Superman Returns

[Hustler]

Look, a movie directed by an openly gay man, featuring two openly gay actors in supporting roles

Who is the second one?

[Penelope]

I did a double feature today, Superman Returns and The Devil Wears Prada; what to say except that the more conventional and predictable Prada was a more enjoyable experience than the more ambitious but leaden Superman.

Which means that I'm siding with the largely negative reviews, something that is a considerable disappointment for me. Superman and Superman II are cherished films of my childhood--for reasons too elaborate and personal to explain (except to note the coincidence of seeing Superman Returns on what would've been my father's 77th birthday), I saw Superman II more than 20 times during the summer of 1981--so I had high hopes for the new film, though it was tempered by my misgivings with the casting and early previews--gut instincts that, sadly, turned out to be right.

Bryan Singer certainly has some visual pinache--there are definitely moments when Superman Returns soars--but there aren't enough of these, and mostly the movie remains frustratingly grounded. There are plenty of nods to those first two films--so many that it almost becomes redundant at times, and allows a feeling of negative comparison to slip into the new film. Also, there are moments that seem to be ripped off directly from other films--a key moment is taken directly from Titanic, while another brings to mind The Spy Who Loved Me.

Part of the great pleasure of the first Superman films was that, although there were certainly serious themes explored, the films retained a lightness of spirit and an epic excitement that was thrilling to experience. The new film is so heavily loaded with its Christian symbolism and alternately so dark and muted at times that it was practically depressing to watch. Brooding and boring is Batman, not Superman.

Then, of course, there's the whole gay issue, which has gotten a lot of press lately due to that Advocate cover story and the LA Times article. Look, a movie directed by an openly gay man, featuring two openly gay actors in supporting roles and a closeted actor in a lead role is bound to have a gay sensibility to it; it's there, but only slightly, it's not excessively pronounced and it's nothing to worked about, but you just know that if the movie tanks, us queers will get the blame, somehow.

And then there's the casting. There's no way Routh can get a nomination; it's a good performance, but, really, he has so very little dialogue, it's just a fine physical performance. Unfortunately, he has no chemistry with Kate Bosworth, who's utterly miscast as Lois Lane (and whoever did her hair should never work again); she actually has better chemistry in her brief scenes with former co-star Kevin Spacey, who otherwise is also unimpressive here. Only Parker Posey emerges with a genuinely creditable turn, but certainly not enough for a nomination.

I really had my fingers crossed for this movie, but no such luck; amazing that a Brett Ratner directed superhero flick is actually a more enjoyable cinematic experience than this.

[Nik]

OK I know now why Brandon Routh is as gelded as a Ken Doll. Seems there were people who took offense with the costumes of Batman and Robin. One reviewer I read said it was "homoerotic"-- is this in reference to the costumes or the relationship? The decision was made not to Show Anything on the new Superman.

I'll have to watch B and R again to see if it's homoerotic to me . Didn't turn me on the first time, but I can always try again, LOL

Those costumes were very fetishistic, to the point that the producers, director, actors and (I assume) costume designers were very conscious of it. And dude, it's George Clooney and Chris O'Donnell. How could it NOT be homoerotic?

[99-1100896887]

OK I know now why Brandon Routh is as gelded as a Ken Doll. Seems there were people who took offense with the costumes of Batman and Robin. One reviewer I read said it was "homoerotic"-- is this in reference to the costumes or the relationship? The decision was made not to Show Anything on the new Superman.

I'll have to watch B and R again to see if it's homoerotic to me . Didn't turn me on the first time, but I can always try again, LOL

[99-1100896887]

Question: Where are Brandon Routh's balls?

[Penelope]

The bunny version of the original 1978 Superman; at the end, check out the last voice credit.

[Mister Tee]

You'd almost swear there were two separate versions being screened -- one that's making respectable critics go ecstatic (four stars from both Jack Matthews in the NY Daily News and Gene Seymour in Newsday), and another that's making some critics go "what the hell are those guys talking about?" (the ones Penelope cites, with Anthony Lane in The New Yorker thrown in).

[OscarGuy]

Since I was never excited about the previews, I'm not expecting much out of it. I thought the same about the original Spider-Man, an ok film that I didn't think was as hot as everyone else claimed it to be. However, we shall see when we go watch it next Monday.

[criddic3]

17 years. The last movie was released in 1987. Shouldn't that be 19 yrs.?

[Penelope]

The LA Times praises Routh but doesn't seem to like the movie at all:

'Superman Returns'
The Man of Steel's return stumbles.
By Kenneth Turan
Times Staff Writer

June 27, 2006

"Superman Returns" is a hummingbird in reverse. The tiny beast shouldn't be able to fly but does, while the massive movie should soar but only sporadically gets off the ground.

Though "Superman Returns" is the first motion picture about the Man of Steel in 17 years, Warner Bros. didn't simply sit back and count on audience anticipation. The studio made a number of smart moves that should have led to something better than this unwieldy sprawl of a movie about how close personal friend Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth), nemesis Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) and the other citizens of Metropolis react when Superman flies into town after being AWOL for five years.

Filmmaker Bryan Singer would seem to be an ideal choice to direct. He's said in interviews that being raised by adoptive parents has always given him an emotional connection with the space orphan protagonist, and he's already made "X-Men" and "X2: X-Men United," two of the best and most successful of the modern superhero films.

An equally shrewd choice was picking 6-foot-3, Iowa-raised Brandon Routh, whose career has been exclusively on TV, for the title role. As both Superman and awkward alter ego Clark Kent, the drudge of the Daily Planet newsroom, Routh brings the right note of appealing earnestness to a man who stands for what the film calls "truth, justice, all that stuff." (It's probably best not to ask what happened to "the American way.")

Also, as might be expected, the film's $200-million-plus budget has bought some nifty "able to leap tall buildings at a single bound" special effects, including an especially involving rescue of a crippled airliner. "Superman Returns" is definitely at its best when its protagonist gracefully flies over, around and through Metropolis.

There are far too many situations, however, in this two-hour and 40-minute epic, when the big guy is not in the air, and, unfortunately, this cumbersome, overly long film doesn't quite know what to do with itself the rest of the time.

It's not that "Superman Returns" doesn't have any ideas, it's got too many; this is a film that tries too hard and wants too much. Absent the acting or the script resources to do all it would like, the picture's multiple agendas conflict with each other instead of cohering. And a rolling series of miscalculations cripple even its best intentions.

...[skipping spoilers]...

The wrench of having an emotionally important person coming back into your changed life is one of the things "Superman Returns" would like to deal with, but the film can't manage it convincingly. One problem is the choice of Kate Bosworth (who co-starred with Spacey in "Beyond the Sea") to play Lane. Bosworth is a game actress (as the surfing movie "Blue Crush" proved) but not noticeably more, and even superhero movies need performers with depth if they are to make emotional connections.

The film's good-versus-evil subplot also lacks conviction. The nefarious scheme Lex Luthor has in the works is a long time coming into focus and is not particularly interesting once it does. "Superman Returns' " biggest miscalculation, it turns out, is having Spacey play the nominal villain. The actor and the director have an illustrious history (Spacey won his first Oscar for Singer's superb "The Usual Suspects") but giving him this role was simply a bad idea, especially when the results are compared with "Spider-Man 2's" Doc Ock or how brilliantly Ian McKellen created the villain in the "X-Men" films.

Unable to decide if Luthor is an amusing character (à la Gene Hackman, who played him in the 1978 "Superman") or one we should take seriously, Spacey tries to split the difference, with unhappy results. For most of the film, his half-jokey Luthor is more of a smug irritant than a menace, a choice that fatally limits Parker Posey's options as sidekick Kitty Kowalski.

That choice also makes it difficult to take Luthor seriously in the film's late stages when the story line insists we do. It's not till that point that "Superman Returns" works up any real tension or jeopardy for its title character, and even then the situation is so sadistic in tone its hard to take any pleasure in it.

Insufficient acting is a weakness throughout the film; when the ghost of Marlon Brando (as father Jor-El in a vintage hologram) gives one of your most memorable performances, you're in trouble. With so many agendas and the lack of a consistent tone, scenes of Superman actually rescuing people is a smaller part of this movie than it should be. Star Routh's presence and the joys of flight keep "Superman Returns" alive, but all those missteps dog its heels, holding it back like little touches of Kryptonite in the night.

[Penelope]

Some more not-so-hot reviews are coming out; Manohla Dargis in the NYTimes:

June 27, 2006

MOVIE REVIEW

'Superman Returns' to Save Mankind From Its Sins

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell. Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud "Superman IV," the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson's passion a run for his box-office money. Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins and what looked like another bummer summer.

The super-size (more than two and a half hours) "Superman Returns" was written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, working off a story hatched by them and the director, Bryan Singer, after what appears to have been repeat viewings of Richard Donner's "Superman." Released in 1978, that film ushered Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's original comic creation into the blockbuster age with frothy wit and a cast that included Marlon Brando in a creamy scoop of white hair and Gene Hackman in clover. Christopher Reeve, of course, wore the cape and tights, while Margot Kidder did a fine approximation of the young Katharine Hepburn at her most coltish. Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty added some laughs, while Glenn Ford supplied a pinch of gravitas.

As nutritious as a box of Cracker Jack and just as yummy, "Superman" was at once a goof and a self-conscious bid at modern mythmaking. Years later, what resonates aren't Mr. Donner's action scenes, which look crude compared with what he would do later in the "Lethal Weapon" series, but how fluidly he changes tones from the iconic (as when the supertoddler lifts a truck off his Earth father) to the playful (as when the souped-up adult realizes that the closetlike phone booth is a thing of the past). Mr. Reeve worked the tonal changes with similar ease, delivering a superhero whose earnestness was strategically offset by his fumbling, bumbling, all-too-human twin, who was just the ticket for the post-Watergate, pre-Indiana Jones moment.

Mr. Singer's Superman, played by Brandon Routh, is a hero of rather different emotional colors, most muted. Like Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins," Mr. Singer's effort reworks the legend against a vaguely modern, timeless backdrop that blends the thematically old with the technologically new. The story opens with some necrophiliac wizardry and Brando newly arisen as Superman's extraterrestrial father. Well represented even from beyond, the dead actor receives billing for his spectral turn, squeezed between Eva Marie Saint, who plays Superman's earth mother, and Tristan Lake Leabu, who plays Lois Lane's young son. The Daily Planet's star reporter is in turn played by Kate Bosworth, whose glum mien and curtain of brown hair suggests that blondes really do have more fun.

Lois, however, doesn't enter the picture until after the filmmakers have laid the story's Oedipal foundation, which finds two men saying goodbye to the much older women who will, intentionally or not, shape their destinies. In one corner, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey taking up the role played by Mr. Hackman) bids cold adieu to the crone who will make him fantastically rich; in another, Superman again digs a fiery trough into the Kent family farm upon crash landing. This time, it's the grown man who brings tears to his mother's eyes and who stares at the sinking Kansas (actually Australian) sun, weighing his responsibility to humankind after a five-year hiatus crossing the galaxies to visit his original home.

It's too bad that Mr. Singer and his colleagues don't really do anything substantial with the good-guy-bad-guy routine. Superman may be a super-creation, but it's his villains rather than his dual identity that have usually given him a kick. Unlike his brooding and angst-ridden rivals in the superhero game, his alter ego is only as interesting as the comic book artist or the actor adding shades of gray to Clark Kent's business suit. Part of the charm of Mr. Reeve's interpretation was that a guy this impossibly handsome, who literally towers over everyone in the office, could hide behind a slouch and oversize eyeglasses. It was absurd, but then so too was the idea that a powerful extraterrestrial would hang around Earth to take the kind of abuse perennially heaped on his human half.

That identity allowed Superman to walk among us, but mostly it allowed him and, by proxy, generations of geeks both creating and consuming the character, to engage ritualistically in a sadomasochistic relationship with Lois Lane. A variation on the high school homecoming queen who sails past the shy guy in glasses on her way to a back-seat tumble with the captain of the football team, this trouble-seeking reporter has always brought out what is most human, vulnerable and identifiable in Superman. He gives her headlines; she gives him a broken, or at least bruised, heart. In "Superman II," which was directed by Richard Lester (and an uncredited Mr. Donner), she gave him a bit more, too, thereby transforming the world's most powerful virgin into a one-night stud.

Near the end of the second film, Superman, realizing that he and Lois have no future, wipes away their boudoir encounter with an amnesia-producing kiss. Mr. Singer expends much more time and many more resources to do pretty much the same, erasing part of the past to create what is essentially a new and considerably more sober sequel to the first two films, one that shakes the earthiness off Superman and returns him to the status of a savior. There's always been a hint of Jesus (and Moses) to the character, from the omnipotence of his father to a costume that, with its swaths of red and blue, evokes the colors worn by the Virgin Mary in numerous Renaissance paintings. It's a hint that proves impossible not to take.

Intentionally or not, the Jesus angle also helps deflect speculation about just how straight this Superman flies. Given how securely Lois remains out of the romantic picture in "Superman Returns," now saddled with both a kid and a fiancé (James Marsden), it's no surprise that some have speculated that Superman is gay. The speculation speaks more to our social panic than anything in the film, which, much like the overwhelming majority of American action movies produced since the 1980's, mostly involves what academics call homosocial relations. In other words, when it comes to Hollywood, boys will be boys and play with their toys, whether they're sleeping with one another or not, leaving women to weep, worry and wait to be rescued.

Every era gets the superhero it deserves, or at least the one filmmakers think we want. For Mr. Singer that means a Superman who fights his foes in a scene that visually echoes the garden betrayal in "The Passion of the Christ" and even hangs in the air much as Jesus did on the cross. It's hard to see what the point is beyond the usual grandiosity that comes whenever B-movie material is pumped up with ambition and money. As he proved with his first two installments of "The X-Men" franchise, Mr. Singer likes to make important pop entertainments that trumpet their seriousness as loudly as they deploy their bangs. It's hard not to think that Superman isn't the only one here with a savior complex.

[Mister Tee]

Can this guy win some sort of award for the most Random Obscure Movie Moment References within a review, please?

He sounds like a pre-neocon Dennis Miller.

[Nik]

No, I don't know the Academy's history of nominating villian's sidekicks, and I'm not interested.

Sonic, I think I ust peed myself. LOL. Really, this was the first time in a while that I actually had to check my pants.

[Nik]

Can this guy win some sort of award for the most Random Obscure Movie Moment References within a review, please?

Ugh, agreed. He's a smart guy and I love Slant (mostly because of Ed Gonzalez) but Keith Uhlich's reviews have become increasingly esoteric and geeze alive man, this one is just plain unreadable!

[Franz Ferdinand]

Can this guy win some sort of award for the most Random Obscure Movie Moment References within a review, please?