a skyscraper or something. Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I did recently watch the terrible reboot, as you know.

Rambo - Didn't see #3 or the reboot. If 2008's Rambo was as good as Rocky Balboa, though, I probably should.

Resident Evil - The third one was actually a big recovery from the awful second one, but I still didn't bother to continue after that point.

Rush Hour - Given how much I liked Rush Hour 2, I probably should have given Rush Hour 3 a shot, but I didn't.

Scary Movie - You'd figured I should just keep going if I'd made it as far as Scary Movie 3, but neither 4 nor 5 ever made it into my DVD player.

Scream - Yes, I made it one further in the Scary Movie series than in the series it was parodying.

Spider-Man - Not only did I never bother to see Spider-Man 3, but I didn't see either the reboot or its sequel.

Starship Troopers - There was a third. It was called Marauder, if I remember correctly.

Step Up - Yes, I saw more than one of these movies.

Transformers - I went farther than any self-respecting viewer should go. But I went extinct before Age of Extinction.

Up series: Okay, including this one as a bit of a joke. I fully intend to get to 56 Up but haven't done so yet.

So quite a few.

Will I get back to some of these? Probably. But let's just say I haven't made it a priority. Nor have I made X-Men: Apocalypse a priority, but since I know I will see it before the end of the year, I didn't see it fit to include it here.

In truth, we'd probably all be better off abandoning more series. If we watched fewer sequels, collectively, we'd probably get more original content.

Hollywood gives us what we demand, and if we don't demand much, we don't get much.

Alien vs. Aliens: Finally, an informed opinion

It's one of those cinematic discussions that seems to keep on circling back around. Every couple years, like clockwork, I seem to be around people having the following debate:

Which is better, Alien or Aliens?

They seem to find this debate especially interesting because, as they are fond of pointing out, Ridley Scott's seminal 1978 film and James Cameron's phenomenally successful 1986 sequel exist in two different genres. Alien, they point out, is a horror movie, or even more specifically, a haunted house movie. Aliens, on the other hand, is an action movie, even a war movie.

I don't mean to belittle this debate or suggest that the people who have it are not creative. I've probably initiated this discussion myself on occasion. I'm just kind of surprised by the legs it's got. People just can't get enough of comparing and contrasting the first two Alien movies.

As much as I have been involved in this debate, though, I've tended to take on the role of the curious onlooker. I mean, I've suspected where my preferences lay, but having only ever seen Aliens once, in the 1980s -- and having seen Alien all three of the times I've seen it since then, including twice in the past five years -- I didn't know if I could confidently choose the original over the sequel, without giving Aliens its due via another viewing.

And as there have been more and more years that have passed since I've seen Aliens, its mythology has grown accordingly. Having already had a sense of its greatness as an action movie, I have since decided that it probably exceeds the sometimes limiting confines of that genre. I mean, just think about the mythical badass that Sigourney Weaver is in this movie.

Until Sunday night, though, when I finally sat down with Aliens again.

The first thing that struck me was the withered, old-fashioned look of the 20th Century Fox logo as it popped up at the beginning of the movie. That's what the logo looked like in 1986, but that made me realize I had this weird persistent idea of Aliens as "new." It's nearly 30 years old, Vance. Some age is going to show on it.

I had forgotten that the movie began with Ripley being rescued from years of hypersleep -- 57 years, as a matter of fact. That figure chilled me when Paul Reiser revealed it to a groggy Ripley. Aliens was interstellaring us years before Interstellar.

The setup is great. In an Aliens appreciation piece I read recently, the writer noted that nearly nothing that can be described as conventionally exciting happens in the first hour of the movie. I was rather staggered to hear this. You could never get away with something like that in 2015, as an action movie would be almost contractually obligated to begin with a ten-minute action set piece, even if it then proceeded into a half-hour plus of laying the groundwork for the second half of the movie (but it probably wouldn't actually deprive viewers of explosions or fisticuffs for any half-hour period of its running time). Yet the opening hour of Aliens works exquisitely, slowly building tension until the creatures are unleased on us in all their fury around the 55-minute mark.

A surprising thing happened then, though. I actually sort of became less interested for the next 45 minutes or so.

Although this is the part where the marines realize how terribly overmatched they are, and it also contains Bill Paxton's most quotable lines, I found both the alien kills and the marines' responses to them less clever than I expected them. This is probably also the part of the evening when I started to get really tired, having gotten a later start on the 137-minute movie than we would have otherwise liked.

Of course, once the cast is pared down basically to just Ripley, Newt and Bishop, the movie really grabbed my attention again. Perhaps it was seeing Aliens for the first time as a father, but I got damn near emotional when Ripley appears in the power loader and spits out her epic line: "Get away from her you bitch!" I love that her fight in the loader takes on an almost slow-mo quality because the loader is so very big and deliberate in its motions. Anyway, the ending felt incredibly satisfying.

I think it's kind of funny that both of these movies end with the alien being shot out of an airlock. Now I'm curious to go back to Alien to see how similar that end scene is. I imagine it's different enough, but it's funny to consider the similarity since these two movies are otherwise thought of as so different in their tone and intention.

So my first viewing of Aliens in about 25 years did in fact convince me of the superiority of the original, which ranges from a slight superiority to a more significant one. Both are obviously first-rate films.

And in case you were wondering, I won't be widening my net to revisit Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection any time soon ... even if the directors of both of those films have gone on to have very interesting careers, and it would be useful to see how these films fit into them in retrospect.

Now I'm looking ahead to what Neill Blomkamp will do with an Alien reboot/sequel ... and after watching Chappie last night, I feel even more encouraged about his maturation as a director and his ability to pull it off. Given the robotics and mech suits he's used in his movies, a reappearance of the power loader in the next Alien film is almost a guarantee.

Things I didn't know/forgot about Superman

My childhood was timed just perfectly so that it was the second movie of certain iconic series that really resonated with me. Yes, I have a much greater intimacy with the likes of Superman II, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, each of which I have seen approaching ten times, while Superman: The Movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Terminator have remained only one-time viewings. (The Terminator movies came out later, respectively, than those other movies, but were also significantly more violent, so I didn't encounter them until later on in my maturation.) I'd say the same thing for The Empire Strikes Back, but my preference of that over Star Wars is more in line with traditional thinking, and I never owned it on video, so didn't watch it significantly more than the original.

For years now I have been trying to schedule a second viewing of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but I just never seem to be able to get my hands on the thing. Remembering it to have disappointed me, you could also say I haven't exhausted the conventional means to acquire it.

Superman: The Movie, I realized, posed no such problem.

See, I got all four Superman movies as part of a DVD four-pack at a Christmas gift swap a couple years ago. That led to my first-ever viewing of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which I consider to be one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It was an easy decision to leave the disc that contained both that and Superman III behind in the states.

The Superman/Superman II disc came with us to Australia, and when I was sick on Sunday afternoon with a chunk of time home by myself, I decided to reacquaint myself with side 1 of that DVD.

Here's what I learned/remembered:

1) This was my third, not second, viewing of the movie. I can be pretty sure of that. Both viewings would have been more than 25 years ago, though, and probably closer to 30 years ago. Then again, there's also a high deja vu factor because some of the events in this movie are recapped at the beginning of Superman II. And some of them are just iconic enough to have seen them elsewhere, in clip packages at the Oscars and the like.

2) I can't believe that the two names that appear before the title are Marlon Brandon and Gene Hackman. Superman himself does not get a pre-title billing. Of course, no one had heard of Christopher Reeve at the time, so it makes sense by Hollywood standards if not by simple logic.

3) I thought I hadn't learned until one of the reboots that the S Superman wears on his chest was his family crest on Krypton. But there it is, right on Jor-El's chest.

4) When General Zod (Terence Stamp) got a mention on a recent episode of Filmspotting as one of the five best "things that came from outer space to destroy us," host Adam Kempenaar referenced his appearance and trial in the original Superman. Knowing that scene iconically from Superman II, I had thought he was mistaken -- and my desire to prove him wrong was one of the reasons I watched the movie again on Sunday. Turns out, he was right -- it's the opening scene of the movie. Which really begs the question: Why in the hell was Richard Donner allowed to include this scene of the three Krypton outlaws being tried, when their involvement in the rest of the movie is going to be absolutely zilch? I know that the first two Superman movies were envisioned as two parts of one whole, and it was probably safe to assume the first movie would be successful enough to greenlight a sequel. (Maybe they were even filmed at the same time -- I can't be bothered to go look it up.) Still, from a basic narrative standpoint that dictates that every part of a script must have a clear purpose for being included, the inclusion of these villains at this juncture makes no sense whatsoever.

5) I said the previous scene was the movie's first scene, but that's not actually true. There's a little prologue that involves us looking at the pages of Superman comic #1 from 1938. Totally forgot that.

6) How horrifying is that Krypton destruction scene? There are bodies hurtling down endless chasms left and right.

7) You would never get away with being able to show the little three-year-old dingle of a naked Superboy these days.

8) Lana Lang. When she made an appearance in Superman III, it angered me -- Lois Lane is Clark Kent's love interest. Not this impostor. Turns out, she has one minute of screen time in Superman: The Movie. Who knew? See #4 about including characters who are going to pay no dividends in this movie.

9) Is that Christopher Reeve dubbing the dialogue for the teenage version of the character? Another thing I can't be bothered to look up.

10) Man of Steel was torn a new one for containing so many product placements in its big fight scene in Smallville. Turns out, there's a dumbfoundingly prominent placement of a box of Cheerios right in the original Superman.

11) This could have occurred to me during one of my many viewings of Superman II, but how the hell did Lois Lane afford a penthouse apartment on a reporter's salary?

12) Metropolis is really and truly intended to be New York. That's something I forgot. Not only do they mention nearby New York cities (such as New Rochelle) in announcements at the train station under which Lex Luthor has his lair, but then of course Superman and Lois also fly by the Statue of Liberty later on.

13) I had forgotten how much of a comedic character Luthor already was in this first movie. I thought he was more of a murderous scumbag, which he is. What really surprised me, though, is that he would be so frustrated with Otis at one point that he would actually jump into the backseat of a car -- while driving -- just to throttle him. Thank goodness Miss Tessbacher is there to take the wheel.

14) And speaking of Miss Tessbacher ... it's so odd to me that the only reason the movie ends positively for anybody is because of this very side character. It's she who frees Superman from the Kryptonite necklace that sinks him to the bottom of Luthor's pool (and how clunky is that entire scene between Superman and the villains in Luthor's lair?), without which Lois Lane would have died and two nuclear missiles would have hit their targets. Not only that, but she also kisses Superman in a moment that the movie lingers on as though it were sort of romantic. I remembered none of this, and frankly consider it to be pretty problematic.

15) And speaking of Lois dying ... the fact that Superman can turn back time by flying at the speed of light in the opposite direction of the rotation of the Earth remains one of the most bogus ideas ever put forward in a Superman movie. It's simply cheating. One question: Did Supe know he would be able to do this when he set out, or was it just a happy byproduct of angrily flying really fast? And if he knew, wouldn't he be more practical about the whole thing, rather than flying through angry tears? And if he didn't know, wouldn't he be more surprised that it worked?

16) And what's up with this series' obsession with nuclear weapons? I know it's a byproduct of the Cold War and everything, but a nuclear weapon is the nemesis in this movie and at the beginning of Superman II (the bomb in the Eiffel Tower). Then there's a whole character devoted to nuclear power in the fourth movie, Nuclear Man, but the less said about that character/movie, the better.

I came away from this viewing with a full confirmation of my belief that Superman II is the superior film. For one, it's got a much more focused and self-contained plot, that builds and builds rather than just springing itself on us (we don't even learn the details of Luthor's plot until just before he executes it). Secondly, it's got far better villains. And thirdly, it's just more fun.

However, I have to realize and acknowledge that it would simply be impossible for me to feel as much love for the original Superman as Superman II, simply for how much I familiarized myself with the sequel and loved it through repeated exposure. It's what I did back in the 1980s that determined this once and for all, and it can't be undone/changed by anything I might do now.

Okay, next up: Finding Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Is Pixar getting lazy?

Used to be that Pixar was pathologically committed to forging new, original material that never failed to be just the thing the zeitgeist needed. Like clockwork, Pixar would release one film per year that seemed to stretch our collective imaginations in one direction or another, toward things we had never seen before, and get five-star ratings from critics in the process.

Now? I'm concerned about the upcoming period of laurel-resting.

Granted, Pixar's latest, Toy Story 3, is the first sequel the company has made in 11 years (since the brilliant Toy Story 2), and by all standards continues Pixar's unblemished record of excellence. But we're about to enter into a period that might be telling in terms of how Pixar plans to settle down in the coming decade.

Namely, you're about to get a lot more sequels.

With the Toy Story movies, there was never a doubt about the company's direction. I know we're only talking about a small sample size with just one previous sequel, but I don't think anyone thought Toy Story 3 was a sign of encroaching laziness on Pixar's part. Toy Story 2 had set a precedent that sequels were acceptable for Buzz, Woody and pals -- and that these sequels had the chance to be nearly as good as, if not better than, the original.

Now, however, the rest of the Pixar catalogue is being opened up to potential franchising. No longer are the Toy Story movies the exception that proves the rule (I'm never sure if I'm using that notion correctly) -- the rule of forever breaking new ground.

Most of you have probably heard that Pixar's next movie is Cars 2, which is set to open on June 24, 2011. But did you know that the following year, Monsters Inc. 2 is being released as well? Wikipedia has it scheduled for released on November 16, 2012. (We'll already know if Barack Obama won reelection by then.) I'm sharing this now because I just found out myself -- yesterday, while checking Billy Crystal's filmography. (If you remember, I wondered in yesterday's post why he no longer acts.)

It'd actually be three sequels in a row for Pixar if not for the fairytale Brave, once titled The Bear and the Bow, which is scheduled to be released on June 15, 2012 -- marking the first time two Pixar films will be released in the same calendar year.

I don't have a problem with the movies they chose to franchise -- I'm a bigger Cars fan than almost anyone I know, and I also really dig Monsters Inc. It's just the quick run of sequels, three out of four films, that seems like a worrisome trend. (And for the record, Brave doesn't sound as promising as other original Pixar material -- it features knights and princesses and other areas that have been done to death by dozens of Pixar knockoffs.)

If these three sequels, why shouldn't we be expecting Finding Nemo Again? Further Up? The Even-More Incredibles? Why not Ratatouille 2, or perhaps, more appropriately, Rata-2-ee?

And then, when they're done with all that, maybe Cars 3 and Monsters Inc. 3? And don't forget Toy Story 4.

I'm not sure if "laziness" is really the correct term, but it seems logical that it's easier -- or at least a safer bet -- to write new adventures for tried-and-true characters, than to produce new characters who may not catch on in the same way (or may not have the same possibilities for merchandising). It's a lot easier if you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go to the drawing board. Reinventing the wheel has worked so far, but Pixar must wonder: For how long?

The years 2007 to 2009 may not have been my favorite years for Pixar movies, but there's no doubt that the triumvirate of Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up raised the profile of Pixar from mere purveyors of children's entertainment to the prestigious makers of dramatic art they are today. In some reviews of Toy Story 3, I even sensed the critic struggling with the dilemma of how to address the basic frivolity of a third Toy Story movie, relative to the weighty issues considered in the last three films. But Pixar has gained such a teflon image, there's no way a critic could question the studio, which benefits from an automatic presumption of greatness, a golden touch that never fails. Fortunately, most critics didn't really feel the need to question, because Toy Story 3 ended up being great. The sighs of relief were audible that this revered company had continued its winning streak.

That's why I'll be especially curious to see the reaction to Cars 2. The first Cars, although inordinately popular with small children (my friend watched it literally 30 times with his young son), didn't leave most adults searching for newer and greater accolades. In fact, it's fair to say that some even turned their noses up at it. I'm the exception -- I really loved the film. But there's no doubt that many people consider it Pixar's weakest or second weakest film (A Bug's Life being the other contender).

If people rhapsodize over the sequel to a movie that features cars with googly eyes, it'll serve as proof to me that either a) Pixar really can do no wrong, or b) the brainwash is complete. Part of the reason we love Pixar as much as we do is because we want to love Pixar that much -- we need to love Pixar that much. If critics wax philosophical about Cars 2, we'll know that Pixar's new phase of going back to the well has been accepted, even endorsed.

If not, it could tell us that our love affair with Pixar is contingent on them continuing to expand our minds -- continuing to present us with rats who want to be gourmet chefs, with trash compactors who want to love, and with old men who tether their homes to hot-air balloons.

I guess we have almost a year before we'll find out.

When Bigger might actually be better

Although I watched the last few seasons of Sex and the City, and only started to get fed up with it near the end, I didn't see the movie until a couple weeks ago, almost two years after its release.

I might have seen it sooner had I not been daunted by the 145-minute running time. But I was also daunted by expecting it to suck.

And suck it did -- at least I thought so. Or maybe more accurately, it was protracted and boring, and I found the characters unsympathetic. It's funny, because the rules are different for a movie and a TV show. On a TV show, the characters' tunnel-vision materialism can seem charming. But in a movie, they have the burden of being Protagonists with a capital P, so their motivations need to be deeper, their actions more magnanimous, than the ongoing pursuit of the perfect pair of Gucci high heels. (For the purposes of this argument, I am going to assume Gucci makes shoes, though I really have no idea).

Sex and the City, the movie, actually went for magnanimity in a way that I found laughable, insulting and almost racist. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) hires a black assistant, Louise, played by Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson. When we meet Louise, she has a designer handbag that she's renting because she can't afford it. So even though she's sophisticated enough to assist fashion maven Carrie Bradshaw, she's ghetto enough to put her bag on the equivalent of layaway? Carrie's decision to hire Louise is supposed to make her look super enlightened, like she either doesn't see race or believes firmly in affirmative action. But the power dynamics in their relationship are pretty gross -- and when Louise returns home to St. Louis to pursue love, Carrie gifts her a real Dolce & Gabbana handbag, which creates this unfortunate "Oh thank you massa!" moment between them.

But I didn't mean to write about race today. No, the real problem with the Sex and the City movie is that it played like an entire season crammed into one 2 hour and 20 minute movie. Each character followed the kind of plot arc that they would normally follow during a typical season of the show, and given that agenda, you could say it was a miracle they fit it into 145 minutes. But that also left the movie feeling very small and workaday, with only one plot point (Carrie and Mr. Big potentially getting married) to raise it above the level of mere TV show.

And this is where Sex and the City 2, which comes out today, may actually have the chance to be better than the original, by being bigger.

A couple weeks ago I shared my concern about the potential for bombastic excess in Iron Man 2, cautioning against the bigger-is-better approach to sequels. But I guess it depends what kind of bigger you're going for. By making this movie bigger than TV, the Sex and the City girls could have me interested again.

In this case, "bigger" means "taking a trip to Morocco."

What may seem like a gimmick is actually a stroke of genius -- take the sex out of the city. That's what a movie version of a TV show should be all about -- expanding the universe of the show and giving us things we haven't seen before. Creating new stimuli to bring out the essential prissiness in Charlotte, the essential sarcasm in Miranda, the essential romanticism in Carrie, and the essential horniness in Samantha.

I haven't read a plot synopsis for Sex and the City 2 -- maybe because I worried it would damage the thesis of this post -- but if the entire movie, give or take a few establishing scenes, takes place in Morocco, I can think of nothing better for the potential fortunes of this potential franchise. Of course, it gives me pause that Sarah Jessica Parker famously sniped that they should never have made a second movie, and I doubt there will be a third. But if they do in fact stick to the Morocco setting, at least the second movie will be a respectable way to go out.

The ideal way I envision it is that it's a week-long trip to Morocco (this much I've gathered from the ads), and that each character's plot arc is something that can be resolved in Morocco itself, even if it may involve phone calls to loved ones back in New York. Make the whole movie one giant travelogue, set in the always-epic cinematic location of the desert, and give each character something Moroccan to keep them occupied for two hours (at least they've shaved 25 minutes off the running time). It will feel both big and appropriately cinematic, which are probably one in the same thing, and it will feel nothing like a TV season on fast forward.

My worry, of course, is that they will spend about as much time in Morocco as they spent in Mexico for Carrie's abortive honeymoon in the first film -- about 15 minutes of screen time. And that will mean they've learned nothing from the criticisms directed at the original.

There's a second way that I hope Sex and the City 2 will be Bigger. You probably noticed that I capitalized the B in Bigger in my title for this post, and, knowing that I'm not someone prone to random capitalizations, you probably assumed I meant something by it. Indeed I did.

Simply put, I hope to see more of Mr. Big (Chris Noth) in this movie. Although he plays a crucial role in the first film's plot, he also disappears for huge stretches of time. And what can I say -- I just find this man extremely debonair. He's clearly a supporting character in the Sex and the City universe, but a viewer -- especially a guy like me -- needs a little diversion from all the talk of shoes and adoptions and pregnancies and orgasms.

However, I've heard some scuttlebutt that Aidan (John Corbett) is the only male character who makes it to Morocco, which means either one or the other of my hopes for the movie will be dashed: Either not very long in Morocco, or not very much Mr. Big, especially since Aidan is Mr. Big's rival for Carrie's affections.

Oh well. What can I expect from a brand name that long ago crossed over from charming me to irritating me?

Boldly committed, or just short-sighted?

As you are probably aware, the advertising surrounding Shrek Forever After has been all about how it's going to be the final Shrek movie.

In fact, for awhile, I thought they had actually changed the name of the movie to Shrek: The Final Chapter, as this poster would indicate.

There have been various other posters/ads with slogans like "It ain't ogre 'til it's ogre" and "the fairy tale is ogre." (I was really hoping to find one that didn't include the word "ogre," but they seem to have lost their pun thesaurus that day.)

It's as though they're trying to do everything possible to go on record about the finality of this movie, to remove every temptation they may feel about making a fifth one.

Well, I'll believe it when I see it. Or, don't see it.

When Shrek Forever After makes another $350 million this summer, will it really be so easy to walk away? How can you just leave money like that lying on the table? Given the franchise's history of box office bravura -- Shrek 2 slayed to the tune of $437 million in the U.S., which is the fifth highest of all time, while Shrek the Third is only 17 spots behind on that list at $320 million -- I fully expect the fourth Shrek movie to outgross all other movies released in 2010. (The bar is currently set at $331 million by Alice in Wonderland). In fact, I put my money where my mouth was -- okay, there was no money involved -- and picked Shrek Forever After as my top-grossing film in the March Madness box office game being run by Fletch at The Large Association of Movie Blogs (LAMB). (And looking at it now, I see I'm the only one -- which could mean I'm either crazy or brilliant.)

Most movie execs don't have the sense to walk away from a franchise until they have bled it dry, until the public appetite for that franchise has clearly started to go on the wane. Certain franchises might go dormant for awhile -- in the case of Indiana Jones, it was 19 years -- but we should all know enough by now to never say never. Until the audience has told you in no uncertain terms that they will no longer pay for this crap, it makes sense to keep making it.

Which is why the makers of the Shrek movies are either boldly committed ... or naive and short-sighted.

Retiring athletes always think they're certain about retiring. But when it's staring Michael Jordan, Brett Favre and Roger Clemens in the face that they will never shoot, pass or pitch again, they change their tune. At that point, all we can really hope is that they have only one false retirement, not multiple. Usually, that hope is dashed.

And it could be the same with Shrek. It could be that when Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy realize they'll only do the Shrek and Donkey voices again at parties, a fifth movie won't sound so bad. But who are we kidding? The impetus for the fifth film would probably have to come from somewhere else in Dreamworks. I don't know if Myers, Murphy and Cameron Diaz have gone on record saying they don't want to play these roles anymore, but any or all of them would probably be replaceable, and the movie would still make $150 to $200 million.

Besides, why wouldn't they want to come back for a fifth? It's not like any of them are master thespians who are turning down serious dramatic roles in order to make more Shrek movies. They wouldn't have to, anyway, because animation is an easy payday. You just sit in a studio and do line readings as you watch the characters move on screen. What could be easier?

If the Shrek movies do truly stop at four, it will give me a respect for the franchise I haven't had previously. I've actually only seen one Shrek movie, Shrek. I liked it fine at the time I saw it. But a dislike crept in pretty quickly. I decided that the essential message at the heart of the film was suspect -- I developed the impression that instead of celebrating difference and loving yourself despite your physical appearance, the movie was actually doing the opposite, in a covert, pernicious way. I'd have to watch it again for examples, but frankly, I don't really want to. But perhaps the thing that annoyed me most, as I saw bits and pieces of Shrek here and there again (and watched most of it again on a plane), was Murphy's Donkey character. Not only was he sort of offensive, he was also irritating. Does that conversation he and Shrek have about whether onions have layers take up 15 minutes of that movie, or 20?

But I'm prepared to take them at their word, for now. If only because I've heard there's a possibility they will keep the franchise going in a matter of speaking, by spinning off to concentrate on Antonio Banderas' Puss in Boots character. A character I am only familiar with by reputation, having seen neither the second nor the third Shrek movie. In fact, now that I look on wikipedia, I see that this spin-off has not only a title, but a release date: Puss in Boots: Story of an Ogre Killer, scheduled to come out next year already. (Who knows when that was written -- IMDB has it merely in "announced" status.)

So Dreamworks will be hedging their bets either way.

Before I leave off my discussion of Shrek Forever After, I wanted to include an aside about the movie's advertising campaign that has bothered me a little bit, but wasn't enough for an entire post.

If you've seen any of the recent ads, it's as though there's a campaign underway to make a cult figure out of a bratty little kid who tells Shrek (a celebrity in his world) to "Do the roar!" The roar, I guess, being what Shrek is famous for. This spoiled little kid has a voice that puts him halfway between Eric Cartman and the midgets (little people) in Tod Browning's Freaks. The "Do the roar!" demand is repeated a couple times, and then you see the kid say "I love you, daddy," from which we are supposed to understand that his father paid a huge amount of money to get him in to see the famed ogre.

I admit that this kid has a good weirdness going for him, and that voice is odd indeed. But what got me a little annoyed was when I saw a digital ad for Shrek Forever After on Venice Blvd. in which "DO THE ROAR!" was being put forth as the big catchphrase from the movie.

I resent the idea that the movie is trying to tell us what lines we will love, before we've even seen it. Aren't quotable lines supposed to develop organically out of the zeitgeist? Aren't we supposed to anoint them as classic dialogue through word-of-mouth? Yet it seems like more and more, the marketing departments behind films are trying to determine our quotable lines for us. Sort of the same thing happened with Inglourious Basterds, when a number of posters/billboards featured the line "That's a bingo!" Then again, those may have been posters for the DVD release, when we had already theoretically decided, as a society, that we found "That's a bingo!" to be a memorable line from Tarantino's film. (I may not have been present for that meeting).

And why wouldn't marketing departments do this, if it works? If it increases awareness/buzz about their film, even ever so slightly? Whether it works for this particular film remains to be seen.

So here's hoping that the Shrek Forever After advertising campaign succeeds in terms of being honest about there never being a Shrek Drinks a Fifth, but fails in terms of forcing a catchphrase on us.

My concern is that it will probably be just the opposite.

The inevitability of excess

I was all set to write a piece this Friday about how Iron Man 2 appeared to be following the dispiriting "bigger, more, but not better" trend of Hollywood sequels.

But sometimes in the blogging world, with all the reading we do, we come across the work of another blogger who has already taken that same perspective, and taken it more eloquently and succinctly than we would have ourselves. So I'd like to refer you to the work of my esteemed colleague Daddy Geek Boy on the topic. It's a good write-up, and you can find it here.

I'll still write about Iron Man 2, but I thought I'd take a slightly different approach, ask a slightly different question. Namely, is it possible for a sequel not to succumb to the sin of excess? Is it possible for a sequel not to have double the good guys, double the bad guys, double the explosions, and in some cases, double the babes?

It's easy to think of examples where they indulged themselves, and it's very easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds, of bad sequels. But this morning I want to consider the good sequels, and see if they were able to avoid this pitfall. Even The Dark Knight, which I won't write about again because I just wrote about yesterday (albeit in purely semantic terms), couldn't resist the urge to add a second villain, even with the first villain as dynamic and dominant as Heath Ledger's Joker.

So I'm examining five of my favorite sequels of all time, ones that I liked better than the original in some cases. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm leaving out series where the first film was always planned as part of a larger story, where future installments of the story were already written (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or envisioned by the creator (Star Wars).

Granted, most creative talents will tell you that they always envisioned their movies as multi-part stories, which is probably true to the extent that it makes sense to mentally blueprint a franchise if you think your movie is marketable. (Plus, most creative types are dreamers, and are overly optimistic/delusional about the quality of their own ideas.) But most sequels came into being because the first movie was good. If it hadn't been good, we simply wouldn't have cared about "the rest of the story" that existed purely in the writer's head.

So without any further ado, here are five excellent sequels, listed in no particular order. Let's hold them up to the light and see how they did.

1) Superman II (1980, Richard Lester). This is by far my favorite Superman movie, which has everything to do with relegating Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) to the role of comic relief, and replacing him with not one, not two, but three new villains. The plot itself is bigger as well. Although it could be argued that reversing the rotation of the earth to turn back time is a pretty big deal, I'd say that having the world taken over by the three Krypton refugees and willingly giving up his super powers qualify as more earth-shattering, as it were, for Superman.

Why it works: Three supervillains might ordinarily spin your head like a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie, but since they essentially operate as one character in terms of their function in the narrative, the movie feels clean and focused. Plus, Terrence Stamp gives what I would argue is one of the great villain performances of all time as General Zod.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron). I don't mean to blaspheme, but this is another case of me liking the sequel better than the original. The T-1000 was like nothing I had ever seen before -- in fact, the rush of excitement I got from Cameron's digital innovations with this character was much greater than what I got watching Avatar. Still, when you break it down to its elements, the movie does have two terminators, and it adds a squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong as the young John Connor.

Why it works: Although there are two terminators, they are not both the hero or both the villain, so the mano-a-mano dynamics of the original are still in place, shifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator against Linda Hamilton to Robert Patrick's T-1000 against Schwarzenegger. And John Connor essentially replaces Kyle Reese from the original. The net gain is really only one character.

3) Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Officially, I like Toy Story better than Toy Story 2, but it's so close that Toy Story 2 has to be considered, hands down, one of the best sequels of all time. True enough, though, there are both more heroes and more villains. Added to the characters we love are a second Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), and there are three characters who share the villain role: the evil toy collector (voiced by Wayne Knight), the evil collectible prospector toy Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer), and, well, The Evil Emperor Zurg, come to life in toy form (voiced by future Pixar director Andrew Stanton, to the extent that the character has any real dialogue). The adventure is slightly bigger as well, as it involves more trips out of the house.

Why it works: Pixar has an instinct for narrative structure that is unmatched in the industry. The writers are smart enough to dole out enough lines to the minor characters so that they all feel involved, so that the extra new characters don't push them into irrelevance. I expect Toy Story 3 to be similarly successful with this narrative balancing act.

4) X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer). This one's going to be a bit more difficult for me, because although I know I like the X-Men sequel better than the original, I have a hard time quantifying why. I can tell you that there are more heroes and villains than the first. The heroic additions include Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who walks the line between hero and villain, and the villains pile on with Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) and William Stryker (Brian Cox), in addition to the usual stable featuring Magneto, Mystique, etc. This film also does what a lot of second movies gain the confidence to do: kill off one of the beloved stars of the first movie, if only temporarily, in Jean Gray (Famke Janssen).

Why it works: X2 is more like the typical superhero sequel than any other movie on this list, which makes sense since only one of the other movies is actually a superhero movie. But it works because the multiplicity of characters actually helped shove at least one character that I did not particularly like, James Marsden's Cyclops, into a corner. Thankfully, Cyclops has little more than a cameo in this movie.

5) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). And here's a sequel that is really, truly different. Star Trek II is a brilliant movie, but it doesn't feel like a sequel at all. Even though it deals with the Genesis device, which can create a whole planet from scratch, and the (temporary) death of Spock, who comes back to life in the next movie during a rapid re-growth on the new planet, Star Trek II feels intimate more than grandiose. There are a lot of quiet moments in which the characters discuss their mortality, and the hero and the villain never once see each other in the flesh.

Why it works: The impression created by Star Trek II has everything to do with the impression created -- or not created -- by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The first Star Trek was a total dud -- I remember feeling a profound sense of disappointment and wondering if there was any hope for the series. If it weren't for Star Trek II, there surely wouldn't have been. We have Star Trek II to thank for all the other Star Trek movies, even the reboot we got last year -- which, if it weren't for Star Trek II, might have been attempted in the 1990s and starred someone like David Caruso. So Star Trek II is a lot more like a first movie than a second movie in that sense, though when you think about it, the whole Star Trek series has kind of assumed a serial quality, as traditionally defined -- each chapter doesn't really need to be bigger and better, it just needs to follow the characters to the next chapter in their lives. I think I'm starting to ramble here.

So is there anything we can take from all this to apply to Iron Man 2? I guess what I personally take from it is that I shouldn't perceive its "bigger, more" approach as creatively bankrupt -- not automatically, anyway. Even the best sequels have to provide more things to look at, more places to turn your attention, and in all likelihood, more minutes of celluloid. That in itself is not a guaranteed recipe for failure, and in fact, it maybe inevitable.

Obnoxious lines like Tony Stark yelling "You complete me!" to Pepper Potts after he jumps out of the plane to retrieve his helmet ... well, that may be cause for worry.

Improper terminology

The big news in geekdom this past weekend was that a release date was announced for Christopher Nolan's third Batman movie: July 20, 2012. Stay tuned to your local entertainment blog for the eventual reveal of the title.

I didn't take issue with the release of the news, but I did take issue with how it was reported.

Namely, in certain outlets, I saw the story reported with variations on the following headline:

'Dark Knight' Sequel Gets Official Release Date

I know the general public has a short memory span, but come on, this is ridiculous.

It's as though an excellent little movie by the name of Batman Begins never existed. (An excellent little movie that I happen to think is more excellent than The Dark Knight.)

Sure, The Dark Knight did capture the zeitgeist in a way few other films have, in a way that far outpaced Batman Begins. It was the second-highest grossing movie of all time in the U.S. until Avatar came along and pushed both it and Titanic down a notch. And Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker struck viewers in a way they hadn't been struck before -- the fact that he died only gave the performance extra weight.

But none of these reasons make it right to go switching up the terminology.

The only really meaningful definition of the word "sequel" is "the second movie in a series." That's a little narrow; a sequel can actually refer to any of the subsequent movies after the first. But each sequel is defined by its relationship to the first movie, not to any of the others. And if you say just "the sequel to such-and-such," without any other modifier, you're talking about the second movie, not the third or any other. It has to do with the definite article "the" vs. the indefinite article "a."

But you wouldn't say Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan is either "a" sequel to Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, or "the" sequel to Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood, now would you? No. Both of those movies are sequels to the original Friday the 13th, God help them.

It's the same with Batman 3. Which will not be called Batman 3, I'm sure, but will certainly struggle to find something as distinctive as The Dark Knight, while still reminding viewers it's a Batman movie.

And I don't really think it was just a semantic error, calling Batman 3 the sequel to The Dark Knight. A headline writer's only job is to be clear and succinct, and perhaps a little funny if the situation calls for it. (Or, if you're The New York Post, to string together as many rhyming single-syllable abbreviations for common words -- abbreviations that no one uses -- as possible, while still making some modicum of sense.) A headline writer knows exactly what is commonly denoted by the word "sequel" -- he or she just chooses to ignore it if pandering to his/her audience.

But is it actually pandering to call the next movie the sequel to The Dark Knight? You could argue it both ways. It's true that significantly more people saw The Dark Knight than Batman Begins, even if it would seem like a logical prerequisite to see the first film first. So maybe the headline is just trying to appeal to as many people as possible. Besides, perhaps calling it "Third Batman Movie" instead of "Dark Knight Sequel" would just make people think of a crappy movie by the name of Batman Forever, which was Joel Schumacher's first Batman movie, the third in the original reboot of Batman movies. "Dark Knight Sequel" drives home the idea that we're still on this particular series of reboots, and haven't somehow slipped back into the age of Schumacher's Batman, with his nippled breastplates and bulging codpieces.

Sometimes, stuff like this is just fun to talk about -- no more, no less.

Homophones, not synonyms

I thought we were done using "too" as a synonym for "two" after Teen Wolf Too and Look Who's Talking Too.

But Tyler Perry has continued Hollywood's "everything old is new again" trend, dusting off this sequel-naming convention for Why Did I Get Married Too?

My friends and I used to laugh and laugh at Teen Wolf Too when it came out in 1987. Not only did it look like a terrible sequel to a movie that was not very good in the first place, and not only was Jason Bateman, at that time, as desirable a replacement for Michael J. Fox as Kirk Cameron or Ricky Schroeder would have been, but that title ... oh, that title! So silly. Okay, I get it -- "too" sounds like "two." And it works semantically as well: "The guy in the first movie was a teen wolf. Now this guy is a teen wolf, too!"

But then the Look Who's Talking series kind of legitimized it by also opting for "too" in the title of its second movie. And though it was still stupid, it was slightly less so, and made slightly more semantic sense: "The baby in the first movie talked. Now this baby talks, too!" (Though, to be fair, the babies don't actually "talk" -- we just hear their thoughts.)

Why Did I Get Married Too? is a little harder to parse. Granted, that could be because I didn't see Why Did I Get Married?, so I don't really know who it was that was regretting his/her nuptials. (I have in fact considering seeing it, but I shy away from it for the same reason I shy away from Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife. Now that I'm married, what would my wife think? In fact, I'm wondering if the box office of these movies has been hurt by their titles. If people who might ordinarily suggest these movies on date night are scared away by the title, worried their spouse will wonder why they want to see it so much.)

The thing that makes this one harder to understand, grammatically, is that for it to make any sense, the "I" in the two titles must refer to two separate people, one for each movie. Presumably, someone in the first movie was questioning his/her decision to commit. But "I" can't refer to this same person this time around, because then the word "too" would be totally superfluous -- the original question would still be in play, and would not need to be modified by the word "too." But if it's a different "I," it almost needs to be emphasized, like Why Did *I* Get Married, Too? But italics don't work in movie titles.

Obviously, it doesn't really matter. It's just fun to talk about. And the movie has made $48.5 million to date, so it appears that at least some husbands and wives have braved these symbolically dangerous waters together.

I suppose a piece about "two"/"too" as homophones would not be complete without mentioning another famously silly example, where the words were reversed. Instead of calling the 1995 Antonio Banderas-Melanie Griffith comedy Too Much, they called it Two Much, because Banderas' character is pulling a scam where he pretends he has a twin brother. One can only assume Banderas and Griffith haven't questioned why they got married after working together on that project, because they're still together, 15 years later.

By the way, this was not intentional, but today also happens to be my second wedding anniversary. Fortunately, I've got a terrific wife, so why I got married is never a question I ask myself.

If you're reading this, happy anniversary, C.