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- Superman Films Ranked: #11 Supergirl (1986)
- Disney Releases ‘Andor’ Trailer and Gives Green Light to 2nd Season
- Disney+ Reveals ‘Willow’ Sequel Series Trailer & Release Date
- Kevin Spacey Charged with Four Counts of Sexual Misconduct
- AWA Studios Partners with GlobalComix for Multi-Language Comics Adaptations
| Superman Films Ranked: #11 Supergirl (1986) Posted: 29 May 2022 03:25 PM PDT
#11 in my ranking of the theatrically released Superman films.
Well, that was something. Reeling from the financial failure of Superman III, the Salkinds were banking on this spinoff to rescue the franchise and their financial stake in the Super characters. It…it did not work. This silly look at superheroes versus witches lacks any sense of urgency even though the action is supposed to undo terrible things. Instead, we get a full act of filler that derails everything that the movie never recovers from, not that its first act was anything terribly special.
In some kind of technobabble pocket dimension that exists for technobabble reasons, saved by Zaltar (Peter O'Toole), lives a group of Kryptonians preserved from the destruction of their home planet. Among them lives Kara Zor-El (Helen Slater). Zaltar uses a device called the Omegahedron to create art projects based on Earth life for…reasons. An accident sends the Omegahedron out of the city and to Earth, so Zaltar gets banished to the Phantom Zone and Kara decides to just go to Earth to get it back so that her people won't die. There's your stakes.
And then Kara gets to Earth and she instantly forgets everything about the movie's stakes. She emerges from a lake in full Supergirl gear for reasons, start smelling flowers and chasing bunnies. Meanwhile, the Omegahedron has fallen into the picnic of Selena (Faye Dunaway), a witch, alongside Nigel (Peter Cook), who is also a witch? I guess. It's not important. Anyway, Selena sees this orb fall into her food and she instantly decides that it will help her…conquer the world. Like…there's no second to consider what this thing is that she's holding. She's going to conquer the world with it.
Now, to talk about Plato for a quick second. He established several rules for drama that dominated Greek theater at its height in Poetics. A couple of these major rules tend to work best in theatrical settings, but one is pretty easily applicable to all forms of storytelling, Unity of Action. This concept is the idea that everything in a story should feed the central point of the story. Everything should interlace together to tell one thing, one story. So, when Selena decides to use the Omegahedron to conquer the world and this has absolutely nothing to do with Kara's central concern of saving her home, it creates a dissonance in the storytelling that creates the impression that we're not watching one story. We're watching several, and they clash.
It also doesn't help that Kara then spends the next half hour trying to get into and blend in with the girls at an all-girls boarding school. Why? I assume it's because superhero convention demands that our superheroes have secret identities, and what would a Supergirl movie be without Kara leading some kind of double life even if it has nothing to do with her story, has no effect on her ability to carry out her central mission and purpose, and she has no direct tie to the planet? So, sure, let's watch Kara get stuck in math classes (taught by Nigel for inexplicable reasons), save Lucy Lane (Maureen Teefy), Lois Lane's younger sister, from a maliciously delivered ball in a schoolyard game, and, because why not, let's watch Selena decide that a man is her primary concern now.
Wait…wasn't she going to conquer the world? Not after she got some tasty man meat from Ethan (Hart Bochner), a groundskeeper at the school that she sees once and decides must be hers, for some reason. And that becomes the plot of the movie for a bit. Selena wants Ethan, so she cooks up a love potion, but it backfires and Ethan ends up falling in love with Kara's alter ego Linda Lee (with brown hair instead of yellow hair). This is after, of course, a ridiculous action sequence where Selena uses her magic to power a piece of construction equipment to literally scoop Ethan up from the ground that Supergirl flies away with to save him. Because, why not? It's not like any of this matters.
Selena ends up getting Ethan back and sending Kara to the Phantom Zone where she meets Zaltar again. I'll say that Peter O'Toole not caring about his performance is still worth watching. He was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for his performance here, but it wasn't deserved. This isn't some great O'Toole performance on par with T.E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia or anything, but I'll take half-drunk O'Toole over most actors desperately trying any day. Anyway, Zaltar leads Kara out of the Phantom Zone in the one special effects sequence that looks any good with a maelstrom that they must crawl past, and Kara gets out for her final confrontation. She wins, blah, blah, blah.
I felt like using witches in a Superman/Supergirl movie was a weird choice, but I was willing to go with it. This subgenre of comic book movies feels more natural with cosmic fantasy than spells and potions, but it's all in a similar vein of fantasy. They can intersect. The problem isn't that. It's that Selena's whole plot is nonsensical. It has nothing to do with Supergirl's motives. It also functions as a complete distraction from the actual story. It probably doesn't help that about half of the film is about girls being boy crazy. At best, this is silly nonsense, but there was real money behind this. It was the final nail in the coffin of the Salkinds having anything to do with the Superman franchise, and it was a deserving end. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing, and hiring Jeannot Szwarc, the director of Jaws 2, was the exact kind of strange choice I would have expected.
Rating: 1/4
Originally published here. The post Superman Films Ranked: #11 Supergirl (1986) appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Disney Releases ‘Andor’ Trailer and Gives Green Light to 2nd Season Posted: 29 May 2022 12:55 PM PDT
The first trailer for Andor puts Diego Luna back in the Star Wars galaxy. Along with the trailer reveal, a second season of the show was confirmed Thursday at Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, Calif., THR reports.
Season one will debut Aug. 31 with two episodes. Showrunner Tony Gilroy revealed 12 episodes have already been filmed, with 12 more planned for a second season that will film in the fall.
Andor centers on Luna's Rogue One character and kicks off five years before Rogue One, with the second season covering the final four-year gap before the film. The series will lead directly into Rogue One with its final scene, said Gilroy, the writer who unofficially took over directing duties on Rogue One and helped shepherd it to more than $1 billion at the box office.
Andor stars Luna as the spy who sacrificed himself in 2016's Rogue One while getting plans for the Death Star to the Rebellion. The series hails from Gilroy. Adria Arjona, Stellan Skarsgard, Genevieve O'Reilly and Denise Gough star.
The post Disney Releases ‘Andor’ Trailer and Gives Green Light to 2nd Season appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Disney+ Reveals ‘Willow’ Sequel Series Trailer & Release Date Posted: 29 May 2022 10:25 AM PDT
After losing its first director last year, Lucasfilm's new Disney+ series based on Willow is coming this fall. Willow is the late '80s fantasy film directed by Ron Howard and based on a story by George Lucas. Now the first trailer shows Warwick Davis, in this eponymous role as Willow Ufgood, returning to (perhaps reluctantly) contend with a new imbalance of good and evil.
Willow will not be alone for his next journey, naturally. Joining Davis in Willow is a much-younger cast of adventurers, mostly women, played by Dempsey Bryk, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ellie Bamber, Tony Revolori, Ruby Cruz, and Erin Kellyman (who previously starred with Davis in Solo: A Star Wars Story). Joanne Whalley from the original Willow will reprise her role as Sorsha in the series.
The new Willow will be set about 20 years after the original film. It will debut on Disney+ on Nov. 30.
via Polygon The post Disney+ Reveals ‘Willow’ Sequel Series Trailer & Release Date appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| Kevin Spacey Charged with Four Counts of Sexual Misconduct Posted: 29 May 2022 07:55 AM PDT
Kevin Spacey, a two-time Academy Award winner, has been charged with four counts of sexual assault against three individuals.
Rosemary Ainslie, head of the Special Crime Division at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) revealed in a statement, "The CPS has authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault against three men. He has also been charged with causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent. The charges follow a review of the evidence gathered by the Metropolitan Police in its investigation"
“Causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent” sounds a lot like rape.
In the 1990s, the prominent actor gained to popularity in films such as Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects, Curtis Hanson’s L.A Confidential, and Sam Mendes’ controversial hit American Beauty. More recently, Spacey starred in the Netflix series House of Cards. His most recent work, however, was on Christmas Eve 2018-2020, when he released a bizarre series of YouTube videos in character after having been fired from the show.
Sexual assault allegations against the Spacey date back to October 2017, when another actor, Anthony Rapp, said that Spacey made sexual attempts toward him when he was 14 years old at a party in 1986. Studios and those in the industry quickly distanced themselves from Spacey. A month after the accusations surfaced, Spacey was replaced by Christopher Plummer in Ridley Scott’s J Paul Getty thriller “All the Money in the World”. Within weeks, 15 other people came forward with similar allegations. Netflix also fired the actor from its critically successful series House of Cards, and he was also dropped by both his publicist and talent agency CAA.
"The Crown Prosecution Service reminds all concerned that criminal proceedings against Mr Spacey are active and that he has the right to a fair trial," the statement from the CPS concludes. The post Kevin Spacey Charged with Four Counts of Sexual Misconduct appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
| AWA Studios Partners with GlobalComix for Multi-Language Comics Adaptations Posted: 29 May 2022 05:25 AM PDT
GlobalComix has just announced a "Global First" localization partnership with AWA Studios, beginning with the release of Emmett: A Lesser Evils Story. "Global First" is a holistic approach to translation in the comics industry, dedicated to fans and readers around the world.
As part of a new service in 2022 and beyond, the Global First mission focuses on translation and multiple language adaptations in order to bring all the world's comics online, to reach readers in whichever language they are most comfortable with. From comic books to short films and webtoons, part one (of four) of the Brooklyn-based, horror/supernatural adventures debuts today on GlobalComix with the digital release of Emmett: A Lesser Evils Story, written by Ian Grody with art by Yishan Li (Hellboy, Batwoman).
Here’s the synopsis:
Welcome to Brooklyn Through the Looking Glass, where a golem with benefits, a spiraling genie, a demon who feeds on bad vibes, and a mischievous mermaid collide with heartbroken, hard-living, and hype-obsessed humans. Lesser Evils is a hilarious, pop culture-filled universe that explores what intimacy, spite, selflessness, and friendship mean today. Meet Lydia Loew, an artisan potter, who goes on a bender after a bad breakup. Then, in anguish and anger, she accidentally conjures up a golem from clay in her Bushwick studio. Enter Emmett, a golem with benefits. He mixes a mean cocktail, is handy around the house, and will help Lydia exact revenge, with a vengeance.
Following the digital release of GlobalComix's Emmett: A Lesser Evils Story, AWA Studios will debut never-before-seen content from the Lesser Evils universe at Tribeca Festival in New York, directed by Justin Fair. Print copies of the comic series will be available with special QR code that unlocks the comic in six languages: English, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Hindi.
"It's not just going digital first, it's going Global First," said Christopher Carter, Founder and CEO of GlobalComix. "We believe that when companies go digital first, they are no longer constrained to the same up-front investment costs of physical market validation, distribution, supply chain, required for localization and global audiences."
"When Christopher first mentioned the possibility of creating seamless localizations of our digital comics on GlobalComix, I knew it was something AWA had to be a part of," said Will Graves, Managing Editor of AWA Studios. "The timing aligned perfectly with the release of Lesser Evils and what better property to launch in multiple languages than a comic universe that takes place in one of the most diverse places in the world, Brooklyn, NY. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with GlobalComix to expand languages offered and make our stories as accessible as possible around the world."
The post AWA Studios Partners with GlobalComix for Multi-Language Comics Adaptations appeared first on Bleeding Fool. |
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