Man of Steel ::: 14 June, 2013

Largo's Shark wrote:

I admire Lester's disdain and his clever subversion of the banal material. A spanner in the works.

I'm curious about what you thought made his work "clever".

Python wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

I admire Lester's disdain and his clever subversion of the banal material. A spanner in the works.

I'm curious about what you thought made his work "clever".

Perhaps the guy on the phone who keeps talking even though he's being blown down the street.  Precise social commentary that.

Whoa, Zod!  Watch it!

Python wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

I admire Lester's disdain and his clever subversion of the banal material. A spanner in the works.

I'm curious about what you thought made his work "clever".

How he was able to stow his way into the production like a Trojan horse, then wreak havoc with Vaudevillian comedy.

Largo's Shark wrote:

I admire Lester's disdain and his clever subversion of the banal material. A spanner in the works.

I have no admiration for people who think they're cleverer than the material. If you are disdainful of Superman, comic books, and American culture in general -- don't agree to make a Superman movie. It may amuse a cynic like you who wants to see the character and concept taken down a peg, but ultimately I don't find that kind of hoity-toity Warhol smugness very entertaining for long.

I go agree in part with that you said about Lester vs. Donner in general though. Donner's Superman films are head and shoulders above Lester's because Donner knew how to handle the character, and I hated Lester for years just based on Superman II and III, until I saw Three Musketeers/Four Musketeers which are two of my absolute favourite movies and by far the best adaptation of that novel. And of course Hard Day's Night and Help! are classics. Lester's good at what he does, but he wasn't right for Superman.

Frankly, Sharky, I think the days of the campy "point and laugh at how stupid heroism is" kind of comic book movie a la Batman '66 and Lester's Superman are probably gone, simply because those movies were made by a generation of men who were in many ways forced into treating that material against their best instincts (Dozier and Lester) and who looked at that material and said "this is silly and childish and ripe for mocking" (which, looking at Silver Age Batman and Superman comics, they were). Now we have a generation of filmmakers who have grown up with these characters in their myriad forms, whether it be the Donner films or the more complex and mature comic books of the Modern Age, or their various well-done animated adaptations, and they have fond memories of these figures from their youths and want to honor them and tell their stories well, rather than mock and deride.

But yes yes, I know, AVTAK is the greatest Bond film because CAMP and so on, virtuous characters should be mocked or torn down, etc. etc., yes indeed, Sharky.

Quote :

How he was able to stow his way into the production like a Trojan horse, then wreak havoc with Vaudevillian comedy.

He wasn't a stowaway -- he was invited! Because the Salkinds knew him, he had produced hits for them before, and they knew he could work cheap! As for the Vaudevillianness, I don't exactly see it as a clever subversion but more or less Lester playing these elements as best he could understand them. A guy like him couldn't see Superman as anything more than a cheap American pop artifact to be mocked and camped up. After the Batman TV series that was the common way of approaching these things. What was unique about Donner's take was that he wanted to do it justice - that was (for the time) innovative, whereas Lester was really just going with the flow. And I'd really hesitate to call any of his comic bits in II or III funny -- the slapstick is all pretty tired and in general just grinds the movie to a halt. Superman III is probably the least funny use of Richard Pryor of all time.

Oddly, Lester did a much, much better job blending the humourous with the serious in his Musketeers films, which have wonderfully clever physical humour but also manage to be serious, literate, and moving when they need to be -- the brilliant casting in those films helps, of course.

Hahaha, the phone-booths fell down like dominoes! Oh that Lester, he knew what a Superman really needed.

Fairbairn-Syko wrote:

It may amuse a cynic like you who wants to see the character and concept taken down a peg, but ultimately I don't find that kind of hoity-toity Warhol smugness very entertaining for long.

1) I am not a cynic. I am a realist.

2) It has nothing to do with Andy Warhol. Read a novel, for once.

































Wait for it...























































3) You've been trolled.

I think it takes a lot more skill to figure out what WORKS about a property, what makes it powerful, and play THAT, than to find out what DOESN'T work and point fingers at it. The first method is much rarer and produces great movies, the second is as common as a Saturday Night Live skit.

Look at PACIFIC RIM, for example. I'm really excited for that flick because it gives the epic, awe-inspiring, earth-shattering feel of the best daikaiju eiga but delivered in all the fantastic glory that modern Hollywood can offer. It'd probably be a lot easier to make a movie mocking all the tropes of that genre (subpar costumes, repetitive plots, poor character development, bad dubbing) -- but why would I wanna see a movie doing all that shit on purpose?

Largo's Shark wrote:

2) It has nothing to do with Andy Warhol. Read a novel, for once.
3) You've been trolled.

You're a great troll, Sharky, as always. Although I wonder why you think me comparing your smug deconstructionist attitude with Warhol has anything to do with a lack of novel reading on my part. Or, for that matter, why you think I don't read novels? That's sort've an odd comment.

Fairbairn-Sykes wrote:

Largo's Shark wrote:

2) It has nothing to do with Andy Warhol. Read a novel, for once.
3) You've been trolled.

You're a great troll, Sharky, as always. Although I wonder why you think me comparing your smug deconstructionist attitude with Warhol has anything to do with a lack of novel reading on my part. Or, for that matter, why you think I don't read novels? That's sort've an odd comment.

I don't have a "smug deconstructionalist attitude", that's just my trolling persona. I despise that shit.

Same goes for the "read a novel" bit. I don't think you're illiterate, though I know you believe me and Ambler look down on you. We don't, though we still play along with your perception of our perception of you.

We take the piss out of each other so much that my urologist bills have gone up tremendously in the last few months.

Free catheters for everyone.

Largo's Shark wrote:

Richard Lester is 10 times the filmmaker Richard Donner is, though you'd never tell from their respective SUPERMAN films.

I just read an old old Lester interview and he mentions having made zillions of commercials, including what he calls the most expensive commercial ever (I guess he means in the 60s and the UK) ... it featured a 12 foot miniature of a Concorde and a bunch of guys flying around in jet packs, and was made for Braniff. Does anybody know ANYTHING about this, it sounds like a dream come true to me. 

And yeah, ROBIN & MARIAN alone is enough to put Lester way over Donner for forever and a day. I mean, I can rewatch LADYHAWKE once every 12-15 years, but I feel so BAD afterward! 

(I just got a PM and a response to a post I made on another site about this place, so I guess it is time to return if you'll have me. But it will be spotty for awhile, have got many balls in the air -- four of them, as Sair Hillary might claim.)

And to answer the inevitable, my wife is a Cumberbatch fan, and feeling ill, so I did actually take her to see the Abrams in a theater. 

All the way through, seemingly 9 hours of it. It's a Shoah thing.

Nice to see you return. :)

I think that must be the ad. 1975 apparently. 

Good to see you back, Trev. ;)

Great find! Now I know what goes in the spot between the Welles/Menzies THINGS TO COME and the Ridley Scott Apple ad when it comes to 'the future - where (you think) you're going to spend the rest of your life.'

I like the gadget at 1:38. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZcCpH-G3os#t=1m37s

I'm trying to think of where I've seen that actor.

Michael Rosenbaum would like to play Lex Luthor in the sequel. I would love for that to happen, as he is the best live action portrayal of Lex Luthor.

I just finished something I've been aching to do ever since the Donner Cut of II came out: I finally made my own fan edit. Never actually finished one for myself before, so it was interesting to see the film play out the way I edited it. I basically made a hybrid of the two versions. I keep a lot of the Donner stuff in, but reinsert key scenes from the Lester film that focus on Lois and Superman. Basically a lot of the Niagara Falls and fortress footage. I even kept some of the Lester versions of the Donner footage, notably the moon sequence because I preferred the effective use of Ken Thorne's arrangement over Michael Thau's awful choice of "tracked" music from Williams that didn't fit the tone. Kept the opening with Lois jumping out the window, thus not reinserting her Niagara falls jump. I also kept many of the footage in that midwestern town, because as goofy as they are they built up to the army attack. In the Donner Cut, we just immediately jump to the news crew covering the villains, despite the fact that we didn't see the villains do anything by that point. The biggest change I've made was the ending. Over the choice of either going with the memory kiss or spinning the world around, I decided to do neither version. Lois gets to keep her memory of the events and the last we see of her is when she watches Superman leave her penthouse, in tears "there he goes Kiddo, up up and away." Kind of bittersweet but in my own perfect SUPERMAN III Lois would know Clark's secret, and that could have had a lot of potential with them trying to move on despite the elephant in the room. But just to keep things on an upbeat mood, I kept the diner scene at the end and of course Superman delivering the new roof with the American flag to the President.

Still, I don't think I'm quite finished. It's a nice rough cut for me, but I feel with a few more tweaking I might be totally satisfied. I just need the right software that I can use to add dinosaurs and turn guns into walkie-talkies.

Python wrote:

I just need the right software that I can use to add dinosaurs and turn guns into walkie-talkies.

 

Python wrote:

I keep reading that with Sting's inflection on I WILL kill him! from the end of DUNE.

I loved MAN OF STEEL, but...



3:19-36 - that describes me down to a t.

 Dug it. Having just revisited the film, I suppose the only thing that would have really made it easier to swallow is have Superman acknowledge the damage around the city. After he takes out that device that obliterated like a two mile radius, it would have gone a long way just to show him look around in horror, before his one on one with Zod. Other than that, I enjoyed it as much as I did in the theater, so it's growing on me. I understand many still want to retain the lightness of the Reeve films, but I felt it was necessary to have this film strike its own cord. I don't find it depressing or too serious, if anything it feels earnest. I think that's the best way to label this. I look forward to seeing how it all plays out in the following film.