Movies!! (Spoilers Ahead)

Recently, I've watched the original Superman and the 1990 Total Recall, both of them enjoyable.

Much like Die Hard, Total Recall is another example of a good "hard R" type film, with the right amounts of "LSV" to work. Enough f-bombs to know that the situation is serious, but not enough where you wonder if they have some debilitating verbal tic, enough violence to show some nasty injuries (I've had that sort of thing applied to me by professionals that were mentioned in a national publication once), but not depicting torture or anything like that (and arguably no worse than what you'd see on the news), and no more than a few risqué elements, though not enough to be disgusting. The plot is somewhat complicated, but I think it's less a matter of "was it a dream or not" is if Hauser really was evil all along or not. My theory (and any responses to it, hopefully) can be seen on TVTropes since I know that it will never be seen here.

Superman is far more optimistic, and probably one of the very few good superhero movies made before 2000 (Superman II not sure of, but the "using the S emblem as a weapon" probably one of the stupider movie weapons, personally). It lacks the cynicism of even the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even comes off as less dated than Spider-Man did. It has problems, of course, and not because of the fact how no one notices that Clark Kent is just Superman with glasses (Christopher Reeve pulled it off convincingly), but like Man of Steel, it starts with a very long exposition, the entire "Act I" of the film is just exposition, and 40 minutes until Superman even gets to Metropolis, and an hour until Lex Luthor shows up, and maybe halfway into the film does the "A Plot" even begin. The second big problem is that Lex's evil plot required that the military was completely incompetent (with inexplicably ARMED NUCLEAR WARHEADS, no less), especially with a staged car accident (flipping the car over and over again) but having the "victim" looking completely okay with not a scratch on her. The third is having Superman fly fast enough to go back in time, which besides the "earth spinning backwards" problem, makes you wonder why he couldn't have stopped the other warhead from going off to California, or why he couldn't repeat the process to make multiple Supermans (Supermen?) be on hand in an emergency situation, nor does it answer any of the other questions about time travel. In the original timeline, Superman saved the San Andreas fault, a bus full of kids, and a small town about to be flooded, but Lois dies when her car is swallowed up, causing Superman to go back in time, but that creates a contradiction, in that if Superman Prime is still saving things, then how is he going to go back if Superman prevented Lois from dying? (That is a run-on sentence. I'm sorry) Nonetheless, it's arguably at least as good as Man of Steel (on a different level of course, both have strengths and weaknesses) and better than the weaker entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, in my opinion). (I admit, I enjoyed the little part where Clark Kent was insinuating that Lois Lane was smoking weed)