Tag Archives: hurt feelings

Episode 5: Hulk

Hulk,

Podcast friends: I’ve got a great new episode for you this week, as Ryan Steans from the Signal Watch returns to discuss Hulk, the 2003 Ang Lee/Eric Bana film about how hard it is to blow up frogs for a living. The film is entirely populated by furious people, and in this episode, you’ll see what kind of effect that has on our personal outlooks.

You don’t have to actually watch Hulk in order to enjoy the podcast episode, and in fact it might work out better for you to avoid it. We walk through the movie and give you all the context you need to appreciate this absolutely terrible and unintentionally amusing mess of a movie.

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible, Stitcher and lots of other places. Come check it out!

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Superman II 1.98: Here We Go Again

Superman II, , , ,

Mission accomplished!

After several harrowing showdowns with the forces of evil, Superman has liberated the Earth, returning all government, military and law enforcement power to the same people who had it before, which is obviously the right thing to do, and not something that anyone will regret later on.

Of course, there are some unfortunate aftereffects. There’s all the wear and tear on Mount Rushmore, for one thing, and a bunch of repair work that needs to be done around the Daily Planet building in Metropolis. Besides that, the world is going to have to figure out how to develop a new approach to global politics and international security, so that three mean people can’t take over the entire planet by blowing up a couple of monuments.

Most significantly, Lois Lane has sustained significant character growth, which will force her to make some difficult choices. She’s been following a dream that can’t come true, and understanding that truth, while painful, will ultimately help her to break out of an unproductive pattern and find a new path forward in life. So obviously we’re going to need to put a stop to that.

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Superman 1.98: Turn the World Around

Superman: The Movie, , , ,

Lois Lane is dead.

Now, you and I know that this is a comic book movie, and in superhero comics and other soap opera narratives, almost nobody dies permanently. Superman died in 1992, Spider-Man died in 2013, Wolverine died in 2014, and here in 2022, DC has just announced that in an upcoming issue of Justice League, they’re going to kill off all of their popular superheroes, and Zatanna. They always come back.

But Superman was the first comic book movie, and they hadn’t established any ground rules yet. The film has been ping-ponging from one genre to another, including psychedelic space opera, screwball comedy and James Bond villainy, and over the last ten minutes, it’s taken a strong swerve into disaster movie.

And if you watch 1970s disaster movies — The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno — then you know that there’s always one personable character who gets sacrificed, in service of the drama.

And Lois Lane is dead.

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Superman 1.38: Unattainable You

Superman: The Movie,

Clark Kent sits down at his new desk on the first day of his new job, and he looks across the tangle of typewriters at the woman that he loves, as of three minutes ago, and for all time.

We’re at the point in Superman: The Movie where the film starts building a new, updated version of the Clark/Lois/Superman love triangle, and we’re going to get into that soon, I promise. But first I want to look at what that relationship has been so far, to set the stage for later discussion about how things work in this 1978 romantic reboot.

Yesterday, I talked about the first few years of the Lois/Clark dynamic, and how they figured out that it wasn’t story-productive to have two lead characters who couldn’t carry on a conversation for more than a couple panels. Today, I want to broaden that view to look at how the Superman/Lois relationship progressed over the next few decades, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to outsource it.

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