Word: supermans
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...feel good about their country. This fantasy of an all-righteous America fills movie theaters even as it fuels presidential elections. Who is Indiana Jones if not the movie-serial avatar of White House Reagan, leaping up from near fatal assaults with a wave and a joke? Who is Superman if not the Krypton Gipper, fighting for truth, justice and voluntary school prayer? At the end of a campaign year that played like one long half-time pageant, two entertaining movies arrive with a complementary pair of star figures for the next generation. Supergirl: the girl next door as feminist...
...might think that the debate had already been settled by the box office performance of last year's films. Black actors starred in three of 1983's six biggest hits: Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, Richard Pryor in Superman III and Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. This summer's two out-of-nowhere hits, the rap musical Breakin' and Prince's Purple Rain, suggest that movies with black themes can attract large mixed audiences. And yet these are a few glittering tokens; for most black actors and audiences, roles and role models are scarce. Though blacks...
...bird, it's a plane, it's (Can you see it coming?) Superman in a plane. Christopher Reeve, 32, who soared to fame as the Man of Steel, is starring next in The Aviator as a rugged, '20s mail pilot. His plane crashes, and Reeve is marooned on a mountain with the companion able Rosanna Arquette. Reeve, an experienced pilot who has soloed across the Atlantic, did all his own flying in the film, a claim he cannot make about his earlier aerial incarnation...
STRAUSS: Also Sprach Zarathustra; Macbeth (Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Lorin Maazel, conductor; Deutsche Grammophon). Who could have predicted that a tone poem based on Friedrich Nietzsche's notions of the death of God, the will to power and the rise of a superman would become one of symphonic literature's greatest hits? Yet long before Director Stanley Kubrick popularized its spectacular organ and brass apostrophe in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strauss's blazing essay in orchestrational virtuosity ranked high in audiences' esteem. Maazel and the Viennese give this mettle tester a commanding reading, capturing the grandeur...
...natural condition of humankind, then genius is the purest and rarest of diseases. Tortured writers, earless painters, mad scientists all live inside the quarantine of their own superiority, distanced by their difference from the world they illuminate and help-recreate. To 19th century romantics the genius was a superman; to most of us today he may seem both more and less than human, an idiot savant, a freak of nature...