By Matt Zoller Seitz
Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns, which opened yesterday, is getting wildly mixed reviews (including pans from Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis). Three House contributors wrote about the movie for their respective publications this week; excerpts and links follow.
I adored the movie -- despite a first act slog that leaves a lot to forgive -- because of its mythic spectacle. The movie is visionary bubblegum, unabashedly in love with its source material.
"In scene after scene," I wrote in NYPress, "Superman Returns implicitly asks what it might feel like to be Superman and to live in a world that has the Man of Steel in it...Where most comic book movies are paradoxically inclined to make their points verbally—bulldozing heaps of raw data in our faces, a la the Matrix movies, Batman Begins and Singer’s own X-Men films—Superman Returns is conceived as a visionary spectacle, a series of mythic tableaus that brazenly liken Superman to Mercury, Jesus, Atlas and Prometheus. It’s a sensory—at times sensuous—experience, modeled not just on great comic book art, but on the crème-de-la-crème of machine-age spectacles: 2001:A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
In Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns is only slightly less enthused. "Nitpicks aside, Superman Returns carries you along with the force of a great many iconic, often poetic images, all backed up by Singer's bold commitment to the forthright emotions of the piece... Despite all the earth-shaking action sequences, this is a surprisingly tender and gentle film—one that feels like it came from somewhere very personal and deeply felt. Lois might have said the world doesn't need Superman, but it sure feels good to have him back."
Meanwhile, over in Slant Magazine, Keith Uhlich is not impressed. His two-star review calls the movie "...a pleasant enough piece of hackwork, anonymous in all the right ways so that it neither offends nor thrills...Aside from a reverse-motion shot of Superman inhaling the inverted and impossible breath of a Busby Berkeley extra while lifting a sunken ship out of the ocean, the themes and characters in Superman Returns remain frustratingly conceptual."
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Superman Returns, times three
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31 comments:
Funny enough, Matt, I was more taken with the setup of the film than what followed. After Superman Returns' extended/distended happy ending to United 93 I found myself increasingly restless - even the quiet moments seemed bloated to me, stretched beyond the point of effectiveness. The father/son bit just felt half-baked: its logical and more daring end would be, to my mind, the literal death of Superman who is then resurrected in the "son" he fathered with Lois. But I guess you can't kill someone that daytime-TV beautiful. I look forward to the sequel's inevitable father/son training montage scored to "You Got the Touch."
And on another note I humbly request that everyone here refuse patronage to Batman & Robin's unofficial sequel: Cutrates of the Caribbean.
If people would arrange back to back screenings of SUPES III & QUEST FOR PEACE as primer before going to see it, perhaps there would be no ill will toward the new movie.
Maybe this is the masochist in me, but I'll take Richard Pryor, Robert Vaughn, Jon Cryer, and Nuclear Man over Superman Returns any day.*
*I might regret this after the sake wears off. :-)
I am pretty much in love with this movie. It's beautiful on many levels; for me, watching it was like having a grandiose, emotional, very satisfying dream.
Yeah, there are some big problems with it -- that stumblebum first act, in particular, and Spacey's performance, which is shallowly amusing but doesn't become electrifying until the end, when Luthor reveals the depths of his cruelty. But the from the plane rescue till the very end, it just carried me along with a musical sureness. It's happy to luxuriate in the world it's created -- that nice slow pan down Fifth Avenue, for instance, showing pedestrians looking up to watch Superman flying low over the street -- and it has a knack for boiling characters and situations down to their mythic essence. It's one step up from a fable, and deliberately so. And the central love triangle is the most adult that I can recall seeing in a comic book blockbuster. There's true melancholy in all three characters, and great courage and strength.
Great to see you back in the NYPress, Matt! Dude, I am totally with you on this one.
I just saw the movie again tonight and this time brought my Dad, which you can probably imagine was just a wonderful experience for so very many reasons.
(In the lobby beforehand we were reminiscing about when I was five years old and he took me to see SUPERMAN II. Poor guy spent the rest of the week worrying I was going jump out my bedroom window with a bath-towel clothes-pinned around my neck.)
Watching SUPERMAN RETURNS for a second time I found myself able to let go of all those pesky pacing and plotting nit-picks and just surrendered to the beauty and the hugeness of the images.
Particularly after seeing PIRATES 2 yesterday and staggering out of the theater feeling more exhausted than entertained ("mandatory fun," the great critic Jim Ridley called it), I was in the perfect headspace for Singer's quiet moments of contemplation.
So many lovely grace notes! In addition to that slow pan you mentioned, there's also Luthor's Metropolis train-set, the kid's piano duet with the henchman, and even that slight throwaway gag of the ER doctors unable to get a needle into Superman's arm!
And of course, there's always the X-Ray vision follow up the elevator shaft - which will probably end up being my favorite shot of this whole year.
Keith, I'm a little baffled by your description of the movie as "anonymous hackwork," because what allows me to look past some very obvious flaws is just how personal and heartfelt it feels. You know, if Entertainment Weekly hadn't already told me Bryan Singer was adopted, I bet I would have guessed.
Just my own perception Sean. To me, Singer's point-of-view is very limited and shallow, predicated on a simplistic and superficial queer gaze that he sublimates in Superman Returns to instead quite blatantly steal from his betters (especially Spielberg and his recent dealings with 9/11), and to no great effect beyond facsimile. The quietude of the plasticine love story and certain other setpieces feels as bludgeoning to me as the eardrum-shattering action sequences of this or Pirates.
But then you get into the question of whether Singer was under any obligation to provide a queer reading of Superman. The "sublimation" you describe seems to me nothing more than serving the material by keeping the Man of Steel's alienation as generalized as possible. And as Sean suggests -- rightly, I think -- if there's an autobiographical component to Singer's version, it has more to do with adoption (an equally profound aspect of one's character) than sexual orientation. And in any case, I don't think it's difficult for any audience member to translate Superman's alienation into his or her own private terms; and in any event, I think what Singer is up to here is a lot subtler and more sophisticated, and its implications much wider, than that celebrated scene in "X-Men 2" where the mutant kid comes out to his parents.)
I am reminded that amid all the praise for Gregg Araki's "Mysteriious Skin," I spoke to a number of people who'd loved his earlier work and felt that he'd somehow gone mainstream because that movie was clearly more "about" the psychological effects of abuse than about homo vs. hetero, the reactionary vs. the outsider/rebel and other Araki touchstones. Doesn't a filmmaker have the right to temporarily abandon or at least minimize the subtexts with which he's long been associated, move in different directions and explore other aspects of his psyche?
He absolutely does Matt, and I didn't mean to suggest that Singer was under any obligation to be explicitly queer. It's just that the queerness is the most interesting thing about Singer, and it's a pretty thin interest at that (of a mostly leering eye candy variety.) The adoption angle is there, I guess, but I think it gets eaten up by all the money that was thrown at the screen. Singer's personal tics aren't strong enough to overcome the big budget beastie.
Granted, this holds only if you give the film an auteurist reading. My feeling is that it's less of an auteur film; that Singer pretty much stays out of the material's way. And still the results are, to me, pretty unmemorable.
I thought the film failed on almost every front. For an action film, it spent FAR too much time on exposition, and when it got to the set pieces, only the first one (saving the plane) had any flair. On the human front, I found pretty much all the characters to be pale imitations of more interesting and well-acted characters in the Spider-man series. Maguire over Routh, Dunst over Bosworth, Simmons over Langella; I could go one, but will conclude this portion of my complaints by noting that there was a terrible lack of chemistry between the three characters who are supposed to feel great passion for one another, again, something you could not say of the characters/actors in Spider-man.
I should cop to the fact that I don't much care for the Superman myth. There's something about the whole character that bugs me. Like most superheroes, he's a walking deus ex machina, which is reason enough to dislike him (where's the suspense when you know Superman's gonna show up imminently?), but more importantly, I wonder about his purpose on this planet. Is his raison d'etre really to save people whose breaks have failed? Are there no larger problems he could tackle? Also, while the film gives some lip service to the notion that Superman's heroics will act as inspiration to humans, who might then improve their own lot by upgrading their behaviour to match Superman's. Yet, can anyone point to a single character who makes any significant step forward toward heroic levels of greatness other than Superman? Sure, Parker Posey feels bad, and weeps for Superman, but fat lotta good that does him. Luthor still stabs the lad with cryptonite.
I'm reminded of Bill's (David Carradine) monologue in Kill Bill about how Superman is really a critique of humanity, via the character of Clark Kent. Kent is how Superman REALLY sees us. Well-intentioned, sure, but in the end, clumsy, inept and ineffectual. That's pretty much the way I feel about this film as well.
Poetic images in a superman movie is enough to get me inthe theater. I'll grit my teeth through Kevin Spacey's scene's tho. Gene HAckman?..Nothing compares 2U.
I agree with most of what Dan said: yes, it's a myth, and yes, the surface of the new movie is handsome enough--but what kind of myth is it, exactly?
I tried to get at a possible answer by watching Superman Returns through the lens of Road to Guantanamo (they're both about superpowers, right?) -- but I'll refrain from linking it here; I am getting mighty bored with all the hate mail.
I was a big fan of Revenge of the Sith because it's also a gorgeously crafted myth, but one that asks the right questions: in Star Wars, power is dangerous and seductive, easily abused. In Superman, our heavenly and slightly melancholic savior has all the power in the world and all we have to do is trust that he'll use it wisely. Thanks, but I'll pass.
Besides, Superman was boring as all hell. I'm not usually the guy who fidgets in his seat and keeps checking his watch, but this movie had few good moments and seemed to never end.
Quoth Muckster "In Superman, our heavenly and slightly melancholic savior has all the power in the world and all we have to do is trust that he'll use it wisely. Thanks, but I'll pass."
We don't have to trust he'll use his power wisely, we *know* he will--because of the strong moral compass instilled in him by Jonathan and Martha Kent. Had the rocket landed anywhere else, it'd be another matter entirely.
I agree with those who say the adoption element is key to this interpretation of the character, and it's one of the things that's always made Superman so fascinating to me. He was raised by incredibly loving and supportive parents who encouraged him to be himself and not hide his unique qualities--which is what everyone wants--yet embracing his unique qualities paradoxically distances him from the rest of humanity. Why does he spend devote as much effort as he does in the movie to stopping petty crimes as he does to dealing with natural disasters? Because he's so conscious of how his powers make it impossible for him to really "belong" that he gets downright desperate in his quest for approval. 95% of the world may think he's the greatest thing since slice bread, but he'll always be conscious of the 5% that fear him for his power--and while the movie incarnation of Lois clearly loves him, she's also on the border of that 5%. Singer's personal life and Routh's looks are making queer readings of the film mighty popular, but I think the film arguably draws more on the character's background as the creation of two Jewish characters at a time when antisemitism was gathering new steam after a period when Jews had started to assert their identity in public as never before (explained far more lucidly by Michael Chabon in his masterpiece KAVALIER & CLAY than I could ever put it). With all due respect, to ask the questions that Dan Jardine does ("where's the suspense when you know Superman's gonna show up imminently?") is to completely miss the point of the character (which Carradine's monologue in Kill Bill also does).
Keith: It's just that the queerness is the most interesting thing about Singer, and it's a pretty thin interest at that (of a mostly leering eye candy variety.)
Did you see the way Jimmy Olsen was leering at Clark Kent the entire movie? They give the man a camera, a froofy attitude and have him panting after Superman. I kept waiting for him to grab Lois and say "Look fish, that's MY man!" before engaging her in a catfight at Superman's Brokeback Fortress of Solitude.
Singer's stereotypes also extend to the only notable person of color (Kumar from the White Castle movie) in the entire film. He's a villain, he's stupid, and he has, at most, one line of dialogue. They don't have a 'hood in Metropolis?
I never liked Superman. As a character, he's devoid of any angst worthy of a superhero. Sure he was adopted, but the Kents were great people. Drop his ass in a foster home, send him to some abusive parents, and make him eat some gov'ment cheese. Then maybe I'll feel sorry for him. That shit will make you want to fight some crime.
The only reason why I love Superman II (and it should have been on that shameful movies of my past list) is that Zod and company are truly bad assed villains. Christopher Reeve is perfectly cast as Superman as well; he almost made Superman work for me. Brandon Routh has no charisma unless you find him attractive, and there was more heat coming off Jimmy Olsen for him than Kate Beckinsale. The love triangle had really dull angles.
Kevin Spacey disappointed me because he's usually adept at juggling comedy and menace (see The Ref). A superhero movie is only as good as its villains (kneel before Zod...) and he's even less interesting than Routh. The scariest thing in the picture was the cannibal dog! Somebody get that bitch a movie!
Oops! Wrong Kate! Kate Bosworth I meant. Kate Beckinsale would have outheated Jimmy for sure!
With all due respect, to ask the questions that Dan Jardine does ("where's the suspense when you know Superman's gonna show up imminently?") is to completely miss the point of the character
With all due respect, that's not a character question, it's a drama question. How do you build suspense when your central character is a walking, talking, flying deus ex machina?
Listen, for reasons that I believe I've already enumerated, I'm just not a fan of the whole Superman myth, so feel free to take my criticisms with the proverbial grain of salt. That the story has little drama or holds near zero interest for me means that even if Singer were Orson Welles, and all the actors the best of their generation, it would have been a challenge to make a film that I'd love. Dude's just not my bag; I prefer my heroes (even my superheroes) with more physical and psychological warts. Gimme Spider-Man any old day of the week.
I'm weirdly religious about Superman (aside from an agnostic phase in my teens), so seeing this movie was somehow like attending church for me (both good -- the lovely, quiet contemplativeness of it -- and bad -- the occasional muddled bit -- again just like church!).
As an adoptee, I found the whole thing quite moving (notions of families formed by emotion rather than genetics, etc.), but I can see why many in the audience I saw it with seemed restless.
It IS, in a weird way, a religious epic, a movie about humanity's relationship with God in a world where God periodically drops in and shows off -- like the Old Testament I guess.
It worked for me as well. A bit stodgy, sure, and everyone was oddly dispassionate about Superman’s having left earth to work out some issues, but hey, it’s the Big Boy Scout after all; tumultuous passion isn’t exactly his thing. Singer gets the escapist power fantasy at the heart of the character—those flashbacks of young Clark’s gleeful leaping across the fields are as breathlessly exhilarating as the jumps I’m sure more than a few of us took off our rooftops, a passably red blanket thickly knotted around our throats—but holds that mood in reserve, opting mostly for the gentle grace of a cape flapping in the wind, or the sights of Metropolis gliding below as if we were standing still. And whenever the hushed reverence threatens to get out of hand, as if Ang Lee had somehow been entrusted with another superhero flick (I actually liked HULK, but that’s another post), Singer has Superman pull off some majestically heroic act and Ottman throws in a variation on Williams’s stirring march.
Even Luthor’s grand scheme, offhandedly dismissed by most comments I’ve seen, struck me as one of the film’s better conceits, a clever variation on the only part of SUPERMAN III anyone this side of Mike Judge remembers: the brief emergence of Evil Superman. This time it’s the whole of Krypton that’s twisted to its opposite, Luthor’s recreated world as craggy and charcoal black as Superman’s is serene and gleaming. Since Supes had just spent years looking for a true fragment of his home, the act spills over the cup of mere maliciousness and becomes something blasphemous—it’s the only thing in the movie that moves Superman to rage, as witnessed by his furious, ground-splitting crash onto the crust. (An aside to comic-book fans: this glimpse of a monumentally pissed-off Superman reminded me of one of my favorite moments from the comic, Superman’s chilling, one word declaration to the bad guy—“Burn.”—in Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything…”.)
Keith Uhlich: “…its logical and more daring end would be, to my mind, the literal death of Superman who is then resurrected in the "son" he fathered with Lois.”
Not for this film, I don’t think. Part of the appeal of the Superman fable is its rejection of the notion that things must end badly, or even compromised. Your ending is arguably better and more truthful, Keith, but it would be as thorough a betrayal of the source as, in the opposite direction, were Hollywood’s happy endings to MISS LONELYHEARTS or THE SCARLET LETTER. (Not that I’m placing Action Comics on the same literary plane as West and Hawthorne, you understand.)
Matt: “But the from the plane rescue till the very end, it just carried me along with a musical sureness.”
Yeah, and better put than I could have.
Sean Burns: “… the kid's piano duet with the henchman….”
Possibly my favorite bit in the film, deftly modulating from giving you the creeps (no way any interaction between the bearer of that tattoo and a child turns out well) to charming you (o, he does just want to play along with the kid) and back again. Lovely, unnerving shot of him suddenly absent from the piano bench, as well.
Keith: “It's just that the queerness is the most interesting thing about Singer, and it's a pretty thin interest at that (of a mostly leering eye candy variety.)”
He’s no master, I’ll give you that. But Singer has been interesting and individual enough often enough for me to place him in that gray zone where the most exalted hacks commingle with the clumsiest, most ham-fisted artists, and it’s pretty much impossible to distinguish which is which.
And his eye candy is, in fairness, often delectable.
Dan Jardine: “On the human front, I found pretty much all the characters to be pale imitations of more interesting and well-acted characters in the Spider-man series.”
Well, Spider-Man the comic was of course conceived of as the anti-Superman, so the imitation’s running the other way. Though I agree with your point, and add to it the anonymous citizens as well, in so many ways the secret heroes of Raimi’s films. When everyone in the stadium cheers Superman’s deft landing of the airplane it’s a charming moment, but regrettably not a rousing one. Singer’s Metropolians (Metropolity?) are rather plastic and bland compared to the rough-edged, brusquely personal, and guilelessly noble New Yorkers that Raimi has pelt the Goblin with garbage, make up catchy tunes about the freak in the mask, or immediately agree to keep the “kid’s” secret.
Dan: “Is his raison d'etre really to save people whose breaks have failed? Are there no larger problems he could tackle?”
The size of the problem rather depends on whether it’s your brakes that go out, I suppose.
Dan: “Yet, can anyone point to a single character who makes any significant step forward toward heroic levels of greatness other than Superman?”
More than feeling bad, Posey sabotages Luthor’s plans for world domination; Marsden unhesitatingly turns the plane around to rescue the man he knows owns the heart of the woman he loves; and Jimmy Olsen gets the snapshot of a lifetime. Not a lot, but more than nothing.
Kino: “Gene HAckman?..Nothing compares 2U.”
I like Spacey more that Matt did, but Hackman’s monstrously egotistical Luthor, hilariously incapable of concealing his disgust at the inferiors that surround him, was both more fun and more menacing.
Dan Jardine: "With all due respect, that's not a character question, it's a drama question. How do you build suspense when your central character is a walking, talking, flying deus ex machina?"
My point was, with Superman--when he's handled right--the suspense shouldn't come from "can he get to the burning building in time to rescue Lois and Jimmy from the elevator in which they're trapped?". Calling him a deus ex machina pushes him onto the sidelines and makes the story about other people. In a good Superman story, the suspense comes from a combination of internal conflict and the need to figure out how to apply his powers to a crisis in order to solve it in a way that minimizes collateral property damage and causes no loss of life. The plane rescue in Superman Returns is a good example of this...he grabs the wing of the jet and my first thought is "that's dumb, it's gonna break off" which of course it does. There's plenty of suspense generated by the need to figure out the right way to use his powers to solve the problem while the clock ticks away. Harry Potter would have a much easier time of it under the circumstances--he'd point the wand, utter some mumbo jumbo and everything would be copacetic.
Singer's movie and the Donner/Lester S2 make his feats seem really epic in a way it's hard for all but the best comics to pull off, but the differences between a self-contained narrative film and serial media make it hard to put across a lot of what makes the character really compelling--the folks who respond to the movies the most strongly are often those who are already among the converted. If you want some good examples of stories that really tap into the character's potential and address your complaints, I'd recommend checking out Bruce Timm's 1996-99 animated series (available on DVD in three volumes) or scoping out Tom De Haven's 2005 novel "It's Superman", which retells the origin story against the backdrop of a very realistic Depression/dust-bowl era America.
And I just can't get behind a story about a superhero who is so not human. He's flawless. Where's the fun in following around a guy who has no blemishes? Give me Spider-Man any old day. The guy is wracked with guilt, dripping teenage angst, has romantic problems, and can have his ass handed to him in a fight, and regularly does. Spider-Man is human. Superman is a Platonic Ideal. He's Jesus Christ, for Christ's sake.
"...a reverse-motion shot of Superman inhaling the inverted and impossible breath of a Busby Berkeley extra while lifting a sunken ship out of the ocean..."
Can someone explain to me what the hell this means? I don't remember any choreographed dance numbers in the movie.
Is it fair to say that Mr. Uhlich didn't like Pirates 2 either? I don't think he did, but his comments seem a little too vague for me to be sure.
Jeff-
Sure didn't like Pirates 2.
To your query: when Superman lifts the ship out of the ocean towards the end of the movie, the film is running backwards (though going forwards) like a Busby Berkeley musical number I remember seeing where the dancers rise out of the pool with lighted sparklers. The effect was accomplished by filming the dancers sinking into the water, then reversing the play direction of the film. Same effect here, to my eye, and I appreciated its analogness where most everything else in Superman Returns was afflicted by digitalis.
Keith: The effect was accomplished by filming the dancers sinking into the water, then reversing the play direction of the film.
Mel Brooks does this exact thing in the Berkeley-spoofed Inquisition number of History of the World, Part I. :)
Maybe I was remembering Brooks more than Berkeley. :-)
"Hey Torquemada! Whaddya say?/I just got back from the Auto de fe./The Auto de fe? What's the Auto de fe?/It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway."
God, that "Inquisition" number kills me.
Yeah, but good as it is, for sheer punch it can't hold a candle to the Oedipus salutation: "Hey, motherfucker!"
For such an uneven movie, History certainly has some big laughs. "Novacaine hasn't been invented yet." "I'll wait."
Superman III was on last night. I was reminded how uninspired the writers were, and how afraid of Pryor Hollywood actually was. The plot of this movie is wretched.
Why not make Pryor a villain whose profanity is like Kryptonite to Superman? With Superman's super hearing, he can't plug up his virgin ears! He's such a big boyscout that even words like "damn" make him squirm in agony.
Pryor swears a blue streak, but to keep the PG rating, we only see symbols like "&@%*!@%" drilling into Superman's ears, accompanied by bleeps on the soundtrack. Eventually, Margot Kidder, who starred with Pryor in Some Kind of Hero, defeats Pryor by sticking a bar of Lifebuoy in his mouth.
Writers, take note! This could be a Superman sequel with Brandon Routh and Chris Rock! I expect a $#*&$!%$@ story credit!
Pirates will cut into Superman's gross next week for sure. Word of mouth on Superman has been lousy.
"Word of mouth" has been lousy n SUPERMAN RETURNS? Not in Smallville-ish Sheboygan, WI, where I saw it with an appreciative audience yesterday, who applauded at the end.
I have no doubt the wildly overhyped PIRATES 2 will cut into its boxoffice...just as I have no doubt PIRATES 2 will decline mightily in its second weekend. The bad odor is wafting in, from Variety, etc.
But, if you love movies, it's not about boxoffice, which is for the Jeffrey Wellses of the world to tussle over as if the fate of nations hung in the balance over who's No. 1 or No. 2 over the weekend. So high-schoolish, this obsession over tracking and rankings, and at a remove from criticism, though for so many writers the difference between content and boxoffice is indistinguishable, and the critique is written entirely through how well the movie is perceived to "open."
Silly.
That all said, I mostly enjoyed SUPERMAN RETURNS, lamenting once more that Luthor has been neutured into some sort of vaudevillian (and the too-brief return to Smallville and the comfort of Eva Marie Saint). Spacey does what he can but he's up against it,and having just watched SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE I don't know why anyone has any lingering affection for those painfully unfunny scenes with Hackman and his stooges. They weren't even funny when I was 13. I'd love to see the complicated relationship Superman and Luthor have on SMALLVILLE brought to the screen, but that's not on the cards...or just ditch Luthor abd bring back Zod, or Doomsday, or something.
Favorite RETURNS hommage: The destruction of Luthor's miniature set, a wink, I think, at the old-school effects work of SUPERMAN '78. [But if Luthor has been to the Fortress, as is suggested, surely he and Lois Lane know each other? They seem to have just met here. And surely he'd want to get her the hell off his boat so he can enact his master plan without Superman's premature intervention?]
Final comment, and not to be too reductive, pitting film against film: This discussion has been lively and provocative. I'll bet any (if any) PIRATES 2 discussion will all be about numbers and boxoffice and why isn't Depp as fresh and funny this time around (if you thought he was in the first place) etc., surface thoughts for a superficial enterprise. [I dozed through the first one.]
Hey guys, I have thought since the day I saw Superman Returns that it fails because they ruined Lois Lane. She was never the person we saw in Singer's film. SR fails because we didn't fall in love with Lois like we did the first time around and a Superman movie is only as good as Lois Lane. I posted more thoughts about it here (http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2006/07/goodbye-lois.html) if you're interested.
-MM
odienator, word of mouth on Superman Returns was lousy???
The Times Square audience I saw it with went WILD at the end.....
I just think Pirates appeals to a wider audience.
I stumbled upon your blog just about a month ago and have found it highly entertaining. I also enjoyed Superman immensely. Any visual popcorn I tend to eat up.
If you have time, check out my new website --
http://www.hiddenflicks.com/
it tracks what trailers are in theaters AND what movies (both new and old) have codas tacked on after the credits. Take a look, I'd appreciate any input and contributions.
Again, keep up the good work.
Ben
OK, I've got two suggestions for the inevitable sequel Superman Begins Again -
1) Recast Kate Bosworth, Brandon Routh and that creepy/irritating kid. Sorry, but if you're going to do endless 'relationship' bits then please hire actors who have chemistry instead of serious Xanax habits. Kate Bosworth is particularly bad, though to be fair she could be a wonderful actress buried by a thanklessly under-conceived role. The man she loves knocks her up, buggers off for five years, literally swoops in just as she's getting her life together... and all Bosworth can muster is either a bad Katherine Hepburn impersonation, or a faintly anxious scowl as if she can't remember whether she remembered to pay the cable bill. Margot Kidder could be irritating and mannered beyond endurance - but at least you could imagine an adult man falling in love with an adult woman.
2) Cut the effects budget in half, don't go into production without a solid script and force Singer to deliver a film no longer than 110 minutes. Is Singer trying to take Peter Jackson's crown as the most self-indulgent FX geek working in film today?
3) And please, let's not have anymore five year old kids murdering henchmen - even when they're whaling on Mommy. That was one moment that took me out of the movie, and start muttering "someone behind the camera has issues."
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