Supergirl in the tank

I’m going to take a stab here at guessing why the movie Supergirl seems to have tanked, based solely on my reaction to last summer’s wonderful blockbuster Superman.

That film was a delightful callback to all of the things that made The Adventures of Superman with George Reeves a baby-boomer childhood favorite and Superman with Christopher Reeve a monster hit in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Clark Kent/Superman and his supporting cast checked all of the boxes for people who may have been disappointed by the darker tone of the Superman movies of the last 10 years or so.

Especially entertaining was the play of the superdog Krypton, who stole every scene he was in, and he was in a lot of scenes.

The light-hearted romp ended with a jarring scene in which Supergirl arrives to pick up Krypto, who turns out to be her pet, not Superman’s.

She’s obviously drunk.

For two hours director James Gunn had set a jolly tone that, again, nostalgically recaptured all of the magic of Superman from earlier incarnations, only to smack us in the face with the nihilistic darkness of the more recent films. What the heck?

“I’m not interested in a movie about Supergirl the lush,” I said to Mary as we exited the theater.

The trailers that appeared, as the film’s release date neared, told a more interesting story. Here is a woman who, like Superman, grew up on the planet Krypton, which was destroyed by some cataclysm and left only a handful of survivors, and she takes the loss of her home planet, and all her friends and family, a lot harder than her famous cousin.

Something happens to shake her out of her dysphoria — it looked like maybe Krypto is kidnapped — and she embarks on a rescue mission that appears to heal her soul, and there’s a hint that she is a more admirable character by the end of the film.

Here’s my theory. The scene in Superman was such a buzzkill for the millions, who do not pay as close attention as lifetime comic-book fans, that when Supergirl arrived in the theaters, they remembered the drunk scene and took a pass.

I am sure that, whenever I get around to watching it, I will find Supergirl is a lot better movie than I expected. But the film has been in theaters for a month and I haven’t gone out of my way to see it. Just sayin’.

What we all have in common

I have thousands of pages and hours of recordings that I will never read, hear or see again, and many that I will never read, hear or see, period, but each of them is a connection to who I am.

A book I have never read, or a record or CD or DVD I have never played, still represents a moment when I reached out thinking, “This looks interesting. I wonder if I’ll find something in it worth sharing.”

That’s what creative expressions are — an attempt to share something the creator thought was worth sharing.

And the existence of each item in my collection is a clue to who I am — the fact that I sought it out provides a hint about me, for better or for worse. The same can be said about each of your possessions.

Perusing a friend’s bookshelf or other collections can tell you a lot about what’s important to them. It’s why we ask things like “What’s your favorite movie? What kind of music do you like? What’s your favorite color” — always seeking clues to who we are. It’s also a search for common ground; we delight in hearing, “Oh, I love that song, too! Oh, the part in the story where that happened, were you as deeply touched as I was??”

Huh. Common ground. We are always seeking common ground.

Here I go into the evil of contemporary politics again: We are assailed daily by people who want to separate us — the opposite of the search for common ground. “You there! Retire to your little box and don’t come around here no more!”

But in our creative works, we find things worth sharing, the things that unite us even in our distinct individuality and uniqueness. When a film or a song or a dance or a play connects with us, we see our common humanity and we share something worth sharing.

I saw a wonderful movie the other day and looked for more information about it, which led me to one review where the writer said, “It’s too bad that actress is a communist — that ruined it for me.”

He didn’t see that a person with abhorrent opinions still made a human connection, because that’s what creators and their creations do — they show us reason after reason to love our neighbors and even to love our perceived enemies. There are concepts that rise above our creations and lead us inevitably to our Creator.

W.B. at the Movies rocking and rolling

This is my week for learning more about seventies rock. I took to Netflix the last few days to watch Bohemian Rhapsody, the fine docudrama about Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen, and then Becoming Led Zeppelin, the new documentary about that band’s formative years.

A common denominator in both stories is the value of collaboration and how the contributions of all four band members creates a greater whole. Jimmy Page talked about the importance of being able to hear what everyone is doing as the songs were mixed. Guitarist Page and singer Robert Plant were the “front men,” but Led Zeppelin would never have been Led Zeppelin without bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham laying down the foundation.

And there’s a key moment in the Queen saga where Freddie goes off as a solo artist and comes back to his friends after it does not go as well as he hoped. He delivers a heartfelt monologue about realizing that he had become FREDDIE MERCURY because of the push-and-pull, the creative friction with his bandmates.

Somewhere in there I heard the observation that great rock bands don’t fail, they break up. These films about two great bands illustrate that dynamic — when everyone contributes as a unit, magic happens, as long as the individuals can keep their egos in check.

These two films tell powerful stories about the power of creative collaboration.