Stuff and things

[sinanju]

So snippy and I went to see Superman Returns this past weekend.  And also The Lake House.  I really liked Superman.  The Lake House...eh, it was alright.  As long as you don't think too hard about all the logical paradoxes involved in the story.  If you do...it falls apart like wet tissue paper.  More detailed opinions (including spoilers) behind the cut, for anyone who doesn't want to know.


I saw Superman Returns twice.  Once on my own on Wednesday, the night it opened here.   And then again on Friday with my lovely and talented wife and some friends.  I liked it a lot, though my first impression was that it stuck too closely to the original Reeve/Donner film.  Superman appears out of nowhere to wow the world; Lex Luthor has an insane scheme to acquire land and power; Superman is subjected to Kryptonite and beaten up for a while before he's rescued, and then he saves the day.

Uhh...okay, on second thought, short of reintroducing Zod and his cronies, or another superhumanly powerful villain, how else other than Kryptonite does one threaten Superman?  Still, the score and the opening credits said This is SUPERMAN you're watching now!  And I liked the film more on second viewing.  My thoughts on the film in no particular order:

• I've heard it said that Lois and Clark are too young in this movie.  I think that's technically true, if it's supposed to be a sequel to Superman and Superman II.  Superman was supposed to be about 30 in the first movie, which would make him at least 35 now, depending on when exactly he supposedly left.  But...Hollywood, ya know?  If you're not in your twenties you're over the hill.  So casting people this age was pretty much inevitable.
• I can totally see why James Marsden jumped ship from X-Men to work on this film.  He got more action as a normal guy here than he ever got in three X-Men movies.  I can't say how happy I am that his character, Richard, was a genuinely nice guy.  It's far too common for one of the suitors of the heroine in modern movies to be an asshole (though it takes her the whole movie to figure out what is made obvious to the audience within minutes at most, sometimes seconds).
  
• I can't say how happy I was also that Lois did not leave Richard for Superman at the end of the movie.  As she told Superman early on, "I've moved on."  And she has.  Whatever she may still feel for him (or again), she's made her choice.
• I liked the new, non-clownish Lex.  I liked the new, non-bumbling-idiot henchmen.  They're not rocket scientists, admittedly, but they're not FOOLS either.  This is good.
• The space shuttle/jetliner rescue was really nifty.  And even threw in a nod to real world physics, in that Superman is limited in what he can do by how much stress manmade objects can take before they snap.  Sure, he's strong enough to catch a falling 777--but it's not strong enough to survive the impact intact....
• Clark seemed too out of touch.  The only person who really seemed to give a damn that Clark was back in the newsroom was Jimmy.  As far as anyone else was concerned, he might as well be invisible.
• "Does he stand for Truth, Justice...all that stuff?" Perry White asks.  You mean, "The American Way?"  But apparently the screenwriters didn't think that phrase was appropriate these days.  To which I can only reply by quoting the website WWTTD.com:

Mike Dougherty and Dan Harris, the two credited screenwriters for 'Superman Returns' have changed Superman’s famous motto, "Truth, Justice and the American way", to "Truth Justice and ... all that stuff". Seriously. No, really.

Dan: "I don't think 'the American way' means what it meant in 1945." Mike: "He's not just for Metropolis and not just for America." Dan: "He's an alien, from Krypton; he has come to Earth to be kind of a savior for this world, not our country . . . And he has no papers." Mike: "What would happen with the immigration laws we have now?" Dan: "I'd like to see someone kick him out!"

Yes, yes, good for you two jackasses. Aren't you just so clever. I bet Stalin and Kim Jung-il couldn't be prouder.

(I would have written more about this but I'm just so angry right now, and when I tried it was just "dirty god damn hippies" and "god I hate Hollywood so much some days" for like 8 pages. Yes, "the American way" was fine in '45 when we were fire hosing little black kids trying to go to school and women couldn't vote, but not now that we're enforcing our hundred year old immigration laws. Yeah, that makes sense. You've clearly thought this out. Was it better then, is that what you're saying? So, for the record, you're for fire hosing blacks and against protecting the US. Okay, thanks Hollywood. I knew about the second one, but I just wanted to be clear.)

Okay, enough about Superman.  Let's move on to The Lake House.

Sandra Bullock moves out of The Lake House in 2006 and leaves a letter for the owner, Keanu Reeves, who receives it two years earlier in 2004.  This starts them writing back and forth, and--in classic Hollywood fashion--falling in love at a distance.  They try to meet, but it doesn't work, but eventually they get together at the end of the film.  True love conquers all!

Just don't think about the logistics.  Maybe a non SF reading audience doesn't think about these things.  I can't say--I've been reading SF since I was a little kid, and the ins and outs of time travel and paradoxes and so forth just leap out at me.  The story is strewn with gaping defects in logic, and cannot be forced into any semblance of rationality.  If Keanu gets killed, thus failing to make the rendezvous with Sandra, causing her to tell him (via time-traveling mail) to stop writing her...then, when she saves him (warning him via time-traveling mail not to make his fatal mistake), then he WOULD have made the rendezvous, so.... you have a classic paradox.  Which is bad enough.

Worse, though, is that the movie fails to give you a solid sense of when many scenes take place either in actual time (what date?) and in relation to one another.  We see Keanu talking and walking with his brother moments before Sandra is told by said brother that he died two years ago in an accident.  So either a) the movie makers cheated by not telling us 2 years passed in the blink of an eye, or b) they kept it from us intentionally in a ham-handed attempt at slipping one past us, or c) they botched the storytelling.

I found myself looking at my watch about midway through the movie--always a bad sign.  It had it's moments, but they mostly come early in the film, when the characters are still playing with the concept of communicating across time.  Before they begin to take it for granted and simply revert to correspondents.  Once that happened, I started wanting it to hurry along to its conclusion and  be over.



So...I recommend Superman Returns to anyone who likes superhero movies.  I do not recommend The Lake House to anyone.

Comments

[aquamarcia.livejournal.com]

Re: your first bullet point -- Yes, Superman Returns is intended to be a continuation of the first two Superman films. The casting of the main characters is a trifle screwy in that it has the feel of having been done as a means of satisfying Hollywood executives who don't think that having Superman and Lois be middle-aged would work for Today's Youth™.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I misspoke. I know the first two films are considered canon in this movie. And I agree that it's typical Hollywood Exec-think to cast these very young people as the stars, though it doesn't match the background.

[jedibuttercup]

I saw The Lake House a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it for what it was, though I saw the "it was him that died!" thing coming a mile off, and the time thing hurt my brain. I couldn't get the illogic of it out of my head until I sat down and wrote this fic to try and explain some of them. Not entirely sure it worked, but the process at least got it out of my head. =)

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

Sometimes "getting it out of my head" is all you can hope for. I also suspected the guy getting killed in front of her had to be significant. I think the time paradoxes would have bothered me less if they'd had a better grasp on showing us when things were happening; deliberately playing with paradox (as in FREQUENCY, for instance) works a lot better when the moviemakers are in control enough that you never have any question about when something is happening.