I read - finally - Mishima in prison. A strangeness - reincarnations, honor, brutality - that incites attraction and also knowing it will be al little (more than a little?) incomprehensible.
Thomas Berhnard, a name heard of but not having a chance to read. From the following, I wonder if he might give us ideas to work with. I do wish there was not the comparison to Herman Hesse, who Kurt Vonnegut demolished for me more than half my life ago. Mario Vargas Llosa is almost as worth listening to as reading.
A few reminders of what we were and what we were supposed to be.
Three surprising facts about the U.S. Constitution
How we screwed ourselves:
Our problems lie in being a simplistic people (but is this not true of others?) and in not knowing our history (even if true of others, we should be doing better.)
An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day (Lapham’s Quarterly) inspired me to take a nap this afternoon after I returned home and opened this article. Novelists pat yourselves on your back.
She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought,
an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of
spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly
accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who
achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to
five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of
unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave
our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration
strikes.
We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from
“out of the blue,” to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in
the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from
the Muses or the gods. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or
intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by
reasoning seldom command. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps
because their origin remains something of a mystery.
A devoted novel-reader since her teens, Christoff Hadjiilieva
suspects that artists—who “live their thoughts”—may know more about the
stream of consciousness than her fellow scientists do.
And a rejection for “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town”:
Thank you
for your submission to Sunspot Literary Journal. Although we must
decline, please know that selecting works for publication can be guided
by pieces we've already accepted for the current issue, a focus on
specific issues, and other elements that change rapidly. The fact that
we have declined your work should in no way discourage you from
continuing on this path you've chosen for your life. We greatly
appreciated the chance to consider your work.
Creatives like you
can change the world. Your perspective is unique. Your efforts to
generate something that makes an impact is difficult, and can feel heavy
when you work so hard without recognition. Please keep going. The world
needs to see things from your perspective.
Part of which may have been accepted for publication.
I drove down to the polygraph on Wednesday. I passed, of course. Wholly irrelevant questions do not even take much energy to answer truthfully. My biggest worry was the pain that kicked up when I could not slouch in the chair.
Then I drove down to the IU law library. I thought I would stop in Broad Ripple but couldn't find a parking spot and walking far was not an option. The places that were gone when I first got back are still gone. A bus route runs up College Avenue.
I made a detour out on 16th Street looking for food and cigarettes and found only cigarettes. Still, there were changes, a little cleaning up.
Coming back into town, I stopped at NafNaf for brunch. They have the hottest hummus I ever had. That would come into play long after I got home.
Three hours scanning cases and emailing them home before I left Indianapolis. By then I only wanted to get to Muncie. Mostly tired of the dumb drivers. We were all going too fast, only somewere going too fast without seeming to pay any attention to the traffic around them. Going down I thought there were going to be three wrecks. Two of which were because of one driver.
Only one scan came through, so wasted time there. Tired, a little dehydrated but I did a little work on the research project and walked something on Netflix. I got a little sick, made a mess, lost of what inspiration I had.
Thursday, I was still feeling disoriented. However, I still had the car so I went off to Payless for meat to fix for breakfast. Protein did not seem to help much.
I got an acceptance on a story. Waiting for confirmation.
The car rental was over at noon, and I got it back there early. I worked a little on background reading for the project before then. A little loopy from Wednesday or the heat or both. I forgot the camera in the car. I figured that out about 2 hours after I got back here (I missed the downtown bus). Back to Enterprise. They had the camera. Then I missed two buses, got stuck out in the heat. A kind owmna at the Motel 6 gave me a bottle of water. I was pretty much wiped out when I got here. I napped for an hour, and that did me no real good. I watched Enola Holmes 3 while working through more law review articles. Why doesn't anyone talk aobut Henry Cavill playing Sherlock Holmes; a bit posh, but he's doing a good job (not going to make anyone forget Jeremy Brett)?
So, here, I am feeling rather fresh without any caffeine. I did not get much done on the article last night and I have the group thing in a few hours, Which means no more chance to get at it before 2 pm.
Sorry to do this since The New Yorker is mostly behind a paywall, but it has consumed my reading lately.
Colson Whitehead’s Big Score- more than Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Lethem, or even Michael Chabon, I think Whitehead is the guy to read and think on what he is doing. Even if he hails from New York.
On Ogygia, Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer: if he will
stay with her, she will grant him immortality and eternal youth. He
refuses, choosing to return to his aging wife and to the certainty of
death. If Socrates is the intellectual hero of the ancient world, and
Jesus the spiritual hero, Odysseus—hardened, brutal, grief-struck,
determined to reclaim his home—is the human hero, the whole man. He
accepts death, and that’s one reason he remains essential to us. Nolan
faces the challenge of creating a hero for the multiplexes who is
ruthless and at times cruel. The audience faces the even greater
challenge of accepting a man far more complicated than any superhero of
recent years. What’s called for in successfully adapting the Odyssey is a
great director and—how else can one put it?—a movie audience capable of
courage.
Consider Why The Odyssey has caused so much controversy. Why complain about a transgender actor or a black one? Who would they have cast? How would they have written the movie or directed it? The director made a choice. The writer made choices. The actors were selected to fit these choices. No one wants to complain about not casting Greeks? Why not complain about not casting real Cyclopes? Why not complain about using English and not Dorian Greek? Purity ultimately kills. Authenticity destroys creativity. Get over yourselves, start creating your own movies, and stop whining about how others do not create to your demands but to their own vision. That seems to be what we are lacking at this time in history: vision.
László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails. Another writer who fascinates me in how he writes and what he writes about. I did a long post earlier today about the Supergirl reviews. This seems to fit in with my obsessions, see what I wrote above about The Odyssey, too. I wonder if technology - especially social media - has made us smaller. Are our imaginations limited by timidity?
So,
each novel has emerged from this obsession with perfecting your own
prose. Your characters are also obsessives. They are men who seek sacred
encounters with rare and beautiful objects: a manuscript, a garden, a
whale skeleton, the music of Bach, the books in the New York Public
Library, the Acropolis. Almost no one understands or sympathizes with
these men. Often, they are destroyed. Some are mutilated. Some die once
they realize that, as one character says, “The higher realm had
disappeared from the human world.” What is the cost of being obsessed
with beauty in the human world, a world of barbarism, where nothing is
sacred?
Everything
that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether
created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which
never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain
changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our
chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our
chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation
to it, for it to hold our souls.
In my own books,
this began to be one of the most important themes for me. I placed this
dilemma onto my characters, so that I could tell the story of how they
were doing in this question, and how they ended up failing. There is a
single personal characteristic to my books: I place my own failures onto
this or that character appearing in my novels, so that he is the one to
suffer, because I don’t want to suffer anymore.
Are we at an especially low point in our relationship to beauty and an especially high point in our suffering?
There
were several ages in human history, and now I’m only speaking of
European civilization. From the European cultural point of view there
was, here in the Mediterranean, a pragmatic culture which regarded the
divine presence as self-evident. To perform a sacrifice in front of a
temple so as to influence a god or goddess was not seen as any kind of
problem. This kind of relationship made the lives of people living in
ancient times unproblematic in terms of the dichotomy between the
transcendent and the space of reality. Then, in European culture,
Christianity appeared, a religion which made an astonishing discovery,
namely, that the primary cause for everything—humans, animals, nature,
fertility, the inanimate world, the universe, the cosmos—could be
concentrated into one single point. This made everyone calm down, and
immediately step into a space where there was no longer any border
between the divine and the human real. With regards to human nature, the
main question became how this recognition could be distributed
throughout a given society, whether in Europe or in the Near East.
Of
course, it was never ideal, and it didn’t mean that, as in a fairy
tale, everyone could step into some kind of unproblematic relationship
with the divine whenever they wanted. God provided a surface for the
instance of beauty. This surface was the outward appearance of
something, its given form. It was, to express it in very general terms,
an entity that could be designated. And then the Renaissance came along,
which was also strongly pragmatic, and there were many more
possibilities for a so-called educated person, stepping away slightly
from the mystical or transcendent relation, to reach a purely human
beauty, a beauty created by human means. After the Baroque is when the
problems continuously begin to occur. A world divested not of God but of
the divine, this was certainly problematic for humankind. You could
enjoy it, because the world exists even without God, and we human beings
are capable of building whatever we want. Because, well, where are we
now?
We’re in a disenchanted technical civilization.
Yet
this current technical civilization is astonishingly genial, even with
all of its enormous problems, because it appears to be almost unlimited.
And since the human being is dangerous, therefore the technical
civilization that he has created is also dangerous. But the relation to
this border has fundamentally changed. Ever since the Enlightenment,
let’s say, the modern human being does not require this relation to the
border. Michelangelo is a fridge magnet now. He is a photograph I take
as I stand in front of a statue by him. But he is still good. Other
things are still good. The “Mona Lisa” is good, that magnificent temple
so close to where we’re sitting is good. Everything is good; the main
thing is that I can’t experience it.
If we were to
ask—how many people are on the planet now, maybe eight billion?—if we
were to ask five billion tourists if they knew something about the
Acropolis, I think everybody in this room would be very sad. The answer
would be, Yes, I saw the Acropolis, it was very beautiful, but let’s say
that the sun was shining a lot that day, and I hardly saw anything of
the Acropolis, because I didn’t bring my sunglasses. We can call this
deterioration, but we could also describe it as something else: that the
demands of the modern, postmodern, and post-postmodern person have
changed. This person demands a life in which pleasure is granted the
primary role. This is a very comfortable attitude for such a creature as
man.
It can be imagined that this is not a
negative process. The important thing is the beauty that Michelangelo
created, or the beauty that was constructed by the genius or geniuses
who made the Acropolis. But it is likely that there will be ever fewer
of us who feel this way. Our relationship to the past has radically
changed. A good half of it is misunderstood. Culture today, during this
flowering of European populism, is nothing more than a kind of
ridiculous right-wing or extreme-right-wing ideology of tradition, in
which culture is noble, and makes me noble, and anyone unwilling to
accept this becomes my enemy. A kind of emotional relation comes into
being, but it is an absolutely negative emotional relation.
I’m
very happy that I’m as old as I am, because I truly feel sorry for the
ones who are young. I can lament a cultural age. Perhaps this isn’t even
an age in that sense of the term, not in the sense that the Baroque or
the Roman or the ancient Greek culture represented an age but, rather,
the entire occurrence of human civilization to date represents one
single epoch, and that is over. If it is really over, I’m very happy to
lament over it.
***
To me, this is unacceptable. The first movement of despair, when a
person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a
form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political
ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious
philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background
whatsoever. When a human being loses his sense of identity, there will
be a need for so-called national identity and similarly idiotic ideas.
Traditionalism, or clinging to it, is already a political category. Let
it remain so, or, better yet, let it not play any role in the political
sphere whatsoever, if only because it can only lead to enormous
problems.
***
It is clear what rebellion in relation to the part means. In an
unbearable situation, it becomes impossible to further withstand a
certain state of affairs. Here we are speaking of some concrete matter, a
given oppression, layoffs in a factory, a bad pension system, and so
on. However, rebellion that relates to the whole gives birth to despair.
Human existence senses that something impedes it from subsisting. This
is like when a person is in complete darkness, and they see nothing, and
they are afraid, they tremble, and they flail around. You must imagine
an enormous darkness, where a person is searching for some kind of
light, because this person is simply attempting to rebel against the
darkness by trying to remedy their own state of despair, and this is the
rebellion of the person’s whole mind, namely, it is when a person can
no longer withstand their own self, and considers not only human life in
a given situation to be unacceptable but also the entire world, the
entirety of human civilization, the human condition, and attempts to
somehow box themselves out of it. I do not wish any of you to experience
this. I do not wish it for you, or for myself.
I have not seen Doonesbury for maybe 30 years, maybe more, but it got its hooks in me when I was only 18. Now, there is a biography of TRudeau and a review of the biography from Los Angeles Review of Books, The Deadline Dickens.
Among countries for which we have food security data, the U.S. ranks 30th out of 37.
Our data for the right to food in the U.S. spans 2015 to 2023. The
U.S. food score fell slightly during that period, from 81.9% to 81.1%.
This means that as the U.S. got wealthier, Americans got hungrier.
Or this?
U.S. health scores have been relatively flat for a quarter century,
rising from 79% in 2000 to a high of 82% in 2012. In 2023, it had
receded to 80%. The rising scores were likely due to more Americans
gaining health insurance following the Affordable Care Act’s rollout. The later decline was caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Or this?
The country has been losing ground on work and pay for 25 years. After
accounting for how much richer the U.S. has grown, its score fell from
about 62% in 2000 to 51% today. This reflects the growth in economic inequality, with the gains in wealth skewing toward the richest Americans.
Or this?
The U.S. scores a 76% on the overall right to education, placing it 20th
among 38 OECD countries. It’s behind Japan and the U.K. but ahead of
some peers, including Canada and Norway.
I finished a draft for a story - after five hurs - ate breakfast around 2:30 pm and instead of cleaning up and doing some housework, I looked at Google News. More press for Supergirl. I have already made my point that it is an ok movie. But what as bothered me is the reaction to it. The reviews I find more interesting, maybe more than the movie which was more entertaining than mind-blowing.
As usual, there’s a tyke in trouble: 13-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a
fellow orphan with a ramrod disposition and a tidy brunet braid that
gives away that her character is modeled on Hailee Steinfeld’s vengeful
teenager in “True Grit.”
Ruthye wants to hunt and kill the creep who murdered her family. Unlike
Supergirl, the child thinks it’s healthier to exorcise — not imbibe —
one’s heartache. The duo visit an Epstein-island-like planet of
kidnapped breeding women where, in one of the script’s subtler sick
horrors, the locals imply that pubescent Ruthye is more valuable than
aged 23-year-old Supergirl. (Although some of the caged extras appear to
be as ancient as 30.) It’s yet another swiped idea, this one from “Mad Max: Fury Road,”
for a minor story beat that’s unnecessary. Still, Alcock reacts with
exactly the right note of disdain: “Cool,” she croaks. ‘Nuff said.
The True Grit copy ends quick and conclusively, unless you've never read the book or watched both movies. Supergirl is not Rooster Cogburn, nor is Ruthye Mattie Ross from Yell County. Mattie Ross has more to do with Lobo. Only when Supergirl rises to the occasion of being Supergirl is there anything like the arc Charles Portis gave to Rooster Cogburn. It might also be noted what happened to Rooster after the main events of the novel - he reverted to his low-born, anti-social ways. Supergirl gives the hope that Kara has found her way back to people. Not that script makes this clear. Still, it is different from any other superhero movie I can think of right now.
Still, the production design has imaginatively askew takes on the
mundane: gridded jail cells, plodding space buses, clumsy oxygen suits
that shimmy on with a satisfying squeak. When Supergirl makes a pit stop
at a celestial convenience store, she samples a snack that I’m forced
to call poop-corn. If “Supergirl” sells enough of it, hopefully Alcock
can rampage again in a more confident sequel that truly cuts loose.
That might be the most fun scene. What the movie bodes for the DC's cosmic stories may be most interesting. More about that below.
James Gunn, along with Peter Safran, knew that he was launching DC
Studios right into the teeth of superhero fatigue. Gunn got asked a lot
about how he was going to avoid that, and the key thing he said was:
We’re not going into production on any movie until the script we have is
rock-solid. For that was the overriding problem with the superhero
overkill era: The films had lousy scripts, which were used as grids on
which to layer the visual effects. Gunn was right to want to take the
comic-book genre back to well-structured screenwriting basics. So what
has he done in his second DC outing? He’s given us a comic-book movie
with the worst script I can remember. (It’s by Ana Nogueira.)
What about all those Sony Spider-verse movies that bombed? No, the script is not Citizen Kane; it is not Iron an; but neither is Superman v. Batman.
I’ve never bought the idea that movies were ruined by “Jaws” and “Star
Wars,” but watching “Supergirl” you might well think that they were
ruined by the Mos Eisley Cantina scene of “Star Wars.” Because that
seems to be the movie’s dominant influence. One set piece after another
features rubbery creatures with heads like melting anvils and tentacles
coming out of strange places, as if this, after 50 years, was still
charming and awesome. (Industrial Light & Magic is one of the film’s
visual-effects houses.) Actually, the cantina scene was corny even back
then, and creatures like these now make you feel trapped in a Muppet
movie.
Alien came to mind along with Star Wars. Maybe even more in the atmosphere. Before Alien, the science fiction aesthetic was sterile cleanliness; after, it had a lived-in messiness of use and decay. That DC has a multi-species universe the creature designs had to follow the cantina scene's multitude of designs. Frankly, this felt like the greatest stretch of imagination in the movie.
Pulling from Woman of Tomorrow was a striking choice for a film
adaptation, showing audiences a different interpretation of Supergirl
than they might be familiar with and providing a unique foil to
Corenswet’s boy-scout Superman. It’s genuinely refreshing to see this
version of Kara on screen, as Supergirl is bravely uninterested
in toning down her flaws and eccentricities. Yet, Kara is still a
lovable character, and Milly Alcock slips so comfortably into the role.
Alcock gives Kara pathos and a razor-sharp edge that carries the entire
movie, sometimes even doing the heavy emotional lifting that the writing
and directing fail to deliver. I hope to see Alcock shine in a film
more worthy of her talents in the future.
This might be the best criticism I have seen; it runs through several reviews. Is it because our society has gotten so misogynistic? Did the men start crying and booing when Ripley killed the alien in Aliens?
Is this a cool neo-space western? Is this a grounded character study? Is it a flashy space opera? Supergirl never seems to commit to anything. Ana Nogueira‘s script prefers to sheepishly flirt with all these tones rather than balancing them. The main conflict of Supergirl also feels strangely disconnected from Kara herself. Notably, Captain Marvel (2019)
had a similar problem, where all the most compelling character
development occurred in flashbacks. It’s not that these heroines are
hollow; it’s just that we rarely see them make choices that shape who
they are in the present storylines of their films. Honestly, it’s
maddening how little the creatives learned from the past mistakes of
other female-driven comic book movies.
***
It’s far from the genre’s worst, especially within the standards of what the DC franchise has delivered in the past, but Supergirl deeply suffers from not knowing how to build a film around its iconic heroine.
Alcock successfully sells a character who doesn’t know what home is and
identifies with nowhere, using copious amounts of alcohol to dull the
pain of her past. However, the film fluctuates wildly on whether it
wants to be an origin story, making an emotional connection with Kara
difficult. The narrative expects the audience to understand her trauma
without elaborating on it early on, meaning she initially just comes
across as a drunk trying to be funny.
***
That disconnect is exactly why the viewing experience is so
frustrating. There are so many noteworthy moments buried inside a
disjointed narrative that it creates a constant push-and-pull; I didn’t
know whether to lean in or pull away. The relationship between Supergirl
and Ruthye lacks chemistry – it feels quite tame – but the dynamic of
Kara stepping into a “big sister” role to warn Ruthye that revenge
yields no rewards works beautifully in the film’s key moments. Kara’s
evolution into the hero we expect is genuinely impressive when it
finally arrives, especially since she spends most of the film out of
costume. And the brief cameos from Superman himself are wholesome enough
to conjure a smile – a sweet reminder of a cousin looking out for
family.
The foundation of a great story was there, and the character
development was exactly what the audience needed; it just required
tighter direction. To prove the point, Jason Momoa pops up as the
chaotic-neutral Lobo. The cameo is designed to provide comedic chaos,
but it feels incredibly tame. Instead of landing jokes, it just feels
like Momoa throwing his weight around and shouting his lines, with
little consideration for comedic timing or whether the character fits
the scene.
I never had any interest in the character or great expectation of the movie, but Alcok's performance is what stitches the script together.
Muchlike the Levity Test for awards hopefuls, there’s a similar test I have for action movies and sci-fi blockbusters — not a test, per se, but more like a common marker of baseline competence. I call it the “who is doing what and where” test.
That’s not a demand for more exposition, or that filmmakers pre-fill every “plot hole”
and explain away all the movie magic. It’s simply a plea for coherent
visual design. I tend to be invested in the action of an action-based
movie when I can tell who is doing what and where. Without that, it
turns into a montage of blurs and reaction shots that kills all
suspense. Rather than being on the ride, I’m simply biding time between
outcomes. Remember when filmmakers could convey a basic sense of spatial
awareness? We used to be a proper country.
Take the Harrier Jet sequence in True Lies.
The whole thing is pretty ridiculous on the face of it. It’s goofy, to
the point that you wonder how much is even meant to be taken
“seriously,” and some of the effects even look kind of chintzy to modern
eyes. But there isn’t a single second of it that leaves you wondering
who is doing what and where. Whatever you think of the ride, you’re on
it. James Cameron builds suspense and wonder through carefully
constructed frames, allowing this big, sort of idiotic cat-and-mouse
game played with hovering fighter jet to work as both drama and
slapstick. “Believable?” Maybe. But really who cares, it’s gorgeous.
Interesting test. I like it. I also like how he nails a few more references, potentially even more pertinent than True Grit.
The only way to save the dog from a protracted, painful death
is to find Krem and retrieve the antidote. Kara has three days to do so
(the relativity of time on different planets is never addressed, perhaps
mercifully so). And so, even if Kara is ambivalent about helping
Ruthye, she has to find Krem in order to help her dog. Popeye, John Wick, Princess Bride… what was I saying about obvious influences?
On
the one hand, it’s rather refreshing that the James Gunn-era of DC has,
on some level, solved the stakes-inflation problem that bedeviled the
MCU. Where every plot was about a big bad planning to destroy the Earth,
all life in the universe, the very fabric of reality, etc
(exhausting!). They solved it largely by ripping references from other
movies, sure, but still: an improvement. That being said, if you’re
going to make a movie that rests on a mission to save a cute dog, maybe
just use a real dog? There’s a limit to how much I
can care about a “dog” rendered in mediocre CG. I suppose I can
understand the need for CG when the dog is doing super stuff, but not
when he spends most of the movie lying sick on a table or doing regular
dog things. Could we not find a real dog? It’s not like there’s a
shortage of real dogs in the world.
Good point about the dog, too. Probably a problem of finding the right-looking dog. Even more in making the point about raising stakes. I see it as a coming of age story for Kara, not the usual beat up on the villain superhero story. Still the script muddles that point, but I am willing to give them points for making the try.
When we first meet the titular
Supergirl, Kara Zor-El, she's a sad, lonely, drunk who spends her days
hungover and her nights drinking heavily with her dog. She's taken off
to a planet with a red sun, which removes her powers and makes her
vulnerable like an ordinary human, so that she can feel the effects of
booze. She abuses it to avoid her real feelings of anger and abandonment
stemming from deep childhood trauma and a sense of parental abandonment
that the film slowly reveals.
If that isn't bright and cheery
enough, she quickly gets caught up in a young girl's quest to find the
Brigands—leather-and-spikes-wearing space raiders who murdered the
girl's mother, father, and brother in front of her, in one of the
movie's two (!) separate on-screen family massacres. It turns out that
the Brigands are essentially an intergalactic rape and sex trafficking
gang who make a practice of abducting, imprisoning, and sexually
assaulting young women, whom they call brides, to perpetuate their
all-male society.
Directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya and Cruella), the movie is tinged with the sort of Heavy Metal-esque
trippy pulp weirdness that Gunn is known for, but it comes across as
forced and tonally at odds with its hero. The whole thing plays like a
fourth-rate Mad Max ripoff, but without the pedal-to-the-metal action
sequences or the single-minded vengeful fury. It's not fun. It's barely
even righteous. It's just miserable. At one point, Supergirl flat-out
murders a guy by pushing a giant sword through his neck. Somehow, I
suspect even Zack Snyder would be appalled.
Which makes me think it did not fit the reviewer's expectations rather than finding any good in what was on the screen.
It's not like the film does anything wrong, it's just slight. I
love not having a plot hinge on universe-changing implications, but
this film just establishes the Supergirl character enough
to lead to other stories. Table-setting is always a part of the deal
with these connected universe stories, but it's surrounded by such low
stakes and forgettable characters, it's hard to care...
None of this is the fault of MillyAlcock, who gives her all to the character of KaraZor-El/Supergirl. Any characterization of hers is lush, full, charismatic, and welcome. At the same time, despite making a Supergirl film, the filmmakers go out of their way to act like you should care about the Brigands, Kryptonianbackstory,
and the logistics of red, yellow, and green suns. It's a very busy
film for essentially a plot that contains two simple story elements.
***
More than anything, Supergirl
is ultimately forgettable. There isn't much to hang your hat on, though
I was mildly entertained. It's a terrible middle ground to be when you
put this much money and effort into a large-scale universe. It's an
underwhelming start for the character, despite MillyAlcock's best efforts.
I find myself agreeing with the grades given more than some of the written commentary. But I come back to my main question of late: by what standards are we judging and can those standards survive judgment?
sch 6/28
I finished my forays into Supergirl with this video that does a better job than most of the above review of distinguishing between the movie-in-and-of-itself and the novel-as-part-of-a-series. I will admit, grudgingly, there is an aesthetic to the series, but I remain convinced it is it the financial that overtops the aesthetic. YMMV.
