Day: July 3, 2006

Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

Well… I didn’t hate it.

The first half-hour, forty-five minutes has some nice touches. As in many of his big-budget extravagaction films, Bryan Singer displays a real fondness and talent for the character-driven, carefully-staged, small-scale suspenseful witty moments… even as such films invariably stomp all over such smaller pleasures, looking to supersede the sequence with CGItis.

What works: a lot of small character details and witty side-ways moments (again, mostly in that first third of the film). One particularly good sequence involving a henchman, a defiant Lois Lane, and her sickly little boy, the boy and h-man playing “Body and Soul” on the piano together. (It’s a really great bit.) Spacey, occasionally. Posey, less occasionally.
Continue reading Superman‘s Big Fat Crying Jag

clubland: white

i have not yet seen the extras but i’m eager to write on this, so i’ll pitch a few ideas. idea no. one: is this a comedy? what makes something a comedy? i’m sure there are people on this blog who are way more qualified than i to discuss the necessary requirements of comedy, but it was hard for me the first time around, ten years ago, and it is hard for me now to see this film as a comedy. there is no laughter. there is, instead, a lot of heartbreak. surely, though, laughter cannot be considered a necessary requirement for comedy, because laughter is so subjective and culture-dependent. simon’s suggestion is that this is a comedy because karol is a schlemiel, and since this sounds interesting to me, i’ll go with it a bit. Continue reading clubland: white