• [REVIEW] Re-evaluating SUPERGIRL (1984)

    From christopherl bennett@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jan 30 10:11:31 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films XPost: rec.arts.movies.reviews

    I hadnt planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and
    Ilya Salkinds Superman film series (including the Donner films, the
    theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series got me interested in revisiting the movie particularly after reading this defense of the film on The Mary
    Sue not long ago, which argued that it worked as an unapologetic Silver Age story, basically the same mindset that let me enjoy Superman III.

    Now, my prior impression of the Supergirl movie, which was written by David Odell (The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal) and directed by Jeannot Szwarc
    (whos since gone on to direct many episodes of Smallville and six of
    Heroes), was not much kinder than my prior impression of the Superman movies.
    I remembered thinking Helen Slater looked great and was reasonably good in
    the role, and I remembered loving the Jerry Goldsmith score, but I also remembered finding it rather silly and resenting the way that Supergirl got stuck with a love-triangle plot while her male counterpart got to save the world. Lets see how that holds up.

    First off, Goldsmiths score is still fantastic. I think I need to get the
    CD. Its very much in the vein of John Williamss Superman work (which was in turn an elaboration on the earlier Superman themes of Sammy Timberg and Leon Klatzkin and just the general heroic-march tradition), but its also very
    much a classic Goldsmith score, with many of his trademarks including the use of novel electronic sounds to supplement the gorgeously arranged orchestra. I also quite like the main title sequence created by Derek Meddings, with reflective titles swooping through the mists and bright lights flashing off them. Its the kind of title treatment that would soon go on to become a
    garish cliche of computer-animated titles, but it was done live with actual reflective cutouts, which gives it a much greater elegance. Though the film
    has some weak effects (like a couple of really blatant jump cuts), it also
    has some spectacular ones, particularly Meddingss superb work with a moving camera and a glass painting to represent the villainess Selenas fortress in the climax.

    The film opens in Argo City, evidently created by Peter OTooles inventor Zaltar as an extradimensional artists colony of sorts, much more inviting
    and organic than the sterile, jagged crystals of Donners Krypton. Its never explained whether it was created/moved to inner space as a means of
    escaping Kryptons destruction or if it was already there and happened to survive as a result. Anyway, Slaters Kara Zor-El, a favorite of the iconoclastic Zaltar, is girlish and a bit gawky, a convincing teenager even though she was around 20 at the time. She has a nice rapport with OToole,
    but it all goes wrong when their playing around with the Omegahedron (one of Argo Citys two power sources, Zaltar says, though the identity of the second is evidently lost to editing) causes it to be ejected into space, endangering the citys survival. (That second power source must not be all that
    impressive, then.) Kara hijacks the pod Zaltar had made to travel to Earth (where her cousin Superman lives) in order to pursue the Omegahedron and
    bring it back, while Zaltar gamely sentences himself to the Phantom Zone for his crime. Technically its as much Karas fault as his, and I like it that
    the film sets her up with a strong motive to correct her mistake, although it unfortuntely forgets it almost immediately.

    After a trip through the lava lamp dimension, Kara somehow emerges from the
    pod in Supergirl costume, and the coltish teenager has somehow given way to a graceful and lovely young woman, just by a change of hairstyle, clothes, and manner. Slaters eyes are just extraordinary perfect for Supergirl and convincing as Christopher Reeves cousin, and just plain compelling to look
    at. And the design of the Supergirl costume is fantastic.

    As Supergirl discovers her powers on Earth, we get the lengthy aerial
    ballet, which is just beautiful, a charming sequence as Kara revels in what she can do and the beauty of the new world shes entered. Its fittingly
    named, as Slaters flying technique is more balletic than Reeves, more like swimming through the air, with arms out to the sides and one knee bent. Its different, but it works for her. Later, she rather randomly adopts the
    identity of girls school resident Linda Lee, and apparently has the same
    power as Lynda Carters Wonder Woman to change into any desired outfit instantaneously, except she does it by passing behind things rather than spinning. This includes the ability to change from blonde to brunette as
    well, and again, she looks very different as Linda. Performance-wise,
    allowing for the fact that this was her debut role, I think she did a
    terrific job, creating a mostly strong and expressive character who was also young and innocent. Shes particularly good in her scenes with OToole in the Phantom Zone, exhorting him to get out of his self-flagellating funk and help her escape. I wouldve loved to see her mature in the role in later movies.

    Most of the films cast is terrific. The villains consist of Faye Dunaway as Selena, an ambitious novice witch who gains great power from the Omegahedron and uses it in pursuit of conquest; Brenda Vaccaro as her roommate/sidekick Bianca; and Peter Cook as Nigel, the mentor in black magic who craves her but whom she tosses over in favor of the Omegahedrons power. Theyre all
    extremely good, particularly Vaccaro, who shows great comedic flair. (Useless fact: When this movie first came out, I knew Vaccaro mainly from The Pride of Jesse Hallam, a TV movie that was filmed at the high school I then attended.
    I dont think I ever saw her in person, though. I was too shy to audition for
    a role as an extra.)

    Maureen Teefy also does a good job as Lindas roommate, who coincidentally happens to be Lucy Lane, sister of Lois and girlfriend of Jimmy Olsen (with Marc McClure reprising his role from the other films and not really doing much). Lucys main role in the comics was to be the most mean-spirited and disapproving girlfriend in history (for some reason, Silver Age DC love interests tended to be thoroughly awful toward the male leads), but here
    shes basically a mini-Lois, sassy and fearless, with much of the same spirit as Margot Kidders Lois. In one of the films big set pieces involving a magically controlled runaway construction vehicle, Lucy throws herself into danger to try to take control of it, while Kara/Linda just stands around
    doing nothing for two or three minutes to let the action play out a major logic hole, and far from the only one in the film. Lucy is knocked
    unconscious in the process, and Supergirl rather callously abandons her in order to rescue the male lead from the vehicle.

    Unfortunately, that male lead, Hart Bochner as the love interest Ethan, is
    by far the most awful part of the film. The attempt at a love story is atrocious. Ethan is a total non-entity, just eye candy until Selena decides
    to cast a love spell on him to test it as a tool for control and hes thoroughly unpleasant and abrasive in his first dialogue scene, up to the
    point where she slips him the potion. Its supposed to make him love the
    first person he sees, but he staggers off and wanders through town for a good ten minutes, then gets caught up by the construction vehicle and needs to be rescued by Supergirl, all somehow without actually looking at anyone until Supergirl randomly changes to Linda after the rescue. Then hes in love
    with Linda for the rest of the movie, and though Kara/Linda initially discourages him, she ends up sort of falling for him which is deeply creepy considering the non-consensual angle to his participation in the story. Which is balanced by the fact that shes evidently underage, so neither participant is really in a position to consent. Its creepy and wrong for both of them.
    The fact that hes shown to be still in love with Linda after the spell
    breaks doesnt ameliorate it any, because that love is totally unmotivated; Supergirl even points out that he doesnt know a thing about Linda. Plus Bochner is a dull, unappealing actor and his character has no discernible personality. I suppose thats sort of a counterpoint to the way female love interests were often portrayed in male-led action movies vacuous, personality-free eye candy existing only to be romantically available to the hero so perhaps one could read a certain satirical statement into it if one desired. But I doubt that was the intent, and it doesnt do much to
    ameliorate the unpleasantness of the character and the storyline. The most annoying thing is that Kara pretty much spills her secret identity to him because she cant resist kissing him as Supergirl. Superman gets to keep his secret to himself, but Supergirl spills it to the first guy who turns her
    head? Okay, that could be chalked up to her youth and inexperience, but it feels a bit gendered, in terms of who has the control and power advantage in the relationship.

    Still, I have to admit, the movie is less centered on the love triangle than
    I thought. Supergirl and Selena are fighting over Ethan, but Selenas interested in Ethan more as a trophy and a pawn than anything else, and as a way to manipulate and hurt Supergirl. Her agenda really is world conquest,
    and she gains the power to pull it off. So, even though the romantic angle is terrible, it isnt quite as demeaning as reducing Supergirl to a petty love triangle while Superman gets to save the world. The stakes really are global and the villainess quite dangerous, once she gets the hang of her powers. In terms of potential for global domination, Selena easily rivals Zod and surpasses Lex Luthor and Ross Webster. Which makes sense, since shes getting
    a power boost from Kryptonian technology. (Which is perhaps amplified in its power on Earth just as everything else from Krypton is, by the logic of Silver/Bronze Age comics. When she first touches it, it seems to bond with
    her as a child of the Sun the same yellow star that empowers Superman and Supergirl.) True, that threat is more potential than actually demonstrated;
    we only get one scene of the townsfolk protesting her evil reign without any real portrayal of its effects. But I was clearly wrong to believe Selenas goals were limited to stealing Supergirls boy toy.

    Selenas fusion of magic and Kryptonian technology even allows her to banish Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, the first time in the series that we see what the Zone is like on the inside, and its a pretty dark and grungy place. (A brighter version of the Zone would later be depicted in Smallville, but never in an episode directed by Szwarc.) The problem is that getting out of it is implausibly easy. Sure, the way out involves risking a deadly maelstrom to which Zaltar sacrifices himself to help Kara, but still, given that onscreen evidence suggests a roughly 50 percent survival rate, youd think Kryptons criminals would be braving the rift all the time and periodically succeeding
    in their escapes. My personal rationalization is that the rift was only
    created when Zod, Non, and Ursa were blown out of the Zone in Superman II (either version), and maybe Zaltar was the first to discover it.

    Its in these climactic sequences that Slaters mostly strong performance as Kara is undermined. Twice, once in the Phantom Zone escape and once when battling Selenas final-boss demon, Supergirl is overcome with despair and whines I cant! until Zaltar encourages her and gives her the confidence to go on (in the flesh the first time, Obi-Wan-style later). Again, this could perhaps be attributed to her youth, but it feels like the movie was saying a mere female couldnt succeed without borrowing strength from a man. (And its one attempt to show any kind of girl power message is in questionable
    taste, as she fends off a couple of truckers who randomly sexually harass
    her, implicitly with rape in mind; and though she thrashes them handily, theyre played more as figures of humor than menace. One of them is a young Matt Frewer, in what is not one of the finer roles of his career.)

    The ending is also kind of arbitrary. Since the filmmakers evidently wanted
    the Superman and Supergirl films to stand more or less independently of each other (or at least decided they did after Christopher Reeve bowed out of appearing in Supergirl), the film ends with Kara getting Lucy and Jimmy to promise to tell no one about her. Really? Dont tell Superman that hes not
    the last son of Krypton, that his cousin, uncle Zor-El, aunt Alura, and hundreds of other Kryptonians are alive and well in inner space? That is
    just so not cool. Its also unbelievable that she could keep her existence a secret, given her public appearances in the city fighting Selenas attacks.

    All told, its a film with a lot of flaws and plot holes and an absolutely horrible excuse for a love story, but theres still a lot that works, at
    least by the turn-off-your-brain Silver-Age standards of the series. Its reasonably well-made, and it has great music and good costume design (by Emma Porteous, who did several Bond films, Clash of the Titans, Aliens, and season
    2 of Space: 1999). Bochner aside, it has one of the strongest casts of any of the Salkind Super-movies, and Helen Slater is a worthy addition to the Kryptonian family.

    Indeed, Kara herself is a terrific character shes intelligent, adaptable,
    a problem-solver. She spends much of the movie actively searching for the Omegahedron, even plotting out search grids on a map at one point. The sense
    of urgency she should have about rescuing Argo City is missing, and she does tend to get easily distracted by schoolgirl antics and creepily wrong
    romance, but those are flaws in the writing and direction, and perhaps can be somewhat attributed to her youth. Indeed, in a sense, they underline her inquisitive nature. Superman grew up on Earth, but to Kara, its an alien planet and shes got too lively a mind to resist exploring its novelties.

    Anyway, even with the flaws in execution, whats intriguing about the premise is that Supergirl is one of the few screen superheroes whos actually the protagonist of her movie. As my friend David Mack recently pointed out in his comments on Mad Max: Fury Road, a hero and a protagonist are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. The protagonist of a story is the character whose action or pursuit of a goal drives the narrative, and the antagonist is the
    one countering the protagonists actions. Usually in superhero stories, its the villain whos actively pursuing a goal (such as world conquest) and the hero whos reactively trying to thwart them, so generally the villain is the protagonist. Thats certainly true of the first three Superman films. And in
    a sense, Selena fills the classic villain-protagonist role, since shes pursuing the goal of conquering the world and Supergirl has to stop her. But Selenas powers are merely a side effect of Karas mistake in losing the Omegahedron, and Kara is the one who sets the story in motion both by making that mistake and by going to Earth in order to correct it. Shes the one
    trying to retrieve the Omegahedron while Selena thwarts her efforts with
    magic. And shes the one who motivates Zaltar to help her while hes content
    to wallow in despair. So shes the primary protagonist of the film. It makes her a nicely proactive and motivated heroine, and is a real strength of the film, despite its constant efforts to undermine itself.

    In sum, I have to conclude that, like the other Superman films that preceded it, Supergirl is not that bad, and is in fact rather fun to watch if
    approached in the right spirit. (Although the same does not go for the film that followed it, The Quest for Peace. Dont expect me to change my mind
    about that one.)

    Helen Slater has gone on to play several other DC characters. She was the
    voice of Talia al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, and played Clark
    Kents Kryptonian mother Lara Lor-Van (billed as Lara-El) in Smallville. And shes appearing in the upcoming CBS Supergirl series as Sylvia Danvers,
    Karas adoptive mother on Earth (opposite Lois and Clarks Dean Cain as
    Karas adoptive father). Hart Bochner also returned to DC, playing Councilman Reeves in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Marc McClure, in addition to playing Jimmy Olsen in four other films, played Kryptonian scientist Dax-Ur in Smallville. Matt Frewers extensive career is surprisingly light on DC roles, but he did a memorable turn as Sid the Squid in Batman: The Animated Seriess The Man Who Killed Batman, as well as playing Moloch in the Watchmen
    feature film.

    Its a shame that Slater didnt get the chance to play Supergirl again, since she was really good at it. It might be a stretch to say that playing Supergirls mother on the upcoming series is the next best thing, but its something, and I look forward to it. I hope the new series manages to make
    Kara a comparably strong, charming, and proactive character, while avoiding
    the films many failings.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From hector@21:1/5 to All on Sat Feb 15 15:11:52 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    On 15/02/2020 3:05 PM, anim8rfsk wrote:
    Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:49:34 -0700 hector<bobble@there.com> wrote:

    [REVIEW] Re-evaluating SUPERGIRL (1984)
    hector<bobble@there.com>
    February 14, 2020 at 8:49:34 PM MST

    On 31/01/2020 2:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:
    I hadn’t planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and
    Ilya Salkind’s Superman film series (including the Donner films, the
    theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the >>> pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series

    Confusing thing to say. I stopped watching Supergirl after season 2
    because of the ideological use they were making of the show. Which they
    admit to pursuing even more if you watch those extras at the conventions
    on the blurays.
    Another series?
    I saw the Supergirl movie when it came out and on DVD, it's alright I guess. >> Helen Slater plays her foster mother in the series.
    And Dean Cain plays her foster father in it.

    They killed him off for being a Republican *years* ago.


    A lot of busy posting pro Trump celebrities on twitter.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From anim8rfsk@21:1/5 to bobble@there.com on Fri Feb 14 21:05:52 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    Fri, 14 Feb 2020 20:49:34 -0700 hector<bobble@there.com> wrote:

    [REVIEW] Re-evaluating SUPERGIRL (1984)
    hector<bobble@there.com>
    February 14, 2020 at 8:49:34 PM MST

    On 31/01/2020 2:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:
    I hadn’t planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and
    Ilya Salkind’s Superman film series (including the Donner films, the theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series

    Confusing thing to say. I stopped watching Supergirl after season 2
    because of the ideological use they were making of the show. Which they
    admit to pursuing even more if you watch those extras at the conventions
    on the blurays.
    Another series?
    I saw the Supergirl movie when it came out and on DVD, it's alright I guess. Helen Slater plays her foster mother in the series.
    And Dean Cain plays her foster father in it.

    They killed him off for being a Republican *years* ago.

    --
    Join your old RAT friends at
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1688985234647266/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From hector@21:1/5 to christopherl bennett on Sat Feb 15 14:49:34 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    On 31/01/2020 2:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:
    I hadn’t planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s Superman film series (including the Donner films, the theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series

    Confusing thing to say. I stopped watching Supergirl after season 2
    because of the ideological use they were making of the show. Which they
    admit to pursuing even more if you watch those extras at the conventions
    on the blurays.
    Another series?
    I saw the Supergirl movie when it came out and on DVD, it's alright I guess. Helen Slater plays her foster mother in the series.
    And Dean Cain plays her foster father in it.

    got me interested in revisiting
    the movie — particularly after reading this defense of the film on The Mary Sue not long ago, which argued that it worked as an unapologetic Silver Age story, basically the same mindset that let me enjoy Superman III.

    Now, my prior impression of the Supergirl movie, which was written by David Odell (The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal) and directed by Jeannot Szwarc (who’s since gone on to direct many episodes of Smallville and six of Heroes), was not much kinder than my prior impression of the Superman movies. I remembered thinking Helen Slater looked great and was reasonably good in the role, and I remembered loving the Jerry Goldsmith score, but I also remembered finding it rather silly and resenting the way that Supergirl got stuck with a love-triangle plot while her male counterpart got to save the world. Let’s see how that holds up.

    First off, Goldsmith’s score is still fantastic. I think I need to get the CD. It’s very much in the vein of John Williams’s Superman work (which was in
    turn an elaboration on the earlier Superman themes of Sammy Timberg and Leon Klatzkin and just the general heroic-march tradition), but it’s also very much a classic Goldsmith score, with many of his trademarks including the use of novel electronic sounds to supplement the gorgeously arranged orchestra. I also quite like the main title sequence created by Derek Meddings, with reflective titles swooping through the mists and bright lights flashing off them. It’s the kind of title treatment that would soon go on to become a garish cliche of computer-animated titles, but it was done live with actual reflective cutouts, which gives it a much greater elegance. Though the film has some weak effects (like a couple of really blatant jump cuts), it also has some spectacular ones, particularly Meddings’s superb work with a moving
    camera and a glass painting to represent the villainess Selena’s fortress in
    the climax.

    The film opens in Argo City, evidently created by Peter O’Toole’s inventor
    Zaltar as an extradimensional artists’ colony of sorts, much more inviting and organic than the sterile, jagged crystals of Donner’s Krypton. It’s never
    explained whether it was created/moved to “inner space” as a means of escaping Krypton’s destruction or if it was already there and happened to survive as a result. Anyway, Slater’s Kara Zor-El, a favorite of the iconoclastic Zaltar, is girlish and a bit gawky, a convincing teenager even though she was around 20 at the time. She has a nice rapport with O’Toole, but it all goes wrong when their playing around with the Omegahedron (one of Argo City’s two power sources, Zaltar says, though the identity of the second
    is evidently lost to editing) causes it to be ejected into space, endangering the city’s survival. (That second power source must not be all that impressive, then.) Kara hijacks the pod Zaltar had made to travel to Earth (where her cousin Superman lives) in order to pursue the Omegahedron and bring it back, while Zaltar gamely sentences himself to the Phantom Zone for his crime. Technically it’s as much Kara’s fault as his, and I like it that
    the film sets her up with a strong motive to correct her mistake, although it unfortuntely forgets it almost immediately.

    After a trip through the lava lamp dimension, Kara somehow emerges from the pod in Supergirl costume, and the coltish teenager has somehow given way to a graceful and lovely young woman, just by a change of hairstyle, clothes, and manner. Slater’s eyes are just extraordinary — perfect for Supergirl and convincing as Christopher Reeve’s cousin, and just plain compelling to look at. And the design of the Supergirl costume is fantastic.

    As Supergirl discovers her powers on Earth, we get the lengthy “aerial ballet,” which is just beautiful, a charming sequence as Kara revels in what
    she can do and the beauty of the new world she’s entered. It’s fittingly named, as Slater’s flying technique is more balletic than Reeve’s, more like
    swimming through the air, with arms out to the sides and one knee bent. It’s
    different, but it works for her. Later, she rather randomly adopts the identity of girls’ school resident Linda Lee, and apparently has the same power as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman to change into any desired outfit instantaneously, except she does it by passing behind things rather than spinning. This includes the ability to change from blonde to brunette as well, and again, she looks very different as Linda. Performance-wise, allowing for the fact that this was her debut role, I think she did a terrific job, creating a mostly strong and expressive character who was also young and innocent. She’s particularly good in her scenes with O’Toole in the
    Phantom Zone, exhorting him to get out of his self-flagellating funk and help her escape. I would’ve loved to see her mature in the role in later movies.

    Most of the film’s cast is terrific. The villains consist of Faye Dunaway as
    Selena, an ambitious novice witch who gains great power from the Omegahedron and uses it in pursuit of conquest; Brenda Vaccaro as her roommate/sidekick Bianca; and Peter Cook as Nigel, the mentor in black magic who craves her but whom she tosses over in favor of the Omegahedron’s power. They’re all extremely good, particularly Vaccaro, who shows great comedic flair. (Useless fact: When this movie first came out, I knew Vaccaro mainly from The Pride of Jesse Hallam, a TV movie that was filmed at the high school I then attended. I don’t think I ever saw her in person, though. I was too shy to audition for
    a role as an extra.)

    Maureen Teefy also does a good job as Linda’s roommate, who coincidentally happens to be Lucy Lane, sister of Lois and girlfriend of Jimmy Olsen (with Marc McClure reprising his role from the other films and not really doing much). Lucy’s main role in the comics was to be the most mean-spirited and disapproving girlfriend in history (for some reason, Silver Age DC love interests tended to be thoroughly awful toward the male leads), but here she’s basically a mini-Lois, sassy and fearless, with much of the same spirit
    as Margot Kidder’s Lois. In one of the film’s big set pieces involving a magically controlled runaway construction vehicle, Lucy throws herself into danger to try to take control of it, while Kara/Linda just stands around doing nothing for two or three minutes to let the action play out — a major logic hole, and far from the only one in the film. Lucy is knocked unconscious in the process, and Supergirl rather callously abandons her in order to rescue the male lead from the vehicle.

    Unfortunately, that male lead, Hart Bochner as the “love interest” Ethan, is
    by far the most awful part of the film. The attempt at a love story is atrocious. Ethan is a total non-entity, just eye candy until Selena decides to cast a love spell on him to test it as a tool for control — and he’s thoroughly unpleasant and abrasive in his first dialogue scene, up to the point where she slips him the potion. It’s supposed to make him love the first person he sees, but he staggers off and wanders through town for a good ten minutes, then gets caught up by the construction vehicle and needs to be rescued by Supergirl, all somehow without actually looking at anyone until Supergirl randomly changes to Linda after the rescue. Then he’s “in love”
    with Linda for the rest of the movie, and though Kara/Linda initially discourages him, she ends up sort of falling for him — which is deeply creepy
    considering the non-consensual angle to his participation in the story. Which is balanced by the fact that she’s evidently underage, so neither participant
    is really in a position to consent. It’s creepy and wrong for both of them. The fact that he’s shown to be still in love with Linda after the spell breaks doesn’t ameliorate it any, because that “love” is totally unmotivated;
    Supergirl even points out that he doesn’t know a thing about Linda. Plus Bochner is a dull, unappealing actor and his character has no discernible personality. I suppose that’s sort of a counterpoint to the way female love interests were often portrayed in male-led action movies — vacuous, personality-free eye candy existing only to be romantically available to the hero — so perhaps one could read a certain satirical statement into it if one
    desired. But I doubt that was the intent, and it doesn’t do much to ameliorate the unpleasantness of the character and the storyline. The most annoying thing is that Kara pretty much spills her secret identity to him because she can’t resist kissing him as Supergirl. Superman gets to keep his
    secret to himself, but Supergirl spills it to the first guy who turns her head? Okay, that could be chalked up to her youth and inexperience, but it feels a bit gendered, in terms of who has the control and power advantage in the relationship.

    Still, I have to admit, the movie is less centered on the love triangle than I thought. Supergirl and Selena are fighting over Ethan, but Selena’s interested in Ethan more as a trophy and a pawn than anything else, and as a way to manipulate and hurt Supergirl. Her agenda really is world conquest, and she gains the power to pull it off. So, even though the romantic angle is terrible, it isn’t quite as demeaning as reducing Supergirl to a petty love triangle while Superman gets to save the world. The stakes really are global and the villainess quite dangerous, once she gets the hang of her powers. In terms of potential for global domination, Selena easily rivals Zod and surpasses Lex Luthor and Ross Webster. Which makes sense, since she’s getting
    a power boost from Kryptonian technology. (Which is perhaps amplified in its power on Earth just as everything else from Krypton is, by the logic of Silver/Bronze Age comics. When she first touches it, it seems to bond with her as a “child of the Sun” — the same yellow star that empowers Superman and
    Supergirl.) True, that threat is more potential than actually demonstrated; we only get one scene of the townsfolk protesting her evil reign without any real portrayal of its effects. But I was clearly wrong to believe Selena’s goals were limited to stealing Supergirl’s boy toy.

    Selena’s fusion of magic and Kryptonian technology even allows her to banish
    Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, the first time in the series that we see what the Zone is like on the inside, and it’s a pretty dark and grungy place. (A brighter version of the Zone would later be depicted in Smallville, but never in an episode directed by Szwarc.) The problem is that getting out of it is implausibly easy. Sure, the way out involves risking a deadly maelstrom to which Zaltar sacrifices himself to help Kara, but still, given that onscreen evidence suggests a roughly 50 percent survival rate, you’d think Krypton’s
    criminals would be braving the rift all the time and periodically succeeding in their escapes. My personal rationalization is that the rift was only created when Zod, Non, and Ursa were blown out of the Zone in Superman II (either version), and maybe Zaltar was the first to discover it.

    It’s in these climactic sequences that Slater’s mostly strong performance as
    Kara is undermined. Twice, once in the Phantom Zone escape and once when battling Selena’s final-boss demon, Supergirl is overcome with despair and whines “I can’t!” until Zaltar encourages her and gives her the confidence to
    go on (in the flesh the first time, Obi-Wan-style later). Again, this could perhaps be attributed to her youth, but it feels like the movie was saying a mere female couldn’t succeed without borrowing strength from a man. (And its
    one attempt to show any kind of “girl power” message is in questionable taste, as she fends off a couple of truckers who randomly sexually harass her, implicitly with rape in mind; and though she thrashes them handily, they’re played more as figures of humor than menace. One of them is a young Matt Frewer, in what is not one of the finer roles of his career.)

    The ending is also kind of arbitrary. Since the filmmakers evidently wanted the Superman and Supergirl films to stand more or less independently of each other (or at least decided they did after Christopher Reeve bowed out of appearing in Supergirl), the film ends with Kara getting Lucy and Jimmy to promise to tell no one about her. Really? Don’t tell Superman that he’s not
    the last son of Krypton, that his cousin, uncle Zor-El, aunt Alura, and hundreds of other Kryptonians are alive and well in “inner space”? That is
    just so not cool. It’s also unbelievable that she could keep her existence a
    secret, given her public appearances in the city fighting Selena’s attacks.

    All told, it’s a film with a lot of flaws and plot holes and an absolutely horrible excuse for a love story, but there’s still a lot that works, at least by the turn-off-your-brain Silver-Age standards of the series. It’s reasonably well-made, and it has great music and good costume design (by Emma Porteous, who did several Bond films, Clash of the Titans, Aliens, and season 2 of Space: 1999). Bochner aside, it has one of the strongest casts of any of the Salkind Super-movies, and Helen Slater is a worthy addition to the Kryptonian family.

    Indeed, Kara herself is a terrific character — she’s intelligent, adaptable,
    a problem-solver. She spends much of the movie actively searching for the Omegahedron, even plotting out search grids on a map at one point. The sense of urgency she should have about rescuing Argo City is missing, and she does tend to get easily distracted by schoolgirl antics and creepily wrong romance, but those are flaws in the writing and direction, and perhaps can be somewhat attributed to her youth. Indeed, in a sense, they underline her inquisitive nature. Superman grew up on Earth, but to Kara, it’s an alien planet and she’s got too lively a mind to resist exploring its novelties.

    Anyway, even with the flaws in execution, what’s intriguing about the premise
    is that Supergirl is one of the few screen superheroes who’s actually the protagonist of her movie. As my friend David Mack recently pointed out in his comments on Mad Max: Fury Road, a hero and a protagonist are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. The protagonist of a story is the character whose action or pursuit of a goal drives the narrative, and the antagonist is the one countering the protagonist’s actions. Usually in superhero stories, it’s
    the villain who’s actively pursuing a goal (such as world conquest) and the hero who’s reactively trying to thwart them, so generally the villain is the
    protagonist. That’s certainly true of the first three Superman films. And in
    a sense, Selena fills the classic villain-protagonist role, since she’s pursuing the goal of conquering the world and Supergirl has to stop her. But Selena’s powers are merely a side effect of Kara’s mistake in losing the Omegahedron, and Kara is the one who sets the story in motion both by making that mistake and by going to Earth in order to correct it. She’s the one trying to retrieve the Omegahedron while Selena thwarts her efforts with magic. And she’s the one who motivates Zaltar to help her while he’s content
    to wallow in despair. So she’s the primary protagonist of the film. It makes
    her a nicely proactive and motivated heroine, and is a real strength of the film, despite its constant efforts to undermine itself.

    In sum, I have to conclude that, like the other Superman films that preceded it, Supergirl is not that bad, and is in fact rather fun to watch if approached in the right spirit. (Although the same does not go for the film that followed it, The Quest for Peace. Don’t expect me to change my mind about that one.)

    Helen Slater has gone on to play several other DC characters. She was the voice of Talia al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, and played Clark Kent’s Kryptonian mother Lara Lor-Van (billed as Lara-El) in Smallville. And
    she’s appearing in the upcoming CBS Supergirl series as Sylvia Danvers, Kara’s adoptive mother on Earth (opposite Lois and Clark‘s Dean Cain as Kara’s adoptive father). Hart Bochner also returned to DC, playing Councilman
    Reeves in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Marc McClure, in addition to playing Jimmy Olsen in four other films, played Kryptonian scientist Dax-Ur in Smallville. Matt Frewer’s extensive career is surprisingly light on DC roles,
    but he did a memorable turn as Sid the Squid in Batman: The Animated Series‘s
    “The Man Who Killed Batman,” as well as playing Moloch in the Watchmen feature film.

    It’s a shame that Slater didn’t get the chance to play Supergirl again, since
    she was really good at it. It might be a stretch to say that playing Supergirl’s mother on the upcoming series is the next best thing, but it’s
    something, and I look forward to it. I hope the new series manages to make Kara a comparably strong, charming, and proactive character, while avoiding the film’s many failings.


    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Arthur Lipscomb@21:1/5 to christopherl bennett on Wed Apr 22 19:16:47 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    On 1/30/2020 7:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:
    I hadn’t planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and Ilya Salkind’s Superman film series (including the Donner films, the theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series got me interested in revisiting the movie — particularly after reading this defense of the film on The Mary Sue not long ago, which argued that it worked as an unapologetic Silver Age story, basically the same mindset that let me enjoy Superman III.

    Now, my prior impression of the Supergirl movie, which was written by David Odell (The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal) and directed by Jeannot Szwarc (who’s since gone on to direct many episodes of Smallville and six of Heroes), was not much kinder than my prior impression of the Superman movies. I remembered thinking Helen Slater looked great and was reasonably good in the role, and I remembered loving the Jerry Goldsmith score, but I also remembered finding it rather silly and resenting the way that Supergirl got stuck with a love-triangle plot while her male counterpart got to save the world. Let’s see how that holds up.

    First off, Goldsmith’s score is still fantastic. I think I need to get the CD.

    I have the CD. I listen to it every now and then. It's OK, but not
    great.


    It’s very much in the vein of John Williams’s Superman work (which was in
    turn an elaboration on the earlier Superman themes of Sammy Timberg and Leon Klatzkin and just the general heroic-march tradition), but it’s also very much a classic Goldsmith score, with many of his trademarks including the use of novel electronic sounds to supplement the gorgeously arranged orchestra. I also quite like the main title sequence created by Derek Meddings, with reflective titles swooping through the mists and bright lights flashing off them. It’s the kind of title treatment that would soon go on to become a garish cliche of computer-animated titles, but it was done live with actual reflective cutouts, which gives it a much greater elegance. Though the film has some weak effects (like a couple of really blatant jump cuts), it also has some spectacular ones, particularly Meddings’s superb work with a moving
    camera and a glass painting to represent the villainess Selena’s fortress in
    the climax.

    The film opens in Argo City, evidently created by Peter O’Toole’s inventor
    Zaltar as an extradimensional artists’ colony of sorts, much more inviting and organic than the sterile, jagged crystals of Donner’s Krypton. It’s never
    explained whether it was created/moved to “inner space” as a means of escaping Krypton’s destruction or if it was already there and happened to survive as a result.

    I think the answer is, do you want a Supergirl movie or not.

    Anyway, Slater’s Kara Zor-El, a favorite of the
    iconoclastic Zaltar, is girlish and a bit gawky, a convincing teenager even though she was around 20 at the time. She has a nice rapport with O’Toole, but it all goes wrong when their playing around with the Omegahedron (one of Argo City’s two power sources, Zaltar says, though the identity of the second
    is evidently lost to editing) causes it to be ejected into space, endangering the city’s survival. (That second power source must not be all that impressive, then.) Kara hijacks the pod Zaltar had made to travel to Earth (where her cousin Superman lives) in order to pursue the Omegahedron and bring it back, while Zaltar gamely sentences himself to the Phantom Zone for his crime. Technically it’s as much Kara’s fault as his, and I like it that
    the film sets her up with a strong motive to correct her mistake, although it unfortuntely forgets it almost immediately.

    After a trip through the lava lamp dimension, Kara somehow emerges from the pod in Supergirl costume, and the coltish teenager has somehow given way to a graceful and lovely young woman, just by a change of hairstyle, clothes, and manner. Slater’s eyes are just extraordinary — perfect for Supergirl and convincing as Christopher Reeve’s cousin, and just plain compelling to look at. And the design of the Supergirl costume is fantastic.

    As Supergirl discovers her powers on Earth, we get the lengthy “aerial ballet,” which is just beautiful, a charming sequence as Kara revels in what
    she can do and the beauty of the new world she’s entered. It’s fittingly named, as Slater’s flying technique is more balletic than Reeve’s, more like
    swimming through the air, with arms out to the sides and one knee bent. It’s
    different, but it works for her. Later, she rather randomly adopts the identity of girls’ school resident Linda Lee, and apparently has the same power as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman to change into any desired outfit instantaneously, except she does it by passing behind things rather than spinning. This includes the ability to change from blonde to brunette as well, and again, she looks very different as Linda. Performance-wise, allowing for the fact that this was her debut role, I think she did a terrific job, creating a mostly strong and expressive character who was also young and innocent. She’s particularly good in her scenes with O’Toole in the
    Phantom Zone, exhorting him to get out of his self-flagellating funk and help her escape.

    Squirt?

    I would’ve loved to see her mature in the role in later movies.


    Me too.

    Most of the film’s cast is terrific. The villains consist of Faye Dunaway as
    Selena, an ambitious novice witch who gains great power from the Omegahedron and uses it in pursuit of conquest; Brenda Vaccaro as her roommate/sidekick Bianca; and Peter Cook as Nigel, the mentor in black magic who craves her but whom she tosses over in favor of the Omegahedron’s power. They’re all extremely good, particularly Vaccaro, who shows great comedic flair. (Useless fact: When this movie first came out, I knew Vaccaro mainly from The Pride of Jesse Hallam, a TV movie that was filmed at the high school I then attended. I don’t think I ever saw her in person, though. I was too shy to audition for
    a role as an extra.)

    Maureen Teefy

    I recognize her from Grease 2.

    also does a good job as Linda’s roommate, who coincidentally
    happens to be Lucy Lane, sister of Lois and girlfriend of Jimmy Olsen (with Marc McClure reprising his role from the other films and not really doing much). Lucy’s main role in the comics was to be the most mean-spirited and disapproving girlfriend in history (for some reason, Silver Age DC love interests tended to be thoroughly awful toward the male leads), but here she’s basically a mini-Lois, sassy and fearless, with much of the same spirit
    as Margot Kidder’s Lois. In one of the film’s big set pieces involving a magically controlled runaway construction vehicle, Lucy throws herself into danger to try to take control of it, while Kara/Linda just stands around doing nothing for two or three minutes to let the action play out — a major logic hole, and far from the only one in the film. Lucy is knocked unconscious in the process, and Supergirl rather callously abandons her in order to rescue the male lead from the vehicle.

    Unfortunately, that male lead, Hart Bochner as the “love interest” Ethan, is
    by far the most awful part of the film. The attempt at a love story is atrocious. Ethan is a total non-entity, just eye candy until Selena decides to cast a love spell on him to test it as a tool for control — and he’s thoroughly unpleasant and abrasive in his first dialogue scene, up to the point where she slips him the potion. It’s supposed to make him love the first person he sees, but he staggers off and wanders through town for a good ten minutes, then gets caught up by the construction vehicle and needs to be rescued by Supergirl, all somehow without actually looking at anyone until Supergirl randomly changes to Linda after the rescue. Then he’s “in love”
    with Linda for the rest of the movie, and though Kara/Linda initially discourages him, she ends up sort of falling for him — which is deeply creepy
    considering the non-consensual angle to his participation in the story. Which is balanced by the fact that she’s evidently underage, so neither participant
    is really in a position to consent. It’s creepy and wrong for both of them.

    I never thought about that before.

    The fact that he’s shown to be still in love with Linda after the spell breaks doesn’t ameliorate it any, because that “love” is totally unmotivated;
    Supergirl even points out that he doesn’t know a thing about Linda. Plus Bochner is a dull, unappealing actor and his character has no discernible personality. I suppose that’s sort of a counterpoint to the way female love interests were often portrayed in male-led action movies — vacuous, personality-free eye candy existing only to be romantically available to the hero — so perhaps one could read a certain satirical statement into it if one
    desired. But I doubt that was the intent, and it doesn’t do much to ameliorate the unpleasantness of the character and the storyline.

    I don't think it has anything to do with intent. That's just how
    characters like that are almost always written.

    The most
    annoying thing is that Kara pretty much spills her secret identity to him because she can’t resist kissing him as Supergirl. Superman gets to keep his
    secret to himself, but Supergirl spills it to the first guy who turns her head? Okay, that could be chalked up to her youth and inexperience, but it feels a bit gendered, in terms of who has the control and power advantage in the relationship.

    Still, I have to admit, the movie is less centered on the love triangle than I thought. Supergirl and Selena are fighting over Ethan, but Selena’s interested in Ethan more as a trophy and a pawn than anything else, and as a way to manipulate and hurt Supergirl.

    I don't think Supergirl was ever in love with him. At best it was a
    mild school girl crush because he showed interest in her.

    Her agenda really is world conquest,
    and she gains the power to pull it off. So, even though the romantic angle is terrible, it isn’t quite as demeaning as reducing Supergirl to a petty love triangle while Superman gets to save the world. The stakes really are global and the villainess quite dangerous, once she gets the hang of her powers. In terms of potential for global domination, Selena easily rivals Zod and surpasses Lex Luthor and Ross Webster. Which makes sense, since she’s getting
    a power boost from Kryptonian technology. (Which is perhaps amplified in its power on Earth just as everything else from Krypton is, by the logic of Silver/Bronze Age comics. When she first touches it, it seems to bond with her as a “child of the Sun” — the same yellow star that empowers Superman and
    Supergirl.) True, that threat is more potential than actually demonstrated; we only get one scene of the townsfolk protesting her evil reign without any real portrayal of its effects. But I was clearly wrong to believe Selena’s goals were limited to stealing Supergirl’s boy toy.

    Selena’s fusion of magic and Kryptonian technology even allows her to banish
    Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, the first time in the series that we see what the Zone is like on the inside, and it’s a pretty dark and grungy place. (A brighter version of the Zone would later be depicted in Smallville, but never in an episode directed by Szwarc.) The problem is that getting out of it is implausibly easy. Sure, the way out involves risking a deadly maelstrom to which Zaltar sacrifices himself to help Kara, but still, given that onscreen evidence suggests a roughly 50 percent survival rate, you’d think Krypton’s
    criminals would be braving the rift all the time and periodically succeeding in their escapes. My personal rationalization is that the rift was only created when Zod, Non, and Ursa were blown out of the Zone in Superman II (either version), and maybe Zaltar was the first to discover it.

    It’s in these climactic sequences that Slater’s mostly strong performance as
    Kara is undermined. Twice, once in the Phantom Zone escape and once when battling Selena’s final-boss demon, Supergirl is overcome with despair and whines “I can’t!” until Zaltar encourages her and gives her the confidence to
    go on (in the flesh the first time, Obi-Wan-style later). Again, this could perhaps be attributed to her youth, but it feels like the movie was saying a mere female couldn’t succeed without borrowing strength from a man.

    I did not get that at all. Like you said it's Obi-Wan style, "Use the
    force Luke." That has nothing to do with gender. Plus they probably
    paid a lot of money for O'Toole, and need to get their money's worth,
    character dead or not.

    (And its
    one attempt to show any kind of “girl power” message is in questionable taste, as she fends off a couple of truckers who randomly sexually harass her, implicitly with rape in mind; and though she thrashes them handily, they’re played more as figures of humor than menace. One of them is a young Matt Frewer, in what is not one of the finer roles of his career.)

    The ending is also kind of arbitrary. Since the filmmakers evidently wanted the Superman and Supergirl films to stand more or less independently of each other (or at least decided they did after Christopher Reeve bowed out of appearing in Supergirl),

    Yeah, that.

    the film ends with Kara getting Lucy and Jimmy to
    promise to tell no one about her. Really? Don’t tell Superman that he’s not
    the last son of Krypton, that his cousin, uncle Zor-El, aunt Alura, and hundreds of other Kryptonians are alive and well in “inner space”? That is
    just so not cool. It’s also unbelievable that she could keep her existence a
    secret, given her public appearances in the city fighting Selena’s attacks.

    All told, it’s a film with a lot of flaws and plot holes and an absolutely horrible excuse for a love story, but there’s still a lot that works, at least by the turn-off-your-brain Silver-Age standards of the series.

    I've grown to enjoy it more and more over the years. And the longer
    versions are better than the theatrical, so that factors in too.

    It’s
    reasonably well-made, and it has great music and good costume design (by Emma Porteous, who did several Bond films, Clash of the Titans, Aliens, and season 2 of Space: 1999). Bochner aside, it has one of the strongest casts of any of the Salkind Super-movies, and Helen Slater is a worthy addition to the Kryptonian family.

    Indeed, Kara herself is a terrific character — she’s intelligent, adaptable,
    a problem-solver. She spends much of the movie actively searching for the Omegahedron, even plotting out search grids on a map at one point. The sense of urgency she should have about rescuing Argo City is missing, and she does tend to get easily distracted by schoolgirl antics and creepily wrong romance, but those are flaws in the writing and direction, and perhaps can be somewhat attributed to her youth. Indeed, in a sense, they underline her inquisitive nature. Superman grew up on Earth, but to Kara, it’s an alien planet and she’s got too lively a mind to resist exploring its novelties.

    Anyway, even with the flaws in execution, what’s intriguing about the premise
    is that Supergirl is one of the few screen superheroes who’s actually the protagonist of her movie. As my friend David Mack recently pointed out in his comments on Mad Max: Fury Road, a hero and a protagonist are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. The protagonist of a story is the character whose action or pursuit of a goal drives the narrative, and the antagonist is the one countering the protagonist’s actions. Usually in superhero stories, it’s
    the villain who’s actively pursuing a goal (such as world conquest) and the hero who’s reactively trying to thwart them, so generally the villain is the
    protagonist. That’s certainly true of the first three Superman films. And in
    a sense, Selena fills the classic villain-protagonist role, since she’s pursuing the goal of conquering the world and Supergirl has to stop her. But Selena’s powers are merely a side effect of Kara’s mistake in losing the Omegahedron, and Kara is the one who sets the story in motion both by making that mistake and by going to Earth in order to correct it. She’s the one trying to retrieve the Omegahedron while Selena thwarts her efforts with magic. And she’s the one who motivates Zaltar to help her while he’s content
    to wallow in despair. So she’s the primary protagonist of the film. It makes
    her a nicely proactive and motivated heroine, and is a real strength of the film, despite its constant efforts to undermine itself.

    In sum, I have to conclude that, like the other Superman films that preceded it, Supergirl is not that bad, and is in fact rather fun to watch if approached in the right spirit. (Although the same does not go for the film that followed it, The Quest for Peace. Don’t expect me to change my mind about that one.)

    Helen Slater has gone on to play several other DC characters. She was the voice of Talia al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, and played Clark Kent’s Kryptonian mother Lara Lor-Van (billed as Lara-El) in Smallville. And
    she’s appearing in the upcoming CBS Supergirl series as Sylvia Danvers, Kara’s adoptive mother on Earth (opposite Lois and Clark‘s Dean Cain as Kara’s adoptive father). Hart Bochner also returned to DC, playing Councilman
    Reeves in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Marc McClure, in addition to playing Jimmy Olsen in four other films, played Kryptonian scientist Dax-Ur in Smallville. Matt Frewer’s extensive career is surprisingly light on DC roles,
    but he did a memorable turn as Sid the Squid in Batman: The Animated Series‘s
    “The Man Who Killed Batman,” as well as playing Moloch in the Watchmen feature film.

    It’s a shame that Slater didn’t get the chance to play Supergirl again, since
    she was really good at it.

    Agreed.

    It might be a stretch to say that playing
    Supergirl’s mother on the upcoming series is the next best thing, but it’s
    something, and I look forward to it. I hope the new series manages to make Kara a comparably strong, charming, and proactive character, while avoiding the film’s many failings.


    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From anim8rfsk@21:1/5 to All on Wed Apr 22 23:19:21 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:16:47 -0700 Arthur Lipscomb<arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

    On 1/30/2020 7:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:
    I hadn’t planned to do any further entries in my coverage of Alexander and
    Ilya Salkind’s Superman film series (including the Donner films, the theatrical version of Superman II, and Superman III), but the buzz over the pilot to the upcoming CBS Supergirl TV series got me interested in revisiting
    the movie — particularly after reading this defense of the film on The Mary
    Sue not long ago, which argued that it worked as an unapologetic Silver Age story, basically the same mindset that let me enjoy Superman III.

    Now, my prior impression of the Supergirl movie, which was written by David Odell (The Muppet Show, The Dark Crystal) and directed by Jeannot Szwarc (who’s since gone on to direct many episodes of Smallville and six of Heroes), was not much kinder than my prior impression of the Superman movies.
    I remembered thinking Helen Slater looked great and was reasonably good in the role, and I remembered loving the Jerry Goldsmith score, but I also remembered finding it rather silly and resenting the way that Supergirl got stuck with a love-triangle plot while her male counterpart got to save the world. Let’s see how that holds up.

    First off, Goldsmith’s score is still fantastic. I think I need to get the
    CD.

    I have the CD. I listen to it every now and then. It's OK, but not
    great.

    It’s very much in the vein of John Williams’s Superman work (which was in
    turn an elaboration on the earlier Superman themes of Sammy Timberg and Leon
    Klatzkin and just the general heroic-march tradition), but it’s also very much a classic Goldsmith score, with many of his trademarks including the use
    of novel electronic sounds to supplement the gorgeously arranged orchestra. I
    also quite like the main title sequence created by Derek Meddings, with reflective titles swooping through the mists and bright lights flashing off them. It’s the kind of title treatment that would soon go on to become a garish cliche of computer-animated titles, but it was done live with actual reflective cutouts, which gives it a much greater elegance. Though the film has some weak effects (like a couple of really blatant jump cuts), it also has some spectacular ones, particularly Meddings’s superb work with a moving
    camera and a glass painting to represent the villainess Selena’s fortress in
    the climax.

    The film opens in Argo City, evidently created by Peter O’Toole’s inventor
    Zaltar as an extradimensional artists’ colony of sorts, much more inviting
    and organic than the sterile, jagged crystals of Donner’s Krypton. It’s never
    explained whether it was created/moved to “inner space” as a means of escaping Krypton’s destruction or if it was already there and happened to survive as a result.

    I think the answer is, do you want a Supergirl movie or not.

    Anyway, Slater’s Kara Zor-El, a favorite of the
    iconoclastic Zaltar, is girlish and a bit gawky, a convincing teenager even though she was around 20 at the time. She has a nice rapport with O’Toole,
    but it all goes wrong when their playing around with the Omegahedron (one of
    Argo City’s two power sources, Zaltar says, though the identity of the second
    is evidently lost to editing) causes it to be ejected into space, endangering
    the city’s survival. (That second power source must not be all that impressive, then.) Kara hijacks the pod Zaltar had made to travel to Earth (where her cousin Superman lives) in order to pursue the Omegahedron and bring it back, while Zaltar gamely sentences himself to the Phantom Zone for
    his crime. Technically it’s as much Kara’s fault as his, and I like it that
    the film sets her up with a strong motive to correct her mistake, although it
    unfortuntely forgets it almost immediately.

    After a trip through the lava lamp dimension, Kara somehow emerges from the pod in Supergirl costume, and the coltish teenager has somehow given way to a
    graceful and lovely young woman, just by a change of hairstyle, clothes, and
    manner. Slater’s eyes are just extraordinary — perfect for Supergirl and
    convincing as Christopher Reeve’s cousin, and just plain compelling to look
    at. And the design of the Supergirl costume is fantastic.

    As Supergirl discovers her powers on Earth, we get the lengthy “aerial ballet,” which is just beautiful, a charming sequence as Kara revels in what
    she can do and the beauty of the new world she’s entered. It’s fittingly
    named, as Slater’s flying technique is more balletic than Reeve’s, more like
    swimming through the air, with arms out to the sides and one knee bent. It’s
    different, but it works for her. Later, she rather randomly adopts the identity of girls’ school resident Linda Lee, and apparently has the same power as Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman to change into any desired outfit instantaneously, except she does it by passing behind things rather than spinning. This includes the ability to change from blonde to brunette as well, and again, she looks very different as Linda. Performance-wise, allowing for the fact that this was her debut role, I think she did a terrific job, creating a mostly strong and expressive character who was also
    young and innocent. She’s particularly good in her scenes with O’Toole in the
    Phantom Zone, exhorting him to get out of his self-flagellating funk and help
    her escape.

    Squirt?

    I would’ve loved to see her mature in the role in later movies.

    Me too.

    Most of the film’s cast is terrific. The villains consist of Faye Dunaway as
    Selena, an ambitious novice witch who gains great power from the Omegahedron
    and uses it in pursuit of conquest; Brenda Vaccaro as her roommate/sidekick Bianca; and Peter Cook as Nigel, the mentor in black magic who craves her but
    whom she tosses over in favor of the Omegahedron’s power. They’re all extremely good, particularly Vaccaro, who shows great comedic flair. (Useless
    fact: When this movie first came out, I knew Vaccaro mainly from The Pride of
    Jesse Hallam, a TV movie that was filmed at the high school I then attended.
    I don’t think I ever saw her in person, though. I was too shy to audition for
    a role as an extra.)

    Maureen Teefy

    I recognize her from Grease 2.

    also does a good job as Linda’s roommate, who coincidentally
    happens to be Lucy Lane, sister of Lois and girlfriend of Jimmy Olsen (with Marc McClure reprising his role from the other films and not really doing much). Lucy’s main role in the comics was to be the most mean-spirited and
    disapproving girlfriend in history (for some reason, Silver Age DC love interests tended to be thoroughly awful toward the male leads), but here she’s basically a mini-Lois, sassy and fearless, with much of the same spirit
    as Margot Kidder’s Lois. In one of the film’s big set pieces involving a
    magically controlled runaway construction vehicle, Lucy throws herself into danger to try to take control of it, while Kara/Linda just stands around doing nothing for two or three minutes to let the action play out — a major
    logic hole, and far from the only one in the film. Lucy is knocked unconscious in the process, and Supergirl rather callously abandons her in order to rescue the male lead from the vehicle.

    Unfortunately, that male lead, Hart Bochner as the “love interest” Ethan, is
    by far the most awful part of the film. The attempt at a love story is atrocious. Ethan is a total non-entity, just eye candy until Selena decides to cast a love spell on him to test it as a tool for control — and he’s thoroughly unpleasant and abrasive in his first dialogue scene, up to the point where she slips him the potion. It’s supposed to make him love the first person he sees, but he staggers off and wanders through town for a good
    ten minutes, then gets caught up by the construction vehicle and needs to be
    rescued by Supergirl, all somehow without actually looking at anyone until Supergirl randomly changes to Linda after the rescue. Then he’s “in love”
    with Linda for the rest of the movie, and though Kara/Linda initially discourages him, she ends up sort of falling for him — which is deeply creepy
    considering the non-consensual angle to his participation in the story. Which
    is balanced by the fact that she’s evidently underage, so neither participant
    is really in a position to consent. It’s creepy and wrong for both of them.

    I never thought about that before.

    I've read that the intention (which you can't possibly get from just watching the movie) is that it takes Kara years to reach Earth, so while she's a kid
    on Argo, she's legal on Earth. None of that jibes with her hiding out in a girl's school, or makes sense as to why anybody would still be alive by the time she gets back home.

    The fact that he’s shown to be still in love with Linda after the spell breaks doesn’t ameliorate it any, because that “love” is totally unmotivated;
    Supergirl even points out that he doesn’t know a thing about Linda. Plus Bochner is a dull, unappealing actor and his character has no discernible personality. I suppose that’s sort of a counterpoint to the way female love
    interests were often portrayed in male-led action movies — vacuous, personality-free eye candy existing only to be romantically available to the
    hero — so perhaps one could read a certain satirical statement into it if one
    desired. But I doubt that was the intent, and it doesn’t do much to ameliorate the unpleasantness of the character and the storyline.

    I don't think it has anything to do with intent. That's just how
    characters like that are almost always written.

    The most
    annoying thing is that Kara pretty much spills her secret identity to him because she can’t resist kissing him as Supergirl. Superman gets to keep his
    secret to himself, but Supergirl spills it to the first guy who turns her head? Okay, that could be chalked up to her youth and inexperience, but it feels a bit gendered, in terms of who has the control and power advantage in
    the relationship.

    Still, I have to admit, the movie is less centered on the love triangle than
    I thought. Supergirl and Selena are fighting over Ethan, but Selena’s interested in Ethan more as a trophy and a pawn than anything else, and as a
    way to manipulate and hurt Supergirl.

    I don't think Supergirl was ever in love with him. At best it was a
    mild school girl crush because he showed interest in her.

    Her agenda really is world conquest,
    and she gains the power to pull it off. So, even though the romantic angle is
    terrible, it isn’t quite as demeaning as reducing Supergirl to a petty love
    triangle while Superman gets to save the world. The stakes really are global
    and the villainess quite dangerous, once she gets the hang of her powers. In
    terms of potential for global domination, Selena easily rivals Zod and surpasses Lex Luthor and Ross Webster. Which makes sense, since she’s getting
    a power boost from Kryptonian technology. (Which is perhaps amplified in its
    power on Earth just as everything else from Krypton is, by the logic of Silver/Bronze Age comics. When she first touches it, it seems to bond with her as a “child of the Sun” — the same yellow star that empowers Superman and
    Supergirl.) True, that threat is more potential than actually demonstrated; we only get one scene of the townsfolk protesting her evil reign without any
    real portrayal of its effects. But I was clearly wrong to believe Selena’s
    goals were limited to stealing Supergirl’s boy toy.

    Selena’s fusion of magic and Kryptonian technology even allows her to banish
    Supergirl to the Phantom Zone, the first time in the series that we see what
    the Zone is like on the inside, and it’s a pretty dark and grungy place. (A
    brighter version of the Zone would later be depicted in Smallville, but never
    in an episode directed by Szwarc.) The problem is that getting out of it is implausibly easy. Sure, the way out involves risking a deadly maelstrom to which Zaltar sacrifices himself to help Kara, but still, given that onscreen
    evidence suggests a roughly 50 percent survival rate, you’d think Krypton’s
    criminals would be braving the rift all the time and periodically succeeding
    in their escapes. My personal rationalization is that the rift was only created when Zod, Non, and Ursa were blown out of the Zone in Superman II (either version), and maybe Zaltar was the first to discover it.

    It’s in these climactic sequences that Slater’s mostly strong performance as
    Kara is undermined. Twice, once in the Phantom Zone escape and once when battling Selena’s final-boss demon, Supergirl is overcome with despair and
    whines “I can’t!” until Zaltar encourages her and gives her the confidence to
    go on (in the flesh the first time, Obi-Wan-style later). Again, this could perhaps be attributed to her youth, but it feels like the movie was saying a
    mere female couldn’t succeed without borrowing strength from a man.

    I did not get that at all. Like you said it's Obi-Wan style, "Use the
    force Luke." That has nothing to do with gender. Plus they probably
    paid a lot of money for O'Toole, and need to get their money's worth, character dead or not.

    (And its
    one attempt to show any kind of “girl power” message is in questionable taste, as she fends off a couple of truckers who randomly sexually harass her, implicitly with rape in mind; and though she thrashes them handily, they’re played more as figures of humor than menace. One of them is a young
    Matt Frewer, in what is not one of the finer roles of his career.)

    The ending is also kind of arbitrary. Since the filmmakers evidently wanted the Superman and Supergirl films to stand more or less independently of each
    other (or at least decided they did after Christopher Reeve bowed out of appearing in Supergirl),

    Yeah, that.

    the film ends with Kara getting Lucy and Jimmy to
    promise to tell no one about her. Really? Don’t tell Superman that he’s not
    the last son of Krypton, that his cousin, uncle Zor-El, aunt Alura, and hundreds of other Kryptonians are alive and well in “inner space”? That is
    just so not cool. It’s also unbelievable that she could keep her existence a
    secret, given her public appearances in the city fighting Selena’s attacks.

    All told, it’s a film with a lot of flaws and plot holes and an absolutely
    horrible excuse for a love story, but there’s still a lot that works, at least by the turn-off-your-brain Silver-Age standards of the series.

    I've grown to enjoy it more and more over the years. And the longer
    versions are better than the theatrical, so that factors in too.

    Yeah. May be the only film that gets worse the shorter it gets.

    It’s
    reasonably well-made, and it has great music and good costume design (by Emma
    Porteous, who did several Bond films, Clash of the Titans, Aliens, and season
    2 of Space: 1999). Bochner aside, it has one of the strongest casts of any of
    the Salkind Super-movies, and Helen Slater is a worthy addition to the Kryptonian family.

    Indeed, Kara herself is a terrific character — she’s intelligent, adaptable,
    a problem-solver. She spends much of the movie actively searching for the Omegahedron, even plotting out search grids on a map at one point. The sense
    of urgency she should have about rescuing Argo City is missing, and she does
    tend to get easily distracted by schoolgirl antics and creepily wrong romance, but those are flaws in the writing and direction, and perhaps can be
    somewhat attributed to her youth. Indeed, in a sense, they underline her inquisitive nature. Superman grew up on Earth, but to Kara, it’s an alien planet and she’s got too lively a mind to resist exploring its novelties.

    Anyway, even with the flaws in execution, what’s intriguing about the premise
    is that Supergirl is one of the few screen superheroes who’s actually the protagonist of her movie. As my friend David Mack recently pointed out in his
    comments on Mad Max: Fury Road, a hero and a protagonist are not, strictly speaking, the same thing. The protagonist of a story is the character whose action or pursuit of a goal drives the narrative, and the antagonist is the one countering the protagonist’s actions. Usually in superhero stories, it’s
    the villain who’s actively pursuing a goal (such as world conquest) and the
    hero who’s reactively trying to thwart them, so generally the villain is the
    protagonist. That’s certainly true of the first three Superman films. And in
    a sense, Selena fills the classic villain-protagonist role, since she’s pursuing the goal of conquering the world and Supergirl has to stop her. But
    Selena’s powers are merely a side effect of Kara’s mistake in losing the
    Omegahedron, and Kara is the one who sets the story in motion both by making
    that mistake and by going to Earth in order to correct it. She’s the one trying to retrieve the Omegahedron while Selena thwarts her efforts with magic. And she’s the one who motivates Zaltar to help her while he’s content
    to wallow in despair. So she’s the primary protagonist of the film. It makes
    her a nicely proactive and motivated heroine, and is a real strength of the film, despite its constant efforts to undermine itself.

    In sum, I have to conclude that, like the other Superman films that preceded
    it, Supergirl is not that bad, and is in fact rather fun to watch if approached in the right spirit. (Although the same does not go for the film that followed it, The Quest for Peace. Don’t expect me to change my mind about that one.)

    Each of the Superfilms is half as good as the one before, chronologically,
    with Supergirl fitting right in where it was released.

    Sadly that continues to this day.

    Helen Slater has gone on to play several other DC characters. She was the voice of Talia al Ghul in Batman: The Animated Series, and played Clark Kent’s Kryptonian mother Lara Lor-Van (billed as Lara-El) in Smallville. And
    she’s appearing in the upcoming CBS Supergirl series as Sylvia Danvers,

    How the Hell old is this post?

    Kara’s adoptive mother on Earth (opposite Lois and Clark‘s Dean Cain as Kara’s adoptive father). Hart Bochner also returned to DC, playing Councilman
    Reeves in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. Marc McClure, in addition to playing
    Jimmy Olsen in four other films, played Kryptonian scientist Dax-Ur in Smallville. Matt Frewer’s extensive career is surprisingly light on DC roles,
    but he did a memorable turn as Sid the Squid in Batman: The Animated Series‘s
    “The Man Who Killed Batman,” as well as playing Moloch in the Watchmen feature film.

    It’s a shame that Slater didn’t get the chance to play Supergirl again, since
    she was really good at it.

    Agreed.

    It might be a stretch to say that playing
    Supergirl’s mother on the upcoming series is the next best thing, but it’s
    something, and I look forward to it. I hope the new series manages to make Kara a comparably strong, charming, and proactive character, while avoiding the film’s many failings.

    --
    Join your old RAT friends at
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1688985234647266/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From BTR1701@21:1/5 to Arthur Lipscomb on Thu Apr 23 11:23:05 2020
    XPost: rec.arts.tv, rec.arts.comics.other-media, rec.arts.movies.past-films

    In article <r7qtqi$ob3$1@dont-email.me>,
    Arthur Lipscomb <arthur@alum.calberkeley.org> wrote:

    On 1/30/2020 7:11 AM, christopherl bennett wrote:

    The fact that he's shown to be still in love with Linda after the spell breaks doesn't ameliorate it any, because that "love" is totally unmotivated; Supergirl even points out that he doesn't know a thing
    about Linda. Plus Bochner is a dull, unappealing actor and his character has no discernible personality.

    Hans! Booby! What am I, a method actor? Put the gun down.

    It might be a stretch to say that playing Supergirl's mother on the upcoming series is the next best thing, but it's something, and I look forward to it. I hope the new series manages to make Kara a comparably strong, charming, and proactive character, while avoiding the film's
    many failings.

    Hahahahahahahaha! Good one.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)