Four-Color World: The Comic Book Thread

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

I need to pick up the Smallville DVDs after Season 6, which is where I think I stopped watching. The show became too uneven to remain appointment TV and I really wanted to see some progression, which was not happening for awhile. But I'm still curious to see how they finished it out and having the DVDs would let me skip the "freak of the week" standalone episodes.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

Once the original show runners bolted after season 7, seasons 8 through 10 were like a whole new show. Half the cast was changed and moved to Metropolis.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

I have only seen bits and pieces of the final seasons of "Smallville," but by the end of the show, there have to be literally tens of thousands of people who know Clark Kent is an alien with superhuman powers.

Gonna make it kinda hard to keep up the secret identity stuff when Superman finally appears.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

It was always uneven and it had a stretch in the middle of its run where the show was just bad, but House is right. It really did evolve into a very different show.

The thing that amazes me is that the two best versions of Lex Luthor of my lifetime were Michael Rosenbaum's on Smallville and Clancy Brown in the Timmverse (Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League), which tells you just how badly the character was written in Donner's movies and in Superman Returns. I was very excited to see Kevin Spacey play Luthor and he had his moments ("Now fly!"), but overall it just didn't work. And he's too good for that not to work.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

When is the god damn Aquaman movie going to come out?

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

You missed it.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

Spacey as Luthor was so jaw droppingly bad that it would have ruined even an otherwise good movie (which Superman returns was not). I guess Spacey hasn't seen a superhero movie in 30 years and thinks that's how villians still act.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

Perhaps, but you have to put a significant part of the blame on what he had to work with.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

You are entitled to your worthless opinion.

It is foolish to go into any of these movies expecting them to stick entirely to the comic books. You are setting yourself up for disappointment. There are certainly flaws in the movie, but whining that they didn't stick to the source material closely enough is just silly.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

While reading this page, I scrolled down just far enough so that it broke along Aquaman's midsection. It made it look like Aquaman was starring in the type of movie Troy McClure would've been very, VERY interested in.

 

Re: The Dark Knight is done, now is it Superman's turn?

Spacey as Luthor was an order-of-magnitude improvement over Gene Hackman's ridiculous version, the very definition of "a star phoning it in."

Although much of the problem with Hackman-Luthor was the result of the idiot scriptwriters (in Superman I, II and IV), they made him a lame-ass cocktail-lounge comedian who didn't even seem to dislike Superman very much (hell, hardly at all). He seemed about as threatening as your average Will Ferrell bad-sports-comedy protagonist.


The absolute bottom line quality of Lex Luthor, whatever version you use -- underworld gang leader, Einstein-Edison level mad scientist, or corrupt crooked billionaire business tycoon -- is that he is supposed to have an absolutely unrelenting raging hatred of Superman.


Spacey was a significant improvement in that department, especially the scenes where he stabs Superman with the Green K shiv and kicks the crap out of him lying on the ground. You actually did get the idea he really did hate Superman.

The 'fire to the people' monologue was also good -- it showed the intellectual arrogance Luthor is supposed to have. Hackman-Luthor for the most part seemed about as intellectual as Al Bundy.

But of course they couldn't resist giving him a dumb-bimbo moll, a crew of idiot henchmen, and of course an obsession with an idiotic real-estate scam.

Now Hackman has been great in many other roles, including several in which he plays thoroughly evil and slimy characters, so there's certainly no reason he couldn't have played a truly sinister, threatening and intimidating Lex Luthor.

But my take on what probably happened is that in 1977-78 when the original "Superman: The Movie" was made, Hackman was a very big star. In fact probably at that moment he was a bigger star than Brando.

Yet Hackman was second-billed to Brando, and when he showed up on the set and saw the shit Brando was being allowed to get away with in his who-gives-a-fuck portrayal of Jor-El, (show up only once or twice in months of shooting, don't bother to learn lines, sleepwalk through scene after scene) my bet is Hackman said, "well we see Brando is being allowed to get away with half-assing it here, maybe I'll half-ass it myself and see what happens."