jobloffski
Posts: 1837
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: elsewhere
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quote:
ORIGINAL: ehowarth
There's two things I love about the Reeve movies, and only one of them I can explain. The one I can explain is the chemistry between Reeve and Kidder. The one I can't is that feeling I get whenever I see Reeve take flight. Seriously, I become about six again! I don't think it's an understatement that Reeve made a bunch of us believe a man can fly. But, after swatting away all this childhood mist that's suddenly rolled into my office, I think casting is going to be insanely important, here.
I think the reason you feel that way is purely Reeves sometimes criminally underrated performance as Clark/Supes. You believe in his performance when he is not flying, you believe it really is Clark taking off his suit to become superman and that extends into when he leaves the ground. Merely the one scene in Superman II where he is clark one second and drops that persona a second later when Lois' suspicions he is Superman are confirmed shows just how far apart the two performances are. My directing experinece is limited, but even I would tell actors something that transcends everything and cuts to the chase: If when playing the part, you allow yourself to truly believe you are this character, everbody else will believe it too, because your eyes will become the eyes of that character without you having to do anything else at all.
Also, Reeves' superman clearly LOVED being super and using his power for good.
The problem with the Singer version is it chucked in the angst too early and didn't allow 1) Enough time for Supes to be Super prior to the angst and 2) Enough time for others to be impressed all over again by his Superness prior to the angst. It also wasted screen time on unecessary Smallville and childhood flashback scenes.
Compare Reeves to Routh, and his angst (mild confusion, really) to Reeves realising Lois is dead in the first movie. The contrast between the superness and the angst is quite devastating in Reeves, whereas with Routh, it was almost all angst, all the time. Reeves had time to show one face of the character and then show the opposite, when something happened that was outside his experience.
Singer made a fatal mistake in having all the important stuff that motivated the entire story of Superman Returns happen prior to the start of the film, and cover it all with a brief title card. Removing the Smallville stuff from SR and using the screentime at the start, to begin what seems a more familiar Superman film, and depicting the Lois/Supes relationship Supes hoped he would be coming back to, then showing him wrestle with the decision to go look for Krypton, and depict Lois realising he had gone, then have a time jump...old fashioned ideas, maybe, but if you want an emotional payoff for a situation, you have to do the work of setting it up (or if you're going to trade on an earlier film you have to make sure the narrative flow is uninterrupted and solid, and not just copy/rejig scenes and shots as if they are why the films worked and not the story itself).
Reeves was so effective because was allowed to 'be' superman and hopeful most of the time so that it actually created drama when he had to do something he wasn't expecting. And the time he spent looking as Lois (as Clark and Supes) and falling in love with her all served to set up the payoff of utter helplessness when he was looking at her dead.
Basic storytelling technique (set up, complicate, pay off) is what made Reeves work. Along with a performance borne of clarity of focus: you believe what you're doing and saying, Mr actor, sir, and you will be convincing.
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Yes, dreamers dream and doers do. But if dreamers DON'T dream, doers don't have anything TO do. Everything that is only here because people exist, only exists because someone thought of it., or in other words, dreamed it.
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Zack Snyder Directing Superman - 
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