To paraphrase Juvenal: the wrath of New Yorkers may be great, but they certainly are slow. One day crowd-dodging will be up there with parkour as a sport for the easily annoyed. Gah! Slow people are the bane of modern society: if we all walked a little faster, so much more could get done. In addition, try not to stop suddenly in the middle of the pavement, although I understand that sometimes this is unavoidable: however please never ever stop and hold conversations in the middle of the road, yeah?

But dodging them, oh yes, is so much fun. Time it just right to dodge an pensioner and slip past some fat kid yapping on his phone. Duck quickly to the right in order to bypass the French couple moving as slow as humanly possible. It’s an art.

Watched Hancock at the AMC Empire on 42nd, which is now officially my most visited US cinema (2 visits). Deconstructing superheroes is well and good, but Hancock sort of misses the mark a little. I’m not sure where, but it really feels like a first act of sorts, perhaps setting us up for a sequel. There’s no real conclusion, it just sort of peters out, and I was frustrated at the lack of resolution to the backstory.

Superhero films are on the way out. I say, blindly. But I remember the excitement I felt at seeing Spider-Man up on the big screen, way back in 2002. Now it’s all starting to wear off, with formulaic plots and rehashes (was there any need for another Hulk movie?). I’d like to see Iron Man, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I think The Dark Knight is a different matter, though. Batman Begins was a real breath of fresh air: gritty realism, post-modern superheroism, a real sense that this was comic book stuff with the gloves off. The sequel seems to be continuing this, and I was glad to see that Christoper Nolan (oh! of course! he also directed Memento: isn’t it funny when you like two completely different things and they turn out to have a common link?) is going for a minimal-CG, maximum-reality take with this one.

I’m still cautious about Watchmen, though.

Ah. There’s a mouse under the microwave. I’m glad I ate out.