Welcome to the first inaugural post of my Blog! Although a link from my webpage to here won't officially begin until August, I wanted to give the ol' blog a shakedown cruise. Let's bring those warp engines on line and see what happens.
No wormholes yet? Good. Let's continue.
For people possibly finding me for the first time, my mini-biography above sums me up pretty well. If you really have a lot of time, you can read more from my site here.
As I write this, I'm about to direct one of my short plays, A Richard Donner Heaven. Yes, as in the guy that directed the first Superman movie. It's great to have two members of Project Improv on board as my thespians: Tiffany LaVoie and Mike Slaton. Although it was directed and acted much to my satisfaction in 2004 for Petfish's Playwright Festival, I'm glad to have the opportunity to direct it myself. The play will be part of "Live Without a Net," a festival of drama and music produced by Sight and Sound, on August 12, 17, and 19. For more details, visit my production website here.
Rehearsals will begin next week. Wish me luck.
Speaking of Superman . . . last week, my wife and I saw Superman Returns (in IMAX 3-D even, woo hoo!). I think Bryan Singer is a fantastic director -- X-Men 2 ranks easily in the top five comic-book movies ever made -- so my expectations were pretty high. After seeing SR I had mixed emotions. Overall, I enjoyed it; it was a very good movie, but just short of great. The directing, cinematography and special effects were aces, and the acting very good. Routh does the impossible by striking a balance between honoring Reeve's performance and adding his own dimensions to Kent/Superman. I like Bosworth as an actress, and she does fine as Lois Lane here, but I miss Margot Kidder's edge. Spacey's Lex equals Hackman's excellence, but is protrayed darker, which fits the tone of Singer's movie.
But -- spoiler alert -- not counting nagging questions that may be answered in sequels (like, are Supes's Krypton crystals that Lex left behind floating with the rest of his "continent" in space??), I have three main problems with the flick.
1) Lex Luthor as a villian. I don't blame the filmmakers for re-kicking off the franchise with Supes's most well-known villian, but he has now been in four of the five Superman movies. The whole "I'm gonna outsmart you with some kryptonite and beat you up/drown you" thing is getting old. Please, give me some fighting thrills with a General Zod or a Doomsday next time.
2) The ending. It's waaaay tooooo looooong. The pacing drains away the dramatic power of Supes's near-death experience.
3) The kid. Good grief o'gravy. What the F do they plan to do with this character? If they plan on kicking off a Superboy franchise, need I remind Warner Bros. that they already have? It's called Smallville! I can't say I follow the tv show, but I'd rather see those guys on the big screen than whatever this character will become. The chronology of the movies would have to jump ahead at least ten years (and make him a teenager) for it to get even remotely interesting. And I don't want to see Pop and Kid beating up bad guys together. Even worse is wasting the setup. Does he have superpowers or not? If he does, use them. If not, why didn't they just make him fully human and not half-Kryptonian, with Lois's fiance as the father? IMHO, it may have been more interesting to see how Superman/Kent dealt with a child that he may "uncle" from the sidelines -- knowing that, if things had been different, and Supes had settled down with Lois, the child could have been his. So the poignancy of the actual father/son situation is soured by the thoughts of a movie exec inserting this whole plot point in order to make a young, quote-unquote hip Superboy movie in the next five years. (And I want to know why kryptonite didn't bother the kid. If his powers have manifested -- as they do a few minutes later when he pushes the piano -- it doesn't make sense. If there are new "rules" for how kryptonite affects half-Kryptonians, the movie doesn't even suggest what they are. Yet. Maybe the sequels will.)
That aside, Superman Returns is worth plunking down your dollars for. When you add up its strengths and weaknesses, it's almost equal to Donner's Superman. And I do look forward to sequels -- minus Supertyke.
