Does anyone else dislike Superman just because it sucks?

My flirtation with seeing Superman finally came to fruition on Tuesday night.

I had first considered watching it on the night before I left for America, the night of its release, before thinking better of it. Especially considering that this was my family reunion we were attending, I thought it best not to skip out for three hours (including commute) on the night before we left just so I could try to review it, leaving my wife with all the last-minute packing details and wrangling of the kids' packing. It's one of those things you have to accept passive credit for having done, but I'm sure my wife would appreciate it if she knew I'd thought better of it. Of course, she'll never know.

Then there was an easy opportunity for me to see it one of the nights in Atlanta before we got to the lake, at a theater that was near where we were staying. Smarter heads prevailed for a similar reason, and at that point I dropped the notion of reviewing it. 

Then if it had been raining one of the days at the lake, as we had been told it might, my cousin actually mentioned the idea of seeing it. It only rained for a single hour on two different days, so lake time obviously took priority.

Well, I'm glad I didn't get to see it in time to meet my own standards for how soon we must review it after its release, because I thought it sucked.

This, unfortunately, gives me something in common with MAGA.

We all know MAGA hated this movie sight unseen as soon as director James Gunn described it as an immigrant story. It was going to be the latest in a line of movies they tried to kill, with varying levels of success, because it was "too woke," joining titles like the 2016 Ghostbusters, Captain Marvel and The Little Mermaid. All female-fronted movies, until this one. Go figure.

But I don't dislike Superman because it's "going woke." I think you should know that about me by now.

No, I just dislike it because it sucks.

I thought about launching into an extended rant about all the things in Superman that don't work -- which, if I'm being honest, is almost all the things in Superman. But again to be honest, I'm just too tired after staying up until 1 a.m., and then heading back into the city for work for the second day in a row, only three days after returning from an international trip where I was not even on the ground long enough to fully recover from my jet lag going in the other direction.

So instead, I'm just going to share my back-and-forth with a friend in L.A. -- let's call him "Paul" -- on Facebook Messenger, after getting out of the theater last night.

"Paul" was the first person I heard about who didn't like Superman, when he posted his reaction on Facebook -- and then, subsequently, kind of the only one. I thought "Paul" must be crazy. "Paul" was not crazy. 

Forthwith, excluding all the various heart and laugh emojis that were provided:

Me: Ugh I couldn't agree with you more on Superman.

Paul: Oh thank God!!!!!

Me: It was so unpleasant to watch. All the jokes fell flat. I didn't like any of the performances. Just a total miss.

Paul: 100%. A complete disaster.
I hated the dog.

Me: Me too! 
Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor was not fun at all. Gene Hackman is rolling over in his grave. Jeez even Zack Snyder is rolling over in his grave. Which is hard to do when you're still alive.
It's probably not worse than Superman IV.

Paul: Oh ... Supe IV is another level of terrible.

Me: Yeah
I'm also not sold on this Rachel Brosnahan. In another of my worst of the year so far (The Amateur). 

Paul: Hated:
Krypton parents want him to fuck everyone and take over Earth?
Earth parents are dumb country bumpkins?
Too many characters, and superheroes. Just make a Superman movie.
Superman gets his ass kicked the whole time.
It's overstuffed, especially the 3rd act.
Jimmy Olson is hitting Lex's GF on the side, but he doesn't even like her?

Me: Yes his constant ass kicking was terrible. I like Pruitt Taylor Vince and his nastigmas (sp?) but not here. Also the extended argument during the interview? Unbearable!
(Reply to) Jimmy Olson is hitting Lex's GF on the side, but he doesn't even like her? Oh my God, CUT IT.

Paul: Lois flies a space ship cause Mr. Terrific says it's very intuitive??

Me: Also that "engineer" was just a weak sauce T-1000.

Paul: Yes ... that's exactly what I started calling her.

Me: I have to go watch The Suicide Squad a hundred times just to purge this from my memory.

Paul: My biggest issue was that everyone loved it. WHAT??

Me: I know. Except MAGA, who hate it for entirely different reasons. The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Paul: No ... still my enemy!

Me: No doubt. Okay I'm going to bed, fun ranting with you.

Paul: One last thing. Supergirl is a drunk sorority girl???

Me: No
One more thing: "I just thought she was sending me sexy selfies. I guess I didn't realize that every sexy selfie was taken in front of a map, blueprint or encoded message. Some journalist I am! Good thing Lex didn't notice!"

We resumed a little bit this morning but it tapered off at that point. 

I so wish MAGA could have been wrong about this movie. Instead they are just right for the wrong reasons. 

Should looking like Superman make someone the next Superman?

News broke this week that they have selected a guy to play Superman in James Gunn's upcoming DC movie Superman: Legacy. You may recall that Henry Cavill was crying about the fact that he wasn't going to play Superman in any future DC films, despite having played the role longer than anyone other than Christopher Reeve.

And guess what? The new guy looks just like Reeve, Cavill, Brandon Routh and Dean Cain -- particularly Cavill, which probably irks him even more.

(I won't say he looks like George Reeves, because that was a different time and George Reeves looked kind of like a cheeseball.)

David Corenswet is this man's name, and you have already seen a picture of him right here in this here post. You might know him from such films as Pearl. I didn't see Pearl, so I know him from such films as Look Both Ways. He's been around for about six years. 

He actually looks sort of absurdly like Cavill. 

Which is really not what you'd hope for a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Now I don't believe that we need a Latino Superman or a Vietnamese Superman or an LGBTQ Superman. (Though I think the Supergirl in The Flash might kinda sorta be that last one? Maybe?) I've never felt diversity for diversity's sake was wisest, despite its potential to please particular factions of the viewing audience (while also risking coming across as pandering).

But as long ago as Chris Evans' casting as Captain America, people were asking if having such a blond, corn-fed looking guy playing this ultimate symbol of American heroism was really the way to go.

Superman isn't quite so specifically American, though of course he was raised in Kansas and any depiction of him has historically gone for that sort of thing. And by casting yet another guy who looks like all the other guys who have played Superman, Gunn and DC have shown a total lack of creativity and opened themselves up to accusations of insufficient diversity in their representation.

Look, we all have an idea in our head of what Superman looks like. But does he have to look exactly like that? Here, if you didn't see the Cavill comparison, these photos make it more manifest:

I mean, it's as though Gunn specifically chose Corenswet to attain maximum verisimilitude in the continuity from Cavill. Which is completely unnecessary as this new movie, as far as I understand it, is not specifically supposed to be a part of the DCEU, though Gunn's involvement might suggest otherwise. Maybe DC really just can't quit the DCEU. (I continue to wonder more and more why I was under the impression The Flash was the last DCEU movie.) It's like it's a parlor trick so see how close you can get to casting the absolute perfectest Superman. 

Speaking of The Flash, one thing that was cool about it was that we did get to see a different take on the character. In a trope that now feels quite familiar from the recent live-action and animated Spider-Man movies, among others, we do get a brief glimpse of an alternate universe Superman in which Nicolas Cage played the character, with long and flowing hair, as he would have looked in the mid-1990s when Kevin Smith's Superman project Superman Lives, to be directed by Tim Burton, was first being talked about. Even if the device was recycled from other and possibly better movies, I thought it was cool, for once, to get a different Superman. 

Twenty-five years after the cancellation of Superman Lives, the character has lived on in many other forms -- or, more correctly, in one form with many minute deviations. And the next deviation is the minutest of all.

Is this really progress?

Supermalevolence

I didn't love Chloe Zhao's Eternals but I didn't think it was a disaster either. I guess my two-star rating on Letterboxd was closer to "disaster," but the film sure does look good.

Eternals spoilers to follow. 

One thing I did love, though, was the depiction of the Ikaris character played by Richard Madden, one of two Game of Thrones cast members who appear in the movie. (That's along with Kit Harrington, who has a puzzlingly small role but should have a bigger one in future installments -- if those installments ever transpire, which seems unlikely given this film's critical and commercial failure.)

The main reason I liked it, though, was that it reminded me of The Boys.

I'd say Ikaris was a clear clone of Homelander except that Eternals predates The Boys by 30 years in their respective comic book forms, so if anything it's probably the other way around. 

Both are handsome white men who are essentially Superman clones, in that they are the most powerful of their respective organizations/groups of assembled superheroes, and shoot lasers out of their eyes. In a rare acknowledgement of DC in a Marvel movie, a young person even calls Ikaris Superman in this movie -- the idea being that these Eternals have been around on earth for so long (7,000 years), they have served as real-world inspiration for cultural icons like Superman. 

Superman has rarely been represented as a fascist on film -- although some of Zack Snyder's depictions have gotten close, and I guess there was that time Christopher Reeve's Superman turned evil and laid waste to a bar by flicking peanut shells at all its glass surfaces. But the fascist undercurrent in the character has always been present, and The Boys and now Eternals have drawn it out explicitly.

Homelander is, simply put, the best thing about The Boys, but it's not just the character itself. I'm not sure where they dug up Antony Starr, because I'd never seen the guy before -- only just now learning from Wikipedia that he's a Kiwi, and that he appeared in the dumb 2004 comedy Without a Paddle. (So, I guess technically I have seen him before.) But Starr has a presence that's so unsettling and so skin-crawling that I think he might be the scariest TV character since Gus Fring. I shriek in joyous agony when he gets that look on his face that suggests he's barely suppressing the instinct to tear someone to bits -- or more likely, to melt their face with his laser eyes. And of course he only suppresses that instinct half the time.

As a character in a movie at least some young people will see, Ikaris cannot be nearly the deranged maniac that Homelander is, nor is Madden as fundamentally charismatic as Starr. But the same supercilious expressions are there, and most notably, the same lethal beams of light coming from his eyes. There's something about these lasers coming from the eyes of these characters, rather than their hands, that makes them even more chilling. It's like, they can obliterate you without even having to lift a finger in your direction. Merely fixing their malevolent gaze on you is enough. It's the closest a superhero comes to telepathic annihilation.

And there's something about that that goes hand in hand with fascism. The mere strength of the power of the belief is enough to eradicate everything in its path.

Of course, again because it is a Marvel movie, Ikaris can't go full villain. We have to see many moments in the end that showcase his humanity -- even though he's not a human -- such as tears, his love for Sersi (another Game of Thrones connection!), and flashbacks to/memories of times where he was magnanimous, gentle and sentimental. He may fly into the sun at the end -- at least I believe that's what he is supposed to have done -- but he'd be back in hypothetical future Eternals films, probably, and would be fully redeemed by then.

No matter how many seasons The Boys runs, there's no redemption in store for Homelander. He's evil through and through, and that's the way we like him.