1. Pop Culture Happy Hour
I was delighted to sit in on this week’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast,
a Very Special Episode we -- okay, I -- have decided to call "The Cavil
Over Henry Cavill." The A-topic this week was the arrival of Man of Steel,
the muscled-up, darkened-down reboot of Superman film franchise that
is, we all agree, short on humor. Also short on height. Zing!
Any regular listener to the show will know that Glen Weldon, my pal-for-life and 25 percent of the show’s regular lineup (along with host Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson and Trey Graham), just spent the better part of two years researching and writing the marvelous Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. I recently ran a freezing cold 12-mile death race wearing a Superman T-shirt, so our credentials are roughly equivalent.
But
they didn’t exactly need a second longtime Supes fan. I snuck in by mocking Henry Cavill’s average-ish height. He is, for the record,
exactly as tall as I am if you believe IMDB, an authority on which actor
heights seem to be self-reported.
“I think he makes you feel short,” Linda teased me during the show.
Ouch. But I am not alone. My film-critic crush Dana Stevens said on the Slate Culture Gabfest this week -- an episode featuring the Gabfest debut of one Glen (Superman:The Unauthorized Biography) Weldon -- that she kept picturing Cavill “standing on a milk crate. Amy Adams seems strapping compared to him.”
Cavill’s performance in the movie is the one
element we all agreed worked splendidly. Otherwise we differed in our
assessments, although it’s clear I liked it more than Linda, who liked
slightly more than half of it, and more than Steven, who hated it....
which means he still may have appreciated it more than G-Weld, who in
various podcast appearances this week has called the film “small” and
“evil” and likened it to a Transformers film. I understand why he said that, but that’s still way harsh, guy.
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