Tag Archives: soap opera

Superman III 4.30: As the World Turns

Superman III, , ,

“Whoa, Dwight, slow down!” urges Morgan Edge, president of Galaxy Communications, to a high-school age visitor that he is inexplicably responsible for. “Kent may be smooth-as-vanilla on the air, but off-camera he’s no electric thrill!”

Dwight Decker is a member of his school’s journalism club, who’s traveled sixty miles to Metropolis for an interview with Clark Kent. He hasn’t tried to contact Clark before this; he just showed up at WGBS in the hope of grabbing a few minutes with his news idol.

“Mr. Kent — you and I need to rap!” Dwight cries, sighting his prey down the hall. But when he turns the corner, Mr. Kent has vanished, still unrapped. In the next issue, Dwight tries hanging around outside Clark’s apartment building, but is disappointed once again.

You may be wondering what role Dwight has to play in the ongoing saga of Superman’s comic book adventures. The answer is: none at all.

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Swamp Thing 3.11: Interruptus

Swamp Thing, ,

I suppose I’m just a romantic old fool, really, but I like to see the young people enjoying themselves. They’re standing in a crowded corner of a stifling set in South Carolina, surrounded by nonsensical movie biology and running out of money with every tick of the clock, but right now — just for this moment — Swamp Thing is an appealing movie.

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Superman II 2.6: Gone Out the Window

Superman II, ,

And then she goes ahead and throws herself out of the goddamn window just to prove a point, and that is what I love about specifically Richard Donner’s version of specifically Margot Kidder as Lois Lane.

At the end of last week, I told you about the Donner Cut, a 2006 effort to reclaim the Superman II footage that Richard Donner shot during the production of the first movie. He’d finished about 80% of the film before the Salkinds fired him, and while some of that footage remains in the theatrical cut, there was a lot that was reshot by the new director, so the Donner Cut assembles the material in an approximation of what the film could have been like, if he’d completed it.

For the most part, it’s not that different from the theatrical release, unless you watch them side by side. There are only three scenes in the Donner Cut that I think are really essential to understanding the development of the film: the beginning, the ending, and the honeymoon hotel discovery sequence. Not coincidentally, all of them are about Lois.

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Superman 1.37: The Invention of Lois Lane

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Okay, listen up, everybody, because we’ve got a lot to do today, and we don’t have time for side chatter.

We’ve reached the Metropolis section of Superman: The Movie, so that means we’ve got a live Lois Lane on our hands, and for the rest of this week, we’re going to drill down into who this captivating and terrifying woman is, how she works, and what we’re going to do about her.

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