The Gab of Steel

Werth: Wise, look up in the sky!

Wise: Is it a bird, or a plane?

Werth: No it's a Hollywood promotional juggernaut for the latest Superman reboot, Man of Steel.

Wise: Henry Cavill's chiseled puss is everywhere.

Werth: While I personally am excited by the trailer—

Wise: And Henry Cavill in a skintight unitard.

Werth:—I have a feeling I'm going to miss that old "comic book" sense of style that some earlier incarnations of Superman embodied. In 1941 producer Max Fleischer of Popeye fame and his brother, director Dave, brought the Superman comic books to the big screen in an animated short-form format for Paramount. 

This was the Golden Age of the animated short, when Bugs, Mickey and Tom & Jerry delighted movie going audiences between feature films and Movietone News segments that showed Europe dissolving into war. They gave the audience time to breathe in between Citizen Kane, Suspicion, and Hitler.

Wise: And made it even harder to sneak out to the john. 

Werth: But with the Superman series, the Fleischers did something a little more elegant than the other cartoons. Sticking to the comic's origin story, these shorts quickly absorbed the audience into the story of Superman, the last survivor of a doomed planet who has super powers like being faster than a speeding bullet and the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. 

When he isn't fighting for truth and justice, he is disguised as mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent whose competitive relationship with deep-throated co-worker Lois Lane will undoubtedly lead to romance.... someday.

Wise: Lois put up a better fight than Hildy Johnson. 

Werth: What makes these simple cartoons so thrilling is the animation that was used. The comic book becomes cinema with art moderne and industrial designs for everything from a radio, to a cityscape, to a huge death ray; and a film noir lighting scheme that uses shadows and light to rival The Maltese Falcon. 

Shot in Technicolor, Lois Lane's salmon jacket and skirt are muted yet bold, and the way the figures move is mesmerizing with their jerking, yet fluid movement. Eight of the original cartoons are worth a gander with Superman fighting various mad scientists, a thawed-out tyrannosaurus rex, and a big ape who runs amok on the midway. 

The robots in The Mechanical Monsters clearly inspired the robots used in 2004's Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, proving that even a 72-year-old cartoon can still inspire today's filmmakers. 

Wise: The Adventures of Tintin (2011) is based on the beloved comic by Belgian artist Hergé and follows the intrepid young reporter (Jamie Bell) and his dog Snowy as they delve into the mystery surrounding a family curse, a valuable ship model and a sunken treasure.  Combining three Hergé books—The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure—the film is a madcap frenzy of chase sequences, slapstick humor, and derring-do, taking full advantage of the combined talents of director Steven Spielberg and producer Pater Jackson.  

Werth: That's a lot of talent.

Wise: The film was animated using motion capture and does so much more successfully than other projects which have used the technique and rendered their actors as a pack of creepy Botoxed mannequins.  

Werth: It's like being sucked into an all-day Housewives of Beverly Hills Marathon on Bravo.

Wise: The technology allows Spielberg to indulge in every action sequence daydream he's had for the past four decades.  Tintin is not bound by the same physics as Indiana Jones, and as a result doesn't simply evade a boulder or weather a nuclear blast in a refrigerator; 

instead Spielberg stages a chase sequence that involves a jeep, a motorcycle, tumbling buildings, a tank, the torrent rushing from a dam, a trained falcon, a clothesline, a crowded bazaar, and a hijacked ship making its way out to sea.  

Werth: And all of it unleashed in 3D.

Wise: The one element lacking is the emotional heft characteristic of even Spielberg's most lighthearted fare.  It's difficult to say if this is the fault of the format (although Jackson's Weta Digital seamlessly marries Hergé's elegant line with incredibly realistic detail) or the cheerful blankness of the film's everyman hero.  

Andy Serkis is both comic and touching as Tintin's tipsy but stouthearted ally Captain Haddock, and even Daniel Craig's sinister Sakharine has more emotional range.  But even if the film doesn't make audiences cry, it can still make them cheer, which is quite an accomplishment for a comic book thrown onto the screen.

Werth: I'm ready to see if Zack Snyder can make me cheer.

Wise: At least as much as you cheered for the giant, blue, naked guy in The Watchmen.

Werth: Tune in next week for more big screen heroes right here on Film Gab!

The Dark Gab

Werth: Greetings, Citizen.

Wise: Werth, I see you're in the your cape and tights again. Can I take this to mean we're going to gab about superhero movies... or should I call the men in the white coats?

Werth: Put your phone away, Wise, because in honor of the premiere of Christopher Nolan's finale to his Batman trilogy The Dark Knight Rises, I would like to give a Film Gab salute to the Caped Crusader. As early as 1943, Batman and Robin were BAM-ing and POW-ing their way through villains on the big screen in serialized shorts based on the popular DC Comics characters. 

Wise: Which were almost as popular as the Boy Wonder's shorts.  

Werth: And in 1966 the Dynamic Duo swung onto the silver screen again with Adam West and Burt Ward reprising their successful television personae along with a bevy of villainous character actors.

Wise: Particularly the sourball delights of Burgess Meredith's Penguin and Cesar Romero's Joker. 

Werth: Then Tim Burton resurrected the franchise in 1989 with his hugely successful Batman before Joel Schumacher took over with Batman Forever (1995) and Christopher Nolan gave a grittier, more realistic take to the crimefighter in 2005 with Batman Begins.

Wise: Batman's had more facelifts than Jocelyn Wildenstein. 

Werth: But the Batman movie that I'm most fond of is Burton's 1992 sequel, Batman Returns. Burton returns to Gotham City with even more visual punches than he served up in his first film. Batman (a stern Michael Keaton) is celebrating Christmas by trying to save the city from a trio of Scrooges: The Penguin (disgusting Danny DeVito), Catwoman (Michelle "Cat Nip" Pfeffier) and city power-grabber (literally) Max Schreck (a be-wigged Christopher Walken). 

Wise: Even Tiny Tim couldn't reform that crew.  

Werth: The plot is pretty silly, but what makes this film work is Burton's grasp of the mix of the dark and the fantastical—which has been one of the draws of comic books from their inception. On one hand you have The Penguin attempting to blow up the city using hundreds of adorable missle-wearing penguins, but on the other, you have two very touching origination stories. 

One about a deformed child who was tossed into the sewers by his 1% parents and the other, a lonely woman who is shoved out a window to her "death" after being taken advantage of by every man she's ever come across. The Penguin and Catwoman aren't just mean-spirited baddies—they're victims. 

Wise: I almost felt bad for them... until Halle Berry made us her victim. 

Werth: And because of comic book touches like Catwoman's hardcore, latex, fetish-wear costume, Batman Returns dances nimbly between comic-book fantasy, and dark, sexual  melodrama.  

Bo Welch's production design makes the whole thing look gorgeous, gracefully merging a snow-capped Gothic cityscape with a host of circus and carnival sideshow touches that make this film dark, but fun enough not to be taken too seriously.

Wise: Batman may be the DC star getting the most attention this summer, but for a long time the company's main attraction was the Man of Steel himself. Hollywoodland (2006) acknowledges the power of cinematic superheros, but also examines the costs in bringing these comic book champions to the screen.  The film presents a fictionalized version of the events surrounding the death of TV's first Superman George Reeves (Ben Affleck).  A second-tier actor who always seemed to be on the cusp of something bigger, Reeves became an idol to millions of 1950s children, but found that defending Truth, Justice, and the American way prevented him from being taken seriously as an actor.

Werth: Ronald Reagan had the same problem.

Wise: His champion, and lover, Toni Mannix (Diane Lane) supports him through the bad times, but also complicates his relationship to Hollywood because her husband Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins) is one of the MGM studio chiefs and his displeasure could spell disaster for Reeves career.

Werth: That's why sleeping with the boss' wife is always a bad idea... even if you're Superman.

Wise: Interlaced with scenes from Reeves' life is a second narrative following ramshackle (and entirely invented) private investigator Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) as he descends into the mysteries surrounding Reeves' death from a gunshot wound in his Beverly Hills home.  Simo has an ex-wife, a kid obsessed with the dead guy in tights, and a bad habit of being on the losing end of a fistfight.  Still, he's determined to expose the sordid underbelly of the Tinseltown in his search for the truth.

Werth: Sounds a lot like L.A. Confidential.

Wise: That's the inevitable comparison—and, most likely, Hollywoodland probably benefited from Curtis Hanson's success—but the two films are actually quite different.  Director Allen Coulter and writer Paul Bernbaum are more interested in meditating on the nature of fame and the need to be heroic in private life than in the double backing plot twists that makes Confidential such an entertaining thriller.  

What both films do have in common, besides their period and setting, are great performances: Diane Lane is amazing as a woman well aware of her shelf life and determined to make the most of it; 

Ben Affleck mostly tamps down his tendency toward glibness and reveals the sorrows of a man who playacts the dreams of others while unable to achieve his own; and Bob Hoskins snacks on the scenery as an exalted thug with a tender spot for beauty.

Werth: I notice you're not mentioning Brody.

Wise: Brody does fine work here, although his sections feel a bit overlarded with incident.  Films with parallel plots are difficult to balance, especially when one half is much more compelling than the other, as is the case here with Reeves, or when the normally delightful Amy Adams ran smack onto a Meryl Streep juggernaut.

Werth: It's hard to make duos work. Luckily neither you nor I are Meryl Streep.

Wise: Tune in next week for more Film Gab from blogdom's Dynamic Duo!

The Big Screen in The Sky

Yesterday marked the passing of someone who experienced Old Hollywood from a child's-eye view. Jackie Cooper was only 7 years old when he first starred in Fox Movietone Follies of 1929. A budding childhood star, he became a regular cast member of the beloved Our Gang shorts and earned his first and only Oscar nomination for the 1931 film, Skippy. He would later go on to fight in WWII in the South Pacific and enjoyed a healthy television career before he got the role that introduced him to a younger generation as the irascible Perry White in the Superman movies. The loss of Cooper and his peers is devastating in that their firsthand knowledge of Hollywood "legend" is priceless. Cooper's story about how director Norman Taurog threatened to kill Cooper's dog so that he could get him to cry during a scene is a prime example of how we must record the stories of those that are still left from the Golden Age of Hollywood in order to preserve that unique history.

For more on Jackie, check out Steve Vaught's brilliant blog: http://paradiseleased.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/a-real-champ-jackie-cooper/

The Big Screen in The Sky

Yesterday we said farewell to lovely British actress Susannah York. Combining beautiful features with sexy and smart performances, York was one of the most recognizable actresses of the 60's and 70's. In a film career that spanned 50 years, she starred in Oscar®-winning films like Tom Jones (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), controversial dramas like The Killing of Sister George (1968), and earned her own Oscar® nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the Sydney Pollack film adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969). In 1978 she made the excellent crime thriller The Silent Partner (excellent in good part because Christopher Plummer does old lady drag) and became immortal to little comic-book obsessed boys everywhere when she played Superman's mom in Richard Donner's Superman. Susannah York was 72.