Jason watches JOHN CARTER

Good news, everybody! The Cinedome 7 in Newark is actually a second run discount theater now. $2 movies most days, $1 on Tuesdays, and if you bring 3 or more people, it's $0.75 each for "Family Mondays." You probably haven't heard much about this because the parent company, Cinemark, doesn't want to steal focus from their brand new state-of-the-art (i.e., all digital) Century at Pacific Commons in Fremont.

Bad news (of course) is that John Carter pretty much sucked. I think I have a new favorite laughably bad scene in a movie. John Carter (who can leap easily 10 times as far as he could on Earth...due to Mars having only 64% 38% of Earth's gravity?) leaps into battle against a CGI horde of giant, green, tusked, four-armed martians, aided only by his intensely loyal, super-fast, slobbering, martian, monster dog. This could be silly popcorn adventure fun, and I could enjoy it. But it cuts between the martian battle and flashback scenes of him returning from the Civil War to find his home burnt and the bodies of his wife and child inside. This is silly popcorn fun with pretensions of serious drama, and it just doesn't fly.

That, and it throws way too much mythology and what passes for plot at you. Also, while it's correct that Mars has two moons, they wouldn't be as huge in the Martian sky as they appear in the movie. But whatever.

[Correction: An earlier version said Mars had 64% of Earth's gravity. In fact, the correct number is 38%. I blame my carelessness of looking up the mass of Mars (instead of the surface gravity) and Google for prominently displaying an incorrect result among many correct ones]

Running Time: 132 minutes
My Total Minutes: 288,075