Good audio and video quality; more importantly, the director knew where
to point the cameras, anticipating which musicians to feature within the
piece. Not only can you appreciate their talent, you can appreciate
their joy in performing for the maestro himself, John Williams.
Grand orchestral motion picture scores were re-introduced to the medium
by Williams in 1977, with his now-iconic compositions for Star Wars.
These types of scores constitute a genre that can be recognized as the
modern equivalent of what we today call classical music, originally
written in the 1700s and 1800s by masters like Bach, Beethoven, and
Mozart.
Two centuries later, we're still listening to their quintessential
works. And, no doubt, in the year 2424, John Williams will be on that
list of great composers.
"Without John Williams, bikes don't really fly, nor do brooms in
Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs
do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not
believe." -Steven Spielberg
(Williams is also arguably the best composer of marches since John
Philip Sousa. While the film 1941 was one of director Steven
Spielberg's rare box office flops, it has a marvelous score by Williams.
Both Williams and Spielberg say this is their favorite march, surpassing
those of Superman and Raiders of the Lost Ark.)
Gas
stations are running out of gas ahead of the holiday weekend. It's
the shortage of tank truck drivers coupled with rising demand that is
causing supply chain bottlenecks and shortages. Experts say a growing
number of stations are reporting that they are simply not able to get
gas delivered- at any price.
What
underlies the G.O.P. commitment to ignorance? Closed-mindedness and
ignorance have become core conservative values, and those who reject
these values are the enemy, no matter what they may have done to serve
the country.
I think I'm done with Facebook. Just got suspended for a week for a post
that violates "community standards." Problem is, the item their moronic
AI finds offensive was posted six years ago.
I'm still a bit away from updating the software here on the website, but
I'm going to post something here daily to stay in practice.
-----
Granddaughter Leanna turns 18 on Friday. She's graduating from Taylor
Allderdice High School next month and heading off to Edinboro University
in the fall, probably majoring in math and computer science. Here she's
taking a break from homeschooling with her beagle/basset rescue, Pepper.
-----
My mother is upset because her home appliances are failing. She bought
them when she bought the house, back in the mid-1960s before consumer
goods became mostly disposable. She's not upset that she has to purchase
replacements; it's just that she'll be 95 this year, and she says she
hates buying stuff that will last longer than she will. I'm not so
sure... the day after Christmas she went shopping for the half-off
Christmas cards she plans on sending next year.
-----
Speaking of the sixties, I went through all this social upheaval back
then. I really don't need to experience it again. At least in the
sixties we had good music.
-----
I tried to get into this, but I just end up fast-forwarding to see the
special effects. I don't find the concept of Superman being unable to
deal with his moody teenage twins particularly engaging.
Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) displaying pretty much
the way I feel about how they've mucked around
with recent cinema and tv iterations of Superman and his universe.
When I was a kid, Superman was always super. He didn't discharge
like a two-year old cell phone with a non-removable battery
if he wasn't in direct sunlight. Starting with the
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman television series in the 90s, this requirement
for exposure to sunlight to restore his powers has regularly
resurfaced. This isn't Superman, it's Birdman.
Also irksome is the invulnerability business. The Superman of
the 50s, 60s, and 70s had just two weaknesses- kryptonite and magic,
whatever the hell the latter is. That version of Superman could
survive a nuclear explosion or fly into the center of the sun without
being injured. He did get short-term amnesia in the classic
Adventures of Superman episode "Panic in the Sky1" (season 2,
episode 12, first aired in 1953) when he collided with an asteroid,
but we never saw Supe bruised or bleeding.
In recent films, Superman has been almost mortally wounded when
stabbed with weapons composed of kryptonite. While kryptonite indeed
weakens him, it isn't capable of puncturing his skin. In the
classic "Defeat of Superman" (season 2, episode 6, aired in 1953),
he was shot with a kryptonite bullet. While it caused him discomfort
("Just a bee sting, Jimmy") it still bounced off.
Then there's Superman killing Zod by breaking his neck in
Man of Steel. Nope. Invulnerable means invulnerable. Regardless
of the amount of force applied, the villain's neck should not have
been able to be injured regardless of its source- not even by another
super-powered Kryptonian.
And the new CBS Supergirl series is a hot, steaming mess
full of stuff like this. Sun drainage issues, lots of sharp kryptonite
injuries and, frankly, too damned many Kryptonians. I won't burden you
with the details, but Supergirl and her cousin are not the touching
sole survirors from a doomed planet, but a pair of goody two-shoes
who instant message and text each other while battling an NFL-sized
contingent of metahuman sociopathic relatives.
Canonical issues aside, the show also suffers from uneven writing
and muddled plots, and from time to time seems to shoot itself in its
non-super foot while limping through its Kryptonian mythos arc.
The show does have its redeeming qualities, like motion picture quality
special effects:
Much as did Helen Slater in the 1984 Supergirl film, Melissa
Benoist really sells the material. She's delightful, both as Kara
Danvers and Kara Zor-El. Were she not so good an actress, this show
would be unwatachable. Sometimes it seems she's keeping this
misguided powerful locomotive on track by sheer force of will.
But sometimes, she gets a script with meat to it, such as this clip,
when battling a villain in the previous episode discharged her
and left her powerless and vulnerable:
Oh well. I've been a fan of Superman since the 1950s, and I'll probably continue
to watch any Superman-related stuff that becomes available. But the apparent
appearance of the Doomsday character in the Batman v. Superman
trailers makes me think things
are going to get uncomfortable.
-----
1 "Panic in the Sky" was the story upon which the Lois and Clark
episode "All Shook Up" (season 1, episode 12) was based.
The writer of the original show, Jackson Gillis, was given a "story
by" credit. Gillis had an impressive, four decade long career that
including innumerable scripts for The Adventures of Superman, Perry
Mason, Lassie, Lost in Space, Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, and
Knight Rider. Gillis had written a motion picture script
"Superman and the Secret Planet" which
was never produced.
(YouTube video: Dean Cain on Jimmy Kimmel: Live!))
The always charming Dean
Cain learns that they somehow made Man of Steel without him.
Cain spent more time on screen in the iconic costume than any other
actor. Hard to believe, but Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of
Superman premiered nearly 20 years ago, in September, 1993.
Given the surprising number of negative reviews, I was worried when the
curtains widened and the stylized Warner Bros logo appeared at the
beginning of Man of Steel.
The review aggregation site rottentomatoes.com had pegged the latest
reboot of the Superman legend at a tepid 57%. But then, this was the
same collection of critics who rated the execrable Star Trek: Into
Darkness at an unfathomably favorable 87%. So I tried to be
optimistic.
I find myself agreeing with the guy on the AMC Movie Talk YouTube
channel who said, "My only explanation for why some critics didn't like
the show... is perhaps their heads were so far up their asses that they
couldn't see the movie screen."
Man of Steel is unlike previous incarnations of Superman. It
isn't presented like a fairy tale. It's a solid science fiction epic,
but one that requires far less suspension of disbelief than other
entries in the relatively new cgi-based superhero genre.
This isn't the childish Superman who spins the world backward to reverse
time, or gives Lois Lane amnesia by kissing her. The villain isn't
trying to destroy California in order to make a killing in real estate,
or forcing all the oil tankers in the world cruise in circles to jack up
the price of gasoline.
This is the story of an extraterrestrial refugee with amazing abilities,
raised by good people after he was stranded as an infant on an alien
world. He has to decide whether to defend his adopted planet or watch
its destruction at the hands of members of his own true race.
The criticisms I've read are disheartening. They mean some truly don't
get the concept of Superman. They aren't bright enough to follow a
straightforward narrative told partly in flashback to provide exposition
and character motivation. They can't put aside the archaic "rules" that
governed Superman's behavior, motivated not by a dedication to a higher
moral code, but by the fear that government intervention would
negatively affect comic book sales in the 1940s and 1950s.
My first memory of television is watching George Reeves pause at a
storeroom door, remove his glasses, then hurl himself via a
barely-concealed springboard into the monochromatic skies of a stock
footage Los Angeles. That was probably around 1958.
It took them 55 years, but they finally got it right.
My kids are taking me to see Man of Steel today, an early Father's Day present.
I'm really looking forward to seeing it; I've been a fan of Superman since, oh, 1957, once
I was old enough to focus my eyes on the blurry black-and-white image of George Reeves in
his foam-padded shoulders.
It was the last day of school- May 31, 1963. My parents decided to take
me on a short weekend vacation trip to Niagara Falls to celebrate my
completing third grade.
We stopped at the J&I Dairy on 13th and McClure in Homestead to pick up
some last minute items. At the front of the store was a comic book
display.
I was three months shy of my ninth birthday, yet somehow had managed to
miss the fact that my favorite- make that only- superhero,
Superman, actually had a comic book. In fact, he had an entire series of
comic books in which he appeared. My experience to this point with the
Man of Steel was the endlessly rerun Adventures of Superman,
which I watched daily on a snowy WTOV Channel 9 Steubenville.
Naturally, I was drawn to the book. My parents bought it for me, along
with some other Superman titles, to keep me quiet on the trip.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that comic book changed my life.
It was the middle of the "Silver
Age" of comics, and after Superman, I discovered Green Lantern,
The Flash, The Manhunter from Mars, and rest of The Justice League of
America.
My comics reading habit opened a world of literature. I discovered that
Superman wasn't the first hero with a dual identity, after learning (in
the comics' letters from readers section) that a Hungarian baroness, Emma
Orczy, had first introduced the concept in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
an idea later borrowed by Johnston
McCulley'sZorro.
You know how when you read an article on a web site that has a link,
which you follow to another link, then ten others, until it's eight
hours later and you haven't found what you were originally looking for
but instead discovered dozens of other even more interesting topics and
facts? Superman comics were like that for me, only instead of
surfing the web, I roamed the stacks of the Carnegie Library of
Homestead.
I mention all this because today in the birthday of Curt
Swan (February 17, 1920 – June 17, 1996), the man whose cover art
for Giant Superman Annual #7 drew me like a moth to a flame. Referred to
by some as "The Norman Rockwell of comics," Swan's influence is perhaps
most apparent in the original Superman film series, where Christopher
Reeve appears to be a real life version of Swan's artistic
interpretation.
Published Saturday, February 16, 2013 @ 12:32 PM EST
Feb162013
In related news, reports are surfacing that the largest crater resulting
from the Russian meteorite strike contained a spaceship, and that a childless,
middle-aged couple rescued a toddler wrapped in red and blue blankets...
Actor Dean Cain turns 46 today. In the 1993-1997 ABC series Lois and
Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Cain perfectly played an
updated version of the superhero. While the show embraced many elements
of the traditional Superman mythos, the major twist was the
portrayal of Clark Kent as the "real person", and the Superman identity
as a disguise. As he said in one episode, "Clark Kent is who I am...
Superman is what I can do."
(YouTube video: Dean Cain panel at Wizard World, 2012)
Published Thursday, September 01, 2011 @ 10:59 AM EDT
Sep012011
"Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like
Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at
their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who
justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would
ever be so noble... grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not
mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where
someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that
says far more about who you are than these characters." -Greg
Rucka
In "Action Comics #900," Superman will renounce his American
citizenship, rejecting the international notion that his actions are
part of US policy. The shift comes after a personal visit to Iran in
support of protestors leads President Ahmadinejad to believe America was
declaring war against the government in Tehran.
By rejecting his citizenship, Superman will now work on a grander
international scale, because, as he says, "truth, justice and the
American way... it's not enough anymore."
That's the official story. I blame the damned birthers. Just because
Clark Kent couldn't produce a "long form" birth certificate...
Published Thursday, December 09, 2010 @ 10:17 AM EST
Dec092010
Santa Claus is going to make an unscheduled appearance at a local church
function this week, and a member of the congregation asked me my opinion.
"I'm the wrong person to ask," I replied. "To me, it's sort of like
asking what would happen if Spiderman showed up unannounced at
Superman's Fortress of Solitude."
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Current weather from my backyard in South Park, PA.
