Say Anything? Challenge Accepted!

I have a few ideas for full-length posts floating around but I don't feel like going deep on a warm Saturday afternoon so I guess it's Grab Bag time again. Saturday Selection I could call it, if I had no shame at all. Or no standards, for that matter. 

Usually, when I do one of these things, I have a few ideas bookmarked but not this time so I'm just going to have to wing it. What's the minimum number of sections for a Grab Bag anyway? Got to be at least three, doesn't it? And in my case a song to end, like the old vaudeville performer I have apparently become.

There's an interesting beginning. I'm a couple of years shy of seventy now, terrifying though that is, but even that advanced age puts me well shy of any age you'd need to be to have experienced Vaudeville. Hell, my mother, who was 93 when she died earlier this year, was too young for Vaudeville. Wikipedia dates it from the 1870s to the 1930s. 

Added to that, it was distanced from me by space as well as time. Vaudeville was a purely North American phenomenon. Over here we had Music Hall as our nearest equivalent. Music Hall flourished from "the early Victorian era until around World War I" (Wikipedia again. This is why I occasionally give them money when they come begging. Without Wikipedia, I'd have to do some secondary research. Or get an AI Agent; which, screw that!)

So how and why do I even know what either of them is? 

There's some excuse, or at least an explanation, for Music Hall. When I was growing up I had to suffer through the interminable tedium of a TV show called "The Good Old Days" (To which I will not link. You can thank me later.) in which much the same bunch of comedians and singers that did the rounds of all the variety shows back then (And there were far too many of them - performers and shows both.) got themselves dolled up in nineteenth-century drag to drone their way through the kind of material that got stage door johnnies hot under the Eton collar, back when Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley flashed an ankle.

O. M. G. ! Just look at that last sentence!  Why in the name of sanity do I know what a "stage door johnny" was or what they wore? Or who Marie Lloyd or Vesta Tilley were? How does this stuff get into your head in the first place and why doesn't fall out again, seconds later? I can't remember 90% of anything I actually want to remember and yet apparently I can trot this stuff out without blinking.

Before someone chips in to correct me on Vesta Tilley, she's there to both prove and disprove my point. I did easily remember her name and she was a massively popular Music Hall star but she wouldn't have been flashing her ankles because she was a male impersonator. I had to google her to check what she was famous for and it was that. 

I heard a whole program about her on the radio once and yet I only remembered who she was and when and where she performed, not what she did, which was the important part. Shows how superficial this knowledge is, much of the time.

As for Vaudeville, my knowledge pretty much starts and ends with the Marx Brothers. I love the Marx Brothers but then who doesn't? I was introduced to them at an early age, when they may even all still have been alive (I'd have to check the dates.) although none were still performing. 

My mother was a big fan and I grew up watching their movies, not only on television, whenever they came on but at the cinema. The Marx Brothers became swept up somehow by the counter-culture as did a whole slew of icons of the past (Viz. Peter Blake's cover for Sgt. Pepper.) and their movies were shown surprisingly often in art-house cinemas when I was still at school. They were also a staple of the college film societies when I was at Cambridge at the end of the seventies and beginning of the eighties.

How the hell did I get started on this in the first place? Oh yes, I remember. (I don't. I had to go back and read the beginning of the post to remind myself...) I was saying how a grab bag post had to be three items minimum plus a song at the end, although that last bit's just me. 

Hmm. I'm nine paragraphs in now (Actually thirteen after the edit...) That's six hundred and fifty words. (Seven-eighty now...) Is it worth getting back to the original Grab Bag?  I could just carry on riffing on Vaudeville, I guess, but I don't know anything about it or indeed have anything I want to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

It occurs to me this is one of those post I sometimes do for Blaugust, when we hit Advice Week or whatever we're calling it that year. Are we doing those this time? The themed weeks? I didn't see anything about it in the opening posts but I'm not sure we've had the full agenda yet.

Based on the last couple of years, though, I don't feel qualified to offer advice to would-be bloggers any more, even though I've been doing this for a decade and a half and I've written well over three and a half thousand posts now. Blogs in the third decade of the twenty-first century don't look much like the blogs I learned from before I started, let alone like this one. 

In a way, they tend to look more like, well, web-logs. It's like regression to the meaningless. 

Rather than long-form posts on specific subjects, topics or activities, most of the newer blogs I still read, the ones I picked up from Blaugusts past, are day-to-day diaries or sets of notes or quick thoughts on this and that. My go-to advice on sitting down and typing to see what comes out, then calling it a post, looks a bit redundant these days. That's what everyone seems to be doing already.

And why not? It's bloody easy, isn't it? Yesterday's Palworld post took me all day, on and off. Probably at least four hours altogether. And here we are today, almost a thousand words done (More than a thousand, post-edit.) and how long has it taken me? About half an hour so far. 

And I can keep this up all day. I'm not kidding. It's the easiest thing in the world, just tapping away at a keyboard, letting your thoughts flow onto the page, lightly editing as you go along and giving the whole thing a final pass at the end. If you ever get stuck for something to say, just say anything.

Ooh! Now I want to watch Say Anything, the 'eighties movie starring John Cusack and Ione Skye. You know it! It's the one where he stands on the lawn under his girlfriend's bedroom window, holding a ghetto blaster over his head. Iconic image. I'm going to grab it and stick it in here later. (Or, in fact, use it as the header.)

That's not my favorite part of the movie, though. My favorite part is where he has dinner with his girlfriend's family and when her father asks him what he's going to do with his life he says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future!". (Except he doesn't, as I'll explain later. It's just another misremembering.)

I used to quote that a lot, often à propos of nothing. Kickboxing! Sport of the future! I'd say. Just like that, out of nowhere. I'd like to say I've stopped doing it but I'd be lying.

It's curious I can remember that quote and those scenes (Albeit in a mistakenly composite fashion, it turns out...) but I have no idea what song was playing on the ghetto blaster. I'm sure it would have been significant. I'm pretty sure it was some awful power ballad. Probably Huey Lewis and the News or Phil Collins or something equally unbearable. 

Oh, you know I'm going to have to look it up now. I was going to embed the clip anyway. 

Hah! It's Peter bloody Gabriel!  I guess that's a step up from the drummer of his old band, at least. Still a horrible song, though, but then Lloyd Dobler isn't exactly Mr Sophisticated. That's kind of the point.

As for the scene where he actually says "Kickboxing. Sport of the future." it's weirdly hard to find online. It's not, as I always misremember, the dinner party scene although everyone else seems to think it is, too. The quote is used numerous times as the title or in the description of clips on YouTube but then the clip is almost always the dinner party scene, where he doesn't say it at all. 

That one does include the superb speech, where Lloyd explains what he won't be doing for a living:

 " I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that."

If you haven't seen that one, do yourself a favor but the only clip I can find on YouTube of the actual scene where he says the key phrase, which is when he comes to pick Diane up for a date, has almost inaudible sound. I might have to find my copy and upload the damn thing myself... 

The key moment is in the trailer above, though.

I said earlier I was too young to have any excuse for knowing literally anything about Vaudeville or Music Hall but I'm also too old to have a deep emotional attachment to teen movies from the 'eighties, aren't I? Say Anything came out in 1989, when I was 31. And I doubt I saw it until the early 'nineties anyway. 

I must be emotionally unstable anyway, I guess, (Quiet at the back!) One of the reasons I haven't rewatched a lot of those 'eighties classics for the longest time is that I get too emotionally involved. Pretty in Pink, Fresh Horses, The Sure Thing, Some Kind of Wonderful... I want to watch them all again but do I want to put myself through the trauma? I'm just going to have steel myself and buy some tissues.

The only one I have re-watched in recent years is Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I think we have about four copies in the house, in different formats. We kept re-buying it for a while. It's a lighter watch, on the surface at least, although not once you stop to think about it. Plus it's the gift that never stops giving. Always something new. 

I have plans to start re-watching and re-reading a lot of stuff once I officially retire. Not that I'll have that much more free time. It's more of an existential decision. Much though I love new things, I'm starting to think I might have overdone the neology just a tad in recent years. The past has its place, too. And not just as somewhere to run to for comfort. There are always new things to find there. 

If I follow though, and I think I will, expect more posts like this, only much more focused and coherent. Not that it would be possible to be much less focused and coherent. Although I could give it a shot if you like...

And with that, I think I'm going to stop. Absolutely not the post I thought I was going to write, although I guess it's kind of a grab bag in its way. A grab bag of memories and associations. 

Didn't I say I was going to end with a song? I think that's how all this started. And it's not going to be Peter Gabriel, I'll tell you that for nothing! 

Modernism - Perennial

Weirdly appropriate, wouldn't you say? 

Also, 2000 words, ninety minutes, including the edit and an hour off for tea but not counting the digression into exactly when Lloyd Dobler talks about the sport of the future. That's how to do it! 

A Girl And Her Dog

I did it! I went to the cinema to see the Supergirl movie. The first time I've been to the cinema since before the pandemic and even back then it wasn't like I was going often. Maybe once a year, if that.

It wasn't always that way. I used to see a lot of movies on the big screen. Well, on a screen bigger than a TV at least. Screens in the '70s could be tiny. There might actually be TVs bigger than that now.

When I was at university it's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say I went several times a week. That was because I was at Cambridge, a collegiate university, and every one of the 30+ colleges had its own Film Society, most of which showed a film pretty much every week during term. I saw a lot of classic films and subtitled foreign movies that way and I saw some of the big, new releases (Like The Empire Strikes Back and Superman.) at the actual cinema in town, too.

After I graduated and moved back home, all through the 'eighties I lived in the middle of a big city with at least three arthouse cinemas and a couple of commercial cinemas all in easy walking distance. I saw a lot of films all through that decade. 

By the '90s I'd moved. I didn't have a cinema I could easily walk to any more. My cinema-going was slowing down but I still used to get to the pictures maybe six or eight times a year. By the turn of the century that was down to two or three and by the time Covid shut the cinemas I was already going a whole year between visits.

So, yes, it certainly takes something special to get me to make the effort, these days. Why Supergirl? And was it worth it? 

First question: I guess Supergirl because I've always liked her and also because I didn't make the effort for Superman last year. I felt I owed it her. Plus the trailers made it look hella fun.

As for the second, Hell, yes! I loved it! No, I fucking loved it! It was everything I hoped it would be and more. The movie, that is. The cinema experience itself? Ehh... that was okay.

But then, what can you expect when you see a movie at half-past nine in the morning? I was literally the only person in the screening. It was in an out-of-town multiplex with a dozen or more screens and my showing was in one of the smaller rooms. Still big enough for about 130 people though. Or it would have, if anyone other than me had wanted to see Supergirl right after breakfast on a Thursday. 

I'm quite a proponent of the value of seeing a movie as part of an audience. I know it has its downsides but you don't need an evolutionary biologist to point out the synergies of a shared experience. There's also the Big Screen Effect, where the more of your field of view the image occupies, the harder your brain finds it to separate the image from reality, which is great for immersion. 

Whether it's worth leaving your house to watch a movie alone, on a screen that's not really all that big, well that's another question. I just didn't want to have to wait six months for the DVD to come out. Although I will be buying that DVD. This is a movie I'll be watching more than once.

So much for the experience. What about the movie? So I liked it. Big deal. Why did I like it? (Might be some mild spoilers in this part but nothing very specific. Probably safe to carry on.)

For a start it's a good movie as a movie, which is very definitely not something you can say about all superhero films. Probably not about most of them. Supergirl has a coherent, linear plot. It starts at the beginning and goes through to the end with precious few diversions. 

There are some well-judged flashbacks that add depth and nuance to the narrative and illuminate certain things about the central character and that's it. None of the usual darting about from place to place and time to time you usually get in comic-book movies. Also it's quite a small cast which helps to keep things focused.

The movie's an adaptation of Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, a strong story in itself, but the movie script cuts a lot of the sometimes over-complicated to-and-fro of the comic. It condenses the action from a few weeks to just three days. The ending, which we'll get to, is very different. I think Woman of Tomorrow may be a better story but sticking closely to it would make for a much worse film. 

That's one of the big, BIG problems with superhero movies in general. Comics have so much more time to tell their stories and so much more freedom to be completely confusing about it and get away with it. Comics fans are nothing if not tolerant of cruft. They relish it, for the most part. The kind of excruciating detail that has comic fans arguing deep into the night just about kills any movie stupid enough to include even a small fraction of it. 

Supergirl keeps things tight. The plot is a revenge arc yoked to two coming of age stories and the writers and director wisely recognize that's plenty. Even so, they still manage to throw in an origin story and make it feel like a natural progression. Origin stories wreck far too many superhero movies. If you're going to do it, this is how. Really, really good work.

Continuity is another bane of superhero franchises. James Gunn has been tasked with rebooting the DC Cinematic Universe so of course this film has to dovetail with the recent Superman movie, something it does perfectly. David Corenswet, an excellent Superman, appears just as often as he needs to and there's just enough cross-fertilization to bang home the message of his own recent movie, that Superman needs to be a force not just for good but for restraint and tolerance.

Supergirl is a force for good and also a bit of a wild card. There's an argument to be made that she's tolerant and restrained, alright: just of the wrong things.

As her mother, Lara, tells her just before she dies and Supergirl leaves doomed Argo City in a pod with her puppy, she needs to be good but she doesn't need to be nice. And she's not nice. But she's more than just good. As Ruthye tells her late on, she's kind. Kind and good does it for me. Screw nice.

I know some Supergirl fans won't like it. Supergirl's been nice all her life. Too bloody nice if you ask me. 

Well, some Supergirls have. This is the other big, BIG problem with superhero movies. Any superhero a mainstream audience recognizes will already have been a dozen different people in the comics before they even get to the screen. And like Swifties, comic fans always have their favorite eras. 

I've known Supergirl since I was about five years old. I have a couple of favorite eras myself but I think this is my favorite now. Milly Alcock is a superb Kara. She looks the part but that's easy. Any blonde can wear the suit. But as she says to Ruthye "It's just a suit". 

Except it's the suit. Not anyone can wear the suit. She can. Magnificently, she spends almost the whole movie not wearing it. She strides about looking seriously cool as fuck in a duster coat. Then, when she puts on the suit, it's like the sun coming up. And you know what happens when the sun comes up. Well, you will if you watch this movie.

Many, many things about the writing and the acting worked for me. I love Kara's pub crawling bad girl act. I love that it isn't an act and yet it so obviously is. Also isn't it interesting she calls it a pub crawl not a bar crawl?

I think the way the movie goes through a whole sequence of adventures with Supergirl winning fights without her powers is genius. She isn't just a badass because the yellow sun made her one. She was born badass is my guess. And if she wasn't, hardship and trauma made her one. I bet on both.

Her relationship with Krypto is just wonderful but so is the relationship she builds with Ruthye, the thirteen year-old orphan who just watched her whole family getting slaughtered and plans on doing something about it. Of course, that relationship also relies on Ruthye and Eve Ridley is stone solid in the part. They're mirror images, through a shattered mirror. 

It should be said that I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. People doing the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing, just makes me happy. And also makes me cry. I cried a lot during Supergirl. At one point I actually sobbed. I was glad I was the only one there. 

I tend to cry a lot at movies, though, especially when anyone does something unselfish or noble or when something happy happens. Sad things tend not to do it for me or not to the same degree. I didn't tear up when Krypto got shot but I did when Supergirl told him "See Buddy? I told you I'd be back" at the end.

I laughed a lot, too. Out loud. There are some great lines. I think I missed a couple when Lobo and Supergirl were exchanging quips mid-fight. Fights are loud in cinema-sound. Jason Momoa as Lobo is... well, he's Lobo. He doesn't get to do a lot else but then when was Lobo ever anything but Lobo?

While I'm praising the plot and the writing I'll also mention a couple of things that absolutely don't ring true and yet ring completely true in comic book terms. Kara shouldn't win some of the fights she wins without her powers. Ruthye absolutely shouldn't win her one fight. They're both fighting way out of their weight class. But they win and they should win.

They win because they're heroes. Heroines. Whatever. They win because comic book stories are myth. If you don't get that you're probably watching the wrong movie.

And then there's the ending. This hasn't been too spoilery so far but here's a big one. I'll stick something under this paragraph in the edit so there's a break and you can leave if you want.

 So. At the end, Kara kills Krem. Krem's the main villain. He has no actual personality, no backstory, no arc. He's evil. That's it. Oh, and nasty. The two aren't always the same. 

Having a villain so straightforwardly villainous and unredeemable simplifies things. I was sitting there wondering just how they were going to resolve the storyline without killing the bastard when Supergirl killed the bastard. She ran him through the neck with Ruthye's sword after talking Ruthye out of doing the exact same thing. Oh, and first she stabbed him somewhere else because of what he did to Krypto. "That's for my dog".

In the source material, Supergirl does not kill Krem. She sends him to the Phantom Zone where he serves three hundred years. At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, he's released as a very old man. And he's learned right from wrong. It took him three centuries but he's done it. Rehabilitation worked. 

He apologizes to Ruthye, also very old by now because living three hundred years will do that to you. She clubs him with her stick and then hits him a few more times when he's down. But she doesn't kill him. She, too, has learned something in three hundred years. 

That's a good ending for the comic. It would be a terrible ending for the movie. We're supposed to wait three hundred years for catharsis and then it's an old woman clubbing an old man while Supergirl stands by and watches? I don't think so.

All this Phantom Zone stuff, anyway - and the damn place has a history as complicated as Ancient Rome - just doesn't play on screen. It barely plays in the comics, frankly. Calling the authorities isn't going to fly. Who they'd even be in this scenario, god only knows. Clearly Krem and his crew are doing whatever they want already. If there was an authority capable of stopping them or holding them, wouldn't they be doing it already?

I'm 100% against capital punishment in real life but this isn't real life. It's myth. Krem has to die. There's just no other ending that's going to work.

I know some fans agree with that but think it shouldn't have been down to Kara to do the killing. Lobo's right there. He's up on a ridge, watching it all go down. Lobo, as Supergirl warns Ruthye when they meet him in a bar, killed his entire planet. If you want some killing done, he's your boy. 

Except if Supergirl lets Lobo do this one instead of doing it herself, it doesn't define her as somehow above the act, it devalues her as too weak to do the difficult thing herself. Plus Lobo already saved her from what looked like (But obviously wouldn't have been, somehow.) certain death. How many times is he going to fix things for her? 

The two  or the three moments in the whole movie I didn't like all make Supergirl look briefly like she's not in control but at least in those she's mostly just unlucky. If Lobo swooped down on his big bike and killed Krem for her, it would make her look weak and indecisive. 

Supergirl is neither of those things. She's angry and bitter and sad and good and kind and strong and brave and irresponsible and responsible and human all the way through. And she needs to kill Krem, so she does. She's good. She does the right thing and, in that situation, that's it.

It's possibly the most responsible thing she does in the whole movie, ironically. And then she goes home and tells her cousin she's grown up. 

Except she doesn't tell him what she's done. Superman wouldn't have done it and he wouldn't get why she did. Best he never knows. She doesn't tell him she's grown up either. Not in those words. She doesn't have to. That, he knows and we know. He can see it. We can see it. He can hear it. We can hear it.

Coming of age story, remember?

I could go on, at much greater length. Sometimes I wish I was back at college so I could write a dissertation on something that fires me up like this instead of bloody William Blake. I like Blake but I never wanted to write five thousand words about him. I'd happily write five thousand words about Supergirl. 

I won't though. I'll just say the music is great and so are the special effects, the fights and the mise-en-scène. A lot of the scenes are lit really dark but I always could see what was going on. It's a mood piece so it works.

I won't say it's a masterpiece. It's not that. It's a great movie though and not just a great superhero movie. It has the feel of those bleak, existential seventies films I grew up with; Five Easy Pieces, Brewster McCloud, Dog Day Afternoon. Like that. Except in space and with lots of people punching each other up into the air.

It was nice to be back in the cinema. I'm glad I took the trouble.  Maybe I'll go again. 

Last Year's Movies Today! Superman (2025)

This was going to be a Grab Bag post but the first item ran away with me so now it's just a review of a movie that came out a year ago. And not even a proper review at that. 

It's the Superman movie I'm talking about. I posted about it several times in 2025 but I'm too lazy to go back and find the posts and link them. No-one would click through anyway, so what would be the point? I mean, hell, what are the Labels for, if not for anyone to find stuff, if they're interested? Not to mention the very efficient search function. Anyone ever use that? No. Thought  not.

Ahem. So, Superman...

I said before the movie came out last summer that I'd probably go see it at the cinema. I was hyped for it after the excellent trailers. Well, that didn't happen.

So then I said I'd put the DVD on my Birthday/Christmas wishlist. I did and I got it and I still didn't watch it because apparently owning a movie on DVD is exactly the same, psychologically at least, as watching it. 

Either before or after I got my own hard copy, the movie turned up on one of the streaming services I subscribe to and I didn't even watch it then. Often I do end up streaming things I own on DVD, sometimes things I've owned for years and never gotten around to watching, because it's just easier that way, isn't it? But I didn't stream Superman. 

We got to 2026 and I still hadn't seen it and all the Supergirl trailers started rolling up and they looked even better than the Superman ones and we got closer and closer to the release date (Which is June 26, I just checked. I knew it was this month.) and I made a "firm decision" to go see that one in the cinema, for real this time, which made me think I probably ought to get around to watching the first one, since they kind of fit together somehow.

And I probably still wouldn't have done anything about it, had Redbeard not felt the need to post about the rotunda at the Cincinnati Museum Center and to include in that post a clip of a scene from the Superman movie and that was what finally tipped me over the edge. 

Sidebar: Material to my decision to watch the movie, I should say that, following the  death of my mother earlier this year at the age of 93, we've acquired a very good 4K Sony TV. I was left "the chattels" in my mother's will, one of which this was. "Chattels" means literally everything in the house except the house itself, which has to be sold and the proceeds split 50/50 with my step-brother, although now we're getting into too much detail for a post about the Superman movie, I think. My mother came up with the chattels thing because a few years back, when her sister died at the age of, I think, 91, she left my mother her chattels, none of which my mother wanted or kept, except for a copper bedpan, which is now in our house but which I believe may have come from my aunt originally. Why we have it? That you'd need to ask Mrs Bhagpuss.

I seem to have drifted a long way from the Superman movie. I only mentioned the TV because the arrival of an actually good set in this house for the first time in at least twenty-five years has led directly to me going downstairs and sitting on the sofa for the specific purpose of watching things. (We live almost entirely upstairs for what are, I'm sure, perfectly good reasons, if I could remember them.). That's how I came to watch The Burroughs, the first seven episodes at least, and having watched the final episode on the laptop I can say with certainty that it does, in fact, make a big difference, watching it on a big screen, after all, something I never really believed before.

Not that I watched The Burroughs in in 4K. It was in HD on the TV and the laptop because you have to pay Netflix more money for 4K and I never have yet and don't have any plans to start. HD seems like more than enough detail to me, anyway, at least on a screen as good as this one. Probably on a better laptop than mine it would, too.

And that's eight paragraphs without a single word about the movie itself so here's my tl:dr for the rest of the post in case you're feeling like you've already put in the work:

It was great! I loved it! Four stars (Out of five). Maybe not a classic but definitely a must-see. As good as I was hoping and better than I expected. Best Superman movie I've seen and I haven't seen them all. 

Which is a bit surprising, really, even to me. Why haven't I seen them all?

Let me think. I saw the first, with Christopher Reeve, on release at the cinema. The best thing about it was that it was Superman! In the cinema! Hard to imagine what a total novelty that was at the time. 

I saw the second in the cinema too but the third and fourth only on TV. They went downhill a bit but they were not untrue to some of the comics. Just mostly not true to the good ones. 

Then there was a big gap until Superman Returns, which I'm pretty sure I've never seen anywhere, so I should probably do something about that, and next there was Man of Steel, for which I returned to the cinema to catch it on release although why I thought it was worth the effort escapes me now. Clearly I didn't think enough of it to bother with the follow-up, the awkwardly-titled Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which I may or may not own on DVD ( I genuinely don't know if I do or not.) but have definitely never watched. Is it technically even  a Superman movie, though? I mean Batman's name comes first...

So, I've seen six of the eight Superman movies and the latest one is the best by a wide margin. Best for a DC fan, that is. Maybe not for a general audience. Probably can't beat the first one for that. 

Or maybe you even need to be a long-time fan for this one. I know the Snyder movies were fan favorites with some fans but then I believe there's a cadre with a much deeper belief in Zack Snyder's vision for the franchise than I've ever had. I bet every one of them is at least a couple of decades younger than me, too. 

Apart from having a coherent plot for a change and the acting being excellent throughout, neither of which can be said about all, or even most, of its predecessors, Superman (2025) is the one that feels most like the comics to me. It feels like it was made by a fan for other fans without ever resorting to actual fan service. 

One of the very best things about it is the way James Gunn gets all the backstory out of the way in a few lines of text over the opening sequence. As a lifelong superhero comics reader, I am so fed up of every superhero movie feeling it has to start by explaining who the leads are, how they got their powers, what their powers are - all that basic stuff that surely to God anyone who cared enough to buy a ticket already knows. I mean, if you watch a sports movie, they don't generally begin by telling you how the game got started and explaining all the rules...

If that's good, though, the way the movie pretty much never stops to explain who anyone is is even better. It's just so refreshing. All the nods and winks to the at least half a century of comics' history are there, in profusion, for anyone who wants them but if you don't know, you don't need to know and neither the writers nor the director is going to tell you.

As a longtime fan of the Daily Planet newsroom as much as I am of Superman, I was stoked to see not just Lois, Jimmy and Perry but also Steve Lombard and Cat Grant. And they were just working there, saying things people say when they work in an office together. Just so good to see and hear.

There was one more Planet staffer I didn't pick up on, too, although I thought maybe I remembered him from the Eliot S Maggin days. I just looked him up and it was Ron Troupe, a character who actually wasn't introduced until the early '90s, by when i think Maggin had moved on and just around when I was slowly drifting out of the fandom myself. But I do remember Ron now I'm reminded and I did know I knew him when I watched the movie, even if I couldn't quite remember who he was, so that's exactly the kind of rich textuality I'm talking about.

It's always interesting to watch the various interpretations of Lois and Jimmy. Lois Lane seems to be an almost indestructible character. I've seen more versions of her than I can remember and I can't think of a bad one. She's always well-cast, all the actors who play her look like the woman in the comics and she's almost always written as a competent, skilled, professional with a sharp wit and a fast mind. It must be a popular part to get, I'd think. This Lois, though, also felt likeable, which is by no means one of the character's core traits. Some Loises have been stinkers. I prefer a softer Lois to a harder one but I'd have to admit the hard ones are probably closer to the four-color archetype.

Speaking of colors, what is with it Jimmy's hair? Why is it almost never ginger in the movies the way it always is on the page? I mean, Lois and Clark never go blond, do they? So why does Jimmy so often have nondescript brownish hair on screen? Or at least that's what I was thinking this time, until that scene near the end, when they all run up to the roof of the Planet building so Lois can fly them away in Mr Terrific's ship (Don't ask...) and the sun hits Jimmy's hair and you can clearly see the auburn tint. So he is a redhead after all!

Jimmy doesn't have a big role but he still manages to give a really good impression of the kind of bumptious, chance-taking personality that got him his own comic all those years. He sees trouble and he runs straight at it. And in this case the trouble is Lex Luthor's girlfriend, Eve Teschmacher (A great call-back to the first run of movies.) who, impossibly and yet somehow inevitably, turns out to be seeing Jimmy on the side, something that would totally happen in Jimmy's comic, if nowhere else in the universe. 

Gunn appears to know these characters and their history so much better than most Hollywood people who've had the use of them in the past. They said he'd be a safe pair of hands and on this evidence, they were right.

Talking of Lex... this is probably the most evil version I've seen on screen. Usually he has at least one redeeming feature. Sometimes he's positively sympathetic. Not here. Here, he's a sociopathic, sadistic megalomanic with a very, very thin skin and absolutely no tolerance for personal criticism. Putting this Lex up there on screen is making a statement. He's code for... well, we all know what and who he's code for, I'm sure. When Krypto throws him around like a chew-toy at the end, I bet half the audience is cheering. I was laughing too hard or I would have been, too.

Obviously, Krypto is great. He steals every scene he's in. How much of it is dog acting and how much CGI is hard to say and also I could not care less. I just want more of his antics. Looking forward to much more Krypto in Supergirl. As she says in her cameo at the very end, he is her dog, after all. 

And finally, in what appears to have turned into a round-up of the characters rather than an actual review, there's The Justice Gang (Not their real name...) That was an unexpected pleasure, especially since it's three characters I either know little about or wish I didn't.

Hawkgirl is severely underused but she really makes the most of her few scenes. Her deadpan tone and expression are devastatingly effective. The bit where she demonstrates just exactly how much not like Superman she is was sheer joy, even if I knew it was coming from the moment the fool she was carrying opened his mouth to taunt her.

Mr Terrific, a character I've barely even noticed in the comics, was so central to the plot he could have demanded co-star billing. Again, he was deadpan as hell and it worked beautifully. The movie as a whole does a great job of balancing action, pathos and humor, which I guess is James Gunn's super-power. I know it's not going to work for everyone but it's right on the money for me.

And finally, Guy Gardner. I would have said it was impossible to put a version of that character on screen that would both be true to the original but wouldn't alienate most  of the audience - but they did it. Just about. 

They have softened him up some. The movie Guy is a lot less stupid, arrogant and abrasive than the one in the comics I read. He comes across as blunt and abrupt, a bit like Batman probably would if he wasn't so keen on presenting as cool and mysterious although, unlike Batman, he does have a noticeable sense of humor, albeit not a very sophisticated one. On the plus side, this Guy did seem like he was at least competent and willing to compromise, two things no-one ever accused the Guy Gardner in the comics of being.

Anyway, so, I liked it. A lot. And apparently I have nothing meaningful to say about it beyond that. So I'll stop. Let's come back in a few weeks and do this all over again. For Supergirl next time.

Stress On Super, Not On Girl

I couldn't truthfully claim that Supergirl has ever been one of my very favorite characters but, growing up, I was a huge Superman fan and my affection and interest extended to all of the Man of Steel's sprawling family. If a comic had any connection to the mythos, I was there for it. 

Along with the core Action and Superman titles, there was World's Finest, in which Superman shared top billing with Batman in one of the most mismatched double acts of all time. And, of course, there was Superboy, who also turned up regularly in Adventure, home of my all-time favorite superhero team, the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

As well as many, many hundreds of issues of those, my unreasonably large collection of comic books from the '60s through to the '90s contains scores of issues of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane and Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. Yep, those are the official titles. Without good old Supes, Lois and Jimmy's lives clearly had no meaning.

And I also have some Supergirl comics.

Supergirl never really settled down. I can remember three or four times she had her own title but looking it up I see the official count is now up to eight, although somewhat confusingly that includes a limited series. I'd say it ought to be seven.

To be fair to the Maid of Steel, the publishing history of most DC characters probably doesn't look much different. Comics, even more than MMORPGs, suffer from the "I'll never catch up" problem. In games it's levels; in comics it's issues. There's a theory that new readers, seeing the current issue on the stands is #237, are going to put it back and look for something in single figures.

That's one reason even successful long-running series keep rebooting themselves. That and the doomed attempt to establish some kind of coherent continuity, of course. Something anyone other than the company archivist can follow would do. It never works but they keep trying, all the same.

Supergirl, I think it's fair to say, hasn't run through seven (Or eight.) eponymous series because any of them was so successful the high numbers put new readers off. The longest run might have been eighty issues? It's more like the writers and artists and editors and publisher kept trying to nudge her into a position where that might get to be the problem. 

I mean, it could happen. She's wearing the suit, right? She's got name recognition. Why wouldn't she be big?

Except she never really has been. Not really big. Not even with a movie and a TV show backing her up. Where Superman is likely one of the most famous fictional characters in the world, up there with Mickey Mouse and Dracula, Supergirl is only famous by association. She's Superman's cousin. She wears the suit, sure, but it's his suit.

And back in the sixties and seventies, when I was reading her adventures, she was a girl too. A girl! I ask you!

Relax. I'm not going to try to stand up that fatuous and fatally flawed argument that super-hero comics are only for boys, not when my personal experience completely abnegates any such spurious, sexist claptrap. The most fervent fans I've known have been female. But I will say that, again back in the sixties and seventies, not all boys were as comfortable with their gender identity as they are now. To be seen reading a comic starring a girl wasn't something they'd all have felt comfortable doing. A female super-hero was a hard sell to young boys and until maybe the 90s, boys were the target market.

For me, the problem with Supergirl comics wasn't that the title character was a girl. FFS, I read pony books when I was ten! It was more that they weren't always very good. (The pony books weren't always up to much, either...) The art in Supergirl stories was generally fine. I never got the impression comic artists of the era had any issues drawing women. If there was a problem there, it might have been they liked drawing them a little too much. Jim Mooney reportedly drew Supergirl naked in all the panels and only put clothes on her afterwards.

No, it was the writers. I'm guessing back in the seventies and eighties, getting the Supergirl gig wasn't seen exactly as a plum job. I certainly don't recall it going to any of the big names of the time. Did Denny O'Neil ever write Supergirl? Or Marv Wolfman? No, it was Cary Bates and Paul Kupperberg. I have a very soft spot for Cary Bates, who had a great run on the Superman titles, but even at the time he wasn't most people's idea of a star writer. I had friends who thought I was nuts for liking him. Paul Kupperberg, I think of as the kind of writer who'd turn up on fill-ins - a pro in the old-fashioned style.

Those are the Supergirl books I remember. Well, I say remember... I remember I bought them and read them. I have no recollection of what was in them. Not a single storyline stuck. Disposable might be the word.

After that, from the late '90s on, the writers' room started to look a little more respectable, with Peter David and Joseph Loeb making an appearance. There's also a host of names I don't recognize because I haven't kept up with the industry in the last thirty years. Maybe some of them are superstars. I wouldn't know.

I do know, though, that there's at least one Supergirl title that has a very high reputation indeed and that's Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. A limited series in eight issues, it was published in the first couple of years of this decade, making it about five years old now. GoodReads has it at 4.39 (Out of 5.) from almost fourteen thousand ratings.

Not everyone loves the book, though. It's controversial, at least in some quarters. I first heard about it from someone who really, really doesn't like it, Anj of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. 

Anj is a proper Supergirl fan, not a part-timer like me. As he says in his bio, "I have been a fan of Supergirl since my early comic days and have followed her in all her incarnations." 

He also has a particular view of who Supergirl is and more particularly who she should be. Not to put words into his mouth but she should be a beacon of hope, a shining light, an aspirational role model, kind, thoughtful, generous of spirit and all-round wonderful. Not a lonely, maudlin drunk out on a bender in some backstreet bar on her 21st birthday before throwing up in a bucket the next morning. She certainly shouldn't be found, as she is in one scene Anj especially dislikes, taking a tweenage girl to watch a public execution.

These things do happen in Woman of Tomorrow. I knew that before I read it because I'd already heard the complaints. And those complaints had put me off a little. I also tend to think of Supergirl as quite a sweet, somewhat naive character. Clean-cut, even. It didn't sound like I'd like this version of her, either, so I didn't bother reading it.

Until a few days ago, that is. It was after I'd watched the second trailer for the upcoming Supergirl movie. In a post I wrote about the first trailer (A post that reads now like notes for this one...) I said it looked "very encouraging". 

The movie is based on the Tom King story. How closely remains to be seen but I'm guessing it'll be fairly similar, although Lobo isn't in the book and I'll take a bet now that Comet the Super-Horse won't be in the movie. She probably won't swear quite as much either, which'll be a pity. The swearing is a highlight. 

Certainly the core elements are all there in the trailers. I can say that now because I have, finally, read the whole eight issues and seen both the trailers. It was the second trailer that eventually got me to the book - that and reading the opening few pages in a copy of the DC Compact version at work, while I was supposed to be working.

The second trailer is a blast. Well, in parts. When it's not bleak, that is. Take a look for yourself.

I watched it and then I read a few pages of the comic and I thought maybe I ought to make up my own mind on whether it was a version of Kara Zor-El I approved of, rather than take anyone else's word for it. So I spent an hour or two reading the whole thing and guess what? It is.

It really is. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is a great comic book. The writing is excellent. Top of the range. The artwork, by Bilquis Evely, is just stunning. It's beautiful but also her panel-to-panel flow is exemplary. Great storytelling.  The characters are complex, nuanced and very relatable. There are some good laughs and a lot of tear-up moments. 

Okay, the story itself is basically True Grit in Space but there's nothing so much wrong with that...

I loved it. I whole-heartedly recommend it. I'd also say that, as I somewhat suspected, most of the complaints seem to me to come from a misreading of what is, if I have any criticisms at all, Tom King's rather elliptical, enigmatic approach to narrative. He leans really hard into the unreliable narrator archetype and I'm not sure that's something comics readers are always all that comfortable with. He also deals quite heavily in irony, which ditto. 

My take on his version of Supergirl is that she's a deep thinker, a planner, a strategist and an extremely moral person with exceptionally high standards. She just likes to keep most of that to herself. And she doesn't much mind looking cool while she's doing it. Or not looking cool at all. Either one. She's seen and done too much to care how others think of her and she's young enough to care a whole hell of a lot.

The whole book is like that. Comics do that sort of thing really well, the words and pictures telling the same different story. Better than novels do it, really. Super-hero comics don't always go there, though, and maybe super-hero comic fans aren't always ready to go with them when they try.

The big structural problem with Woman of Tomorrow, though, comes right at the end, on the very last page. I won't spoil the ending even by hinting at what happens because it's a good ending that oughtn't to be spoiled. I don't need to do that to explain what the problem is, anyway.

The book ends with some panels in which a thing happens that appears to negate everything that's taken the whole eight issues to set up and resolve. You seem to get a satisfying ending followed by a coda that turns it on its head and it's unsettling to say the least. I found it so odd and confusing, I had to google to find out what other people thought.

And what they think, some of them, and what I think, is that the problem is being too subtle. In this very last few panels, the writing is slightly too nuanced for its own good and the art slightly less demonstrative than it needs to be. The result is ambiguity, whereas I'm pretty sure the intention was clarity. 

It's an editing problem, fundamentally. Someone should have said "They're going to misunderstand this, guys. You need to make it just a tad more obvious what's going on..."

I imagine everyone concerned knew exactly what the scenes they'd written and drawn meant so they saw what they expected to see, whereas readers coming to it without the internal thought processes of the writer and artist could only go on what was there in front of them. Happens all the time.

Which is fine, actually. I mean, if they don't get it, screw 'em, right? It's not like art has to explain itself.

Sounds like I'm being ironic but I'm not, not really. Art is held to different standards than entertainment, which is why we keep running into these issues whenever the lines blur. When we read comics or play games or watch movies or TV shows we expect to understand everything and we get cross when we don't. It's reasonable. 

Only it's not. Nor fair. Not reasonable or fair of us to have those expectations, that is, because we also expect the best of our entertainment to aspire to being art. We knock it when it settles for less and when it reaches and falls short. But even when it succeeds, we don't always like it. 

And that's both reasonable and unreasonable, too. Sometimes things don't make sense because they actually don't make sense. The writer or the director or the actor didn't get it right. We deserve better. Sometimes they don't make sense because we haven't been able to make sense of them. That's when the creators deserve a better audience. 

Often, though, we can't tell the difference. Is it us or is it them? Let's all sit down and talk about it for a generation.

That's one of the things that make it all such fun. I hope the Supergirl movie turns out to be as controversial and divisive as the comic on which it's based. If it does, I hope it's for the right reason. But even if it's not, better that then being bland, right?

And a lot of those old Supergirl comics were pretty bland. If we're going to be honest.

Is The Bag Half Empty Or Half Full? I think We All Know The Answer To That One...

I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.

Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs

Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.

As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG, AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in 2016. 

I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just before the end of January. Yes, this year. 

I will almost certainly play some more AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can tell.

That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something that's very clear from the response to the company's new Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers. 

Guess how much they were asking for? 

A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!

I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game? 

Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look good on phones, tablets and Steam.

Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did. But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house Artix Game Launcher.

The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game, AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother for an old game when you have a new one? 

I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it. Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually, more than just those people by the look of it.

Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so. 

As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game. And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.

I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that. And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really happening. 

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!

 

Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj. 

I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers. (Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an abomination, that's all I'm saying..)

I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to remember, as have most DC superheroes. 

It's the curse of the long-running character. For all the endless droning on about "continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like. You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention will demonstrate all too convincingly.

The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The 1984 movie featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it lost money. 

It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in 2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it. It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.

Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this year's Superman Day.

Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.  

Only this year it isn't. April 18 is Supergirl Day instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.

To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin taking the lead for one year.

I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels. 

And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.

Finish With A Song

I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...

Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton

Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.

The duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!

They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers, Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's, Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5. 

Expect further examples of both right here.

Krypto? Two Days In A Row?

I'm looking forward to Blaugust beginning on Friday for the simple reason it'll give me something to write about. Let me rephrase that. It'll give me something to write about that someone might want to read. 

It's not that I'm short of ideas. More that I'm short of ideas that fit the supposed purpose and function of this blog, which started out as place where I could write brief, pithy opinion pieces about Massively Multiple Online Roleplaying Games and shifted over time to accomodate anything and everything in the broad sphere of popular culture that interested, irked or excited me.

And so it remains. Except, as astute readers may have noticed, it now features mostly posts about things I might watch or play or read or otherwise consume rather than those I actually have consumed.

Which is fine, I guess. As a reading experience I'm not sure there's a huge qualitative difference in a post where I describe some new game I read about and speculate on whether I'd want to play it and one where I recount in needless detail my personal experience with a game I have actually acquired an played, based on little more than the tutorial, which is probably as much as I'm ever going to see of it.

Ditto songs. Back when I came up with the intentionally faux-naif title What I've Been Listening To Lately for my regular music feature, it did at least tend to include some songs I'd been playing in the background while I was writing other posts. Now, it's mostly songs I've heard once and bookmarked, then  listened to once more as I decide what goes into the latest post. 

And does it matter? Probably not. They're songs I liked enough to make a note of and then enough more to keep in on a second listen. I can assure everyone I do still listen to a lot more new or new-to-me songs than ever make it onto the blog, so anything that appears here has at least passed the audition. 

Similarly, I read about and watch trailers for plenty of games I can't even be bothered to bookmark and some of the ones I do save for later get kicked out on review without ever meriting so much as a mention here. Does that make those posts materially inferior to the endless stream of uneccessarily lengthy analyses of every last, tiny development in Guild Wars 2, something that provided the backbone of this blog for the best part of a decade?

Second-to-last GW2 screenshot I ever took. Apparently in October 2023,
which means I must have played more recently than I thought.

 

Posts on TV shows describe a slightly different arc. I very rarely, if ever, write about shows I haven't seen and usually I wait until I've seen the entire run before putting finger to key. Which would be all well and good if I was actually watching any but at the moment I'm not. I literally haven't looked at any of my streaming platforms at all for almost a couple of weeks now. I'm not writing about TV because I'm not watching any.

What I am doing, as I've mentioned far too often, is making music with AI. I do this all the time now. It is close to being the only leisure activity/hobby I have at the moment. It's taken over all the time I used to use both to play games and watch shows and some extra besides. And I have more sense than to post about that more than once in a very long while, much though I'd love to. It'd be the blogging equivalent of cornering someone at a party and reading them your poetry.

With any other spare time I get, I've been scanning, digitizing and editing the novella I mentioned, from which I'm spinning off all these songs. That's taking some time, too. What I'll do with it after that remains to be seen but I won't just be putting it up on this blog or talking about it here other than in this kind of tangential reference. I want to do something a bit more substantive than that although I'm still puzzling over what that might be.

All of the above makes for a somewhat self-indulgent post on the last day of July but a week from now, as we approach Week Two of Blaugust - Introduce Yourself Week - it will suddenly become entirely relevant, appropriate and apposite. Even tomorrow, on Blaugust Day One, it will kind of make sense. 

Maybe don't read it until then? Oh, sorry... too late...

Anyway, in the spirit of writing about things I haven't done, let me say a little about the two new superhero movies that just came out - Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. The first thing I wanted to say is that I have considered going to see both of them. And, indeed, am still so considering.

This is a notable event. I believe the last movie I went to see on release at the cinema was Arrival back in 2016. If I've seen anything since, I can't remember it. I'd blame my absence from the cinema on the pandemic but on that evidence I'd dropped off the wagon well before then. 

Post-pandemic I have tried to get my former movie-going partner to come and see a couple of things with me but she's not interested any more, having also had the habit broken by the enforced shut-down. As for going with Mrs Bhagpuss, who's never been a keen cinema-goer but could occasionally be tempted, now we have Beryl, who cannot be left Home Alone (Although she could sit with us as we watched Home Alone, together, at home, I suppose. I've never actually seen Home Alone...) going out together to do anything non-dog-friendly involves such a logistical performance neither of us can be bothered with it.

Which leaves going to the movies on my own, something I used to do not all that infrequently when I was younger. Much younger. 

I have no existential objections. It's actually a good way to see movies if you want to concentrate on the film rather than have a Shared Social Experience. It's just a bit more effort than I'm quite ready for... although that might be changing.

I want to see Superman enough that I did get as far as looking up the times of showings. I was thinking of going this week but my mother had a health scare and ended up in hospital so a lot of time was spent driving backwards and forwards that could have been spent sitting in a darkened auditorium.

She's back home now, though, and next week is - in theory - clear of obligations (See how long that lasts...) so maybe...

I am and almost always have been a Superman fan, of course, which explains some of the interest. All the same, I haven't felt any burning desire, let alone need, to see a Superman movie since Christopher Reeve first donned the cape in 1978. This movie feels different, though, as evidenced by my previous posts, gosh-wowing over the trailers. 

Superman (And even more so Supergirl.) fans of a certain age have a very particular view of the right way to do The Superman Family. It's been a while since there's been a movie that felt like it might come anywhere close to the mark. This one does and it seems almost rude not to celebrate the occasion by paying to see it.

If Superman has been inadequately served by Hollywood, though, what about The Fantastic Four?  Marvel's First Family, the bedrock on which the entire Marvel Universe was built, have infamously never been given the treatment they deserve by any medium other than the comics themselves. There have been some FF films and they have been bad.

  (The 2015 Version. Apparently the movie is even worse than the trailer. Scary thought.)

By all accounts, the new one isn't. It's good. Maybe very good. That alone makes it worth seeing, if only out of curiosity.

The thing about the Fantastic Four, though, is that they were always more respected than loved, even by Marvel fans. In the 1960s, Superman was old-fashioned in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the company that published his adventures but the FF always seemed to carry an aura of The Establishment about them that made them something of an odd fit for Marvel's increasingly counter-culture image. 

Let's be honest - Reed and Sue Richards came off like someone's parents. Then Franklin Richards popped out and they really were. What with Johnny Storm seeming to have walked off the set of 77 Sunset Strip and Ben Grimm acting like he had to be in his forties at least, I never really got how the FF were supposed to be part of the same teenage Swinging Sixties set as SpiderMan or the X-Men. It's no wonder their classic run is a whole series of introductions for hipper heroes like the Silver Surfer and Adam Warlock. 

For all that, the team is seminal, with an importance that can't be ignored. Once again, if there's finally a version of the Fantastic Four up on screen that works, I can't but help feel I ought to make some effort to go check it out.

Chances are I won't. I'll likely end up getting both movies on DVD or even watching them on a streaming platform, although that's possibly even less likely to happen than seeing them at the cinema.

I almost said, if you've seen either of them, let me know what you think in the comments, but then I remembered I'm still trying to avoid spoilers so maybe don't do that just yet. Save it for the post when I talk about actually having seen either or both of them.

You might have a while to wait. 

We Can Remember It For You Piecemeal

I do feel as though I might be playing more games again soon. I'm feeling that itch. Today, though, I don't have anything to report on that front so here's something on ephemerality instead. 

It's something I'm always aware of. Keeping a blog that records your momentary interests and holds them in stasis is altogether too similar to keeping a diary to avoid it. I used to think and sometimes said out loud that one of the blessings of a blog is that it allows you to revisit your past but, like Monk considering his idiosyncracies, I now wonder if that's not both a blessing and a curse.

I certainly find it uncomfortable to see just how wonderful I once thought things I now don't consider all that great at all. The overwhelming power of novelty is all too clear in the back pages of this blog. Contrapuntally, it's concerning to observe just how many times I say the same thing without seeming to realize it's not just not a new idea, it's not even a new idea to me.

The same, only more so, applies to all that writing I did back in the 'eighties and 'nineties. Not the fiction which, apart from a handful of contemporary references, feels moderately timeless now I revisit it, but the endless lists of favorite things and all those cultural opinions I couldn't keep to myself. 

I was brought to thinking about all this when I came across a file on an old floppy disk yesterday, the full text of a review of the year I did for the APA back in 1998. The year before online gaming swallowed me whole.

The first thing I noticed with discomfort was how much more I'd been doing then in terms of going out and participating. Cinema, live music, visting friends, foreign travel, rummaging through the detritus of other peoples' lives at all kinds of sales and in all kinds of stores. Of all those activities, I think the only one to survive the onset of live gaming was the travel. It took a pandemic to put an end to that.

Still, as much of that drifting down can be laid at the grave of youth as blamed on gaming. I was turning forty then and after that watershed many people, maybe most people, experience a sharp decline in interest in anything that takes them out after dark. Or out of the house at all.

It's later, when retirement arrives, that filling up the time requires the taking up of hobbies and activities. Or so I've heard. Personally, I have more to do than I can find the hours for and that's just here at home. Still, old people do go out more, I believe. Until they can't, of course.

So, shelve the angsting over age and lost engagement. That's not what really set me back when I heard myself speaking across a gap of more than a decade and a half. What surprised, maybe slightly shocked me was the intensity with which then-me recommended books and music and movies I now couldn't remember at all.

And these weren't just passing fancies like the tunes I share here every couple of weeks. I already know plenty of those barely ring any bells with me even a few months on, much less that they'll last seventeen years. No, remember this was my Pick of the Year round-up. These were supposedly the works of art that had had the most impact on me over the preceding twelve months. You'd think I might at least remember the names...

Here's an example. Talking about all the books I'd read that year

"Best of the lot, though, was Jean Thesman's The Last April Dancers, a novel so bleak it could almost be called Plathian."

Anyone heard of it? Anyone? Bueller?

I had to look it up. It was apparently my favorite novel of 1998 but I didn't recognize the name of the author or the title of the book. And guess what? After now I've looked it up I still don't.

Here's the entry on Goodreads. It comes with a handy thumbnail biography of Jean Thesman, who died in 2016 at the age of 86, " leaving behind a significant legacy in young adult literature." She wrote around 40 novels and was known for her "lyrical style, emotional depth, and strong female characters".

I can see why I rated the book so highly. I just don't get why I can't remember anything about it, not even that it existed, not least since I apparently found the experience of reading it "so harrowing I twice had to stop reading it to build up courage to carry on" . You'd think something like that would leave a lasting impression but it seems you'd be wrong.

I do read a lot of books and I do find most of them very hard to recall in detail but in most cases a glimpse of the cover or at most a glance at the blurb will quickly bring a flurry of images and incidents rushing back, even after many years. This one? Not a damn thing. 

Now I feel I need to go look for more of Jean Thesman's work but despite her success it seems there's not much left in print, even in her homeland USA. Used copies, if you can find them, are already acquiring collector's price-tags, especially in hardback. Missed my chance there, it seems.

Of course, it may be that I already have a copy of The Last April Dancers, somewhere in the house. I certainly have most of the other "juveniles" I praised in that 1998 round-up. I'd been going through a phase of scooping them up whenever I saw them, mainly in charity shops where, at the time they were ubiquitous. You never, ever see them now. There's little as ephemeral as a popular YA novel.

Still on my shelves from that 1998 list:  M.E. Kerr (If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever?  and The Son of Someone Famous) and Barbara Wersba (Tunes For A Small Harmonica  and  Crazy Vanilla). I was only thinking about re-reading Barbara Wersba last week, as it happens. As for "the left field Waltons -go- Survivalist ethos of Cynthia Voigt and her epic Tillerman family saga", I have re-read at least a couple of those since 1998. I can remember all of that lot, vaguely, and yet in the year I first read them all, The Last April Dancers supposedly made the greatest impression. Now it's the one I might as well never have read at all.

From books to music. It's a truism that music's far easier to revisit than fiction. It's all in the length. Three minutes for a pop song; three days for a novel.

And surely to god you'd expect anyone to remember their favorite song of an entire year! I mean, okay, maybe they might not have it in mind but if they saw the name of the band or the title of the song, they'd at least recognize and presumably remember they liked it, right?

Guess what my favorite song of 1998 was, according to my 1998 yearly review? I mean, I took the trouble to put it in print so it has to be true...

I say that because I'm seriously questioning it now. According to what I wrote at the time,  "If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune". 

The what now? Is that a style? A genre?

No, it's a band. Here's "the Slacker tune" I was talking about.

It's called "Scared". It got to #36 in the UK in 1997, so it didn't even come out in the year I was writing about. That's what happens when you buy all your CDs from bargain bins. 

Slacker are at least a step ahead of poor old Jean Thesman in that once I'd gone to YouTube and listened to Scared I did vaguely remember it. And I do like it, even now. Even if Ihaven't thought about it in seventeen years. 

I find it very hard to believe it was the best thing I heard in the whole of 1998, though. Hard as in completely freakin' impossible. It's progressive house ffs!

Here's the full list of my favorite singles of 1998: 

"On CD, my favourite singles were Scared (Slacker); Song 2 (Blur); Glorious (Goya Dress); Kowalski (Primal Scream); Lazy (Suede) Rhino Rays E.P. (Dawn of the Replicants); Ginger  (David Devant and his Spirit Wife);  Pussycat  (Mulu) and  On the Soft (Magicdrive). If I had to choose a favourite-of-favourites for '98, I guess it would be the Slacker tune, but the third track on the Goya Dress  single, 20th Century Box, is pretty dam' magnificent."

Can you believe I rated that Slacker tune more highly than Song 2? Had I been hit in the head?

Not only can I can remember six of those eight songs very clearly (More, actually, since the Dawn of the Replicants CD is an EP.) but I've listened to all of them fairly consistently ever since and several have had their charms exposed here on the blog. How the heck did I think Slacker was the best of them if I then never listened to the damn thing again?

And here's the weirdest part: my runner-up is one of the others I have no memory of at all!  When I read that yesterday, I had no clue who Goya Dress were (Still don't, in fact.) and no memory of any track on their CD single, let alone the third, which presumably was the equivalent of a second B-side.

I listened to that one yesterday as well. It's good. I certainly wouldn't pick it now over On The Soft or Song 2, though.

What am I supposed to read into all that? that my tastes have changed even though my tastes haven't changed? That back then I had good range but poor focus? That my memory is terrible except when it's completely fine?

Dunno. I'll finish with something a bit more encouraging, for my mental state, anyway: movies. It seems in 1998 I was still going to the cinema often enough to have opinions based on experience. And what's more I can remember the movies I wrote about and going to see them at the cinema. Maybe it's that that sticks them in the mind.

"Films, then.  The one I remember most clearly is When We Were Kings, which I found to be a magical recreation of fragmentary memories and images."

I went to see that one, a documentary on Muhammed Ali's infamous Rumble in the Jungle, with my mother, who's always been a fan. I saw it at The Arnolfini, a gallery and arthouse cinema in Bristol. I remember the seats being very uncomfortable. The movie was great, though.

And finally, because I laughed when I read it and to show how much more snarky I used to be back then, my mini-review of the film I liked least in 1998:

"Most disappointing film, by far, was L.A. Confidential, which was pot-boiler twonk; the performances were ordinary, except for Kim Basinger's, which was too artificial and stilted to rise that far, (and would have been insulting to the memory of Victoria Lake, had Basinger actually resembled the Girl With the Peekaboo Bangs in any way whatsoever, which she patently did not); the photography was dull, not even a hint of the Technicolor sheen the reviews lauded; the direction was functional and uninvolving; the script was a mish-mash of incoherent cliche, simultaneously simple to follow and confusing (almost as if it had been very badly cobbled together from the plots of two or three complicated novels, in fact); worst of all was the ludicrous, prolonged shoot-out ending which actually made me feel angry for having paid money and wasted two hours of my life just to get to that climax of banality. All in all, I didn't much like it." 

Even now, I remember it as being two of the most tedious hours I've ever spent in a cinema. My opinion on the film has never shifted although I've had a few quite heated arguments with people about it, the most recent being this year at work. Nothing remotely ephemeral about it 

My opinion, that is. The movie's ephemeral as hell.