Parker Posey inspired by boring, outdated character for her new Superman Returns character.
By Burbanked on Apr 5, 2006 in Movies | 802 views |
We’re feeling pretty good with what Bryan Singer’s franchise jump-starter Superman Returns has been showing so far. That well-made teaser with John Williams’ classic score and Brando speaking from the Great Beyond was absolutely stirring - but because we tend toward the bitter and cynical, allow us for just a moment to let the Angry Movie Dork© run free.
Parker Posey, speaking in a brief interview with SCI FI Wire, draws similarities between her Superman Returns character Kitty Kowalski and Eve Teschmacher from Richard Donner’s Superman, including:
- Kitty is Lex Luthor’s girlfriend, just like Teschmacher.
- She gets to wear stylish clothes. Like Teschmacher (well, it was 1978).
- The character is “less evil than one would expect”; “into pretty things and money”; and “has a change of heart” when Lex wants to take over the world.
Well, gosh, we sure appreciate all these loving homages to Donner’s film, but is it really important to “reimagine” even the bad parts? Shall we expect Lex Luthor to have a bumbling, moronic sidekick with his own bring-the-movie-to-a-screeching-halt antics (complete with soundtrack theme)? Is Kevin Spacey going to play the over-the-top villain as if he’s in another movie than everyone else?
And not to get sidetracked too much, but can someone maybe explain why exactly Lex Luthor needs a girlfriend?
Certainly one cannot disrespect Bryan Singer’s taste in material and directorial aesthetic. The man knows his way around a superhero movie and is clearly capable of envisioning the genre with a serious, real-world touch.
But let’s hope that he knows where to draw the line in paying tribute to Donner’s film. And let’s also hope that line is somewhere far short of the scene where a wise, shimmering, and badly CGI’d apparition of Christopher Reeve hands over the glowing Krypton crystal to a wide-eyed and humble Brandon Routh as the music swells and the camera cranes up, up and away.
Unfortunately, somewhere in Burbank, a Warner Bros. development executive just had the exact same thought about “how to punch up the beginning of the third act”.
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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