Actually, having just finished it, the draft I posted is very different from the one Moriarty reviewed, the main difference being that there is no Luthor reveal.

Yeah, the one Doc Sub read is the one I read.  There's no gay Jimmy stuff, Luthor stuff is much better integrated, the whole Kryptonian plot is pretty well done.  It really reads a hell of a lot better than Moriarty's review makes it sound.

I totally enjoyed it.  Sure, Krypton doesn't explode.  Whatever.  Jor-El is still alive, and there's some strange and nebulous religious bullcrap all over the thing (and I say this as a pretty intense believer in Christianity), but there are some amazing elements.  JJ's Lois Lane is a great character in her own right, as firey and passionate a crusading reporter as you could like, able to take care of her own business without needing a rescue all the time.  The scene where she meets Clark outside a frat party that both of them are dragged to is amazing - it makes her the inspiration for his own journalistic career, and really shows how someone like Clark Kent/Superman could truly fall in love with someone like Lois Lane.  Man of Steel took good steps in that direction, but I actually like JJ's version a little more.

And, call me a heretic if you like, I love that Superman's main adversary in all of this was his own upbringing (at least until the Kryptonians show up).  While the Kents loved him and tried to raise him with that love, they also taught him a great deal of self-control, which when others taught him that what he could do was wrong, became repression and a crippling insecurity.  That was pretty similar to Man of Steel, actually.

A lot of the beats of the Air Force One rescue mirror the scene in Superman Returns where Clark rescues the plane, and that plays really really well.

Anyway, sorry for topic derail.

Harry Potter has a sense of humour about itself when it does it, and then explains it pretty plausibly with the wand stuff afterwards.

Love mashups like these.

The audio from the Man of Steel trailer edited it to the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Yeah, that may well be. Cutting-in-the-camera and doing other things to arrange it so it's harder to butcher your film is definitely a neat trick. John Ford, Hitchcock, Bogdanovich all did it at some point. (Peter Bogdanovich tells a cool story—he's full of cool stories—about how he resorted to cutting-in-the-camera to make it harder for the suits to fuck with Last Picture Show.)

I actually don't know if that's what Donner was up to or not, but I wouldn't be surprised. During the commentary, I think it was Trey who made the point that a lot of the coverage during the newsroom scenes seemed influenced by All the President's Men. So the long takes might not be monocausal, but yeah, they may have served as a creative "insurance policy" for Donner. Whatever it was, the long takes are quite well done and come off naturally. I love the one in Lois' apartment, when Superman flies off the balcony and we move, without a cut, to see a suit-and-tie-clad Clark enter through the front door. That one really makes the long take serve the storytelling—very cool.

Libertarian Superman just wants to smoke pot and not get busted, stop judging guys.

I think Lois' spelling problems is just mean as a character quirk. I think it even continued and was a joke on Smallville.

You can be smart and spell for shit (ahem).

Yeah, you know if a Superman came to Earth, religious peole would freak the fuck out, right? (Sorry, your god is fake; THIS IS REAL BITCHES!)

Last edited by Mr. Pointy (2013-08-09 12:01:22)

I listened to this ep the other day. Lots of fun. My feelings are pretty much the same. There's so much to like about this movie, and then the ending just goes to hell. Not only is the time travel stuff stupid, there's no conflict. Lex Luthor has no reason at all to contact Superman in the first place. It's crazy. The writers just have these two completely separate stories going at the same time and then mash them together for no reason in the third act because, hey, something's got to come to a climax.