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Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Superman' Review: David Corenswet Soars but James Gunn's Movie Hits Rough Air
In recent years Superman has become something of a nowhere man, a caped irrelevancy. You just know all the superheroes over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe make fun of him on their Slack channel. Yet for decades he was a figure of glory, flying at the highest altitudes, fists clenched in strength, jaw and chin firmly set with the fortitude of a true champion of civil order. In the era known as the American Century, he symbolized the country's sense of exceptionalism, justice, optimism and might. (His alter ego, Clark Kent, was just as morally sound, if awkwardly virile — a point that Vladimir Nabokov addressed in a 1942 poem: 'I have to wear these glasses—otherwise / When I caress her from my super-eyes / Her lungs and liver are too plainly seen.') Superman had his own radio show by 1940, and a feature movie, Superman and the Mole Men, as well as a TV series little more than a decade later. In both vehicles he was played by George Reeves, polite, bland and not noticeably muscled. But Metropolis in those days wasn't terribly violent. Superman's 'S' could have stood for 'security.' With time, as America's sense of itself became more complex, Superman could be discussed analytically, abstractly or ironically without having his integrity questioned or compromised. Norman Mailer invoked him in his book about JFK, Superman Comes to the Supermarket. Charles Strouse and Lee Adams created a Broadway musical version (It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman!). Roy Lichtenstein turned him into a pop-art icon. But his apotheosis came with the 1978 blockbuster Superman: The Movie. The promotional campaign touted the slogan 'You will believe you can see a man fly' — well, no, not really. Not now, not ever. But you did believe in Christopher Reeve's charmingly diffident, classically beautiful Superman. If it was good to be the king, it was better to be Superman. Since then, though, Superman has been critically weakened, and not because of the green toxic glow of Kryptonite. In the still-expanding superhero action-movie universe, he's a stolid old moon eclipsed by bright, zippy asteroids. He's also languished in the inky shadow of mystery that director Christopher Nolan brought to D.C.'s other major superhero, Batman, starting with Batman Begins. Henry Cavill's Superman aimed for a similar muscled gravitas, but without much success. (If you wanted a 'dark' Superman, he can be found in Laurie Anderson's song 'O Superman,' which equates him with American nuclear capability.) But now he comes again, our Superman, in his first film appearance since 2017's Justice League, and directed by James Gunn, whose restless visual style and irreverent humor practically created a Marvel subgenre out of the Guardians of the Galaxy films. You don't get the impression Gunn will waste any time trying to make Superman great again. The film isn't guided by the vaulted principles of truth, justice and the American way as much as it is by Hollywood's playbook of reboot and tentpole. The result is a dizzyingly wild, wildly imperfect movie with one radical flash of inspiration — we'll get to that — and a refreshingly different Superman. David Corenswet, best known for two Ryan Murphy series, The Politician and Hollywood, has a face that's handsome but short of chiseled superhero perfection, and his hair, dyed raven-black, to some degree doesn't work with his natural tone. He occasionally looks seasick. (He also tends to get banged up a lot, as if he'd been observing the Queensberry rules in a World Wrestling fight.) But his features are strong, attractively so, and they tend to settle into an expression that's friendly, uncomplicated (but not dumb) and open. Shot in closeup as he soars through the sky, he's most likely thinking about how to quash nemesis Lex Luthor (a funny Nicholas Hoult, long, thin and round-headed as a Q-tip). But, for all you know, he might also be anticipating the lunch his robot staff will have prepared for him at the icy compound he calls home. A Superman who can be imagined looking forward to a decent meal isn't a bad thing. The movie barely deals with Superman's alter ego, Clark Kent, whose hair appears to have been zhuzhed with some special gel that survived the exodus from Krypton. His life at The Daily Planet is sketched in lightly, perhaps too lightly, although Skyler Gisondo's Jimmy Olsen is buoyantly likable as he cultivates an underworld source, a romance-minded moll named Eve (Sara Sampaio, delightfully cartoonish). Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane comes to life only fitfully, but in those moments Superman has flashes of genuine feeling. In one provocatively long scene, Lois, who knows Superman's secret identity, argues with Clark that Superman should let her interview him (Superman, of course, always gives Clark the exclusive scoop). Lois's professional pride, Clark/Superman's surprisingly prickly self-defensiveness and the couple's seesaw of friction and attraction are the closest a superhero movie will ever come to Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives. You're also grateful for Gunn's willingness to indulge in silly, throwaway moments. Why, for instance, is there a shot of Clark's hands dropping two slices of bread into a toaster? I have no idea, but I laughed anyway. Gunn also takes a break from the action to show Superman sipping hot chocolate and quietly saying, 'Mmmm!' These small, humanizing touches are more memorable than any of the world-threatening chaos being created by Lex Luthor. But of course chaos is what drives the film. Luthor wants Superman hampered, injured or simply destroyed as he schemes to provoke a war overseas. This is just a lot of busyness. When the aggressor nation's military finally advances against the hapless opposition, you may find yourself wishing movie directors would stop throwing in toothless battle scenes. This one couldn't look less authentic if you filmed an army of parking valets stumbling around a desert, searching for car keys lost in the sand. Before this rather dull international incident, Superman has journeyed into a pocket alternate universe where Luthor stashes and tortures anyone who's tried to thwart him. The prisoners are housed in an enormous complex of stacked glass cubes that could serve as an arena-sized production of Company. Alternate universes never bode well, though, and this one soon is collapsing into a black hole. Visually the whole sequence is a mess, a surging digital spray of color. It's as if someone had thrown handfuls of costume jewelry into a wood chipper. Gunn also finds time to introduce Krypto, Superman's (CGI-rendered) dog. Krypto is cute and boundingly energetic, always eager to play and, as the movie goes on, a bit tiresome. It wouldn't do him any harm to spend a day with a mythic dog whisperer, possibly in the company of Cerberus and the Hound of the Baskervilles. This bring us, at last, to that radical tweak I mentioned earlier — a tweak that has the potential to upend a sizable chunk of the Superman legend. (That's assuming Gunn takes it seriously. Maybe he doesn't.) I don't intend to spoil it here, but it has to do with the high-minded moral instructions that little Kal-El, the future Superman, received from his now-dead parents. It turns out that their full message, spelled out in a hologram of papa Jor-El (played by an unexpected A-lister), was until now garbled because of a technical message isn't nearly as lofty or empowering as Superman might have wished. Even on Krypton, it seems, the Philip Larkin line applies: 'They f--- you up, your mum and dad.' Superman is in theaters July 11. Read the original article on People
Wall Street Journal
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Sweet Science': A.J. Liebling's Chronicle of Boxing Culture
For a pastime defined by competitive brutality and associations with organized crime, boxing has attracted the affection of remarkable writers. The list of American luminaries who have analyzed the sport equals those of baseball, football and basketball, and includes Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates and Ernest Hemingway. But A.J. Liebling did it best, in his 1956 volume 'The Sweet Science.' The book's title is a phrase coined by 19th-century British journalist Pierce Egan, whom Liebling quotes frequently, calling him 'the Herodotus of the London prize ring' and comparing him to Thucydides. The longtime New Yorker writer also cites Mozart, the Duke of Wellington, James Joyce and the Battle of Gallipoli in the pages of 'The Sweet Science,' a collection of his magazine pieces. Its mixture of highbrow culture and lowbrow fighting is among its signatures.
New York Times
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Before QAnon and the Deep State, There Was Iron Mountain
The December 1967 issue of Esquire was, on the whole, standard fare for the age: a photo spread of the actress Sharon Tate; a write-up of a party thrown by Andy Warhol; a review by Norman Mailer of a film by Norman Mailer ('the picture, taken even at its worst, was a phenomenon'). Less characteristically, the magazine also included a 28,000-word feature with a sober title: 'On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.' The article, the editors warned, was 'so depressing that you may not be able to take it.' All the same, it was a gripping read. The piece — an excerpt from an upcoming book, 'Report From Iron Mountain' — provided a cold-eyed assessment of the costs of disarmament. The report was said to be the work of a 'Special Study Group,' its members unknown, that had been meeting secretly in Iron Mountain, a warren of corporate bunkers north of Manhattan. The group took a dim view of a world without war. Armed conflict, they argued, was 'the essential economic stabilizer of modern societies,' spurring growth and creating jobs. War was the nation's 'basic social system': It created a collective purpose; it fostered loyalty to the instruments of power. The authors' prescriptions were chilling, if comically so. With no wars left to wage, the government might need to concoct 'a believable external menace' — the threat of alien attack, for example. Young men, lacking an outlet for their aggression, might be diverted into state-sponsored 'blood games.' 'Report From Iron Mountain' was soon revealed as a hoax. But it was so good a hoax, so deft and deadpan and precise in its aim, that nearly 60 years later, it retains a certain hold on the public consciousness. The story of this report — who conceived it, what they intended and why it endures, like toxic waste leaking from a metal drum — is the subject of 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain,' an excellent new book by the British journalist Phil Tinline. His fast-paced account is often entertaining but never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power. As Tinline recounts, 'Report From Iron Mountain' was the work of left-leaning satirists. Victor Navasky, the founder of a highbrow humor magazine called Monocle (and later the editor and publisher of The Nation), had been struck by a newspaper article about a 'peace scare': Rumors of de-escalation in Vietnam had sent stock prices reeling. Wall Street was not alone in this concern. In the 1960s — when military spending hit its highest level since the Korean War — defense officials and think tank intellectuals were already worried about the end of the party. One study asked, 'Can We Afford a Warless World?' This mind-set, to Navasky, was ripe for parody. He and two colleagues recruited Leonard Lewin, a Monocle contributor, to draft a report so frightening that they could claim the government had suppressed it. The novelist E.L. Doctorow, then the editor in chief of the Dial Press, agreed to publish the work. Esquire, too, was in on the joke. Except that, to a surprising number of readers, 'Iron Mountain' did not seem like a joke at all. It felt like the truth. It felt like confirmation: that a cabal of politicians, generals and corporate leaders was exploiting — or inventing — the Cold War as a pretext for consolidating power. On the left, a cohort of young activists had grown up reading C. Wright Mills, a sociologist who warned that a 'power elite' had brainwashed the public into accepting 'the military definition of reality.' On the right, where the 'Iron Mountain' narrative really took hold, Tinline introduces a cast of cranks — each a case study in what Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid style' in American politics. Chief among them was Gen. Edwin Walker, a conspiracy theorist 'who saw himself locked in deadly combat with a malignant 'control apparatus' that lurked deep inside the state.' Little wonder that when reporters exposed the book as a hoax, its truest believers kept on believing. The Pentagon's insistence that 'Iron Mountain' was fiction also failed to persuade, and fueled talk of a cover-up. For many Americans, not just those on the ideological fringes, official denials had about as much credibility as Gen. William C. Westmoreland's promise of 'light at the end of the tunnel' in Vietnam, a phrase he used in a cable around the time the book hit the stores. This distrust in authority was coupled, paradoxically, with a credulousness about dark conspiracies. An 'extraordinary number of people these days will accept as true practically anything that is to the discredit of the U.S. government,' the conservative writer Irving Kristol complained shortly after the book's release. 'Are we becoming a nation in which all obvious truths are suspect and only political fantasies are credible?' Tinline's answer is yes, we were. This makes his book both important and unsettling. Its final chapters trace the influence of 'Iron Mountain' on succeeding generations of right-wing extremists, including the currently ascendant group. Over the past six decades, what began as a satire has mutated and metastasized, serving as source code for antigovernment militias, politicians who rail against 'globalists,' neofascists who vow to put America first and Christian nationalists who conjure the well-worn threat of Jewish bankers. The current assault on the 'deep state' carries echoes of 'Iron Mountain.' So does the notion of 'false flag' attacks, from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Jan. 6 insurrection. War, it turns out, is indeed the nation's social system, but not in the way the Iron Mountain report imagined. Those in power are not, at present, waging war overseas but waging war on truth and freedom — and on a system of self-rule that depends on both.
