Honoring Kidder and surfacing from the bottom

I probably wouldn’t have watched Superman II Wednesday night only to celebrate the life of Margot Kidder. Although I cherished her on some level, this was really the only movie I much remember her from, as I only saw the original Superman like three times (one of which was in the past few years) and I only just saw The Amityville Horror last year for the first time. I’d memorialized her on the blog on Wednesday and that was probably enough.

But there was also an interest in surfacing Superman II from the bottom of my Letterboxd list for rewatched movies.

I’ll explain.

I’ve kept track of my movie viewings for a long time, but one of the most recent was starting to make note of when I re-watched a movie. That started about 12 years ago, in July of 2006. The first re-watch I recorded was Ghostbusters. I don’t know why Ghostbusters prompted me to start recording rewatches, or whether I made the decision and Ghostbusters happened to be the first one I saw after that. But either way, I’ve consistently kept track of every movie I’ve rewatched since then.

They say the flesh is weak, but so is the Microsoft Word file, even though I’m an avid backer upper. So when I started on Letterboxd maybe seven years ago, I decided to transcribe my list of rewatches over there, and kept adding any rewatch in both locations. Call it a cloud backup of sorts. I’d put the date watched in the notes field, so that information was preserved too.

When you add new movies to a list on Letterboxd, they automatically go to the end of the list. I might be able to tweak that but I’ve never figured out how. The list was more interesting to me, though, with the newest entries first. So each time I add a new movie, I change its number in the list from 400-whatever to #1, then it jumps to the top. (I’ve rewatched over 650 movies, but about 200 of them were before I started keeping track of rewatches, and I have not watched them since so they aren’t on this list.) This means that the same movie is always last.

For a long time that was Ghostbusters. Every time I moved the newest addition to the top, I’d have to first go down and look at the bottom and see Ghostbusters there.

But then I watched Ghostbusters again in 2016. And because no movie can appear in a Letterboxd list more than once, it was moved to the top, with the latest rewatch date added to the existing rewatch date.

The new last film on the list? Superman II.

It’s been that way for nearly two years, and because I like to consider very inconsequential things (which offers an explanation for this entire post), I had been idly wondering when I would give Superman II another watch and surface it from the bottom of this list.

And that brings you up to Wednesday night.

Now that I’ve watched it again, the new last film on the list could stand awhile, unless I artificially watch it just for the purpose of surfacing it. That movie is The Matador, and though that’s a film I like quite a bit, a third viewing is not really fighting its way into existence. I may soon surface the second-to-last movie on the list, though. That’s Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, which I own and which I have been on the verge of popping into the DVD player for some time now.

I suppose I should actually devote some of this post to Kidder and Superman II, shouldn’t I?

I did appreciate Kidder in this movie, though I think I realized that I had slightly exaggerated just how charmed I am by her here. Although this is a childhood favorite that I thought was impervious to reevaluation upon multiple viewings, I had a number of small criticisms of the movie. I wouldn’t say that Kidder or her performance was one of them, though I didn’t feel the pang of nostalgia and sorrow I expected to feel when I watched it – that I feel when I watch Star Wars and see Carrie Fisher, for example. Ultimately it makes sense that Fisher would have had more of a sway over me than Kidder did, as she appeared in three beloved movies to Kidder’s one. The sense of sorrow is probably a bit greater as well as Fisher died before her work was really done, as she was going to appear in at least one (and probably only one) more Star Wars movie. (I should acknowledge also that Princess Leia in Jabba’s slave outfit was probably also working on my budding sexuality when I first saw it at age nine, and there’s no equivalent for Lois Lane – though if I had seen her turn in Amityville Horror there might have been.)

The interesting thing about Superman II on the whole was how hurried it felt to me on this viewing. You want a tight script to move you along in the action, but some of the jumps seemed downright nutty. For one, when the three Kryptonians first land in that hick town and start wreaking havoc, there is already talk on a concurrent newscast about the use of nuclear weapons being ruled out due to the risk to the population. Hasn’t the world only been aware of these three for like 15 minutes? Who’s talking about nuclear weapons? Sure, there was that incident on the moon, but at this point the powers that be are still likely trying to piece together what that was. When Zod takes the camera, he’s already asking if there’s no one on Earth to even challenge him. The very next scene, they’re changing the faces on Mt. Rushmore to their own. Isn’t that a little fast?

Then I was also reminded how little screen time there is between when Superman forfeits his powers and gets them back. It’s hard to say how much time is actually passing in the movie, but it couldn’t be more than a day or two, a week at most. The only scene outside the fortress of solitude is when he and Lois take a ride to a diner to get dinner and he has the fight with the local bully. He’s already walking back to the fortress (what happened to their car? And where did Lois go?) and already shouting in empty fury at his dead parents, telling them he “failed.” I should have timed it, but it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes of screen time.

Lex Luthor’s time with the Kryptonians also feels very hurried. Gene Hackman as Luthor is one of my favorite parts of the movie – he works so much better as comic relief than “the big bad.” But there’s barely any time between when he introduces himself and having to scurry to explain his relevance and avoid being killed. Both sides are shrewd enough and pragmatic enough for a feeling out period to be logical.

Still a favorite and I’ll still miss Margot Kidder.

"Our Zod" and "our Khan"

I've long associated Superman II and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in my head, but never before had so many reasons to do so as I do these days.

Not only did they both come out around the same time (1981 and 1982, respectively), they were both installments in series that would run for years and years and reboot in multiple incarnations. They were also both second movies that I loved, following on the heels of original movies that underwhelmed me. In fact, I'm sure I've seen Star Trek: The Motion Picture only once, and I've seen Superman: The Movie twice at most, though possibly only once.

Both movies also gave birth to what, to this day, I consider to be two of the greatest villains in cinema history. Their names should come as no surprise to you, since I've included them in the title of this post and furnished you with pictures of them above.

SPOILERS TO FOLLOW ABOUT STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS AND MAN OF STEEL

Zod (then played by Terence Stamp) and Khan (then played by Ricardo Montalban) have dug themselves into our collective moviegoing psyche to such an extent that they were both rebooted in movies from the summer of 2013 (one in an actual second movie, the other in a second reboot of the series in the last ten years). It's not a secret in Man of Steel; it's sort of a secret in Star Trek Into Darkness, hence the spoiler warning. In fact, these characters' reappearance in these franchises (neither having appeared since their original movies) was such a selling point that the characters' presence alone got people in my generation excited about seeing these movies.

The thing is, they're not "our Zod" or "our Khan."

I thought that was particular felicitous phrasing from a friend over the weekend. I hadn't seen Man of Steel yet (I accomplished that feat Tuesday night), but people were talking about it a little at someone's birthday drinks -- not very positively, as it turns out. They knew not to get into spoiler territory with me present, but I also didn't want my presence to shut down the conversation completely, so I gave my one friend the chance to throw me a bone on something that I thought would be easy: "Is Michael Shannon at least good?" I figured there was only one possible answer to this question.

"Yes, but he's not our Zod," my friend said.

It turns out I both agreed and disagreed with my friend. Michael Shannon wasn't our Zod, it's true. But he also wasn't that good. Maybe my friend didn't think he was so good either, but wanted to give me something I could use to bring a sense of optimism to my impending screening.

However, Shannon was enough like our Zod, appearance and otherwise, to at least be recognizable as Zod. I can't really say the same for Benedict Cumberbatch as (LAST SPOILER ALERT) Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness. Cumberbatch is a far more interesting presence than Shannon, more cunning and diabolical, but he's really not that much like Ricardo Montalban. I suppose giving a character in 2013 bronzed muscles and a mane of shoulder-length white hair isn't really practical, but did Cumberbatch have to be so different from that template? Why even call him Khan in the first place?

As I try to make an objective case for those movies from the early 1980s being superior efforts to the movies from the summer of 2013, I must also realize that there's nothing objective about it. I try to imagine myself as a teenager today coming to these movies, and what I would think of them. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is a real oddity in a lot of ways, as the hero (Captain Kirk) and the villain (Khan) are never actually in the same place at the same time. Not once. As a teenager today, I'd probably be flummoxed by long parts of the movie in which "nothing happens." Superman II is as much of an oddity in different ways. It does contain moments of the kind of darkness Zack Snyder is going for in Man of Steel -- don't forget Christopher Reeve dramatically yelling "Father!!!" in the shattered Fortress of Solitude -- but it's also got a ton of moments of levity, more than any modern teen is accustomed to seeing in their superhero movies. Whole characters (Lex Luthor, Non) are basically comic relief -- and that's just among the "villains."

So yeah, of course I'm going to prefer "our Zod" and "our Khan" over "their Zod" and "their Khan." They may see it as the reverse. If they're smart, they'll overcome the problem of being born in the late 1990s and find the true genius in the original incarnations of those roles, and in the inimitable performances of Stamp and Montalban, each subtle in their own ways, each chewing the scenery in their own ways as well.

More than anything, though, I see the resurrection of these characters as a validation of two movies from my youth that I have cherished for years, standing up for them even when others in my generation were snubbing them upon discovered "Great films" with a capital G.

Oh, I don't take the fact that they're being offered to the next generation of pop culture junkies as proof, per se, that Star Trek II and Superman II were great. You might say I should draw the opposite conclusion, that if Zod and Khan are being offered to the masses again, it's a sign that they are safe enough for general consumption.

But I don't choose to see it that way. I always thought I was a little weird that I could quote whole sections of Khan's whispered threats to Kirk. I always thought it was a little goofy when I put on my best Terence Stamp voice and operatically performed the line "Why do you say these things to me, when you know I will kill you for it?" Now I feel more prophetic than marginalized.

And I guess I do pity today's kids a bit, because they're not getting movies that are both awesome and sort of ridiculous at the same time. You can't love Zod and Khan without realizing that you are, on some level, getting off on a completely hammy performance. But these hammy performances didn't make the movie suffer, as they might today. Somehow they elevated the movie and made it more grandiose. That's what's been lost today: the ability to look at a big performance unironically. Zod and Khan filled the screen, sometimes with near Shakespearean levels of gravitas that couldn't help but verge on the camp. But that's what made them great.

It's not just that movies tried to be funny back then but they don't try to be funny today. Strangely, you have a flip-flop in the tones of these movies from the movies that revived these characters this summer. Star Trek II is a dour film, containing almost no humor outside of an occasional playful exchange between Bones and Kirk. Star Trek Into Darkness tries to be funnier than that -- not a lot funnier, but somewhat funnier, as the whole character of Scotty (Simon Pegg) exists for comic purposes. Superman II, on the other hand, is practically a comedy for whole patches of the running time, while Man of Steel barely cracks a smile once -- and when it does so, it's inappropriately out of sync with what's going on in the story.

This does make me wonder what today's young people grab onto when they're looking for "their Zod" or "their Khan" -- not those actual characters, but the modern equivalents they will one day cherish. Is it Loki from The Avengers? Is it Bane or the Joker? Is it the character Michael Sheen plays in the Twilight movies? I hear he's frigging hilarious.

What seems likeliest is that they don't have a Khan or a Zod -- and that's the saddest part. Everyone deserves a Khan or a Zod ... even if they have the audacity to have been born in the late 1990s.

The inevitability of excess

I was all set to write a piece this Friday about how Iron Man 2 appeared to be following the dispiriting "bigger, more, but not better" trend of Hollywood sequels.

But sometimes in the blogging world, with all the reading we do, we come across the work of another blogger who has already taken that same perspective, and taken it more eloquently and succinctly than we would have ourselves. So I'd like to refer you to the work of my esteemed colleague Daddy Geek Boy on the topic. It's a good write-up, and you can find it here.

I'll still write about Iron Man 2, but I thought I'd take a slightly different approach, ask a slightly different question. Namely, is it possible for a sequel not to succumb to the sin of excess? Is it possible for a sequel not to have double the good guys, double the bad guys, double the explosions, and in some cases, double the babes?

It's easy to think of examples where they indulged themselves, and it's very easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds, of bad sequels. But this morning I want to consider the good sequels, and see if they were able to avoid this pitfall. Even The Dark Knight, which I won't write about again because I just wrote about yesterday (albeit in purely semantic terms), couldn't resist the urge to add a second villain, even with the first villain as dynamic and dominant as Heath Ledger's Joker.

So I'm examining five of my favorite sequels of all time, ones that I liked better than the original in some cases. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm leaving out series where the first film was always planned as part of a larger story, where future installments of the story were already written (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) or envisioned by the creator (Star Wars).

Granted, most creative talents will tell you that they always envisioned their movies as multi-part stories, which is probably true to the extent that it makes sense to mentally blueprint a franchise if you think your movie is marketable. (Plus, most creative types are dreamers, and are overly optimistic/delusional about the quality of their own ideas.) But most sequels came into being because the first movie was good. If it hadn't been good, we simply wouldn't have cared about "the rest of the story" that existed purely in the writer's head.

So without any further ado, here are five excellent sequels, listed in no particular order. Let's hold them up to the light and see how they did.

1) Superman II (1980, Richard Lester). This is by far my favorite Superman movie, which has everything to do with relegating Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) to the role of comic relief, and replacing him with not one, not two, but three new villains. The plot itself is bigger as well. Although it could be argued that reversing the rotation of the earth to turn back time is a pretty big deal, I'd say that having the world taken over by the three Krypton refugees and willingly giving up his super powers qualify as more earth-shattering, as it were, for Superman.

Why it works: Three supervillains might ordinarily spin your head like a bad Joel Schumacher Batman movie, but since they essentially operate as one character in terms of their function in the narrative, the movie feels clean and focused. Plus, Terrence Stamp gives what I would argue is one of the great villain performances of all time as General Zod.

2) Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron). I don't mean to blaspheme, but this is another case of me liking the sequel better than the original. The T-1000 was like nothing I had ever seen before -- in fact, the rush of excitement I got from Cameron's digital innovations with this character was much greater than what I got watching Avatar. Still, when you break it down to its elements, the movie does have two terminators, and it adds a squeaky-voiced Edward Furlong as the young John Connor.

Why it works: Although there are two terminators, they are not both the hero or both the villain, so the mano-a-mano dynamics of the original are still in place, shifted from Arnold Schwarzenegger's terminator against Linda Hamilton to Robert Patrick's T-1000 against Schwarzenegger. And John Connor essentially replaces Kyle Reese from the original. The net gain is really only one character.

3) Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter). Officially, I like Toy Story better than Toy Story 2, but it's so close that Toy Story 2 has to be considered, hands down, one of the best sequels of all time. True enough, though, there are both more heroes and more villains. Added to the characters we love are a second Buzz Lightyear and Jessie the Cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), and there are three characters who share the villain role: the evil toy collector (voiced by Wayne Knight), the evil collectible prospector toy Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer), and, well, The Evil Emperor Zurg, come to life in toy form (voiced by future Pixar director Andrew Stanton, to the extent that the character has any real dialogue). The adventure is slightly bigger as well, as it involves more trips out of the house.

Why it works: Pixar has an instinct for narrative structure that is unmatched in the industry. The writers are smart enough to dole out enough lines to the minor characters so that they all feel involved, so that the extra new characters don't push them into irrelevance. I expect Toy Story 3 to be similarly successful with this narrative balancing act.

4) X2: X-Men United (2003, Bryan Singer). This one's going to be a bit more difficult for me, because although I know I like the X-Men sequel better than the original, I have a hard time quantifying why. I can tell you that there are more heroes and villains than the first. The heroic additions include Nightcrawler (Alan Cumming) and Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), who walks the line between hero and villain, and the villains pile on with Lady Deathstrike (Kelly Hu) and William Stryker (Brian Cox), in addition to the usual stable featuring Magneto, Mystique, etc. This film also does what a lot of second movies gain the confidence to do: kill off one of the beloved stars of the first movie, if only temporarily, in Jean Gray (Famke Janssen).

Why it works: X2 is more like the typical superhero sequel than any other movie on this list, which makes sense since only one of the other movies is actually a superhero movie. But it works because the multiplicity of characters actually helped shove at least one character that I did not particularly like, James Marsden's Cyclops, into a corner. Thankfully, Cyclops has little more than a cameo in this movie.

5) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, Nicholas Meyer). And here's a sequel that is really, truly different. Star Trek II is a brilliant movie, but it doesn't feel like a sequel at all. Even though it deals with the Genesis device, which can create a whole planet from scratch, and the (temporary) death of Spock, who comes back to life in the next movie during a rapid re-growth on the new planet, Star Trek II feels intimate more than grandiose. There are a lot of quiet moments in which the characters discuss their mortality, and the hero and the villain never once see each other in the flesh.

Why it works: The impression created by Star Trek II has everything to do with the impression created -- or not created -- by Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The first Star Trek was a total dud -- I remember feeling a profound sense of disappointment and wondering if there was any hope for the series. If it weren't for Star Trek II, there surely wouldn't have been. We have Star Trek II to thank for all the other Star Trek movies, even the reboot we got last year -- which, if it weren't for Star Trek II, might have been attempted in the 1990s and starred someone like David Caruso. So Star Trek II is a lot more like a first movie than a second movie in that sense, though when you think about it, the whole Star Trek series has kind of assumed a serial quality, as traditionally defined -- each chapter doesn't really need to be bigger and better, it just needs to follow the characters to the next chapter in their lives. I think I'm starting to ramble here.

So is there anything we can take from all this to apply to Iron Man 2? I guess what I personally take from it is that I shouldn't perceive its "bigger, more" approach as creatively bankrupt -- not automatically, anyway. Even the best sequels have to provide more things to look at, more places to turn your attention, and in all likelihood, more minutes of celluloid. That in itself is not a guaranteed recipe for failure, and in fact, it maybe inevitable.

Obnoxious lines like Tony Stark yelling "You complete me!" to Pepper Potts after he jumps out of the plane to retrieve his helmet ... well, that may be cause for worry.