Day: December 17, 2008

Wednesday various

  • You know, it’s one thing to create an unnecessary and unanticipated sequel to a thirty-year-old movie that was deeply rooted in the computer technology of that time and hasn’t exactly aged well. It’s quite another to give it a title as terrible as TR2N.

  • “You don’t see that many novelizations of musicals.” Now we know why! [via]

  • A Twitter-based e-zine? It’s an interesting idea, if nothing else. Twitter’s 140-character limit doesn’t allow for much, if any story development, so it’s no surprise a lot of the stories so far have leaned closer to being jokes. Still, it’s a paying fiction market.

  • Speaking of paying fiction markets. And speaking of Twitter, I’m @unrealfred if you want to follow me. I make no guarantees I’ll follow you back — I suspect a small handful of my (very few) followers are spammers — but you never know.

  • Aw, this is just a shame: Peter Falk is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

That’s one way of putting it

Nathan Rabin on Superman IV:

The result suggests the Cliffs Notes’ version of a book that wasn’t worth reading in the first place.

He also writes:

Getting Reeve, Kidder, and Hackman to reprise their roles lends the film an air of authenticity but The Quest For Peace still feels like one of those creepy DirecTV commercials that drop clumsy commercial plugs into classic movies. It looks real but it still feels disturbingly ersatz.

I can remember seeing this in theaters. My ten-year-old self didn’t hate it, but probably should have. I’ve had no desire to ever re-visit it, whereas the suckiness of Superman III still has its limited charms.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. As Rabin points out, Reeve only agreed to participate if the studio also bankrolled his pet project, Street Smart, which is the film that introduced the public to Morgan Freeman — and for which Freeman earned his first Oscar nomination.