Return to the Classics (A Behind the Candelabra Review)

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.  

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I've never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

There was a time when Władziu Valentino Liberace was a king. The child of Italian and Polish immigrants in Wisconsin, he rose to success throughout the 40s and 50s tickling the ivories in a variety of increasingly baroque costumes: tuxedos and fur capes encrusted in rhinestones. His reign has long since passed. Now, when his name is evoked, it's to mark someone as flamboyantly gay; Wallace Wells in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World refers to him as the writer of the "Gay Handbook". It's obvious now looking back at him with hindsight. This guy, with his glitter-encrusted bouffant hairpiece, soft lilting voice and face dolled up to the nines? How did people not know he was gay?

Those people had the obvious answer: gays were decadent demons bent on corrupting your children, humping you in back alleys like a dog taking a bitch, and dragging America into a cesspool. They weren't entertainers, they weren't the softly-spoken man doing renditions of Chopin and Berlin, and they weren't richer than Croesus. Liberace was successful, popular; even when his star faded from the mainstream in the 60s, he remained a darling on the Vegas circuit, selling out night after night, working round the calendar, and living in a miniature Nevada palace. In the words of Roy Cohn from Angels in America, homosexuals were "men who know nobody, and who nobody knows". Liberace was successful, ergo he was a bachelor who just hadn't met the right woman yet.

Bob Black (Scott Bakula) says as much in the opening minutes of Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra. When Liberace (Michael Douglas) wheels out his protégé (Cheyenne Jackson) for a quatre mains duet, Black jokes about them being "a pair of queens", earning him the outrage of an elderly woman sitting in front. To the surprise of his partner, Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), only the two of them, expatriates from the gay underworld, can tell he's hiding in plain sight.

...In a Single Bound (A Man of Steel Review)

Poster by Martin Ansin.

Behold, I teach you the superman! - Friedrich Nietzsche

The generic template for a superhero is a man in spandex and tights flying about doing good, cape billowing in the wind, and it all started 75 years ago. Superman is more than just a superhero. To paraphrase Tom Baker, he's The Superhero. The definite article, the idea given form. As in fiction, Superman has two fathers: writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, who had been plying their craft in the funnypages for years before striking gold. The Superman that appeared in Action Comics #1 was a socialistic demigod, not yet capable of flight, but able to leap tall buildings "in a single bound!" and more than willing to let might make right, fighting against injustice from the street on up.

Over time, Superman evolved into the airborne friend of humanity we all know and love. Well, the one we should all know and love, if it weren't for that emotionally crippled upstart in the bat costume. In film, Superman has had several earthly incarnations. Christopher Reeve pretty much wrote the book on Superman with his mannered, detailed, fantastic performance in Richard Donner's 1978 film, a high every other adaptation has tried to recapture. Superman II suffered from executive interference, leading to two quite different cuts circulating; Superman III had Richard Lester up the slapstick to diminishing returns; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was...just...sad to behold; and Superman Returns tried in vain to recapture Donner's glory days and instead gave us Superman as Deadbeatdad Man.

Now Zack Snyder, of 300 and Watchmen fame, steps up to the plate for a newer take on the Last Son of Krypton. Warner Bros. have obviously been eyeing up all the bank the Dark Knight films have made, and are keen to recapture the success with Christopher Nolan overseeing production, and David S. Goyer providing a script. Keep in mind, when a studio attempts to catch lightning in a bottle twice, all that's left are burns, so how does Man of Steel manage?