The Man of Tomorrow, Yesterday

It may be that you've never seen the 1978 big-screen Superman, aka Superman: The Movie. It is, after all, 35 years old, and some of you are not. Suffice it to say it was the first time a comic-book superhero had ever been given a movie (or TV) adaptation with an actual budget or scope. When it went into production, the Batman TV series was still in daily reruns, so most filmmakers were tempted to approach it with a similar attitude of camp.

I hate camp! Luckily, so did Richard Donner, who jumped at directing the film after William Friedkin and Sam Peckinpah passed. It was only Donner's third feature, though he'd directed popular TV shows for years. Anyway, if you are one of those folks who's never seen Superman, you may want to skip this blog entry and add Superman to your Netflix queue instead, because these were my thoughts as I rescreened it last week.

The film is dedicated to its cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, who died before it was released. As you watch the film, it becomes more and more amazing that Unsworth wasn't nominated for his efforts. Donner was incensed, doubly so because production designer John Barry was left out in the cold. The film was nominated for its film editing (Stuart Baird), sound editing (Gordon K. McCallum, et al.), and unforgettable score (the one and only John Williams). Donner would later point out that Williams's score all but yells "SUP-erman!" each time the mighty caped hero appears.

My God, I miss cinematic overtures. After a short prelude that recalls Superman's debut in 1938's Action Comics #1, this movie opens with a great one. We're whisked through the stars courtesy of visual effects that seem slightly cheesy now, but were jaw-dropping at the time--if only because it was rare for so lavish an effort to be expended on mere opening credits. When I was a kid, one of my bucket list items was to see my name WHOOSH! out of a screen the way Superman's did. (Y'know, actually, it kind of still is.) And then, after a three-note crescendo that recalls Thus Spake Zarathustra, we arrive on the planet...

Krypton! Later, Superman, played by 26-year-old Christopher Reeve, will remind us it's spelled "with a K-R-Y." I have no idea why that should be, unless the spelling is a tribute to the noble gas with atomic number 36; but then, I also have no idea why some newsmagazines spelled "Gaddafi" with a Q. Doesn't matter. Regardless of how Krypton ever looked in the comics, this is how it looked and will always look to my generation of fanboys. We go straight to the sentencing of a trio of supervillains, General Zod and his sidekicks, already chosen as the antagonists of Superman II. In fact, Superman and its immediate sequel were shot all at once...but more on that later.

It appears political correctness will never come to Kryptonopolis, even if Greek root words have. Non is introduced by Jor-El, Superman's birth father, as "this mindless aberration." That's just mean! And he's up for "eternal living death" in the Phantom Zone to boot! Jor-El goes on to introduce Zod's other crony as "the woman Ursa." Hel-lo, patriarchy! I mean literally: we see dozens of Kryptonian elders, and only one of them is female. Adding insult to injury, she seems to be the only one who doesn't get to wear her family emblem as a black decal on her glowing white robes. Even more surprising, it appears Kryptonian justice has no interest in defense attorneys. "GUILTY!"

Jor-El tells the ruling council, "This planet will explode within 30 days," then adds redundantly, "if not sooner."

And he's right. The council teleports an investigator to Jor-El's house to make sure he and his wife Lara have honored their word to remain Krypton-bound, but he never arrives. Instead, Jor-El delivers a long farewell speech before sealing his only son in a crystalline starburst spacecraft. Lara, on the other hand, just lays her head on Jor-El's shoulder, content to let him do all the talking. And why not! Marlon Brando earned a record $3.7 million for his ten minutes on screen, so make him talk! He refused to learn his lines, reading them instead off baby Kal-El's diaper, and pestered Donner with suggestions that Jor-El should look like a glowing green bagel instead of Marlon Brando in a spit curl. After profit participation, Brando wound up earning tens of millions of dollars for only 12 days' work.

The scene in which Krypton is destroyed, particularly the shots in which bodies plummet into burning chasms, haunted my dreams for years.

BLAMMO! Krypton goes bye-bye, and Kal-El is launched on a journey through six of "the 28 known galaxies." Does screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz mean "star systems?" I have to assume he does, though the confusion of "galaxy" for "stellar system" is repeated several times throughout the course of the movie. Jor-El electronically lectures his son for the entirety of a cosmic voyage we assume takes several years, continuing an explicit allusion to Christian "Father and Son" themes.

The spaceship crashes into a grain field outside Smallville, Kansas, and out steps toddler Kal-El, thus revealing the most memorable peepee in comic-book cinema (Dr. Manhattan's in Watchmen notwithstanding).

Young Clark Kent outruns a train, which kinda puts the kibosh to the whole "lay low" approach. Young Lois Lane spies the feat and reports it to her parents, played by Noel Neill and Kirk Alyn. Neill played Lois on the old TV show; Alyn played Supes in a series of cliffhanger short films. Young Clark is played by Jeff East, but all his lines were looped by Reeve--a fact East discovered, to his vast displeasure, at the premiere. Unlike the ADR in Star Wars, for example, this looping sounds pretty good. It's another feather in the sound editors' cap.

Glenn Ford plays Clark's adoptive father. As he dies, I find myself tearing up. What the hell? I've always been a sucker for good dads in movies, though, and Ford's performance still strikes me as iconic.

Superman leaves home, wanders north to the Arctic, and uses a Kryptonian crystal to build his beautiful Fortress of Solitude. This really was a triumph of production design, so much so that it deserved a nomination all by itself. Jor-El continues his Brando-y lectures, including the following remarkable statement: "This year, we shall examine the various concepts of immortality, and their basis in actual fact." It strikes me at this point that "Jor-El" sounds kind of like "Jehovah."

Upon graduation from Brando University, Clark Kent moves to Metropolis, New York, gaining a job at the Daily Planet newspaper with what must have been the most bullcrap curriculum vitae in the history of printed communications. Clark and Lois (Margot Kidder) exchange pleasantries with Rex Reed, possibly the most recognizable movie critic in America in 1978. Currying favor, were we?

Even lowlifes are remarkably well-dressed in Metropolis. Lois's mugger wears a sport coat. Lex Luthor's numbnuts assistant Otis favors a suit and tie. We follow Otis into Luthor's subterranean lair, apparently a repurposed subbasement of Grand Central Terminal. Again, props to John Barry. This set is fantastic. Echoing generations of Superman fans, however, I have to ask: why Otis?! Why in the 28 known galaxies would Lex Luthor, the self-described "greatest criminal mind of our time," ever saddle himself with such a vapor-brained yutz? Luthor, like Zod before and after him, appears to crave the company of hot chicks and large men with learning disabilities.

We add another feminist check mark in passing against costume designer Yvonne Blake, who can't seem to dress Valerine Perrine in anything that doesn't reveal at least eighty percent of her admittedly astonishing rack.

Poor Lois runs afoul of what has to be the least competent chopper pilot of all time, which prompts the classic exchange: "Easy, miss. I've got you." "Y-you've got me? Who's got you?!" That might be my mom's favorite movie dialogue ever. I didn't realize until years later what a celebrity crush she had on Christopher Reeve. And who could blame her? For me, even all these years later, after Brandon Routh, Dean Cain, and several other worthy portrayals, Christopher Reeve IS Superman, and that makes him immortal.

After a police car chase that would've been the climax of almost any other '70s action movie, Superman helps a little girl retrieve her cat from a tree. She runs inside to tell her parents about the encounter, and we hear, "Haven't I told you not to lie? (*SMACK*)" Ah, child abuse. Funny then, funny now.

The Man of Steel meets Lois at her penthouse apartment for an interview and impromptu date. "Nice place," he says, and indeed it is. One wonders what Lois earns per word at the Daily Planet, especially the many words she's unable to spell. Superman gives his vital statistics as 6'4", 225 pounds. Wait--didn't Jor-El say he'd have a "dense molecular structure?" What's he made of, then? Balsa neutronium? Is that how he flies? Not to put too fine a point on it, Lois makes it very clear throughout the interview that she has Kryptonian schlong on the brain. And how exactly did she know about Superman's X-ray vision? She must have read Action Comics.

In the course of that interview, the Man of Tomorrow looks Lois dead in the eye and vows, "I never lie." It's a motto that stuck with me for life. Say what you will about me, I do tell the truth, at least as well as I know it.

The Great Blue Boy Scout takes Lois out flying in a scene that starts out deliriously wonderful but quickly turns to embarrassing mush. "Can you read my mind?" I don't know, Margot Kidder. Can you stop reading that godawful poem? It's the bane of boy-movie screenwriters, isn't it? Romance, I mean. I don't know if anyone other than Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark) has gotten it right in my lifetime.

As he does in The Empire Strikes Back, John Ratzenberger makes a surprise appearance as a USAF radar officer. Cliffy!

For the first time in the movie, the effects team runs out of gas, and Christopher Reeve is frequently surrounded by coloring-book matte lines. It's the only time we don't believe that man can fly. Incidentally, Zoran Perisic and company won a Special Achievement Oscar for "Zoptic," their state-of-the-art system of rigging and flying effects.

Just before the climactic earthquake begins, Lois's car radio plays "Give a Little Bit" from Supertramp, a subtle in-joke. The song, a bona fide classic, was only a year old at the time.

Weirdly, Superman keeps calling Jimmy Olsen "son," though the actors were only five years apart in age. Marc McClure, aka Superman's pal Jimmy, went on to play Marty McFly's unreliable older brother in the Back to the Future movies. He's still working, though his last film was a dog movie with the unpromising title Hercules Saves Christmas.

That Lois: what a screamer. Deduct several more feminist happy points, or just go ahead and bury her alive as the movie does. That scene appeared in my mother's nightmares for decades. But Superman hears her dying gasps--the score whispers "can you read my mind"--and off he goes to save her by whipping around the planet and somehow undoing time. It's ridiculous, of course, but I guess it's kind of like that old cliché: "I would move heaven and earth for you." Superman does.

Superman patches up the San Andreas Fault, resurrects Lois Lane, and deposits Lex Luthor in Sing Sing. "This country is safe again, Superman," the warden announces, "thanks to you!" And so it is.

After Superman premiered as a massive hit but while Richard Donner was in post on Superman II, the movie's colorful, irascible nutjob of an executive producer, Alexander Salkind, decided to dump Donner in favor of Help! director Richard Lester. To this day, no one seems to know exactly why that happened. Some say it was because Donner objected to Salkind cutting Brando out of Superman II to save money. Others say Donner hated co-producer Pierre Spengler. Salkind said Donner went over-budget and over-schedule. Donner said he was never given a budget or a schedule. Whatever the case, scenes for the sequel were reshot in an attempt to meet guild stipulations that unless 75% of the film was shot by Lester, it wasn't a Richard Lester film. Donner's footage sat in European vaults until editor/producer Michael Thau convinced Warner Brothers to authorize and release Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut to home video in 2006. It's the version I own now, and if you're a fan of Donner's work, then it's well worth the cost of a rental or purchase.

On June 12, I'm turning 45. I'm not so happy about that, to be honest, so I'm distracting myself two nights later by catching the new summer blockbuster, Man of Steel, in the biggest, loudest format I can find. Care to join me? I'll be happy to share my popcorn, but the Dibs are all mine.

I may be all grown up now, but every kid still grows up needing his Superman.

Near Future

As I look ahead to the year in movies, I'm struck by how thoroughly we geeks have inherited--some might say infested--the media. When I was a kid, we could count on less than half a dozen respectable genre entries per year. As for TV, Star Trek reruns were pretty much the best we ever got, though the Saturday morning cartoon spinoff of that series attracted surprisingly hardcore science fiction writers (Larry Niven and DC Fontana, to name just two). The pickin's were so slim many of us actually paid to see David Lynch's miscarriage of Dune (a classic novel Hollywood has yet to get right). Now, thanks to the Lucas-Spielberg era and its spiritual heirs, erstwhile B-movie space operas and sci-fi head-scratchers have been elevated to the status (and budgets!) formerly reserved for epics by Fleming and Lean.

Well, let's be honest: that's a mixed blessing. For every tech-friendly James Cameron epic, there are dozens of brain-dead genre reboots, remakes, refluxes, and regurgitations. This year will be no different. Though I have warm nostalgic feelings for their predecessors, it's hard to work up too much excitement for A Good Day to Die Hard (Feb. 14), Oz: The Great and Powerful (Mar. 8), The Wolverine (July 26), and so on. One senses these movies were made primarily for almost-guaranteed financial returns, not because anyone involved had a necessary story to tell.

Still, there's plenty of smart fare on the menu for discriminating nerds this year. Granted, I'm the guy who got his hopes up for Prometheus, so what do I know? Well, I know that wasn't an entirely unworthy effort, and I'm hoping for better from the next wave. I think Shane Black, now enjoying his career resurrection after self-imploding the most lucrative screenwriting résumé in Hollywood, has a lot to prove with Iron Man 3 (May 3), a franchise he inherited from Jon Favreau. Hopefully it'll feel more like the first Iron Man movie than its overstuffed sequel. My fondest hopes for 2013, however, are pinned on JJ Abrams, the TV wunderkind (Alias, Lost, Fringe) who graduated to big-budget wonderments (Mission Impossible 3, Star Trek (2009), Super 8). I saw eight minutes of his Star Trek Into Darkness (opening May 17) projected with the HFR release of The Hobbit, and I'm desperate to see the remaining 112 or so.

A further word about Abrams. As most of you know by now, Abrams has (after flatly denying this would happen a mere two months ago) accepted the reins of Star Wars, Episode VII, which Disney is producing to milk the Lucasfilm cash cow they bought for four billion dollars last fall. I'm all for this selection, and, back in November, so was every other Star Wars fan on Earth. Then, mere minutes after somebody leaked that Abrams was taking the job, the Interwebs exploded in outrage. "He's Mr. Lens Flare!" was the common refrain. "He has no original ideas! Just look at Super 8!" Yes, please do. It's a Spielberg pastiche, to be sure, and there are plenty of lens flares. Hey, you know who else used plenty of lens flares? Steven Spielberg! Go back and watch any of his 1978-1993 output. Until Schindler's List, it was kind of the Great One's stock in trade. And who cared? We geeks certainly didn't. So why the boohoo and brouhaha now?

It's because somewhere along the way, my fellow geeks decided it was cool to crap on entertainment we love, and frankly, I'm effing sick of it. Listen, hipsters, it's okay to simply enjoy things, even silly things, and the nerd gods won't hand you bonus health or extra lives for acting as if you're above it all. I love Star Wars. I just do. I know it's silly. So what? Is it any sillier than huge, aggressive dudes in tight pants and spherical helmets beating the snot out of each other to move a pigskin back and forth on a field? Is it sillier than telling your kids the presents you maxed out four credit cards to buy were delivered by an obese Scandinavian elf on a sled pulled by magic flying reindeer? Is it sillier than Heaven and Hell, or pretending every bride is a virgin and every groom is James Bond? Who are we fooling? The best stuff in life is ridiculous.

So yeah, I like superhero movies, which is why my birthday celebration will be seeing Man of Steel on June 14. I like promiscuous superspies and Eiffel-Tower-sized robots made of guns who still fight with karate. I like space opera--or, as a family member once memorably referred to it, "gay-ass rockets 'n' shit." (Sorry, gay friends. It was 2004, a much snarkier time.) I like all of that CG-splattered nonsense. And if somebody like Abrams or Cameron can make it look pretty and pretend there's some kind of microscopically-plausible scientific rationale for invisible aircraft carriers or faster-than-light travel or werewolves, then so much the better. I'm tired of defending what I love against charges that it's childish. Of course it's childish. That's exactly what I love about it. When I start chomping at the bit for Star Wars VII, what I'm really drooling for is that rush of exhilaration I used to feel behind a silo-sized bucket of popcorn at an epic sci-fi eyeball-exploder. I want that feeling again. I think most geeks do. Maybe that's why they try so hard to act superior now in their fat years; they've been chasing that dragon so long they're weary of pursuing it in vain.

Well, cheer up, fellow dorks. Against all odds, we grew up and married pretty girls in spite of our parents' predictions, and the jocks who gave us wedgies are now working at Jiffy Lube. Meanwhile, guys like Abrams and Cameron and Favreau and Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson and on and on and on, folks who grew up loving the same geeky spectacles that we do, invaded the movie business. Consequently, we can look forward to mecha vs. kaiju fisticuffs in del Toro's Pacific Rim (July 12--and if you know what either "mecha" or "kaiju" means, Gentle Reader, congratulations: you're one of us). I'm intrigued by Elysium (Aug. 9), the new film from Neill Blomkamp, the Kiwi who gave us District 9. Perhaps this summer we'll also get Alfonso Cuarón's slow-shooting Gravity, a hard (meaning scientifically accurate) SF epic which promises new verisimilitude in depicting a zero-G environment.

My admiration for Sin City knows no bounds, so I'm hoping Robert Rodriguez will recapture that sheen of graphic magic in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For (Oct. 4). Failing that, perhaps the long-awaited movie adaptation of Ender's Game, a certified classic and thematic precursor to The Hunger Games, will deliver (Nov. 1). If not, there's always the Hunger Games sequel, Catching Fire, opening a mere three weeks later (Nov. 22). Closing out the year--almost--is the epic halfling-dragon confrontation of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Dec. 23). I say "almost" because, by Great Odin's beard, I'm downright turgid for the return of Ron Burgundy in Anchorman: The Legend Continues. Don't act like you're not impressed.

Writing sci-fi is tough in 2013, perhaps tougher than ever before. See, we caught up to the future. Granted, Marty McFly's hovering skateboard or time-skipping DeLorean failed to exist, but we did get email, cell phones, the Internet, home computers, pocket computers, dashboard computers, computer games, virtual identities, and Craigslist casual encounters. What cyberpunk authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson once called virtual reality, we're about to call the movies. The 3-D HFR (high frame rate, or 48FPS) release of The Hobbit had some problems, sure, but that was its debut attempt. In the next decade, movies and even TV will achieve a level of realism comparable to looking out a window, the only difference being that instead of my own parking lot, I'll see a sandworm or Coruscant or the Justice League of America. A generation from now, we might log onto the Web merely by thinking about it. Like Jason Bourne, we'll have multiple identities, but some of them will only "live" online. It's an exciting and, from a career standpoint, terrifying time to be alive, because the changes soon to come will be so bizarre and unpredictable that no sci-fi writer could anticipate or even describe them. That's why all this geeky bedazzlement is so important.

Genre entertainment, especially serious science fiction, prepares our minds to be boggled. It reminds us we live on a planet, not a color on a map. It gives us hope when that seems foolish. You say, wait, that's religion's job, and maybe you're right, but science gave us the iPhone. It yields results. The Bible, by contrast, hasn't developed a new app since 90 A.D. (I mean, come on, give us PowerPray, Angry Jews, something!) Sci-fi warns us away from looming dystopias and gene-altered nightmares. It keeps our brains young and agile and ready for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the nanotech era to come. Sci-fi turns awkward adolescents into astronauts and nerds into billionaires. I can't wait for this year's fresh round of fictional futures...and I'm all done pretending I'm not rabid for more.