Sat
May
17
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace - Wikipedia
Everything about this film seemed to go wrong. Superman III was terrible kitsch and the franchise looked dead in the water after Supergirl, in which Christopher Reeve was slated to cameo, bombed. However the rights were obtained by the Golan-Globus group and they approached Reeve, with no script in mind to reprise his role.
Reeve rightly voiced some reluctance at the manner Superman III had dissolved into absurdist comedy, so Golan & Globus offered him an insane deal involving story input, free reign over a project of his choice and the possible notion of his directing a fifth Superman title.
Due to budget cuts, the infamous scene on 42nd Street where Superman walks up to the United Nations was actually filmed in the rainy English city of Milton Keynes.
Even the score suffered. John Williams was unavailable, so he elected Alexander Courage (who sadly passed on May 15th and prompted this post) to score the thematic material for the film in his stead; with the Symphony-Orchestra Graunke in Munich. To quote Wikipedia directly:
“As the sessions progressed it became apparent that the players were not up to the challenge of some of the complex action cues. After the completion of recording on May 18, the sessions in Germany were canceled and the rest of the score was recorded with the National Philharmonic Orchestra at CTS Studios in England from May 23-June 2. Courage scored 100 minutes of music for the film and also recorded album versions of three new John Williams themes. A soundtrack album was prepared in 1987 by Cannon’s musical advisor Jack Fishman, but it was aborted when most of the music selected for it (including three songs by his son Paul Fishman) ended up getting cut from the film. No music from Superman IV was released for over twenty years until the Film Score Monthly soundtrack label presented the complete score as part of their 8-CD anthology Superman: The Music (1978-1988) in 2008.”
Tim Burton's Concept Art for Superman.
To say that this would have been a bit of a departure for the series is understatement of the millennium (Although thanks to rabid comic geeks, internet millennia only last for a petasecond).
Acrylic’s Times RSS Reader has garnered a lot of buzz lately. It’s ostensibly every other RSS app you’ve ever used, but the twist is that it will position your feeds into various blocks and columns like a newspaper grid, giving you an assortment of stories to read. It uses pagination to separate content into different categories.
I currently subscribe to 30+ RSS Feeds, of which I read around 10-15 compulsively. I use Netvibes for this because it has a lot of great advantages over software-based RSS readers (the telemobility notwithstanding). The major disadvantage is, of course, that I’m unable to passively follow a feed: I have to actively go to Netvibes to check and see if it’s been updated. That’s fine for sites like Lifehacker and Linkbunnies, which are usually either nonessential or infrequently updated, but there are certain sites that pique my interest with a vast majority of their content, so to have a gentle prod when they have updated would be a great benefit.
Times seemed like a natural place to start, but there are a lot of crippling problems. A lot of people gripe about the price - $30 for something you can do for free with Netvibes, Google Pages, NetNewsWire, et al - but that isn’t something that bothers me. If you build a product I like, I’ll pay for it. The main issue I had with Times was the interface for adding feeds. For something that has presumably been through several stages of testing (it’s a 1.0.4 app at the moment) it seemed unpolished and ill-considered.
You select your feeds for each page from a library of sources that is pre-populated by Acrylic’s choice of sources. You drag them and drop them onto the placeholders on the grid. The interface for viewing your library is a lot like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, but hideously wrong - the buttons feel a little pokey and it looks very cluttered, which brings me nicely onto my main gripe: you can’t delete their choice of news feed - you’re stuck filtering through their library in search of the feeds you added. The library comes with about 15 feeds in it already - none of which I was remotely interested in reading.
It’d be helpful if Netvibes supported OPML exporting of feeds, but sorting through the 30+ feeds I read in Times’ cluttered interface would have been hellish. Hitting the tiny arrow buttons to skip to the next page… dragging the little buttons. It’s very sexy and ‘Apple’ in presentation but it’s a Microsoft solution in thought and planning.
Looks like my search for an RSS Reader goes on, sadly.
