Stuff I Hate: Superman The Movie (1978)
Being courteous can be hard for me and sometimes I find it totally impossible. (Apologies to Michael Cohn. You just keep dancing however the music moves you.) I’m better at keeping my trap shut these days, but being nice is making me lose touch with who I really am; a total shithead that thinks everything sucks. Writing on the Mishka blog for me is like screaming into my pillow.
I just watched the Superman movie last week and was amazed by it’s badness. Chris Reeves is too nerdy to be Superman. The special effects look shoddy, even by seventies standards. It’s too long. How does Lois Lane, a newspaper reporter, afford to live in a penthouse? They paid Marlon Brando a million bucks and he added nothing. Lex Luthor wears a wig for the entire movie. Even though Superman lives in Metropolis you can see famous New York landmarks all over the place. There’s more stuff that really, really sucked but I thought I’d focus on two scenes that express what is wrong with the movie.
The clip gets “good” about three minutes and thirty seconds in when Lois Lane thinks the weirdest shitty poem at Superman while he stares at her blankly, like a happy frog. It turns out that the weird retard bologna she’s saying in her head were intended to be song lyrics but they went with this instead.
“Can you read my mind ?
Do you know what it is you do to me ? ”
The characters in Superman interact on a level that would make sense to a grade school audience for the most part. The characters acting like children really makes the sex and death elements in the movie seem obscene. There’s a scene in which Lois flirts desperately and invites him to use his x-ray vision to see her underwear and asks him other squirm inducing questions. Later she dies when her car falls into a trench and then it fills up with dirt while she claws at the glass and is buried alive.
In response Superman screams,”Noooooo!” and reverses time by flying around the planet in a way that reverses the planet’s orbit. That’s a concept that was too goofy and morally questionable to even make it into the comics.
In conclusion, fuck this movie, I hate it.
- Toilet Cobra
April 21st, 2009 at 7:19 am
This might be my favorite blog post of all time
April 21st, 2009 at 11:16 am
Damn TC, you single handedly cursed the actors in this movie aside from Gene Hackman because he’s eternally a badass.
April 21st, 2009 at 11:28 am
hi-
as an adult, your review is right on.. i saw this movie as a kid, and grew up with it, so it didn’t seem as cheesy.. you have to admit, all the growing up in smallville stuff was cool and true to superman lore.. fortress of solitude was dope too.
superman II was way better if you dare to check that out.. the richard donner director’s cut is what you want to get, be warned though, it has it’s cheesiness too. oh and fyi- luthor is supposed to be wearing a wig, he’s bald.
-ron
April 21st, 2009 at 11:56 am
this made me lol
April 21st, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Once I realized that the opening credit sequence was–no shit–20 minutes long of those fucking titles flying in and out and in and out, I fell way out of love with this movie. I was 12. Spot on. And yes: Brando?! Dude brought zero to the piece.
April 21st, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I’m twenty-five going on twenty-six and grew up with Tim Burton’s Batman. I only remember seeing scenes of the Superman movies on TV but never watched them in their entirety. I did read my dad’s silver age Superman comics over and over again so that era of Superman where it was at it’s most ridiculous is something I like.
Backpedalling on my hatefest, the Smallville scenes were great. The cinematogrophy was pretty throughout the movie. I had mixed feelings of the Fortress of Solitude. I thought it looked a little too much like it was all made of plastic, especially that device that contained his computer dad.
I am netflixing all of the Superman movies including the new one. I’ve decided to catch up on all the comic book movies that I haven’t seen.
I know Lex Luthor’s a bald character but he should have appeared bald in the movie. Gene Hackman wouldn’t play along though. Before the Superman history was retconned Luthor met Superman when he was still Superboy, became his pal and received a science lab as a gift. Luthor caused a chemical fire which Superboy blew out and somehow the chemicals washed over Luthor’s head, causing instant baldness. He instantly turned from good to evil, cursing Superboy and vowing to use science only for crime. Somehow the balding chemicals ignored his eyebrows.
April 21st, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Has anyone ever explained why the actor who plays young Clark has a fake nose?