My Superman
Because I was up for this gig. Along with ten thousand other writers, I’m sure. Jiminy, thing was in development for 19 years, they must have asked everyone on the planet at least once.
Anyway, I never got to the pitch stage (wait a minute, I wasn’t up for this gig after all — I was up for Batman vs. Superman — so this idea never would have worked anyway –)
Anyway, I had this idea. And now that the official WB/DC approved movie is out, I know that they’ll never do my idea. But I still think it’s a great idea and here I share it with you.
The executive I spoke with at WB was interested, of course, in “re-inventing” Superman. So I set my mind to that task and came up with this.
WHAT DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ABOUT HIMSELF? Superman knows that he is the Last Son of Krypton. He knows that his father, Jor-El, was a scientist who predicted that Krypton would explode, and that Jor-El stuck him in a rocket-ship and sent him to Earth where he could be safe. More than safe, actually. Jor-El did all this because he loved him so much.
HOW DOES SUPERMAN KNOW ALL THIS? Well, in the 1978 picture, young Clark finds a glowing green crystal in the barn and takes it, logically enough, to the Arctic, where he throws it in the water and it grows into a crystal palace. And Jor-El comes on in a hologram projector thing and tells young Clark about all this.
Okay. Here’s the pitch. What if — oh, how screenwriters love sentences that begin with “What if — “
WHAT IF JOR-EL IS LYING? What if everything that Jor-El puts in his message to Clark is a lie? What if Kal-El is not the last son of Krypton, what if Jor-El was not a scientist, what if Krypton did not explode, what if Jor-El isn’t even Superman’s father?
Well, why would he lie to young Clark like that? Because Jor-El killed Superman’s father. Because Superman’s father was the Wise and Good King of Krypton, and Jor-El killed him, and put his son in a rocket-ship and sent him off to God knows where, and put this message in the green crystal tucked inside the blanket on the rocket-ship so that Kal-El would never come looking for him. He put on this act of being such a kind father, such a loving father, all so that dumb little Kal-El would never think to go back home, looking for Krypton, to find that Jor-El is, in fact, an evil usurper who is running the planet into the ground.
Which, in fact, is what has occurred. Jor-El, like our own president Bush, is an evil, greedy dictator, always using up more, more, more. And he’s been gradually taking over other planets, spreading his evil all over the galaxy. He’s got an army millions of soldiers strong, always expanding his influence, Rome-like, across the universe.
And now he’s gotten to Earth.
And Superman finds out (somehow) that Jor-El is still alive. He intercepts a space-telegram or something. And he goes out to the moon or something to meet up with his beloved Daddy and there’s Jor-El with a whole army of soldiers, and THEY’RE ALL SUPER. And they fight Superman on the moon, grab him, shove him down, ram a piece of Kryptonite into his mouth and take off for Earth, to kill everyone on the planet and turn it into another Kryptonian outpost.
And Superman has to do something about that. Because he finally realizes, after a lifetime of misplaced, mopey homesickness, that he’s not a Kryptonian. He’s an Earthling.
It’s The Chalk Circle all over again.
Anyway, so that was my idea. When the Bryan Singer picture got greenlit, I knew it was dead, but I brought it up to a friend at DC once because I thought it would make a good “Elseworlds” series. His eyebrows shot up to a fair distance above his head when I got to the big twist, but he said it went “too far” in re-writing the Superman ethos and that they weren’t doing the “Elseworlds” stories any more.
So there you have it. I have another story that involves Batman, Superman and a surprise twist, but maybe I’ll save that for the next issue of Bizarro.
Xmen: The Last Stand
I dunno, I loved it. Am I crazy?
I know there are many out there who found this movie sadly lacking. I’m not sure what they were expecting.
Maybe all the bad reviews lowered my expectations, but I had a whale of a time. Feel free to tell me why you didn’t like it.
And, just so no one’s hands are tied, SPOILER ALERT.
UPDATE: It seems that a lot of people, not so much here as elsewhere on the internet, hate Brett Ratner. Is there something I’m missing? Did he kill someone’s father? Many people, it seems, went into the movie already hating it because it was Ratner instead of Bryan Singer, as though Singer is some kind of dynamic Francis Coppola-level visionary and Ratner is some kind of soulless Guy Hamilton-level hack. ‘Sup with that?
Beetlejuice, Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
WARNING: Massive spoilers.
I rented these three movies to study their approaches to production design, but ended up watching them for a completely different reason.
All three are, of course, Tim Burton movies. And all Tim Burton movies are about a collision between the “real world” and an irrational individual, whether that individual is Edward Scissorhands, Jack Skellington or Tim Roth’s character in Planet of the Apes.
I started with Charlie then worked my way backwards, for no particular reason.
I had no trouble recognizing Willy Wonka as the typical Tim Burton protagonist, the artist who cannot live alongside society. He builds himself a world of his imagination, shuts out the “real world” and eventually loses himself inside his creation. He is saved by the intervention of a child who shares his passion and reconnects him with society, but on their own terms. At the end of Charlie, pointedly, Charlie’s family and their house has been moved inside the chocolate factory. Willy Wonka has not, after all, rejoined society; rather, he has brought a family into his own demented reality.
Charlie is, of course, most handsomely designed, but then I wonder. The design of Batman was, in 1989, such an all-encompassing, overwhelming shock that it pushed aside a number of narrative problems that the movie has. I wonder if, fifteen years from now, Charlie will look like Batman looks today.
Because Batman looks, well, it doesn’t bad, but it does look really dated and really, really cheap.
Ridley Scott mentions that he had it rain all the time in Blade Runner to disguise the fact that all his streets were backlot constructions. Tim Burton didn’t take his thinking that far, or else he wanted to emphasize his sets’ artificiality, because boy they look artificial. What in 1989 seemed like a design triumph now looks cramped, overstuffed, cheap and fake. The extensive miniature work looks obvious, mismatched and awkward, Jack Nicholson’s makeup looks crude and unforgiving.
By the standards of today’s superhero movies, the plot makes very little sense. The Joker has no plan, he just tries a bunch of stuff. Batman almost kills him, so he decides to poison Gotham City. He falls passionately in love with Vicki Vale for no particular reason, then destroys some art, then stages a parade, where he plans to gas thousands.
Beloved characters with fifty years of history behind them, like Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, are turned into stock Hollywood types with no affinity for the originals, while ciphers like Alexander Knox and Vicki Vale and Bob the Goon are given major screen time. (I have never read an issue of Batman with any of these characters in them.) By the standards of something like X-Men or Batman Begins or Spider-Man or Sin City, there is very little respect for the source material at all.
But as a Tim Burton movie, Batman works reasonably well. The design is extensive, but doesn’t look particularly Burtonesque by today’s standards. Batman looks nothing like Corpse Bride or Sleepy Hollow or even Batman Returns.
So I watched Batman feeling a little disappointed, but then I watched Beetlejuice and it all fell into place.
Beetlejuice, aside from being the comedy version of The Others, is, amazingly, almost the same movie as Batman. The title character is, essentially, the exact same character as The Joker, with the same sense of humor, the same unbridled lust and even a similar makeup job. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis have to rid their house of Beetlejuice just as Batman has to rid Gotham City of The Joker. Burton even cast Michael Keaton in both films, and it’s as if Batman and the Joker are really just two sides of the same personality. Bruce Wayne is also Batman, and is also the Joker. Bruce Wayne can’t deal with society and so becomes Batman, but his anger and self-loathing surfaces as the Joker and his nonsensical destruction.
There! If that’s not dimestore Freudianism, I don’t know what is. Excuse me, I’m going to go smoke a cigar while driving a train through a tunnel now.
Beetlejuice and the Joker (and, I realize now) Willy Wonka are all irrational creatures. (There’s at least one of these characters in every Tim Burton movie, but these are the three I watched today.)
Joker’s plans may be scattershot but Beetlejuice’s makes no sense whatsoever. Beetlejuice wants to get out of some kind of purgatory (represented by Alec Baldwin’s tabletop town model). It is explained that he can only get out if you say his name three times. Then it turns out he’s able to get out anyway. Then it’s revealed that he can only get out if he marries a living person, so he decides to force marriage upon Winona Ryder. Similarly, love seems almost beside the point to Batman/Joker’s plans, and positively repellant to Willy Wonka.
These movies are all about the irrational. When people ask Willy Wonka about his absurd creations, he responds as if he doesn’t quite understand them himself, as if he’s as amazed as you are at their existence (either that or he responds as if they are the most rational things in the world and you are an idiot for questioning him). Wonka’s creations (in Burton’s movie anyway, it’s been a while since I read the book) don’t make any sense, they simply are. As Charlie says in the movie (I’m paraphrasing) “It doesn’t have to make sense, that’s why it’s candy.”