Lois and Clark: The Adventures of Superman, Kryptonie, Screwball Comedies, and Old-Timey Newspaper Tropes

 How can you make an invincible character work dramatically? A walking dues-ex-machina like Superman is much less dynamic then, say, the X-Men who have various strengths and weaknesses.

Ahh, but kryptonite, there’s the rub. So if correctly employed in a script, Superman would either be completely on or completely off. Still kind of clunky, no?

That concern was on my mind when I decided to revisit Lois and Clark. The 1990s Superman reboot that focused on the budding romance between Superman and reporter Lois Lane was notable for one of my first celebrity crushes in Teri Hatcher and, I can’t remember much else, unfortunately.

What I found was a show in the very conscious mold of a screwball comedy. The genre solidified on stage and on screen during the Great Depression with a society reeling from the loss in wealth and class status. Status is key to the genre as both parts of the romantic coupling have a mix of higher and lower social statuses in relation to the other that must be bridged to make a more perfect union. For instance, in Bringing Up Baby, Katherine Hepburn’s character has the assets of having more inner confidence and being more fun than Cary Grant’s character while having the disadvantage of being a woman and having less of an actual job (she appears idle rich). In Ball of Fire, Barbara Stanwyck’s character has the assets of confidence, sexual experience, street smarts and quite possibly greater material wealth (she’s the sweetheart of a mobster), while her counterpart (Gary Cooper) has the assets of stability (he has a house which she needs), and a different sort of cultural status as a member of an academic aristocracy of sorts.

In Lois and Clark, Lois Lane is a whip-smart and well-connected reporter thriving in a man’s world. She’s literally the boss of Clark which is the clearest difference of status attainable. So what does Clark bring in return? Secret super powers! It also helps that their career as muckraking reporters (which almost involves more muckraking than would be permissible by modern standards) get them into a lot of trouble so that Clark can come in handy. Thus, Clark’s struggles as a man trying to create a life for himself often comes down to the decision over whether to use his super powers and how to do it subtly.

Like the most famous screwball comedy about reporters, His Girl Friday (or the play The Front Page from which it drew its inspiration), Lois and Clark also harkens to an earlier era of the newspaper industry.

Let’s talk about how Lois and Clark treats newspapers:

In this version of the Daily Herald newsroom, the boss, Perry White, has a hard-nosed management style might come across as cruel by modern day standards. His biggest concern is getting the scoop and he fosters a hyper-competitive environment dedicated to that aim. Reporters seem to be demotes or promotes reporters based on their ability to get him juicy information.

In a modern day newsroom, an editor would assign beats to reporters and work on building an audience across multiple platforms. He or she would have a team dedicated to what’s known as long-form journalism to take on big-issue stories such as government corruption or (in this universe) the dastardly deeds of super-villains. They wouldn’t switch reporters to whatever story is hot at the moment, because the editor would want to build brands. This would involve building a following among the the community for their crime reporter or reporter for the mayor’s office.

The function is different here for obvious logistical reasons. Lois Lane needs to be in every story, so she has to be covering every beat and be at the center or else the episodes are 1% as interesting. Additionally, Lane needs to have powers that are comparable to super powers in her ability to scoop out a story.

But more importantly, in the days of Hecht and MacArthur, scooping was everything. Rival newspapers in most major cities were fighting enormous circulation wars and newspapers would print two editions a day so that readers could be apprised of the latest news immediately. Think of it as the twelve-hour news cycle. In other words, customers made their choice between competing products twice a day and a big pay day could await if one newspaper if they could feature details about a story that another paper didn’t have.

Despite what this show wants you to think, life or death doesn’t depend on a news story being released so waiting on a story long enough to ensure accuracy or quality is generally a better thing.

Downfall of comedy I: Where it stands today

In response to an interesting question: What's a good "stupid" comedy?

I'm going to assume by "stupid" the person mean films that don't have the respect of critics or film academics. The truth, however, is that comedy usually doesn't get the respect of critics as much.

Although comedy is an integral part of movies and a respectable genres, you have to think that comedy isn't as well-respected as it used to be by the critical community, or not a lot of it anyway. Successful comedies today include:
-Indie hits like Little Mrs. Sunshine and Lost in Translation,
-Dramedies with good scripts and good dialogue by the likes of Alexander Payne, James L Brooks or Charlie Kaufman. It's no small coincidence that these guys win screenwriting rewards at the Oscars
-The Coen Brothers seem to be an outliar among comedic directors and that they seem to be put into a class well above other comic filmmakers by film critics. They're film scholars who are well-versed in film history (as if someone like Mel Brooks or Vince Vaughn isn't?) and it usually impresses the film critics that their movies are usually innovative in their technical aspects or clever uses of refences to past films (i.e. Man Who Wasn't There is based on film-noir, Intolerable Cruelty is based on screwball comedies, and Big Lebowski is based on The Big Sleep). A lot of casual movie fans like the Coen brothers too and have given them a large cult following. The reputation of the Coen brothers is continually being inflated through a mutual enthusiasm between the critics and the casual movie fans that "well, we at least agree on something on the comedy front."
-I could also see the critical community being split between many other comic autuers who would have had more critical respect if the comic genre itself was more respected such as Kevin Smith, Adam McKay, and Judd Apatow (and there might be some other examples in here). Kevin Smith has gotten some good reviews by Ebert and Roeper but I doubt more serious outlets like Sight & Sound or Premiere Magazines would give him the time of day on their review columns.

Comedy used to be equally viable in film achievement on every level back in the day. Columbia Studios became a major power player through the success of the pure comedy, "It Happened One Night" from 1935 which won the oscar that year. Screwball comedies dominated cinema in the 1930's and 1940's and Billy Wilder forged a great career out of comedies. What I find interesting is Mel Brooks' career and how it figures into that transition (which I'll cover in the next post)

Reviews of bad films

One perk of being a film critic is that every movie you see is a good experience. Either you like the movie which is good, or if you don't like the movie you get to write a review tearing the movie into pieces which is particularly fun. Here are some movies, I didn't like much:

A View from the Top: (2003)
Gwenyth Paltrow plays a girl determined to rise above her small-town roots and, with the inspiration of a TV infomercial, become a stewardess. The story about this girl's search for happiness is moderately inspiring and when she finds it in the end, I'm touched. Unfortunately, I'm having trouble being forgiving for everything in the middle. I'm not sure whether it's a comedy or a drama but it doesn't really succeed at either. The movie has a grand total of maybe three minutes of humor in it. I'm not saying the movie tried to be funny and only succeeded a little. It clearly chose to infuse only a small scattering of jokes and to rely more on the touching story instead. Sadly, the casting director and the score writer were not informed of the game plan as comic genius Mike Meyers was cast and, unfortunately, underused and the score sounds like an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. As for the drama, it's really not compelling at all, possibly due to the lack of chemistry between pretty much anyone.

Down with Love: (2002)
I don't know whether Director David Reed was a fan of those Doris Day/Rock Hudson romantic comedies that this is supposedly a tribute to, because he seems to be simultaneously trying to glorify and mock them. We are treated to a background of those neat bright colors from the 60s and the leads, Rene Zellweger and Ewan MaGregor, embrace their parts to the point where it's easy to join in on the fun. On the other hand, everyone here feels more like a caricature of the era than a real person. The sexual undertones are grossly exxagerated and the characters possess seemingly infinite smartness (when Zellweger's character makes a confession at the movie's climax, you'll know what I'm talking about). The point, however, is that Down with Love acts is of something was wrong with the 60s, and contrary to what history tells us, people back then were not thinking, 'this aversion to sex is ridiculous, if only this film had more direct references to sex, I really would enjoy this film.'

Hot Shots Part Duex (1992)
Due to an evident lack of standards in what he'll accept a paycheck for, Charlie Sheen returns in a sequel to the Top Gun as his character goes on a top secret mission to rescue hostages of Iraq, in what is possibly supposed to be a political send-up of the Iran Hostage Scandal and the Gulf War. The movie doesn't really ever decide what it's spoofing and doesn't think it needs to, although a central theme is the testosterone-heavy hero movies of the 80s as it takes cues from Rambo, the films of Jean Claude Van Damme, and violent comedy video games. The film also plays on everything from Goldfinger, to American Gladiator, to President Bush's famous vomiting episode.The tempo of the comedy is very rapid and very random with jokes being thrown from all directions. At best, this film can pass as a guilty pleasure, as you could take in the jokes that hit and discard the ones that miss.

Jonny English (2003):
I hate to say it but this movie would have been easier to enjoy if we hadn't been recently flooded with James Bond spoofs in the form of the Austin Powers trilogy. Still, Jonny English becomes pretty unique within the bumbling spy genre when it doesn't try to mock everything in sight and insert as much bathroom humor as they can fit into every minute. Rowan Atkinson plays the title character, a third-rate spy who comes to power when everyone else is killed in an explosion he accidentally caused, Ben Miller plays cinematic history's most overqualified sidekick, Natalie Imburgia exhibits a playful sense of humor as the steaming love interest, and John Malkovitch's performance as the villain is choked up in an annoyingly thick French accent. The humor, revolving around English's stupidity, gets to be repetitive and the film makes the mistake of caring too much about a plot not worth caring about.

Thursday night must-see blog

So I'm watching Thursday's TV night and as I'm watching rather than writing about the youtube thing I was going to write about, I start to want to write a little bit about what I'm watching on TV. I start making notes about the programs that I'm watching and before I know it, I have a whole page or two of incomplete notes, and I figure i'll finish those notes and write about them a little more in detail, so I end up with about 6 pages of notes on NBC's TV programs that appeared from 8-10 p.m. last night.
My Name is Earl last night:
My Name is Earl reminds me that one method of comedy is just to make feel-good stories. There’s a highly oversimplified saying that drama is about the failure of man and comedy is about man’s greatness, so logic suggests that comedy can be successful by capitalizing on its realm of human greatness. Not that all comedy is like that. A great deal of comedy revolves around stupid people, and one of the three elements of comedy according to Plato (no, I’m not making that up) was inferiority. Comedy, however, often capitalizes on a feel-good element that I think is underemphasized in reviews of comedy movies. The two best feel-good movies of all time, arguably, are Frank Capra’s “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” and Capra is primarily known as the inventor of screwball comedy. Adam Sandler, for that matter is also a filmmaker who specializes in feel-good stories. (you kno what, maybe I got the saying all wrong about comedy being about human triumph and drama being about tragedy, but who knows.)

-On My Name is Earl, I can’t help but notice that Catalina, the illegal alien who cleans a hotel,” is quite intelligent and well-spoken. This is a very positive portrayal of a Latin American woman in TV. She’s not just the illegal sassy Latin-American sidekick. In tonight’s episode, Joy is confiding to Catalina about a relationship she had with a store manager of Target or something like that because of the discount she get on audio cassettes. When Catalina asks, “You slept with a guy just because of tape decks?” Joy replies, “Well, it was before CDs were invented.” Then Catalina says, “Wait! Didn’t CDs come out in 198-,” before Joy cuts her off in embarrassment. OK, let’s take a moment to consider this: Catallina knew offhand the exact year in which CDs came out and cross-referenced it to Joy’s age to conclude that she was having sex at a really young age. That’s actually pretty hard.

It’s a really small moment, but it is a great one for the positive portrayal of Hispanic people on screen, made all the more remarkable by the fact that My Name is Earl, like most comedies, is a show all about stupid people: Sublimely dumb people who think Karma was created by Carson Daly, and while Catalina has some of that charming stupidity in her (in one episode she said she thought God was a homeless man with an iguana or something), she’s also intelligent and resourceful and has turned out to amount to more than the sum of her initial character traits.

Right now, Ugly Betty is being celebrated for its positive portrayal of Latin American Immigrants amid the Immigration Debate. America Ferrarra’s character and its symbolic ramifications has been written about everywhere from Time Magazine to Newsweek and she was even honored in the congressional records when a member of the House proposed or created a resolution (I don’t know which) honoring her. But it’s often the small things that make a difference in racial perceptions.

Do you think I’m making too big a deal of a small moment? Well, I’m reminded of the textbook I read for my first film class: “Reel to Reel: Sex, Race, and Class at the Movies.” She writes about a very small moment in a film and how that helped destroy a stereotype: “I imagine all the myriad ways in which conventional representations of black people could be disrupted by experimentation. I am equally moved by that moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, but it deconstructs and expresses so much. It reminds us that appearances are deceiving. It made me think about black men as travelers, about black men who fight in armies around the world. This filmic moment challenges our perceptions of blackness by engaging in a process of defamiliarization (the taking of a familiar image and depicting it in such a way that we look at it differently).”

She even goes on to make a strong parallel to my Ugly Betty-My Name is Earl connection by comparing Jim Jarmusch to Quentin Tarantino, the latter of who got more attention for his supposedly “progressive” work.

OK, for a point-by-point blog, I probably should not have dwelled long on that one point but I felt I needed to right all that to make a complete coherent well-thought-out point.

-Sometimes a watch or clock can ruin a TV show. Avoid looking at a watch at all costs while you’re watching TV. In tonight’s episode Randy confesses her love for Catalina and Catalina appears to reciprocate. They hug and everybody claps. The only problem? It’s 8:15 so I know the show’s not going to end, and 5 seconds later it was confirmed that I was indeed correct.

-I really kind of like the Randy-Catalina relationship and where it’s going. I felt that before this episode they could have had a Jim-and-Pam or Niles-and-Daphne thing, where the tension get stretched out forever even though they’re legally married. I felt the ending of the episode took a back turn, because the first two relationships I previously mentioned went years where the characters weren’t together. These two are already married and had sex, so that reduces the tension significantly. What is there left? The two having good sex? Especially considering the show’s lovable innocentness, this is an unusually wrong move by the show to have two characters jump into bed together as a way to move a plot. Remember when the show played with the audience’s perceptions of what we might’ve thought Randy and Joy did when her kids were gone in season 1, through some cleverly concealed shots?

The Office:

The Office is such a great show because it’s so very, very relatable to the point where I want to live vicariously through the characters. Like an Alexander Payne movie, I’m not thinking

It’s kind of the cornerstone of the Must-See Thursday Night TV experience, and it deserves whatever accolades it’s getting. I’m sure because The Office is at the top of the heap, plenty of people are eager to attack it, because people like to attack whatever’s at the top.

The thing I feel like noting this time is there are usually just a couple brilliant moments on The Office each week, that are just pure comic gold. It’s the kind of comic setup and payoff, that you just have to gaze at the TV screen in awe of the comic minds behind it. Here are this week’s top 5 moments:

-That Dwight asked him about the preference between a brunette and a redhead in front of Pam and Jim. Way to up the sexual tension!

-Her “you’ve gotta have 8 hours of sleep” painfully akward attempt at small-talk with Jim. It was a painfully awkward moment where the usually composed Pam reverted to Michael-like behavior and in this show, lately as Michael is becoming more romantically competent this season as he’s having relationships with that real-estate agent and Jan, it’s good that the show is keeping the usual level of akwardness through other factors.

-She’s supposed to answer phones with her clothes on because they have to use up the whole three hours. The presence of the stripper is hilarious as she was just looming everywhere. Wait, why couldn’t anyone in the room use the stripper? Stanley’s married. Kevin’s engaged but I don’t think that would stop him. Ryan has a girlfriend upstairs who gets jealous of everything. Same with Dwight. Roy and Jim wouldn’t want word getting around that they’re doing stuff with strippers when they want to look like a gentleman with Pam. Oscar’s gay. Hmmmm….what about the warehouse manager, Daryl?

-“That is not the real Ben Franklin, I am 99% sure.” Hillarious. Thank god Jim is back to resorting to playing pranks on Dwight.

-The fact that Michael felt the need to confess to Jan about a lap dance he had not foreseeing that he might actually get in trouble as the office manager for throwing a bachelor party in the warehouse.

OK, let’s talk about what makes The Office really good, what gives it that something extra: The Office is the best portrayal of modern romance I’ve ever seen on TV or the movies. Jim is incredibly cool and cool under pressure as well: look at how he handled that near-disastrous situation Dwight put him in by replying, Blonde. When Roy asked him what kinds of girls he likes in an episode a couple seasons back, he answered single moms. And cool guys like Jim are expected to act cool all the time, but when he’s around Pam, you can visually see his knees turning into butter, and while it was really at a high point last season, it’s gotten more complex with the competition for Pam resulting from Karen, and the fact that Roy is losing weight and starting transforming himself into the fiancé he never had the chance to be. Jim and Pam are a classic love story but there’s now a beautiful sense of ambiguity to their relationship. In each episode, as Jim and Pam are trapped in that ambiguity, and these obstacles get in their way, Jim and Pam and Karen revert more and more like clueless middle schoolers panicking at the prospect of losing their relationship.

Scrubs:

I’ve rediscovered Scrubs lately. I casually watched episodes in its first two years, but recently I’ve been looking for something new to watch in syndication, since I’ve seen pretty much every episode of Sienfeld and Friends in syndication, and Scrubs is on all the time on Comedy Central and the Superstation (which I think is TBS). I think because it’s between two great shows, that helps, obviously, and the musical episode which was really great, clinched Scrubs place as a regular on my list of programs to watch.

-They actually have some legitimate anti-war stances and pro-war stances. The arguments of people in this show for and against Iraq could actually be borrowed by politicians in a debate verbatim. Humor is usually about stupid people, but humor is also about something entirely out of the ordinary, and it’s out of the ordinary for characters to be much smarter than we expect them to be. Examples include that bit on Conan O’Brien where Max and Conan exhibit an almost encyclopedic knowledge on topics such as reality tv, Grease the musical and the Winter Olympics in clearly scripted conversations that end in a stare-off or how on Newsradio, it’s revealed somewhere along the way that Andy’s Dick’s character is secretly a licensed dentist who had passions of becoming a really bad reporter. Another example is how in the film Wayne’s World, all of a sudden everyone in this room of rock stars and roadies knows everything in detail about the history of Milwaulkee, Wisconsin and can have an intelligent discussion about it.

-With that monologue that J.D. gives at the end, this show is like My Name is Earl in comedy-by-feeling-good

30 Rock:

I think 30 Rock is doing some things that the other backstage-SNL show on NBC, “Studio 60” is not doing: it does not put us to sleep with characters who are all exactly the same and it’s just more sharply written. At the same time, I kind of do like how “Studio 60” explores the fascinating topic of what goes on backstage, and I wish “30 Rock” would do the same to at least some degree. I feel like focusing on each of the characters a little so that’s where most of my posts will center.

-It’s been a while since I’ve taken European history, but I think this inbreeding thing is actually historically true. How many people know that.

-Who’s the bald guy, exactly? Don’t like him, although he looks moderately appropriate for his environment: The 30 Rock look.

-Judah Friedlander really has the 30 Rock look.

-The 30 Rock look (what I assume they were looking for when they cast this film) is self-deprecation. People who are brilliant humorously but don’t look very good. That’s Tina Fey’s whole comic shtick: make fun of her own lack of good looks. Honestly, though, she’s pretty good-looking and I feel like her whole comedic method is based around some unresolved therapy and self-image issues. She looks great, seriously.

-Alec Baldwin is hilarious as if that didn’t need to be said.

-Despite taking a part that was initially meant for someone else, Jane Krakowski, is really doing reat stuff with her role as Jenna. She’s delightfully quirky and has great comic timing, and she gets a lot of mileage out of her main comic quirk, thinking her sexuality can solve everything. And that also makes her more sexy, too.

-This episode is so solid narratively that it could work as a romantic comedy movie if you stretched it to two hours. Come to think of it, you can make two movies based on this: I could see someone pitching either the Jack-Liz subplot or the Jenna-inbred Prince as a film to a studio and having a decent possibility of getting greenlit.

-Carrying on that last thread, I think that the dynamic between Liz Lemmon and Jack Donaughy (I’m doing this on a non-wireless laptop so I don’t have some easy reference like imdb.com to look up the correct spelling of the last name so to those annoying people who like to correct spelling errors: deal with it) reminds me of a screwball comedy, which is actually quite impressive. Screwball comedies were a popular form of comedy during the Great Depression. The formula involved pairing people of two different social classes together in an unlikely relationship and the happy ending where the two get together romantically in the end supposedly gave hope to depression audiences that because love could conquer class differences in the film, perhaps their might be hope for their own poverty problems to be worked out through the compassion of the government or the people who had money or whatever else. Screwball comedies went out of style because of the socio-economic conditions that made audiences relate to them, so it’s kind of odd that in the year 2007, they kind of are starting to make that work with Jack and Liz. They are two people seperated by inconquerable class differences.

-Kenneth the Page really wouldn't be interacting with the president of NBC or the members of the show so much, in real life, would he?

Deal of No Deal (there was a commercial for this show):

This show is THE EXACT SAME THING OVER AND OVER. Some guy possibly winning a million dollars WITHOUT ANY SKILLS WHATSOEVER. THEY DON’T NEED ARITHMETIC. Why are we bragging about that? I love how they find new ways to promote it each week: this time a father of 8 is playing our repetitive game! This time a guy from Oklahoma is playing our repetitive game! Tonight Celine Dion is going to say a few words to our contestants before they do the same boring thing!

Ball of Fire as a screwball comedy

This was a short essay from a collection of short essays I did for a film class on Ball of Fire which I felt was a really underrated screwball comedy:

Ball of Fire was directed and written by three of the best at their genre. Howard Hawks was a notable director of screwball comedies and the team of Wilder and Brackett wrote a number of comedies including Ernst Lubitsch's funniest film Ninotchka (1939). Wilder would also later become once of cinematic history's greatest comedic and dramatic directors with The Apartment and Some Like it Hot.

In Hollywood Genres, Howard Schatz writes, "The Screwball comedy dominated Depression-era screen comedy and provided that period's most significant and engaging social commentary" (151). Schatz suggests that screwball comedies were not just escapist fare for Depression-era audiences but they remedied their shattered dreams that their poverty and discrepancies in wealth couldn't be overcome. One important element for this remedy to work was that there had to be a love story that crossed class boundaries, usually with the woman as poor but more socially apt and the man as the opposite.

In Ball of Fire, Gary Cooper isn't so much rich as he is distinguished in the world of academia. He is a lexicologist in charge of an encyclopedia project with eight other professors, each in charge of a different field of knowledge. The fact that the other professors are twice his age highlights just how smart he is in his field. Barbara Stanwyck, an excellent comic foil, is a nightclub singer whose boyfriend is a gangster on the run from the police. She comes into contact with Cooper through his work. He is doing a section for his encyclopedia on slang and enlists her to help him and needing to hide from the cops, she accepts. This set-up is very interesting because while Gary Cooper is not rich, he's an expert on the language of the rich in a sense. In turn, Stanwyck's character, Sugarpuss O'Shea, is lower-class only through his standards. In terms of actual material wealth, O'Shea is richer than Cooper because her boyfriend has stolen large amounts of money while he has worked nine years into his uncompleted encyclopedia. Also, Sugarpuss O'Shea has absolutely no academic credentials, but suddenly becomes of use to him as an expert on slang through her lower-class background. Many twists on the traditional form of the screwball comedy are thrown into the story adding enough complexity to the relationship that it becomes unclear who really has the upper-hand. Moreso, the language theme presents wealth as an illusion which validates the main message of screwball comedies as well.