Author: Derek Robertson

Charmed as his life might be (stable and remunerative employment at a daily city newspaper!),  it’s easy to feel sorry for Superman. Having been around for now the better part of a century, the blue unitard-wearing hero’s name has become almost metonymic with an idealized, impossible conception of “goodness” (see: everything from the ponderous 2010…

There are certain films that look incredible — on paper. Those films are often put on the “Black List,” a register of the most-loved unproduced screenplays in Hollywood as determined by a survey of Hollywood machers. (Think the Associated Press and Coaches’ college football polls, but for people who earnestly say, “Let’s do lunch.”) Flight…

The novelist John Gardner once classified a certain type of hack writer as the “disPollyanna” — a curdled optimist whose wounded, childlike idealism is inverted and weaponized in the form of “crude jokes and images, slang phrases borrowed from foreign languages” meant solely “to shock prudes.” The disPollyanna “simplemindedly long[s] for goodness, justice, and sanity”…