First Shot: Waiting for the other boot to drop

Some people never get enough of a good thing. And others just never get enough of anything.

For instance, did you know there’s a crew of diehards out there who feel that life is cheating them because they’ve never gotten to see every frame of footage Bryan Singer shot for Superman Returns? Land o’ goshen, as Pa Kent might say!

While others search for more respectable Holy Grails of filmmaking – like, say, the supposedly lost Lon Chaney thriller London After Midnight that’s now and then purported to exist somewhere in a moldy South American basement – this bunch just have to know how SR would have played out had it been assembled according to Singer’s unalloyed “vision.”

Specifically, they’re interested in learning for themselves how the flow of the movie would have been affected by the reinstatement of Brandon Routh’s allegedly somber, all-but-wordless “return to Krypton,” and how that fascinating preamble might have informed and contrasted with the somber, all-but-wordless 154 minutes that did make it into the movie’s theatrical version.

(Author’s note: OK, I’ll confess. If you sweet-talk your search engine just right, you might -- might -- be able to find a review of the film I once wrote, in which I basically crawled into its lap and handed up four stars for it to suck on like a Charms Blow-Pop. What can I say? The Year of Our Lord 2006 was a long time ago, and there’s nothing like looped viewings on FX to help you see flaws you missed the first time around – like stultifying boredom. And besides, if you’re familiar enough with my oeuvre to have called hypocrisy back in paragraph three, it says far worse things about you than it does about me.)

Anyway, this completist campaign to get Superman Returns: The Vein-Opening Cut released on Blu-ray, DVD and/or View-Master has a neat little website, where an entire list of “support sites” lends weight to the idea that there’s a public groundswell of interest in its agenda. And there are some bigwigs represented in there, including Rotten Tomatoes and IGN -- along with the expected gaggle of domains whose logos just happen to consist of three-dimensional block letters that slant upwards and are rendered in red or blue. It’s a grassroots thing.

The idea, presumably, is for industry movers and shakers to tumble across the site and be spurred into action by the obvious passion behind its careful enumeration of the “missing” sequences -- as well as its copious misspellings of simple words, and language so grammatically tortured it appears to have been composed in Swahili, then manually entered into a translation engine by Brainiac after a few Foster’s oil cans. But if the passions of the semi-literate touch your heart, and you can’t afford to shell out for Palin’s memoir, do as the Krypton crew implores you: “Enter in our site and leave your support by signing our signs book!”

My sign involved a finger.

Posted by Steve Schneider on 11/15/2009 4:08:33 PM Permalink | Comments: 7