NYT: 'Superman Returns To Save Mankind from Its Sins'

Brandon Routh dons the cape and tights in "Superman Returns."

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: June 27, 2006

Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell. Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud "Superman IV," the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson's passion a run for his box-office money. Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins and what looked like another bummer summer.

The super-size (more than two and a half hours) "Superman Returns" was written by Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, working off a story hatched by them and the director, Bryan Singer, after what appears to have been repeat viewings of Richard Donner's "Superman." Released in 1978, that film ushered Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's original comic creation into the blockbuster age with frothy wit and a cast that included Marlon Brando in a creamy scoop of white hair and Gene Hackman in clover. Christopher Reeve, of course, wore the cape and tights, while Margot Kidder did a fine approximation of the young Katharine Hepburn at her most coltish. Valerie Perrine and Ned Beatty added some laughs, while Glenn Ford supplied a pinch of gravitas.

As nutritious as a box of Cracker Jack and just as yummy, "Superman" was at once a goof and a self-conscious bid at modern mythmaking. Years later, what resonates aren't Mr. Donner's action scenes, which look crude compared with what he would do later in the "Lethal Weapon" series, but how fluidly he changes tones from the iconic (as when the supertoddler lifts a truck off his Earth father) to the playful (as when the souped-up adult realizes that the closetlike phone booth is a thing of the past). Mr. Reeve worked the tonal changes with similar ease, delivering a superhero whose earnestness was strategically offset by his fumbling, bumbling, all-too-human twin, who was just the ticket for the post-Watergate, pre-Indiana Jones moment.

Mr. Singer's Superman, played by Brandon Routh, is a hero of rather different emotional colors, most muted. Like Christopher Nolan's "Batman Begins," Mr. Singer's effort reworks the legend against a vaguely modern, timeless backdrop that blends the thematically old with the technologically new. The story opens with some necrophiliac wizardry and Brando newly arisen as Superman's extraterrestrial father. Well represented even from beyond, the dead actor receives billing for his spectral turn, squeezed between Eva Marie Saint, who plays Superman's earth mother, and Tristan Lake Leabu, who plays Lois Lane's young son. The Daily Planet's star reporter is in turn played by Kate Bosworth, whose glum mien and curtain of brown hair suggests that blondes really do have more fun.

MORE AT LINK ------->

http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/movies/27supe.html?ex=1152072000&en=a571c7f5ac5db416&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Only a few more days now! It looks so good. :)

Reviews are embargoed until the official day of opening, which is 12:01 AM on Wednesday, June 28, 2006. Try www.rottentomatoes.com and see more early reviews and comments. More positive than negative at this point. But things could change swiftly...

The NYT review is considered to be "thumbs down":

"Where once the Man of Steel flew up, up and away, in a leaden new film he flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins."
Manohla Dargis, NEW YORK TIMES

I saw the film last Thursday and will post my review when the old clock on the wall gets to tomorrow.

Are you planning to see it?

In peace,

Radio_Lady

"Yeah, folks, this is a popcorn movie!" or "don't waste your money". Had no idea reviews are held back until opening day. I'd like to see it if its something "special". I thought that Batman begins movie with Christian Bale was fantastic.

I love seeing a good flick in a nice theatre, especially when there's no "theatre" commercials. Haven't been since "Walk the Line" It was wonderful.

However, with the advent of immediate venues -- such as the Internet -- the publicists, who represent the movie distributors, feel they have to "tighten the reins" somewhat on WHO gets to see their movies (for example, no guests were allowed at the "Superman Returns" preview), HOW they are watched (movie theater security often checks our bags for recording devices, or used an electronic wand to detect if we are carrying anything made of metal).

This includes allowing NO CELLPHONES or RECORDING DEVICES in the preview theater, because of film piracy issues, and finally, attempts to control WHEN the reviews are actually seen, read or heard.

This month, Warner Brothers passed the word to us that we would risk de-listing if we put our reviews out before Wednesday. Obviously, many people are disregarding their wishes. I'm just trying to follow the rules.

i got my tickets, am going to see it..in less than 8hrs...:)

I'll see it, but later.

Thank you.

Superman Returns doesn’t exactly whiz by...

By David Edelstein

From the start, Superman Returns has a pall that it never shakes off: Even the superheroics seem like stopgap measures in a world slipping grimly into the abyss. Before the credits, we learn that Superman has been absent from Earth for five years in a search for survivors from his exploded home planet, Krypton—clearly a hopeless quest, and when he gets back, he spends a lot of time in bed in his mother’s house. Marlon Brando appears as Jor-El in footage from 1978, the actor relatively sane and trim, at least compared with the barking-mad barrage-balloon he’d become: The sense of prodigious waste is inescapable. The brassy John Williams theme and the familiar flying credits signal that the series won’t be starting from scratch the way Batman did—which means no matter how good the new guy is, we’ll feel the loss of the all-too-human Christopher Reeve. As it turns out, the new guy, Brandon Routh, isn’t very good at all, and when he is, it’s because he’s channeling Reeve’s dithering, butterfingers Clark Kent and his sheepishly grinning Man of Steel. In the first scene, an elderly woman expires after leaving her fortune to Lex Luthor—and she’s played by Noel Neill, everyone’s favorite Lois Lane from the fifties TV show. RIP, Lois. To cap off the funereal opening, the new Luthor is cinema’s most convincing sadist, Kevin Spacey. Is Superman being resurrected or buried alive?

There’s nothing wrong with tortured emotion in comic-book pictures. The genre’s writers and illustrators have kept their superheroes fresh by finding dark underbellies and kinky variations. (How about that gay Batgirl?) And ever since the Tim Burton–Sam Hamm Batman of 1989, it has been de rigueur in movies to focus on the freaky alienation aspect of the superhero’s life: This is how talented people make movies for 14-year-olds while retaining their self-respect. The director of Superman Returns, Bryan Singer, mined the gay-outsider subtext in the first two X-Men movies (“Have you tried not being a mutant?” asked a teen’s distraught parent), and he must have seemed the perfect guy to give this series the depth and urgency that Sam Raimi brought to Spider-Man.

Once past the overture, there’s at least a shred of hope that Singer and the screenwriters, Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, are laying the groundwork for a soaring climax. In the Daily Planet newsroom, Clark is again an amusingly impotent bystander, and these are the best moments in all the Superman sagas: the ones where you wait for the doffing of the glasses and loosening of the tie. This time, Lois has just won a Pulitzer for an editorial called “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman”—a thinly veiled expression of rage at being abandoned. (The superhero took off for Krypton without telling her or the world.) Could this turn into a comedy of remarriage—Superman and Lois in His Girl Friday? No chance with this Lois, Kate Bosworth, the blonde surfer-queen of Blue Crush. She isn’t a bad actress, but she’s motorless, with guileless little eyes; and the hotshot investigative reporter is now an overprotective single mom with a frail boy and an earnest fiancé (James Marsden) whom she doesn’t have the wit to manipulate.

The bigger problem is that Singer’s weighty rhythms are disastrous for Superman, and the movie actually gets heavier in its last half-hour. Spacey’s Luthor—until now less a supervillain than a clammy businessman—mutilates Superman with sociopathic relish: The sequence is so ugly that Luthor’s lame, jokey comeuppance feels monstrously inadequate. But by then the audience has moved far ahead of Singer. A scene in which Lois tries to persuade her fiancé to turn his plane around and help the disabled superhero could have been compressed into ten seconds instead of dragged out to a minute, and the final scenes would make Wagner check his watch. It’s not that the movie is 157 minutes; it’s that it feels like 157 minutes.

MORE AT LINK --------->

http://newyorkmetro.com/movies/reviews/17394/

didn't like it either..its a good thing, I don't listen to critics...;)

devastating.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060626/REVIEWS/60606009

I read it last night, but on the other hand, as a superman head, he doesn't know superman...eberts notion that ONLY KRYTPONITE can hurt superman is extremely flawed....and the thought that superman actually showed strain in saving the plane in Superman Returns, is bad, or infuses that superman has a limit to his power. In that regard, Ebert gives me the impression that supermans power should be unlimited, and if Ebert ever read a superman comic, he would see, that thats not how superman works, he shows strain, and gets slapped around with the rest of them....but to each their own.

Damn, in Superman the Movie Reeve/Superman showed strain in pushing missles into space, so I'm like...wtf? But on the other hand, I believe Ebert gave Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift 3stars, same with the new Garfield movie...;) So, to each their own...:)

"Superman is vulnerable to one, and only one, substance: kryptonite. He knows this. We know this. Lex Luthor knows this. Yet he has been disabled by kryptonite in every one of the movies. Does he think Lex Luthor would pull another stunt without a supply on hand? Why doesn't he take the most elementary precautions? How can a middle-aged bald man stab the Man of Steel with kryptonite?"

Funny, he gives rave review of Superman The Movie, yet old Gene Hackman fooled superman, and yet Spacey gets a slap, for stabbing him with kryptonite? Elementary precautions, like what? Its in New Krypton, superman cannot see through any material from his home planet, even if its a genetic clone. Superman can get fooled, and its better this way, it seems what Ebert wants is an Infallible God, which, in past times, has made Superman lame/boring...because in truth, how can you hurt an infallible god? :)

On edit:Ebert says that Superman has been disabled in every single movie, with kryptonite...not true in Superman II...nor, Superman IV....

in before talking about Lois' kid. I mean it isn't hard to put together but still.

Until I came across your post.

Mostly for Kevin Spacey, who is my favorite movie bad guy. I'll probably wait a week or two, though, until the crowds die down a bit.

has a HUGE crush on Kevin Spacey, thats why she is going to watch it...Spacey is one of those guys, whom if my wife met, I would let her have at him, if he would have her....but on the flip side, if Salma Hayek, or Catherine Zeta Jones want to get it on with me, than my wife is "okay" with that..

I don't need Kevin Spacey.

Here's my very own bald-headed guy, decorated for the Fourth of July.

to joke around with...i'm dedicated to my wife...;)

Seriously, just about all the "thumbs-down" reviews I've seen pretty much boil down to the complaint that Superman Returns just isn't "fun" or "light" enough. For those critics, I offer George Reeves. Y'all have fun!

I for one can't wait to see it. Just the ten little minutes of clips I've seen have blown me away.

film works for you!

Right now, it's getting pretty positive reviews, and it doesn't officially open in the United States until tomorrow.

that where one hates something about a movie the next one will love that very same part. As for me, the local theater is playing it tonight at 10, I'm going to be there midway back and center. But this is really just practice for next week and Pirates of the Carribean, I have been dying to see it.

PLEASE NOTE: Read these message boards at your own risk.

There may be "spoilers" in these reviews. The IMDB does not monitor the message board posts very well and they can be crude, insulting, and unhelpful.

I have not read all of them myself.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348150/board/nest/45390625

that Superman needed some airbrushing in scenes because Routh is, well, a little heavy in his superunderwear, affecting the character's profile.

"For my new costume, one person in the wardrobe department spent a month working only on my codpiece. Wardrobe had more discussions about it than any other part of my costume."

Another panel states, "'Superman Returns' takes place six years after 1981's 'Superman II,' and Lois has a child that is not mine. After all this time away, I still haven't learned that my underwear doesn't go over my clothes. And people still haven't figured out that, as Clark Kent, only my glasses hide my identity. Amazing!"

This was a comic page E1 of Tuesday's paper, cleverly created by Derrik Quenzer, and is supposed to be Superman talking, not Brandon Routh. I can't link to it because it does not appear to be on-line tonight.

In a subterranean room lined with racks of clothes, not far from a set where workers are dismantling an exterior of the destroyed Daily Planet building, costume designers Louise Mingenbach and Dan Bronson are showing off a mannequin sporting the suit. “I’ve done all of Bryan’s movies,” Mingenbach says. “He doesn’t like costumes to be distracting.” Per Singer’s instructions to “not reinvent the wheel,” Mingenbach avoided the armored suits that have recently been in vogue and designed a classic costume inspired by the Joe Shuster–drawn Superman from the ’30s, with high-tech upgrades.

The blue sections are made of a stretchy fabric called Milliskin, which fits over a padded muscle suit that “acts like a girdle,” Bronson says. The insignia on Superman’s chest is a molded latex relief (not a silk screen) composed of thousands of tiny “S” shields, which were laser-cut into the emblem. The red trunks have what Bronson calls “a patented package flattener” and Mingenbach terms “a little quiet cup,” to keep protuberances down to a minimum and everything PG. And for the occasional bathroom break, Mingenbach adds, “it also has a little zipper.”

When the first photo of the suit was released and the Internet began buzzing about how the color was too dark and the “S” too small, Mingenbach was “pretty devastated.” (For Singer’s response to the criticism, check out his video diary at www.bluetights.net.) “We made all the deviation we could without changing the iconic value,” she says.

MORE AT LINK ----------->

http://www.premiere.com/article.asp?section_id=6&article_id=2489

I think the little rumor emerged from the hormonal minds of average Americans...

thanks for this, RadioLady.

:rofl:

Holy Kryptonite!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=105&topic_id=5313593&mesg_id=5313593