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Superman vs. the Elite
Superman vs. the Elite 2012
When I started this site, I had planned to watch only theatrical movies including all the movies that come out this year. But when I recently decided to also watch other types of releases I had forgotten to check out straight to video release dates. So I didn’t even realize that this movie had come out last Tuesday until just a few days ago, so I had to give it a look. It’s yet another DC Animated movie from producer Bruce Timm, whose name you’ll hear a lot anytime superheroes and animation are brought up. And honestly, this is one of the best of these animated movies I’ve seen so far, from the animation, to the story, to the characters, to actually getting to tell an interesting Superman story, it’s all here. It even got my wife and daughter hooked through the whole thing.
Superhero Shorts: Superman Classic
Superhero Shorts: Superman Classic
Welcome to this week’s edition of Superhero Shorts where I take a look at a different superhero themed short film and get the creator of the film to answer a few interview questions. This week I’m talking with Robb Pratt, a professional storyboard artist, director, and animator who is currently working for Disney on their upcoming film Planes. He created an original independently animated Superman short film called Superman Classic which you can watch below. You can also visit Robb’s official site.
Why are there so many bad superhero movies?
I’ve gone back and forth so many times trying to figure out what to write this week. I’ve thought about writing on The Avengers, origins, sequels, and probably a half dozen topics that I’ve since forgotten about. I finally settled on this topic, why are there so many bad superhero movies? There are lots of great superhero comic books, and comic books are a visual medium, so you would think that moving from one visual medium to another would be easier than say adapting a novel, right? And yet it was so easy to come up with a list of the 33 worst superhero movies, and I can probably think of a dozen high profile movies that didn’t even make that list. The number of really great superhero movies, there are probably only a couple dozen or so, and many of those have only been made in the past few years.
Are Fantasy Heroes “Super”?
As usual, I’m starting this off with a little bit of an update. I was really happy with my first Superhero Shorts article, taking a look at a brand new video that has just come out, and I’ve gotten to talk to two other video creators. This Saturday I’ll be featuring the video “Wolverine’s Claws Suck” by the video team of Greg and Lou from YouTube, and next Saturday I’ll be featuring Batman: Dead End by Sandy Collora. I’ve been really happy with the people that have gotten back to me and answered my questions, I hope the trend continues. As far as upcoming movies, Thursday is Batman: The Movie. I’m hoping to have another video with my daughter Jena talking about it, but I haven’t filmed it yet, so she might not cooperate, and I haven’t yet decided what two movies I’m going to watch to finish out the month, though I may end up watching Sky High and Zoom. But today, I’ll be talking a little bit about a couple other movies.
What defines a Superhero?
The goal of this blog is that I want to watch and review at least 100 superhero movies this year. But that leads to the question, what defines a superhero movie. On the tab up top for “The List” of movies that I’m watching this year there’s a brief description, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Does a superhero have to be in comic books? Were the Incredibles a comic book before they were a movie? I don’t think so, and yet they are a classic example of a superhero team. Does a superhero have to have powers? That’s pretty much thrown out when it comes to one of the most popular superheroes of all time, Batman, and yet no one would hesitate to call him a superhero. Does a superhero have to be human? One of the other most popular superheroes of all time, Superman, is technically not a human even though he looks exactly like one. One of the more popular non-human superheroes that easily comes to mind and doesn’t look human is the Martian Manhunter. Do they have to wear a costume? X-Men origins: Wolverine is a recent movie featuring a bunch of well known superheroes, and yet not a single one of them wears a costume the entire movie. Does it have to take place during the modern day? The new Captain America almost entirely takes place in the 40’s, and Judge Dredd takes place in the future.
Steel
Steel 1997
It’s not even halfway through the month and I’m already watching the last non-Blade movie. Sometimes it’s weird working ahead and writing these posts ahead of time, but for as long as I can manage I enjoy having some breathing room. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t go for some crazy project like watching and reviewing a movie daily. Anyway I’m getting really far off the point of the movie. It was late at night on a Friday, Jena was obsessed with wanting to watch this “farting horse movie” as she called it, also known as The Greening of Whitney Brown… I think I liked “farting horse movie” better. So once again I just watched the movie with my wife. But anyway, towards the end of Shaq’s basketball career and near the height of his fame, he decided he wanted to branch out and cash in on that fame. The quickest route apparently was movies and he joined a project based on one of the characters that I believe was introduced during the Death of Superman comic book event, Steel.
Superman Returns
Superman Returns 2006
I started watching this movie with a preconceived notion in my head. I originally watched this movie when it came out in an IMAX theater and I enjoyed it, even though I wasn’t too impressed with the few 3D scenes. I later bought it on DVD, but it wasn’t an immediate buy, I bought it because it was on a super-discounted sale and I don’t think I ever watched it after I bought it, maybe once, and I think I watched some of the special features. But instead I became influenced by the opinion of the internet which dubbed this a mediocre and boring sequel with a lot of dumb ideas. So when I started watching this movie again, I was expecting a certain level of mediocrity. I was wrong. Now don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t blown away by this movie, but I was interested and invested in it through most of the almost two and a half hours of it. I say most because it did go on a bit too long. I also noticed the starting of a dichotomy in the way I watched this movie since writing these review blogs. In some parts of the movie I caught myself watching with an extra critical eye, and yet other places I still got carried away in the movie. Jena in the meantime had to practically be dragged downstairs to watch it, wouldn’t stop talking, and really just wanted to go back upstairs and play. The only time she was mostly quiet during that 45 minutes or so was during the shuttle sequence.
One of the biggest things going for this movie is the fact that Bryan Singer knows his Superman. There are tons of references to all sorts of previous incarnations of Superman, some are nice and smooth like the fact that Lois doesn’t know how to spell, while others are a bit of “look at that, Superman is posing just like he did in Action Comics #1”. You could almost play a drinking game – take a drink anytime an older Superman is referenced. It helps a lot that I just watched the first two Christopher Reeve Superman movies not too long ago, as the director himself has said that this movie is kind of a spiritual sequel to Richard Donner’s Superman II. There also seems to be a lot of the Christ metaphor that Richard Donner has said to have used in the original Superman movies, especially the scene where Superman is falling to Earth from space in the shape of a crucifix and more or less is resurrected shortly afterwards.
I almost disagree with the thought that this is a spiritual sequel to Superman II though, because in my mind it feels like it tries to cover a lot of the same ground as the first Superman movie. Superman’s been gone for 5 years so the world is more or less at a point where it’s like there’s never been a Superman. When he returns it’s just like when he first arrived, the only difference is that people are asking “where has he been?” instead of “where did he come from?”. Not only that, but Lex’s entire scheme is more or less the same as it was before, only bigger. Instead of buying up cheap land in the desert and knocking the rest of California into the sea, he’s creating new land and forcing most of the USA into the sea. There’s also no real fight scene, the biggest action setpieces are Superman saving people from disasters, not supervillains. He even reintroduces himself to Lois with a flight around town and an exclusive interview. But instead of falling for a single Lois, he’s trying to break up Lois’s steady relationship even though she’s practically dating a surrogate Superman/Clark Kent hybrid. He flies, he’s a reporter, and he’s there when she needs him. Not only that, but in her time of most dire need, Richard chooses her while Superman chooses Metropolis.
The relationship was almost the biggest part of this movie and when you look at it from that perspective, I thought it did a good job of portraying such a complicated relationship. Lois loved Superman, they got together in the second movie but her memory was erased of it. In fact I just realized that she supposedly had no memory of their night together as per Superman II, that leads the question of how quickly did Superman leave after that night, and how quickly did she get into a new relationship? Anyway she loved Superman but he left her without saying goodbye and she rightly moved on.
Aside from the relationships, there was some action in this movie. There were a couple disasters like the shuttle sequence near the beginning of the movie and the Metropolis destruction from the crystal’s EMP. Both of these scenes were well done with big budget special effects and kept me hooked. But the climax of the movie, where Superman gets beaten up on the Kryptonite crystal island, stabbed with Kryptonite and yet all it takes is a little sun and he’s got enough power to lift the entire Kryptonite island into space when in the first movie he couldn’t even get out of a pool with a little Kryptonite necklace around his neck.
And finally there’s the biggest all around complaint I’ve seen about this movie – Superman’s son. From the beginning it’s really clear to the audience that it’s Superman’s son even though all the characters are doing their best to deny it, claiming it’s Richard’s son. He’s also presented as an extremely fragile and sickly boy with various allergies, asthma, and whatever else he has. And yet after exposure to Kryptonite – my theory anyway – he begins to show signs of being Superman’s son, like violently crushing a man to death with a piano. Thatta boy! As well as hints of superhuman sight finding Superman in the ocean. I’m not mad that the kid is Superman’s son, but there’s just so much stuff that could have been handled differently. Like the fact that Superman’s been gone 5 years which would make him 4 years old, yet he looks and acts much older. He had no knowledge of the boy so he had to have taken off very soon after Superman II, and Lois had to have quickly hooked up with Richard for everyone to think it’s Richard’s kid. But in the grand scheme of things, most of those problems could have just been explained better without changing the movie.
Finally, how did I think this compares with the original Superman? I thought Christopher Reeve played a much better Clark Kent. Brandon Routh does an ok job, but I thought it was ridiculous when the jokes were made comparing the two and all the other characters laughed it off, when for me Routh’s Clark had a little too much confidence to be all that separate from Superman. I also thought the original flight with Superman and Lois had more wonder to it than this one, other than the whole “can you read my mind” voiceover. But the action scenes in this one were much better, the improvement in special effects really does a lot in this respect. And Kevin Spacey‘s Lex Luthor is a lot more cold and calculating, yet he still retains a bit of the old humor even if it’s a lot darker this time around, which I do like. And continuing my trend in finding interest in the side characters, I really enjoyed Kitty in this movie. I thought Parker Posey had a lot of fun with the role. I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on Superman Returns, next week I’ll be taking a look at the old and new Captain America movies for the first time. Until next time this is Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Superman Final Thoughts
It’s week 2 and I’m already slacking on my project. Luckily I’ve worked ahead enough that I won’t be missing any posts just yet. Finally got around to watching the new Captain America tonight, and the next two movies on the list I own so they shouldn’t be a problem to find. I tried to film a video of my daughter’s thoughts about Superman but this was all I was able to get out of her.
I think the Superman franchise is pretty troubled. Superman is a tough character to have good conflict. He only has one weakness, and he’s generally stronger than anything else that can be thrown at him. That’s probably why the two movies that turned out the best are ones that didn’t have him dealing with someone as powerful as him. The first Superman movie and Superman Returns both deal with Lex Luthor and natural (or technically not-so-natural) disasters. They also deal strongly with his personal relationships and the trouble of leading a dual life, without resorting to sitcom-esque hijinks of a double date. The others tried to give Superman a worthy foe to fight and the only one that came close was Superman II, but the Richard Lester version threw too much slapstick into the mix that deflated what drama was there. Superman III and IV were just awful combinations of low budget or shoehorning plots that don’t really fit just because that’s what the filmmakers wanted in their movie.
I have hope for the new Superman movie, although the only thing I have to go on is a few photos and the track record of recent Marvel and DC movies, then again the buzz wasn’t very good for the Green Lantern which I haven’t seen yet. As long as it’s not yet another rehash of the same plot that I’ve seen twice, and there’s no Braniac fighting a polar bear or a giant spider in the third act, I’ll probably enjoy it. What I would like to see in a Superman movie is a real look at the duality of his personality that’s not directly tied to a love interest. I’d like to see him face off against a worthy adversary that’s not Lex Luthor and is something that actually makes sense. But until then, I’ll just have to wait for it, at least I’ve got plenty of movies to watch in the meantime. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace 1987
My stack of Superman DVDs are due back today and it’s time to finish it out. I think even Jena has a feeling that this one’s going to be bad because she’s not even interested in watching the movie with me today and doesn’t come downstairs until about 40 minutes into the movie. She vaguely pays attention but never really gets into the movie. Before I even watched this movie I was warned by several people over Twitter that this is an awful movie and they were completely right.
Now on the surface you might think it’s a good idea for a movie. It’s got Margot Kidder as well as Gene Hackman back in full force. Gene Hackman had left during Superman II after Richard Donner was fired and Margot Kidder was delegated to a cameo in Superman III after disagreeing with that same decision. And he’s got a big superpowered villain to face off against in the third act. But ultimately that wasn’t enough to save this movie because everything was just handled poorly by a company that couldn’t give them even half the money they needed to pull it off.
Early on in the movie, while Clark was troubled about a child’s highly publicized request for Superman to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, he revealed his secret identity to Lois so he could unburden himself to her while taking her on a flight around town just like in the first Superman movie. But during the flight he uncharacteristically let her go on purpose so she could start to freak out for a moment before he came back to catch her. That was totally an un-Supermanlike thing to do to her, and to top it all off, immediately after talking to her he gave her another amnesia kiss so she forgets it all once again, just like in Superman II. But unlike Superman II, which was still ridiculous but at least he was doing it to save her the heartbreak and torment of keeping his secret, in this movie he basically used her for his own needs and tossed her a forget-me-kiss so things would be back to normal.
There’s just ridiculous scene after ridiculous scene, like where Clark and Superman went on a double date with the new head of the Daily Planet Mariel Hemingway, who was this movie’s love interest for Clark, and Lois. But it was just excuse after excuse for Clark or Superman to leave the room for just a moment so the other could pop in. And Superman apparently agreed to get rid of the nuclear weapons by having the countries shoot them all into space where he collected them in a giant net and threw them all into the sun. I’m sure several dozen nuclear weapons being tossed into the sun wouldn’t have any major repercussions on Earth… riiiight. And the countries will all apparently forget how to make more nuclear weapons? I’m not even going to get started on Ducky, err John Cryer, Lex’s teenage slacker nephew.
But there’s a new supervillain who’s just as powerful as Superman, right? Well, he’s just as powerful as Superman as long as he’s in direct sunlight, because anytime he gets into the shade for a few seconds he completely powers down, and yet he flew around the world with no ill effects. He’s also so hot to the touch that Lex can light his cigar on his finger, yet he could carry Mariel Hemingway into space and she’s perfectly fine…riiiight. They gave Superman yet another power that doesn’t make any sense. Apparently he has “brick-vision” which allowed him to rebuild a part of the Great Wall of China that got destroyed in a fight with Super-blondie just by looking at it. And Superman figured out Super-blondie’s weakness just by thinking about it for a while, at least that’s what he told Lex at the end of the movie. I thought he was going to do something interesting when he was first created and rebelled against Lex, saying “I’m the father now.” And yet that was the full extent of his young rebellion, he just went back to serving Lex no questions asked.
And if you can’t tell already, there’s just so much going on in this movie that nothing got the amount of time it needed to fully tell the story. There’s a hostile takeover of the Daily Planet by a tabloid millionaire who put his daughter in charge. His daughter was interested in Clark Kent romantically and supposedly cared about the paper more than following her father. There’s the whole nuclear threat that prompted the boy to write a letter to Superman asking him to get rid of all the nuclear weapons. There’s Lex and his nephew using a strand of Superman’s hair to make Super-blondie who was supposedly an altered clone of Superman who looked nothing like him, had only a couple of the same powers and a ton of new ones, and constantly sparked and buzzed which was really annoying. There’s the romantic plot between Clark and Mariel Hemingway, There’s Perry White getting a loan to buy back the paper, there’s a bit about Clark not wanting to sell his old farm to a developer, instead he wanted to wait for an actual farmer, and on and on and on. And only about half of these plot threads even had a resolution. Most were just touched on and then left behind.
The worst part about this movie is it’s not even bad enough to make fun of it. Through most of this movie I was just wondering where the heck the movie was going with this, or why the heck did they just do that? I was constantly puzzled and not in a good way. Why the heck did Super-blondie have Gene Hackman’s voice? What does that have to do with anything? Why does Super-blondie have a crush on Mariel Hemingway when he’s never even seen her before? Why does he have weirdly long fingernails? How does that even make any sense? Superman fighting himself made more sense than this movie, and that’s saying something. It’s amazing that they got all of the original cast to agree to make this movie considering how it turned out. What a way to end a series. Next week I will be watching Supergirl as well as Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. I’d still like to watch Richard Donner’s cut of Superman II, but it will have to wait until I can actually get a hold of it. Don’t forget to leave a comment and tell me what I should watch next, until next time this is Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Superman III
Superman III 1983
If you’ve read either of my earlier posts, you’d know I’m cranking through the Christopher Reeve Superman movies before they’re due back at the rental store tomorrow. That means I’m watching Superman III today and Superman IV tomorrow even though I’m posting both quite a bit later. As they say, it’s all downhill from here. And of course my daughter Jena, not knowing any better, is still more or less excited about seeing more Superman. As a side note, I’m kind of conflicted for when I get around to the Batman movies. I know several of them get pretty dark, especially the Nolan ones, but at the same time Batman is above all else her favorite superhero next to Wonder Woman. But that’s a decision for another time. Feel free to share your comments on the topic though, I’d love to hear them.
Anyway enough stalling, it’s time to talk about Superman III and boy is there a lot to talk about. I won’t go into too much detail about Jena’s reactions to the movie this time. If you read about what she thought of Superman I and II, it’s pretty much the same here. Her favorite scenes were Superman rescuing the kid and his dog, Superman fighting himself, and Superman fighting the giant computer.
Now for my thoughts, I could tell right away that this movie was going to take a turn for the worse when it started off with a Rube Goldberg-esque comedy of errors over the opening credits complete with a blind guy and several pratfalls. It then had Lois Lane going away for no reason (other than Margot Kidder didn’t agree with the producers for firing Richard Donner) to Bermuda and another random couple from the Daily Planet won a free trip to South America for no reason other than a cheap gag later in the movie, while Clark went back to Smallville for his High School reunion and a claim that it would make a great story. While there he ran into Lana Lang, the prettiest girl in High School and his new love interest in this movie. Since Lois was a no-show, this gave Clark another chance at love and the chance to be a father figure to Lana’s son. Personally, I could never get over the fact that he was kind of dating his own mother as Annette O’Toole went on to play Martha Kent in Smallville and that’s what I know her best as.
Then there’s Richard Pryor, more or less the “man” in “Superman III”, in other words he’s almost as much if not more of a main character than Superman himself. So much so that when he sets off a tornado in Columbia, instead of showing Superman foiling the disaster, they showed Richard Pryor re-enacting the scene with a pink tablecloth before he skied off the side of a skyscraper. Yet he still managed to survive the fall without being caught by Superman. Even though he spent half the movie trying to kill Superman, he had a sudden change of heart when he and his employers were on the verge of succeeding in that plan. In the movie he played a genius that acts like an idiot, at one point he even admitted that he had no idea what he was doing. It was basically just an excuse to let Richard Pryor do a bunch of comedy bits which for me were very hit and miss.
The big setpiece in this movie, at least the one that’s not just being described by Richard Pryor, was when Superman came into contact with some homebrew low tar Kryptonite which turned him into drunk-dad Superman. You could tell he’s evil because he always has a grimace on his unshaven face and dirty tights. But luckily Lana and her son came into town and he gets through to Superman with the oh so powerful words “You’re just in a slump!” Because I know when I get drunk and start doing evil and destructive things for the fun of it, some kid telling me that I’m in a slump will perk me right up. He then inexplicably splits into two and has a fight with himself, the good side being represented by Clark Kent. This fight was laughable in the fact that after throwing huge objects at Clark, the thing that knocked him out was an incredibly weak kick to the face. And Clark finally defeated evil Supes by violently choking him to death.
Aside from the non-villain that is Richard Pryor, there’s the rich billionaire that wanted to get richer and his blonde bimbo girlfriend. Of course she’s just pretending to be an idiot so she can… um… show that she’s smart at the end of the movie by saying a couple so-called smart things before being pinned to the wall and… um… that’s it. They hint early on that she’s pretending to be smart and it seems like a set up for something, yet they never really pay it off aside from the other villainess saying “how’d you know that?” before glossing over it. And then the final villain in the movie is a giant computer made from blueprints that Richard Pryor drew on a bunch of random wrappers that the homely villainess suddenly revealed that she knew perfectly well how to use, and became self-sentient and self preservation kicked in, causing it to attack and/or assimilate anything that threatened it including its creators.
Yet somehow through all the ridiculous stuff going on, I somehow enjoyed watching it. I believe I mentioned it somewhere on this site but I’m not here to completely bash these movies even though it may seem like it in this review. Maybe it was all the ridiculousness that won me over. I thought drunk-dad Superman was hilarious, as well as the fake-dumb blonde bimbo sidekick. I thought it was really over the top in the scene where she was seducing drunk-dad Superman and her necklace was a snake and an apple. And even though the comedy was over the top and out of place most of the time, it was genuinely funny some of the time. At least this movie didn’t give Superman some completely random superpower that he’s never had before or since. Check out my thoughts on Superman IV this Thursday to finish this series off. Next week will be Supergirl because I couldn’t easily find the Richard Donner cut in my area, and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns. Leave a comment to let me know what I should check out next. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.
Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights 