As Scott pointed out in his review, you need not fear that this week's Superhero Movie is another brainchild of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, whose satanic perversions of the parody genre -- Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans -- have been terrorizing unsuspecting audiences every year since 2006. Superhero Movie was actually directed by Craig Mazin, a protégé of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker dream team responsible for Airplane! and The Naked Gun, and produced by David Zucker himself. But it, too, is plagued -- albeit to a much lesser degree -- by what's turning out to be the problem with the entire modern generation of spoofs going back to Scary Movie: relentless pop culture specificity.

The basest incarnations of this, of course, are the Friedberg-Seltzer monstrosities, which may be worthless as comedies but which could prove valuable to historians because they indicate precisely what dominated the American zeitgeist in the few months before their release. It's too generous to call these films' vulgar spasms "jokes," but to the extent that's what they are, they depend entirely on either audience members' awareness of US Weekly-type factoids such as Britney Spears' shaving her head or their recall of particular scenes and characters in recent box-office hits. That's not to say that these kinds of jokes can't be funny -- the problem with Friedberg and Seltzer, as others have pointed out, is that they think throwing something current on the screen ("Look, Paris Hilton!") constitutes humor. But they do limit comedies' universal appeal and staying power.

So it appears as if Sacha Baron Cohen is still causing quite the mess here in the United States as his alter-ego Brüno; getting kicked out of airports, showing up to an Easter play at a church in Kansas wearing chains, and the list goes on. First off, for those not familiar with Brüno, he's a gay Austrian fashion reporter who's wildly flamboyant in every way. The film, which marks Cohen's follow-up to Borat, will be called (deep breath) ... Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. Needless to say, I cannot wait to hear my local news coughing up that title when it comes time for the weekend box office figures.

But back to Ben Affleck. Seems Mike Walker from the National Enquirer called into Howard Stern last week saying that Affleck called friend Sarah Silverman following an interview with Brüno. Affleck was told Brüno was a "very famous openly gay fashion journalist," but that didn't stop Ben from admitting it was "the weirdest sit-down he has ever had with a reporter." Eventually, Silverman coughed up his name and only then did Ben realize he'd been had. Part of me doesn't believe this at all, because I can only imagine the hoops one would need to jump through in order to get an actual sit-down interview with Ben Affleck. Then again, perhaps Cohen's crew have perfected their little joke by now. Either way, I'm sure Affleck will be making an appearance in the film.

For more, as well as a brief video of Brüno's crew dancing in an airport, head over to Slashfilm.

Aah, the '70s. The age of energy crisis, political turmoil ... and disaster movies. With Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon set to make a big splash on movie screens next week, it might be time to look at the top disaster flicks of the '70s ... and start making bets on which will be the next one to be remade. These films had cutting-edge effects, top casts and high-power studio screenwriting and production behind them ... by the standards of the day, anyhow. Time has not been kind to many of these films, and some of them now work far better as cultural artifacts than as actual movies. But at heart, they all have a certain something -- hard-core premises, ambition and the kind of casting you'd get if you put your finger down at random in the Beverly Hills phone book.

Oscar-winning actress Maureen Stapleton died today at the age of 80. Stapleton was nominated for Supporting Actress Oscars  three times - in 1959 for Lonelyhearts, 1970 for Airport, and 1978 for Woody Allen's Interiors, before finally winning the prize in 1982 for Reds. In her Oscar-winning performance, Stapleton played left wing anarchist-writer Emma Goldman, a journalist who covers the Bolshevik revolution. 

Stapleton was nominated for multiple Emmys, with a win in 1967 for Among the Paths to Eden. She also found success in theater, earning Tony Awards for her role as Serafina Delle Rose in Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, and again in 1971 for her role in Neil Simon's The Gingerbread Lady.