Once a month, I get together with my brother Clay and occasionally others in the family, to watch a movie. The movie part of the experience is always frustrating, because Clay and the family want to watch very mainstream movies, never Luis Buñuel or David Lynch, and because there are always “technical difficulties,” and because they don’t respect the ‘movie experience’. Always, there’s lots of talking during the show, so even the mainstream movies I might like are less than they could be.

I’ve given up on these events as movies. To me, they’re much more about family than about the film.

Let’s recount yesterday screening of Superman (1978). Clay was going to watch from his house in the distant suburb of Prairie Dog City, while I’d be watching with our pal Leon, at his house in south Seattle. Movie time was 1:00 PM, and Leon and I arranged to meet at a restaurant for lunch, at 11AM.

The food was so-so, but the conversation was easy and genuinely a surprise. Leon is not a political person, and usually changes the subject when politics comes up, but he doesn’t liked Donald Trump, and for the first time in the fifty years I’ve known him, he wanted to talk politics. All through lunch, we agreed that Trump and Elon Musk are nuts, and that they’re doing great damage to America.

After lunch, we got to Leon’s house at about 12:45, which is when Clay texted us that something had come up, and he wouldn’t be available to watch the movie until 3:00.

This is the opposite of unprecedented. Among about half my family, “something comes up” one time out of three. But hey, I’m retired, had nowhere else to be on a Sunday afternoon, so I didn’t complain.

I am, however, the world’s champion at introversion. Leon and I had already been talking for two hours, and now we’d be talking for two more hours? He’s my best friend who’s not dead, but four hours of conversation with anyone is at least two hours too many. My sociability was maxed out an hour before the movie started, and remember, at these monthly movies the conversation doesn’t stop when the movie starts.

At a few minutes before 3:00, my brother texted again, and we moved into another recurring frustration of these movie days:

When I watch a movie at home, it’s always on a thumb drive. Insert the drive, click on the movie, and it plays. No passwords, no commercials. Clay and Leon don’t do thumb drives. They watch movies through perhaps a dozen different online streaming services, and it never comes off without a hitch. I mean, never.

Whether we watch a movie literally together or ‘together’ but from remote locations, I’m always waiting while Clay or Leon fumble through the streaming services to get the movie started. Usually it’s ten or fifteen minutes of fumbling — “Did I get the password wrong?” “It was supposed to be on Roku, I checked” etc. Sometimes it’s half an hour. Once, it was an hour, and they couldn’t get the movie to play, so we watched a different movie.

Often, when we’re in different locations, one or both of them watch the movie on a commercial service, so to remain synced I have to pause my playback of the movie for two minutes every ten.

Yesterday there were no commercials, but much time was spent searching for the movie on Plex, because Clay was certain he’d set it up on that service. Leon’s Plex password wasn’t working and neither was Clay’s, and the search function kept kicking Leon out, and when all the elements finally lined up, whoops, turns out Clay had forgotten to set the movie up on Plex.

After living through this monthly for years, this time I’d brightly brought the movie on a thumb drive, so before all this rigmarole I plugged it in and thought I’d saved the day. Nope. Leon has a smart TV but it’s not a computer. It didn’t react when I inserted the thumb drive, and he didn’t know how or whether his TV could open a video file, and neither did I.

Eventually they gave up on Plex, and Clay paid to rent the movie from Amazon Prime. Then we spent ten more minutes trying to get it to play on Prime at both Leon’s and Clay’s houses, but Jeff Bezos is no dummy — you can’t rent a movie and play it on two devices simultaneously. Leon and I are both supercheapskates and refused to pay, so Clay rang off and said he’d watch the movie later.

We’d planned to watch the movie at 1:00, the three of us. Instead it was 3:45, and only me and Leon.

The picture quality was really bad. The purples glowed strangely, it was almost but not quite focused, and the print had deteriorated so much that you could see the seams in all the special effects. I’ve tried to approximate the visuals by uglifying the poster, above, and that’s what the whole movie looked like. I have pirated films off VHS that looked better than Amazon’s paid presentation of Superman.

And the movie was not the rousing adventure I’d remembered from my 20s. First, there’s a plodding and slow set-up, introducing three bad guys who won’t be seen again until the sequel. For the purpose of watching this movie, 100% waste of time.

Then comes Superman’s origin story, which everyone knows so I won’t recount it, but it’s badly done. Marlon Brando is awful as Superbaby’s father, and the whole sequence is overwrought like Fonzie doing Shakespeare. Month and a half ago, I saw the first episode of TV’s Adventures of Superman, telling this same story on a fraction of a fraction of the budget, and it was far superior to this movie’s overdesigned and overexplosive Krypton sequences.

Also, Brando mispronounces their planet — it’s crypt on, not crypt un.

We’re 25 minutes into the movie before Superbaby crash lands on Earth and the story begins to become interesting. The Superboy stuff is very well-handled, with Glenn Ford fabulous as Clark Kent’s earth dad.

Then there’s another spot of tedium when Superteen finds a green popsicle that came with him from his birth planet, tosses it into the ice, and it magically sprouts into his Fortress of Solitude and brings boring ol’ Brando back as a ghostly presence. Brando speaks for about two minutes, with his voice altered for some spooky audio effect that makes what he’s saying unintelligible. What? What? What? is what Leon and I kept saying to each other.

Wouldn’t it be fabulous to have a green popsicle you could toss at the ice and it would resurrect a dear departed loved one for a posthumous conversation? I’d choose my wife over my father, but with either it would be such a marvelous miracle. Now imagine the frustration, if you couldn’t even understand what the revived dead person was saying. Murfle durfle purfle, is what Brando said.

The rest of the movie gets better. Margot Kidder is the perfect Lois Lane, and she and Clark and Superman have the right dynamic. It’s the best film or TV adaptation of Superman, but if half an hour was edited out the movie would be better.

Gene Hackman plays arch-villain Lex Luthor for laughs, and the movie surrounds him with a buffoonish henchman and a clueless moll. Sorry, no. I read a lot of Superman comics when I was a kid. It’s a comic book, not great literature, but Lex Luthor needs to be a super-genius bad guy, not a joke.

Christopher Reeve is terrific, born to play the role of Superman and Clark Kent, but I’m no longer 11 and it’s hard to give a damn about a character with so many superpowers he’s basically a god. He can fly, see through things, he’s impervious to heat and cold, bullets bounce off him, and he can jet himself through outer space at 50x the speed of sound to change the course of human history after it’s happened. Meh.

Give me Batman, a billionaire who’s not evil — fat chance — but at least the character is human. Unlike Superman, shoot Batman and he’ll die.

During the best scenes of the movie, Leon was talking, and despite not watching the movie with us, Clay kept texting about other stuff, so Leon’s phone was sounding off every five or ten minutes. It was not the optimal viewing experience, never is.

Usually, when we’re watching a movie at different locations, Clay and I have text or email conversations during the show. But he wasn’t watching the movie, and my phone was in my backpack, completely silenced. When I got home, 62 emails from Clay were waiting — the entire Plex-to-Amazon dialogue, plus all the comments during the movie (“Have you gotten to the part where he outruns the locomotive?”, etc), and numerous links to Superman-related trivia and music and clips from the movie I’d just watched. Half the links required a login I neither have nor want, and the other half rebuffed me for having ad-blockers installed. The last email from Clay suggested Superman II as our movie for next month.

Being literally a hermit, this was most of my social interaction for February. I enjoyed the conversation with Leon, though an extra two hours of it was exhausting, and as always I wish there was a way to mute the conversation during a movie. I’ve said something about it, several times, but didn’t this time, because why bother? I missed having Clay around, either in person or via text/email, but invariably he nudges the conversation to right-wing politics, and this time I simply erased those emails.

I said no to Superman II, so it’s undecided what next month’s movie will be, but it’ll definitely include problems logging in.

2/17/2025

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