Superman.
When I was little, I was kind of .... obsessive about Superman. I mean,
sure, I loved Batman as much as the next proto-gothling, but it wasn't the
same. The sense of alienated isolation and loss coupled with the sheer
love of his adopted world; the absolute power tempered with compassion and
responsibility; the frustration at wanting to tell the world, "Hey, look,
I'm really somebody behind these glasses, behind this awkward
shyness." The sheer epic grandeur and mythic weight of it all. I ate it
up with a spoon.
Where some kids grew up with religion, I grew up with comic books. They helped shape my moral core. They taught me that the proper use of power, any power, is to help those who have none. No one taught me that better than Superman.
(And I learned a lot more besides. I could tell you what all the different colors of kryptonite were -- green, red, blue, white, gold, crystal -- and tell you what they did; I could tell you that a young Clark Kent fashioned his hornrim glasses from two circular fragments of the cockpit glass of his rocket, because regular glass would melt if he used his heat vision. You know, the important details. I had "non-fiction" books about Superman and I studied them the way I never studied anything at school.)
I don't remember, oddly enough, if I ever saw Superman: The Movie in a movie theatre. But I certainly watched it on video, a hundred times or more.
I've seen it since, in the cold morning after of adulthood. It's -- not great. The special effects are no longer convincing. Most of the acting (aside from the brilliant Christopher Reeve) is just not up to par. The script doesn't hold together. The jokes fall flat.
It's not the movie I remember. There's no way to go back and see something like that, from your childhood, and have it be the way you remember it.
Or so I thought until last night.
Watching Superman Returns at the Cinerama was, in so many ways, like having that experience, of seeing the original movie for the first time as a child, back again. It is every bit as good as I remember the original being, in every way that it really wasn't.
The casting is great. Okay, Lois Lane is kind of forgettable, but entirely competent. But Brandon Routh frickin' channels Christopher Reeve -- I kept forgetting it wasn't him, somehow given back to us -- and Kevin Spacey somehow manages to take Gene Hackman's version of Luthor and build on it, to make it something three-dimensional and dark and scary-crazy.
Superman Returns. Boy, does he ever. If you like awesome, go see it. At the Cinerama, if you can manage it.
Where some kids grew up with religion, I grew up with comic books. They helped shape my moral core. They taught me that the proper use of power, any power, is to help those who have none. No one taught me that better than Superman.
(And I learned a lot more besides. I could tell you what all the different colors of kryptonite were -- green, red, blue, white, gold, crystal -- and tell you what they did; I could tell you that a young Clark Kent fashioned his hornrim glasses from two circular fragments of the cockpit glass of his rocket, because regular glass would melt if he used his heat vision. You know, the important details. I had "non-fiction" books about Superman and I studied them the way I never studied anything at school.)
I don't remember, oddly enough, if I ever saw Superman: The Movie in a movie theatre. But I certainly watched it on video, a hundred times or more.
I've seen it since, in the cold morning after of adulthood. It's -- not great. The special effects are no longer convincing. Most of the acting (aside from the brilliant Christopher Reeve) is just not up to par. The script doesn't hold together. The jokes fall flat.
It's not the movie I remember. There's no way to go back and see something like that, from your childhood, and have it be the way you remember it.
Or so I thought until last night.
Watching Superman Returns at the Cinerama was, in so many ways, like having that experience, of seeing the original movie for the first time as a child, back again. It is every bit as good as I remember the original being, in every way that it really wasn't.
The casting is great. Okay, Lois Lane is kind of forgettable, but entirely competent. But Brandon Routh frickin' channels Christopher Reeve -- I kept forgetting it wasn't him, somehow given back to us -- and Kevin Spacey somehow manages to take Gene Hackman's version of Luthor and build on it, to make it something three-dimensional and dark and scary-crazy.
Superman Returns. Boy, does he ever. If you like awesome, go see it. At the Cinerama, if you can manage it.