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Ubiquitous
Apr 13, 2016, 3:11:54 PM4/13/16
to
by David Kalat
So this is not a review of Batman V Superman. For one thing, TCM
doesn’t take kindly to us Morlocks spending too much time on
contemporary movies when there’s so much classic cinema yet to
explore. But more importantly: why? I mean, it’s a practically
Nietzschean film—beyond being good or bad. It just is. Despite
near universal critical disapproval, it opened to a juggernaut of
tickets sales that staggers the imagination, and even a near 69%
drop (!) in attendance from week 1 to week 2 still left it as the
nation’s top movie. So what difference would it make one way or
another what I thought?
And I’m not even sure I have a coherent opinion. It’s such a mess
of competing and contradictory impulses and ideas, some of which are
excellent, some of which are abhorrent, and a lot of which are
intriguingly off-kilter ideas that cannot help but feel wrong no
matter how they were done. But in the end, I have to say I’ve spent
the last several weeks obsessively turning the thing over in my
head, trying to make sense of my reactions, to claw my way to a
coherent opinion. I haven’t spent so much time wrestling with a
movie since Primer, and before that, since The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse or Playtime. And those are some of my favorite movies of all
time. So while I hated a lot of this, I have to admit it provoked a
deeply engaged reaction from me. I can’t easily dismiss that.
But as I said, this isn’t about Batman V Superman. Instead, I plan
to hash out some of my thoughts by revisiting where this all
started—the 1978 Superman The Movie, which I hope we can all agree
was pretty wonderful. But if it weren’t for the one, we wouldn’t
have the other.
I remember being in that theater in 1978 when the house lights
dimmed and the opening overture started to play. I was eight. Some
movies had that—a musical overture, like you’d have at an opera, to
get people in the mood and make sure they were seated and quiet
before the thing started. Also, back in those days, they sometimes
showed short films before the feature—and even though Superman was a
butt-numbing 143 minutes, they still had time to screen a short
called Popcorn. I only vaguely recall seeing the short—enough to
remember it existed and that it was called Popcorn, but I’m hoping
some of y’all have sharper memories than me to fill in the missing
details.
This was a big deal—there were no superhero films before this.
That’s hard to imagine, with today’s glut of superhero films. Even
Steven Spielberg (who’d been considered to direct Superman back in
the 1970s, for the record) has recently opined that we’re watching
the superhero genre peak and sputter out, the way Westerns did. He
may be right—but in 1978 this was groundbreaking stuff.
There’d been superhero media before–and I’m sure the partisans of
things like the Columbia Batman serials or Superman and the Mole Men
will make their voices heard in the comments, but the idea of a
comic book adaptation as big budget A-list marquee fare was novel.
For the most part, comic book characters seemed better suited to TV
in those days. For the benefit of the younger readers who didn’t
live through this reversal, there was once a time when TV was where
you put all the poorly-thought-out repetitive franchise stuff, and
movies where were serious writers and actors did serious drama—as
opposed to today, where that’s the exact opposite. But then TVs
were small and the picture was poor, and they were there to keep
people entertained while they did household chores as opposed to
being appointment events that demanded attention—it simply made
better sense to use the TV platform to tell endless iterations of
the same story. For any given show (let’s use Superman as the
example) you wanted a clearly defined premise that could be easily
conveyed in the opening titles (“Look! Up in the sky!”) and then
spend the next half hour or hour riffing. Each episode was a
perfect representative of the series—watch one and you’ve basically
seen them all—a fractal narrative.
And comic books suited this aesthetic perfectly. Superman had been
appearing in multiple weekly installments since the 1930s—a huge
part of his appeal was the endless cornucopia of Superman stories he
promised.
But a movie? That’s a one-time thing—a standalone experience, meant
to encapsulate the entirety of the idea. There could be sequels,
sure, but no one thought in terms of franchises then. It was
madness to take Superman out of his weekly adventures and try to
make a single, definitive Superman adventure.
The first to try was Mario The Godfather Puzzo, who tackled the
enormous mythos of Superman and turned it into something like 500
pages of screenplay. That’s like 3 times too much writing, and
after a few stabs at rewriting he gave up trying to cut it down. So
the thing passed to Robert Benton and David Newman, a pair of
writers who back in 1966 had created the lunatic Superman musical–
having conclusively demonstrated that they knew Superman, were
willing to take crazy chances, and had terrible ideas. They
inserted a camp sensibility into Puzo’s serious story… for some
reason.
What they didn’t do was make it any shorter. At which point
producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind decided to lean into the
length. Why fight it? Years earlier they’d made The Three
Musketeers only to find there was too much footage. Rather than
just cut it and waste the money, they decided to keep it all and
just cut it into two movies. Applying that ethic to Superman, they
decided to go ahead and film the whole script and release it as
Superman I and II.
I hesitate to write “two movies for the price of one,” because this
was decidedly not the price of one movie. Superman eventually ended
up costing $55 million—an insane amount of movie in 1978. In those
days, if you wanted to spend a ton of money on your blockbuster to
show the world what an A-list important thing it was, you’d write a
check for somewhere around $20-30 million. This was double that,
and not all of that money was well spent at all.
For one thing, the Salkinds spent a lot of it on some high-priced
and temperamental movie stars (namely Marlon Brando and Gene
Hackman, neither of whom made life easier for the production team).
Then there was all the money wasted on the revolving door of
creative teams—each new director discarded the work of his
predecessor and started anew. Eventually Richard Lester took over
Superman II from Superman director Richard Donner, reshooting
nearly all of his footage and thereby undermining the whole idea of
shooting two movies at once. And of course there were the many
millions spent on R&D to get convincing special effects to make
Superman fly.
This detail is easy to overlook, in our era of CGI, but in 1978 it
wasn’t clear how you would approach this problem. Audiences started
from the assumption that the special effects would be crap—to the
extent that the film’s primary marketing campaign (aside from “come
see all the big name movie stars”) was to announce “You’ll believe a
man can fly.”
Which was a tall order. In the end, the effects technique was the
same blue screen/green screen technique used by Star Wars to make
spaceships zoom over alien worlds, but there’s a key difference: we
know what people look like, and we know what cities look like, so
even though we’ve never seen a flying man before we have a basic
idea of what that should look like.
Superman came out in the wake of Star Wars and Jaws, but it had been
in production so long that both of those films arrived while it was
already underway in some form. There was no opportunity to shape
the production to learn from the experiences of those nascent
blockbusters. Either Superman would join their ranks on its own
merits, or not. There was no way to hedge the bet.
Which meant that when this very long gamble paid off so handsomely,
justifying all the risky decisions the Salkinds made along the way,
that success enshrined those decisions as a form of modern cinematic
gospel. There would be more Superman films, and more superhero
films, and eventually a superhero genre so busy that people can
speculate on when it will have run its course… and all of that would
owe so much to Superman that nobody would easily dare second guess
any of the Salkinds’ choices. Whether they meant to or not, they
established a formula:
1. The Origin Story
It’s easy to see why Superman opted for an origin story—the idea of
making a big-budget Superman movie instead of a weekly TV series was
to commit to making the definitive Superman story. How else to do
that but to tell the one story that underlies all the others—the one
that every other Superman story needed to establish in the opening
titles or on page 1?
But, this became something of an albatross to the genre when applied
to other superheroes. Not every superhero has a great mythic origin
story—a lot of them are just silly or stupid or derivative or
boring. But with few exceptions, all superhero franchises pay
tribute to this forebear by starting with the very beginning,
whether it makes any sense as entertainment or not.
(By the way, this is apropos of nothing but I thought I’d fit it in
anyway–I recall in the lead-up to Superman there was a contest
advertised in the comic books I read that you could enter a
sweepstakes and compete to win a walk-on role in the film. I
dutifully sent in my form, but naturally I didn’t win. When the
movie came out, I watched rapt looking for the winner to show up–and
when baby Superman steps out of the crashed Kryptonian ship in the
Kansas corn field, a naked little boy, I was certain that had to be
the winner, and that some poor schmuck had won a contest and been
forced to appear naked in the movie. I wasn’t disabused of this
idiotic idea until many years later–the actual winners were two
teenagers who show up as football players at Clark Kent’s high
school. This brings me to the question of casting–)
2. Stunt Casting (Heroes and Villains)
The Salkinds signed Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando before they even
had a finished script, and well before anyone even knew what roles
these guys would play. But they were two of the biggest box office
draws of the 1970s, so having them in the movie created buzz and
established legitimacy. This was the first attempt to make a major
event film out of comic books, and the prejudices against the
project were a problem—having serious actors was a way of
advertising that the project wasn’t just a cheap cash-in.
For a while, it was assumed that the producers would also cast a
major star as the title character—like Burt Reynolds, Robert
Redford, James Caan, maybe Sly Stallone. Someone like that.
Meanwhile, they hired an unknown stage actor named Christopher Reeve
to do line readings for the Lois Lane auditions. And as Reeve read
Superman’s lines, over and over, opposite an endless parade of Lois
Lane wanna-bes, Richard Donner’s wife nudged her husband and said,
“hire that guy.”
And thus was born the practice, adhered to ever since, of casting
major established stars as the villains and supporting players,
while casting the lead often with newcomers or young actors just
getting an early break.
3. Stunt Casting (Cameos)
Stars of the 1940s Superman serials Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill show up
briefly as the parents of Lois Lane.
This became a time-honored tradition, too, of bringing in the stars
of prior versions to appear in hey-didja-see-that cameos. For
example, when Lou Ferrigno (TV’s The Incredible Hulk) appears as a
pizza-eating security guard in The Incredible Hulk with Edward
Norton, or when Bob Kane (one of the creators of Batman) appears as
a newspaper cartoonist in Tim Burton’s Batman.
4. Long
143 minutes is a long movie by anyone’s standards, but when the
Salkinds sold it to TV in 1981 they recut it to 188 minutes (because
they were paid by the minute). The current version on home video
clocks in at 151 minutes.
So, not only was it long and epic to start with, but for secondary
markets it got even longer—a trick that apparently Zack Snyder is
expecting to pull when he adds in the extra footage to turn Batman V
Superman into its R rated director’s cut later this year. Oh,
sorry, I wasn’t going to talk anymore about that.
--
For the White House's "Take Your Daughters To Work Day," Sasha &
Malia golfed.
So this is not a review of Batman V Superman. For one thing, TCM
doesn’t take kindly to us Morlocks spending too much time on
contemporary movies when there’s so much classic cinema yet to
explore. But more importantly: why? I mean, it’s a practically
Nietzschean film—beyond being good or bad. It just is. Despite
near universal critical disapproval, it opened to a juggernaut of
tickets sales that staggers the imagination, and even a near 69%
drop (!) in attendance from week 1 to week 2 still left it as the
nation’s top movie. So what difference would it make one way or
another what I thought?
And I’m not even sure I have a coherent opinion. It’s such a mess
of competing and contradictory impulses and ideas, some of which are
excellent, some of which are abhorrent, and a lot of which are
intriguingly off-kilter ideas that cannot help but feel wrong no
matter how they were done. But in the end, I have to say I’ve spent
the last several weeks obsessively turning the thing over in my
head, trying to make sense of my reactions, to claw my way to a
coherent opinion. I haven’t spent so much time wrestling with a
movie since Primer, and before that, since The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse or Playtime. And those are some of my favorite movies of all
time. So while I hated a lot of this, I have to admit it provoked a
deeply engaged reaction from me. I can’t easily dismiss that.
But as I said, this isn’t about Batman V Superman. Instead, I plan
to hash out some of my thoughts by revisiting where this all
started—the 1978 Superman The Movie, which I hope we can all agree
was pretty wonderful. But if it weren’t for the one, we wouldn’t
have the other.
I remember being in that theater in 1978 when the house lights
dimmed and the opening overture started to play. I was eight. Some
movies had that—a musical overture, like you’d have at an opera, to
get people in the mood and make sure they were seated and quiet
before the thing started. Also, back in those days, they sometimes
showed short films before the feature—and even though Superman was a
butt-numbing 143 minutes, they still had time to screen a short
called Popcorn. I only vaguely recall seeing the short—enough to
remember it existed and that it was called Popcorn, but I’m hoping
some of y’all have sharper memories than me to fill in the missing
details.
This was a big deal—there were no superhero films before this.
That’s hard to imagine, with today’s glut of superhero films. Even
Steven Spielberg (who’d been considered to direct Superman back in
the 1970s, for the record) has recently opined that we’re watching
the superhero genre peak and sputter out, the way Westerns did. He
may be right—but in 1978 this was groundbreaking stuff.
There’d been superhero media before–and I’m sure the partisans of
things like the Columbia Batman serials or Superman and the Mole Men
will make their voices heard in the comments, but the idea of a
comic book adaptation as big budget A-list marquee fare was novel.
For the most part, comic book characters seemed better suited to TV
in those days. For the benefit of the younger readers who didn’t
live through this reversal, there was once a time when TV was where
you put all the poorly-thought-out repetitive franchise stuff, and
movies where were serious writers and actors did serious drama—as
opposed to today, where that’s the exact opposite. But then TVs
were small and the picture was poor, and they were there to keep
people entertained while they did household chores as opposed to
being appointment events that demanded attention—it simply made
better sense to use the TV platform to tell endless iterations of
the same story. For any given show (let’s use Superman as the
example) you wanted a clearly defined premise that could be easily
conveyed in the opening titles (“Look! Up in the sky!”) and then
spend the next half hour or hour riffing. Each episode was a
perfect representative of the series—watch one and you’ve basically
seen them all—a fractal narrative.
And comic books suited this aesthetic perfectly. Superman had been
appearing in multiple weekly installments since the 1930s—a huge
part of his appeal was the endless cornucopia of Superman stories he
promised.
But a movie? That’s a one-time thing—a standalone experience, meant
to encapsulate the entirety of the idea. There could be sequels,
sure, but no one thought in terms of franchises then. It was
madness to take Superman out of his weekly adventures and try to
make a single, definitive Superman adventure.
The first to try was Mario The Godfather Puzzo, who tackled the
enormous mythos of Superman and turned it into something like 500
pages of screenplay. That’s like 3 times too much writing, and
after a few stabs at rewriting he gave up trying to cut it down. So
the thing passed to Robert Benton and David Newman, a pair of
writers who back in 1966 had created the lunatic Superman musical–
having conclusively demonstrated that they knew Superman, were
willing to take crazy chances, and had terrible ideas. They
inserted a camp sensibility into Puzo’s serious story… for some
reason.
What they didn’t do was make it any shorter. At which point
producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind decided to lean into the
length. Why fight it? Years earlier they’d made The Three
Musketeers only to find there was too much footage. Rather than
just cut it and waste the money, they decided to keep it all and
just cut it into two movies. Applying that ethic to Superman, they
decided to go ahead and film the whole script and release it as
Superman I and II.
I hesitate to write “two movies for the price of one,” because this
was decidedly not the price of one movie. Superman eventually ended
up costing $55 million—an insane amount of movie in 1978. In those
days, if you wanted to spend a ton of money on your blockbuster to
show the world what an A-list important thing it was, you’d write a
check for somewhere around $20-30 million. This was double that,
and not all of that money was well spent at all.
For one thing, the Salkinds spent a lot of it on some high-priced
and temperamental movie stars (namely Marlon Brando and Gene
Hackman, neither of whom made life easier for the production team).
Then there was all the money wasted on the revolving door of
creative teams—each new director discarded the work of his
predecessor and started anew. Eventually Richard Lester took over
Superman II from Superman director Richard Donner, reshooting
nearly all of his footage and thereby undermining the whole idea of
shooting two movies at once. And of course there were the many
millions spent on R&D to get convincing special effects to make
Superman fly.
This detail is easy to overlook, in our era of CGI, but in 1978 it
wasn’t clear how you would approach this problem. Audiences started
from the assumption that the special effects would be crap—to the
extent that the film’s primary marketing campaign (aside from “come
see all the big name movie stars”) was to announce “You’ll believe a
man can fly.”
Which was a tall order. In the end, the effects technique was the
same blue screen/green screen technique used by Star Wars to make
spaceships zoom over alien worlds, but there’s a key difference: we
know what people look like, and we know what cities look like, so
even though we’ve never seen a flying man before we have a basic
idea of what that should look like.
Superman came out in the wake of Star Wars and Jaws, but it had been
in production so long that both of those films arrived while it was
already underway in some form. There was no opportunity to shape
the production to learn from the experiences of those nascent
blockbusters. Either Superman would join their ranks on its own
merits, or not. There was no way to hedge the bet.
Which meant that when this very long gamble paid off so handsomely,
justifying all the risky decisions the Salkinds made along the way,
that success enshrined those decisions as a form of modern cinematic
gospel. There would be more Superman films, and more superhero
films, and eventually a superhero genre so busy that people can
speculate on when it will have run its course… and all of that would
owe so much to Superman that nobody would easily dare second guess
any of the Salkinds’ choices. Whether they meant to or not, they
established a formula:
1. The Origin Story
It’s easy to see why Superman opted for an origin story—the idea of
making a big-budget Superman movie instead of a weekly TV series was
to commit to making the definitive Superman story. How else to do
that but to tell the one story that underlies all the others—the one
that every other Superman story needed to establish in the opening
titles or on page 1?
But, this became something of an albatross to the genre when applied
to other superheroes. Not every superhero has a great mythic origin
story—a lot of them are just silly or stupid or derivative or
boring. But with few exceptions, all superhero franchises pay
tribute to this forebear by starting with the very beginning,
whether it makes any sense as entertainment or not.
(By the way, this is apropos of nothing but I thought I’d fit it in
anyway–I recall in the lead-up to Superman there was a contest
advertised in the comic books I read that you could enter a
sweepstakes and compete to win a walk-on role in the film. I
dutifully sent in my form, but naturally I didn’t win. When the
movie came out, I watched rapt looking for the winner to show up–and
when baby Superman steps out of the crashed Kryptonian ship in the
Kansas corn field, a naked little boy, I was certain that had to be
the winner, and that some poor schmuck had won a contest and been
forced to appear naked in the movie. I wasn’t disabused of this
idiotic idea until many years later–the actual winners were two
teenagers who show up as football players at Clark Kent’s high
school. This brings me to the question of casting–)
2. Stunt Casting (Heroes and Villains)
The Salkinds signed Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando before they even
had a finished script, and well before anyone even knew what roles
these guys would play. But they were two of the biggest box office
draws of the 1970s, so having them in the movie created buzz and
established legitimacy. This was the first attempt to make a major
event film out of comic books, and the prejudices against the
project were a problem—having serious actors was a way of
advertising that the project wasn’t just a cheap cash-in.
For a while, it was assumed that the producers would also cast a
major star as the title character—like Burt Reynolds, Robert
Redford, James Caan, maybe Sly Stallone. Someone like that.
Meanwhile, they hired an unknown stage actor named Christopher Reeve
to do line readings for the Lois Lane auditions. And as Reeve read
Superman’s lines, over and over, opposite an endless parade of Lois
Lane wanna-bes, Richard Donner’s wife nudged her husband and said,
“hire that guy.”
And thus was born the practice, adhered to ever since, of casting
major established stars as the villains and supporting players,
while casting the lead often with newcomers or young actors just
getting an early break.
3. Stunt Casting (Cameos)
Stars of the 1940s Superman serials Kirk Alyn and Noel Neill show up
briefly as the parents of Lois Lane.
This became a time-honored tradition, too, of bringing in the stars
of prior versions to appear in hey-didja-see-that cameos. For
example, when Lou Ferrigno (TV’s The Incredible Hulk) appears as a
pizza-eating security guard in The Incredible Hulk with Edward
Norton, or when Bob Kane (one of the creators of Batman) appears as
a newspaper cartoonist in Tim Burton’s Batman.
4. Long
143 minutes is a long movie by anyone’s standards, but when the
Salkinds sold it to TV in 1981 they recut it to 188 minutes (because
they were paid by the minute). The current version on home video
clocks in at 151 minutes.
So, not only was it long and epic to start with, but for secondary
markets it got even longer—a trick that apparently Zack Snyder is
expecting to pull when he adds in the extra footage to turn Batman V
Superman into its R rated director’s cut later this year. Oh,
sorry, I wasn’t going to talk anymore about that.
--
For the White House's "Take Your Daughters To Work Day," Sasha &
Malia golfed.
Robert Misage
Apr 15, 2016, 3:55:31 PM4/15/16
to
first time, on a 16mm projector in my elementary school gym, using the
wrong (non-anamorphic) lens. I was a Batman kid, but I loved the movie
just the same, and hoped that my favourite hero would get a film of his
own someday. Outside of the animated series, I still haven’t seen
anything resembling the Batman I grew up with, nor am I likely to
anytime soon, unless there’s another reboot that opts to go back to the
“dark detective” that enthralled me in numerous 3-colour panels way
back when.
Meanwhile, BvS was about as entertaining as a damp dumpster fire. It
wasn’t true to the comics (Gotham is the Brooklyn to Metropolis’s
Manhattan? Since when?) and there was very little logic to the actions
of any of the characters. I know asking for logic in a so-called comic
book movie is asking for a lot, but the Marvel titles have been a
triumph of tone and narrative thrust by comparison. I guess I’m stuck
with Tim Burton’s Batman Returns as my favourite screen version of the
character, at least it has some sort of cartoony vision to it, as
opposed to Snyder’s patchwork quilt of storylines and fanboy-pleasing
references.
anim8rfsk
Apr 15, 2016, 4:52:05 PM4/15/16
to
In article
<86CF4544298BFC49A422...@NAMXA02.corp.doosan.com>,
He'd already had 3 by that point!
Outside of the animated series, I still haven’t seen
> anything resembling the Batman I grew up with, nor am I likely to
> anytime soon, unless there’s another reboot that opts to go back to the
> “dark detective” that enthralled me in numerous 3-colour panels way
> back when.
>
> Meanwhile, BvS was about as entertaining as a damp dumpster fire. It
> wasn’t true to the comics (Gotham is the Brooklyn to Metropolis’s
> Manhattan? Since when?) and there was very little logic to the actions
> of any of the characters. I know asking for logic in a so-called comic
> book movie is asking for a lot, but the Marvel titles have been a
> triumph of tone and narrative thrust by comparison. I guess I’m stuck
> with Tim Burton’s Batman Returns as my favourite screen version of the
> character, at least it has some sort of cartoony vision to it, as
> opposed to Snyder’s patchwork quilt of storylines and fanboy-pleasing
> references.
--
Join your old RAT friends at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1688985234647266/
<86CF4544298BFC49A422...@NAMXA02.corp.doosan.com>,
Outside of the animated series, I still haven’t seen
> anything resembling the Batman I grew up with, nor am I likely to
> anytime soon, unless there’s another reboot that opts to go back to the
> “dark detective” that enthralled me in numerous 3-colour panels way
> back when.
>
> Meanwhile, BvS was about as entertaining as a damp dumpster fire. It
> wasn’t true to the comics (Gotham is the Brooklyn to Metropolis’s
> Manhattan? Since when?) and there was very little logic to the actions
> of any of the characters. I know asking for logic in a so-called comic
> book movie is asking for a lot, but the Marvel titles have been a
> triumph of tone and narrative thrust by comparison. I guess I’m stuck
> with Tim Burton’s Batman Returns as my favourite screen version of the
> character, at least it has some sort of cartoony vision to it, as
> opposed to Snyder’s patchwork quilt of storylines and fanboy-pleasing
> references.
Join your old RAT friends at
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1688985234647266/
Utopians
Apr 30, 2016, 10:51:41 AM4/30/16
to
one.
One of the reasons Richard Lester had to do so many re-shots was
because of the re-writes pertaining to the movie. Because the budget
was a problem, they had to stop production and just assemble with what
they had….and they did.
Originally one of the nuclear missiles was suppose to destroy the
Phantom Zone, not the explosively wired elevator from the Eiffel Tower.
Among other things.
I wish we could see some of that Guy Hamilton footage from Italy as
well. In terms of story structure, SUPERMAN if had a genuine
predecessor, it would have to be THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
I think its strange that as big and popular as the movie was, it didn’t
seem to help many of the talent involved. Brando was his own worst
enemy and already had problems. Of course Christopher Reeve and Margot
Kidder also had there share of turmoil. I’m still surprised that
Richard Lester is written off nowadays by seemingly ignorant film fans.
Ignorant. I just cannot think of another word. Or perhaps protective
over that SUPERMAN II re-cut? Why is he he not more beloved. He made
ROBIN AND MARIAN and PETULIA. He collaborated with the Goons and the
Beatles. I’m not even a Beatles fan but you can’t dismiss A HARD DAY’S
NIGHT. Even HELP was better than average. He was very much a “Mod”
filmmaker, sort of the forerunner for Steven Soderberg and Wes
Anderson.
Oh well. What the hell do I know?
Even the Salkinds never seem to get past the Superman business. I mean
they really could have had a James Bond series with this but it didn’t
work out. I remember liking their version of SUPER GIRL, a fun fantasy.
Apparently they had a tense relationship with co-owners Warner Bros.
Much like how Disney, Universal, Fox and Sony do about their rights to
Marvel characters.
The movie did seem to help Richard Donner. He is a very good filmmaker.
Generally I enjoy his movies, no matter how preposterous the movies can
be. He does a good job of showing most of the actors having a good
time; a good balance between comedy and action. Donner had a big hand
in establishing Mel Gibson and for that matter Joe Pesci. Anyone who
uses Tom Atkins can’t be all that bad.
1000113...@facebook.com
Apr 30, 2016, 11:04:21 AM4/30/16
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In article <586dc259-5da9-4a01...@googlegroups.com>,
leno...@yahoo.com wrote:
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>Darn, I was hoping for something about Laurie Anderson!
Nice to see you’re a Laurie Anderson fan too! Hope to see her recent
film project Heart of a Dog sometime soon.
leno...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>
>Darn, I was hoping for something about Laurie Anderson!
Nice to see you’re a Laurie Anderson fan too! Hope to see her recent
film project Heart of a Dog sometime soon.
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