I'm not exactly a prude, you know. I like a bawdy joke as much as the next guy, and swearing in a movie doesn't really scare me off. I'm certainly not one of those "You say the F-word too much" people. The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Clerks, Space Balls, the Naked Gun flicks, they're all fairly high on my favorite comedies list.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm not opposed to filth humor in movies. I just expect there to be more than filth. Sadly, Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen didn't take my proclivities into consideration when they made Superbad.

The film starts out with a way cool 1970s-esque title sequence that totally rocked my world. If only they had taken it somewhere other than to fake out the audience in the first scene. I'd've loved some groovy interstitials here and there throughout the movie. It would've given the film a bit more of a stylistic identity.

From the title sequence, we go to a porn joke. Then another porn joke. Then a MILF joke followed quickly by dick joke, dick joke, vagina joke, porn joke, blowjob joke, porn joke again . . . You get the point.

Maybe I feel so let down by Superbad because I went into it with such high expectations. As a fan of the late lamented series Arrested Development, I was excited to see Michael Cera working again. One of the greats of his generation, he has terrific comic timing, and from what I've seen and heard, he's darn good with the improv. Here, though, he takes a back seat to Jonah Hill, often playing the straight man.

And I was looking forward to Jonah Hill, too. He had a (very) small part in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and apparently his star has been on the rise since. I'm not sure I buy him as an 18-year-old, but I can get over that. There's also Seth Rogan and a couple other recognizable faces (Joe Lo Truglio makes a brief but awesome appearance, pictured above if you click the picture), making this a can't-miss cast.

I wish. Boy do I wish.

Am I just getting old? Could that be it? I'm well outside the demographic, and I was never one of the "Let's get drunk and screw" kids, so I'm doubly removed. On top of that, Seth (Hill) was so very over-the-top angry all the time, which annoyed me and made me wonder why Evan (Cera) and Jules would even want to be around him in the first place. I think that's part of the point, but it could've been done better.

Another problem was the B-story with McLovin and the two wacky cops (pictured above). There were parts of that story that were funny, but it just kept going until it went past funny to uncomfortably funny to just plain uncomfortable, which I guess is my main problem with the whole movie. There were some funny concepts and funny sequences, but most of the time they kept going after the bit should have ended. It was like a bad episode of Saturday Night Live; they knew they had 90 minutes to fill, and they were going to fill them, funny or not.

It was only made worse by the half-hearted, tacked-on, almost-sentimental ending. What I'm left with is an average film and a below average Judd Apatow film. Then again, I came away from it with a big long list of new slang terms for blowjobs and vaginas.

And once again, the universe achieves balance.

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Adapting a book into a film is a tricky business. Stray too far from the source material and you have readers coming at you with torches and pitchforks. Stay too true to the text and you risk having a bad movie; not everything translates, after all. But trying to have it both ways is by far the worst choice. Unfortunately, that's the choice made when To Kill A Mockingbird was made into a film.

It's not that there isn't any good in the film version. To the contrary, some things it does quite well. The problem, I suppose, is that I finished the book less than a week before I saw the film, making it nigh impossible to keep from comparing the two.

What surprises me the most is how much of the film is explicitly about the Robinson trial, while so much of the book isn't. The gentle changes and seemingly digressive life lessons of the novel can't be accommodated in a two-hour film, so many of them are excised.

Some of the changes were reasonable and well-considered, such as the deletion of Aunt Alexandra and Miss Rachel and moving the role of Dill's aunt to Miss Stephanie though I probably would have gotten rid of Dill as well. And painful as it was to lose them, I understand the loss of the trip to Calpurnia's church, Miss Maudie's fire, and Christmas at Finch's Landing. Compressing the entire affair to less than a week makes sense too.

Truth is, I would have probably cut more. As I say, the biggest issue that I have with the film version is that it tries to have it both ways. I would've gladly applauded a film that tried to keep the spirit of the novel while creating most of the scenes out of whole cloth.

But in To Kill A Mockingbird, most of the scenes are shown almost verbatim, and that's a problem. Dialogue that reads well on the page doesn't always work on the screen, speechifying is more easily hidden when it's couched within descriptive passages, and some sections, their context removed with other excised scenes, seem out of place and unnecessary. The shooting of the rabid dog comes to mind, as does Scout's fight on her first day of school.

So the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird pales in comparison with the book. The good news is that it's not all bad. The film works best when it gets completely away from the book. For example, the scene with Jem sitting in the car outside the Robinson's home was especially moving. Jem sees a young black boy through the window, both of them knowing that they live in different worlds, when Bob Ewell appears outside the car. It's a moving moment, one that wouldn't have worked in print, but is perfectly at home here.

Another moving scene is near the beginning of the film, with Atticus tucking Scout into bed. For the first and final time, the children's mother is mentioned and Scout, too young to remember her, tries to wrap her head around who this woman was. In a move only possible in cinema, the camera pans from the children's bedroom window to Atticus sitting on the porch listening to Jem dreamily answer Scout's questions about their dead mother, his wife. Was she nice? Was she pretty? Did she love us? Did we love her?

The climactic scene presented a special challenge to the film crew. In the book, it wasn't clear during the fight who attacked the children, or who saved them, or whether Jem was dead or alive. But without Scout's point of view, the scene could have been hamstrung by giving the audience too much information too soon. Pulling the camera in, showing limbs but not their owners, hearing the sounds of the fight without the visual blow-by-blow effectively ramps up the tension and saves the scene. Very well done.

And then there's Boo. Put simply, the entire film, warts and all, was worth it to see Robert Duvall shrink into the corner in Jem's bedroom. A caged animal, hair a disheveled shock of white, the sullen face, the sad eyes. Boo on film is exactly Boo in my head, and that doesn't happen often. Hard to believe that this was Duvall's first major role on the big screen.

And so the film ends, as does the review. Overall, it's a good film. Not as good as it could have been, not as good as the book, and not as good as some people say, but good enough that I'll be seeing it again in a few months.

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Ah, Spring. The time when the snow melts, the robin returns, the days grow longer, and the grass grows green once again. And right on schedule, emails have been circulating about how to force gas prices down.

For the last couple years, the outcry has come in the form of not buying gas on a specified date; usually May 15^th. Here’s an article from snopes.com detailing the history of this “gas out” protest. The email I’ve received this year is a bit different, but only slightly less silly. The basic gist is that by moving your gasoline purchase from one retailer to another, you will magically force the price down.

As you can see from the links above, both ideas are old, dating back to as far back as 2000. For some reason, people forget that they’ve gotten the same email several times and decide that it’s a neat-o-keen idea to just re:all. And so the cycle continues.

This wouldn’t bother me so much, but I’ve started seeing the email forwarded through from highly (sometimes very highly) paid business people who should know better.

Therefore, I’m posting a slightly modified version of an email that I’ve used in the past to try to explain that the idea a) is stupid, and b) would be ineffective even if you got everybody to cooperate with the protest, which would never happen anyway.

Please feel free to pass it on and link to me from your blog. If you see anything that needs correcting, please leave a comment; otherwise I’ll just assume that I’m super-smart and correct on all counts.

I’d heard that this “gas out” thing was making the rounds again, and here it is! Let’s dispel some of this, shall we?

Not buying gas on May 15^th (or whatever day)will have NO effect on gas prices. I was in the industry in the late 1990s, and when this “gas out” idea first appeared around 1999 (around the time we hit $1.50), store managers like me and corporate officers alike were laughing at you.

The fact is, if you do what this email suggests, you’ll either buy gas on May 14^th or May 16^th. Either way, you’re still buying gas. It makes no difference to the oil companies when you buy gas, it just matters that you do buy gas. “Gas outs” come up every year, and they always have zero effect.

The April 1997 “gas out” is fiction. Local gas prices were somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.09/gallon at the time, the same as they’d been for the previous five years. Nobody was protesting $1.09.

That said, there are things that you can do to cause a (long-term) decrease in gas prices. As with all worthwhile things, they all require a change of lifestyle. (These are listed in order of importance. If you only do one of them, do the first one.)

1. Drive a more fuel-efficient automobile. The person who started this email is right; it does cost $30-$50 to fill up the average car. One of the factors that has driven that average up is the proliferation of SUVs that get 10-15 mpg. Take away the SUVs (usually with nobody in the passenger seat) and other guzzlers, and replace them with cars that are designed to get better mileage, and you will be helping to decrease national usage of gasoline. As long as Americans are driving as many unnecessary guzzlers as we are, gas prices will continue to rise.
2. Carpooling isn’t always feasible (it isn’t for me), but if it is, do it. You’ll cut your gas usage at least in half. This should go without saying, but you should also “trip-pool”. For example, don’t go to the grocery store for a gallon of milk, come home, then make a separate trip to the bank an hour later.
3. During a gas price war, reward the gas station that has the lower price. You do this anyway, but make a conscious decision not to go to the station with a higher gas price because they have better coffee or that cashier that you like to flirt with. (She hates that, by the way.)
4. When prices level out, go with the bigger brand gas station. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but you have to realize what’s happening behind the scenes. The production arms of Marathon/BP/Exxon/etc. sell their gas to the smaller companies and Mom&Pops. When they do, they tack on a mark-up, which the Mom&Pop has to integrate into their price. Once the Mom&Pop raises the price to account for the middle man, the big company that sold them the gas can raise the prices at their stations, and then the cycle starts all over again. By buying from the bigger company when prices are level, you’re keeping the cycle from continuing, thereby keeping the price (relatively) lower.
5. Finally, get over the idea of lowering the price without changing your behavior. It just doesn’t work that way. Duh.

And if you send me one more of these emails with a big re: list, I’m re:ing all of them back, yelling at you for doing it.

Don’t. Test. Me.