The Gospel According to Superman

[khaosworks]

Christopher Priest (no, not that Christopher Priest, the one formerly known as Jim Owsley) tears Superman Returns a new asshole.

The Gospel According to Superman

Go read it. I'll be right here.

Back? Okay — I agree with much of what Priest says here, although of course I didn't notice the lack of black people or minorities all that much. I don't think it's unconscious racism on my part; it's simply that we've been conditioned from years of cinema and television not to expect minorities on screen. It's only when they do appear that we notice them.

But it's this passage that got me saying an amen:

As nate451 posted on the Internet Movie Database:

[Singer] seems entirely unaware that he has crafted an entire movie without a laugh, without a tear, without a moment of tension or suspense or compassion or fear. Such a complete failure makes all other complaints about the film no less true, but ultimately academic.

In the absence of any kind of actual content to push the movie along, Singer instead relies on an endless string of movie clichés. Lex Luthor quotes Greek myths, has a collection of ancient statues, and listens to classical music. A little boy gasps as he sees what all the adults have failed to see—that Superman is Clark Kent. Lois Lane leans over a comatose Superman and says, "I don't know if you can hear me, but…" One would be hard-pressed, in fact, to find a single cinematic moment in Superman Returns that has not been done before.

Priest also goes on at some length about how he's offended by the trivialisation of Jesus with Singer's heavy-handed use of the Messiah motif. While I think Singer was a bit anvil-licious with those ideas, I didn't think it was all that offensive: after all, Superman-as-Messiah has been there since the beginning, and it's an obvious direction to take. For my part, the movie's greatest sin is what Roger Ebert also points out: it's glum, it's lacklustre.

And like I said in my earlier assessment, it's ordinary, and a Superman movie should not be ordinary.

Comments

[opadit.livejournal.com]

I came away thinking that there was a less than realistic (for mid-town Manhattan) distribution of non-whites in the crowds and the office, and that it would have been much, much nicer, in 2006, to see a few non-whites in primary roles. A couple of Lex Luthor's henchmen looked Latino or Arabic. Ew.

Wasn't a lot of it was filmed in Australia? Where less than 10% of the population is non-white. That would explain why there were only a few token ethnic types in the crowds. But Singer and/or the studio really did have a choice about the major stars. There are enough bankable African-American and Latino stars that some kind of substitution could have been made; it's not as if there were budget concerns. I think it would have been great to see Danny Glover as Perry White, for example. Thandie Newton (British, not American, I know) is cute; how about her for Kitty Kowalski?