Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Flying High

Last night I went and saw Superman Returns.
Even though this movie was released in the US end of June, it won't be showing in Germany before the end of August. I don't know exactly why they wait so long. In the last couple of years, the release dates all over the world got closer and closer together in order to stop pirating. My best guess would be that this time they waited a bit in Germany, to prevent getting caught in the World Cup frenzy - but why then wait more than six weeks?
Anyway, France, luckily for me, is not that far behind (it started second week of July) and so I went to see it here (with French subtitles).
It is very noticable that half of France is on vacation. Usually, when I try to get from here (20km south of Paris) to Paris itself, I need at least 90min if not more, due to all that traffic. This time, though, I manged to get to the theater in less than an hour.
I got to the theater with plenty of time to spare and managed to dip into Loisirs & Création a craft shop a few steps away from the theater. I've bought two hanks of DMC color variation threads and a very small Lanarte kit.

The movie: I really liked it. It felt a lot like the old Superman movies, though of course the technology has been updated. It amazing how Brandon Routh looks like Christopher Reeves. He has an absolute charming smile and the acting was pretty good too.
I also liked Lois Lane - there were a couple of Superman versions where that woman only got on my nerves. It took me until five minutes before the end before I realized that the guy who played her finace was the same who played Cyclops in the X-Men movies - which obviously proves that the glasses/no-glassed routine that works so unbelievably well for Clark Kent/Superman is in fact working.
The FX were mostly very good (except for some cape action that didn't look too real for me) and the rescue of the Space Shuttle / airplane was very, very cool.
Buidling on the good old Superman theme music by John Williams was a very smart move - I have to see if I'm going to get the score eventually.
The story was true to the comic books - who cares about physics when he can have a superhero to play with? And only the old Lex Luther could have come up with the evil master plan for this installment.
So, all in all, I was very happy, and I will go and watch it again when it finally comes out in Germany.

A quote ... sure (taken from IMDB.com):
Perry White: [Explaining to Lois Lane why she must write an article on the return of Superman, rather than a massive power outage] Three things sell this newspaper: Tragedy, sex, and Superman. These people have had enough tragedy, and we all know you can't write worth a damn about sex

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