Smallville (Page 2 of 3)

Kristin Kreuk has broken her silence on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/MsKristinKreuk/stat … 3184955393

It must be so surreal for people who worked closely with Allison, or who were close friends with her, to read these things in the press. I mean, do you think that Tom Welling or Justin Hartley were sitting around the set a few years ago thinking "this chick is cray-zee"?

I've seen Going Clear. It's a fascinating movie. Leah's show pairs well with it, in that we get to see a wider view of the cult and how it has hurt many people in different ways.

I hear that she may branch out to other cults though. Maybe we will get some people to explain what Allison did to them.

jese.

It's also surreal to me that it's one of only two things Informant and I ever agreed upon.

haha

That is sad. Smallville has always been a fun show to go back and rewatch when I absolutely do not want to think about what I'm watching. Now the show is hard to go back to, and it is a huge smack in the face to all of the many people who put ten years into making that show. Many of them were great at their job.

Hopefully we will be able to watch the show again someday. And maybe they can cast a new Chloe in the Arrowverse or on Krypton, and repair the damage to the character. Maybe young Bruce Wayne can meet Chloe on Gotham.

And the thing about pineapple on pizza is how the tanginess of the pineapple brings out the sweetness of the tomato sauce! That interaction is golden!

Okay, what else can we maybe agree on? Because if there's nothing else, it's a miracle that we get along as well as we do.

This is a weird situation. I never really hated Chloe (though there were times when she got close), and yet Allison is a disgusting, repulsive human being. Meanwhile, Felicity Smoak has turned into a character that appeals to me about as much as another Obama presidency, but I don't harbor any I'll feelings toward Emily Bett Rickards.

So the idea of replacing Chloe with Felicity makes me sad, but the idea of replacing Allison's image with Emily's doesn't.
Part of me thinks they should keep and celebrate the Chloe character, but change her appearance (maybe do that thing where they make white characters black for some reason). Another part of me thinks that no matter how they alter her appearance, Allison would always be able to look at Chloe and own a part of that character.

Turn her into a villain and kill her off?

My feelings about Kristen Bell are complicated. I love Veronica, but I'm actually not a fan of Bell's in general.

I think that's all. The show ran for ten years and had a ton of guest stars, so I'm sure that there are other stories out there, but those are the big ones. It's weird for me to group Young's death in with the others. He was bipolar and that resulted in a serious depression, causing him to kill himself. The others were (presumably) decisions made with a clear mind.

In other news, my brain has created it's official Chloe Sullivan exit story. I may never actually write it, but at least I now have a story that builds off of Smallville history and does what needs to be done. Maybe I'll write up some of those ideas later... After I finish that Supergirl script that I've been chipping away at here and there for a couple of years now.

Plus Jensen Ackles has been to Hell a few times now.

I feel really bad for people like Tom and the crew who worked their asses off and built a legacy with this show, only to have it destroyed by Allison's evil decisions. I want to find a way to bring that back to them while putting her in her proper place.

You have no idea how weird it is for me to see Slider_Quinn22 saying we should separate the art from the artist when he insists on Quinn in Season 4 indicating Quinn's sociopathy rather than Jerry being half assed and hungover and not bothering to learn his lines or read the entire script.

But Chloe shouldn't be a villain just because Allison is one; we shouldn't confuse the actor with the character.

At this point, I would digitally replace Allison with Ann Coulter or Tomi Lahren if it would get Allison's sorry ass out of the show.

Slider_Quinn21's right that Allison's crimes aren't onscreen whereas Jerry O'Connell's bad choices were. Sorry for the typo.

**

Allison's lawyers are trying to negotiate a plea deal; her parents have taken a deal her out of custody but under house arrest. My opinion: we cannot make deals with people like Allison Mack.

I couldn't care less what New Age garbage or pedantic psychobabble we might put forth: this woman is a human trafficker, a willing accessory to rape and slavery and pedophilia and she did it all in the guise of female empowerment and she used you to do it. She used me to do it. Every time we felt pride and joy and admiration for Chloe's intrepid perseverance and compassion for all, we were feeding a false myth that Allison used to carry out her crimes with impunity until now.

I have no children, but I have a niece. Her name is Lauren. I love her more than I've ever loved any one or anything, so much that I wrote her into SLIDERS REBORN as Quinn's gay teenaged protégé. If Lauren were arrested for Allison's crimes, I would certainly visit Lauren in prison, but I would do nothing to extricate her and nothing to mitigate the consequences of her crimes and I certainly wouldn't put up any money to give her the creature comforts of house arrest after she deprived innocent people of their liberty and safety and violated their bodies while using Chloe Sullivan to entrap her victims. Also, I wouldn't have any confidence in Allison's ability to abide the conditions of her bail; she has no concern for right and wrong, actions and consequences, harm and suffering. She has no kindness, no care, no love, no soul. I want Allison in jail. I want justice served.

Realistically, however -- she may turn evidence against Raniere, expose his network, lay bare his organization and assets and accomplices and victims and offering her immunity and a reduced sentence could serve a greater good and contain a worse evil. I understand that. But the thought of striking any kind of bargain with Allison makes me sick. The idea that Allison could resume her life without a shred of consequence for all the people she's abused and tortured and raped and enslaved and possibly present herself as a victim is outrageous.

Not to poke fun at Grizzlor who has shown himself to be one of those excellent people who can admit that they were wrong -- but in a shocking turn of events, Allison's appearance has been cancelled, and I hope we can say that everything else in her life has been cancelled as well.

I don't know how anyone around her let it get to this point with Allison -- and perhaps they didn't have control -- but if they didn't, then it's not someone who we can act had no culpability and didn't keep willfully imposing criminal acts.  Like, don't treat her like a little girl if she truly was responsible for these crimes she is being charged with.

Don't act like it was all Reiner and she had no agency.

Sorry, I didn't meant for it to appear as a response directly to you Informant.  Just was a general thought on my part.

http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/allison … 1202788522

Interesting article, with comments from a source close to Smallville. It helps create a sort of timeline between Allison being a nice, but desperate and lost young woman, to the monster she became. I do think she was an easy target, and that she was broken because of this. However, that doesn't excuse what she became. We are responsible for our own choices. So while wrongs may have been committed against her, they in no way excuse the wrongs that she committed on others.

And when she broke, she really damn broke.

So... Is the Allison that we saw on Smallville the same person that she is today? Or is there a divide somewhere?

Like I said, it's not really about concern for her. I'm just interested in the way people become what they've become. Character arcs, I guess. My brain seeks information. Motive. Backstory.

Apparently, Allison was once a normal person. But even within those comments about her, I spot weakness. They say that she was interested in finding her place in the world, helping people and female empowerment. None of those things actually mean anything. They're general notions of genres of goals. To me, this paints a picture of someone who had been playing characters her whole life and didn't have a grasp of who she was as a person. She was an empty vessel, and that made her a prime target for a cult. She wanted to feel like she had purpose and meaning, and ultimately, power over the world.

I can understand how a cult leader could take someone like that and mold that person into a monster. It doesn't change what she did, or lessen what she did in any way. People who are taught a pattern of abuse as children often repeat that pattern. It doesn't lessen their own crimes, but it helps us to understand where that evil is rooted. It helps us identify that pattern elsewhere.

Like I said, I'm fascinated by the psychology of cults. Maybe because I've seen it up close. That doesn't change the fact that I just looked at a clock, saw the letters "AM", got a flash of those initials burned into human flesh, and was disgusted.

Allison should definitely rot in prison for what she did. She is a disgusting human being. But she is the product of a machine, and I want to know how that machine works.

On another note, I saw an article that attempted to pain the whole Smallville series as cursed, with actors who never amounted to anything after it ended. Plagued by fleeing cast members (Michael and Kristen left after seven seasons! That's a whole series run for most shows!) and chaos. The article was BS, trying to paint Allison as one part of a larger tragedy. I don't get the need to ruin other people who just happened to be around her at one point, years ago.

Shall we all agree upon a schedule to monitor Sabrina Lloyd's blog for any signs that she's joined a cult? https://motheringaroundtheworld.com

Allison Mack's defense lawyers have decided to try to argue that blackmailing people into sexual slavery isn't illegal:

https://jezebel.com/allison-macks-lawye … 1831388421

https://www.vulture.com/2019/04/allison … -case.html

Allison Mack has pleaded guilty. Actual remorse or a cold calculation that it was her only chance at escaping life imprisonment and having to register as a sex offender?

At the very least, I think Mack should be registered as a sex offender for her trafficking and subject to permanent GPS monitoring. She's dangerous and is a threat to any women who cross her path.

https://medium.com/@r0ckthastarz/alliso … 45b8281f45

A highly anecdotal account of meeting Allison Mack. *shudders*

**

Also, Grizzlor’s photo with Allison Mack is now her Wikipedia headshot.

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/smallville … inal-cast/

A SMALLVILLE animated series? ... I don't know. There are challenges.

The thing about SMALLVILLE is that it was mostly about having very specific actors onscreen and it lasted 10 seasons because people liked the actors. Their physicality. Their rapport. Tom Welling's performance as Clark is based in his huge body mass and his incredibly gentle screen presence. Michael Rosenbaum's appeal as Lex is through his ability to make really lengthy monologues about THE ART OF WAR seem like he's coming up with them off the top of his head.

Animation and dialogue recording on the DC Animated Films budgets is never going to pull that off, unfortunately. The voice performances in those projects always make it obvious that the actors are recording in isolation and create the weird sense that the conversations are stitched together from the actors' voicemails. The animation is also incredibly stiff with very little performance or body language in the movements.

Japanese animation often has limited animation with an emphasis on hyperdramatic composition because their budgets don't allow fluidity. Western animation often rejects that approach but also can't afford for fluidity; there's the sense of seeing action figures in their posed stiffness being marched on and offscreen. To capture what made SMALLVILLE work (as much as it ever worked), you'd need Don Bluth style animation with live actors performing all the scenes and animators adding the actors' body language to the drawings. But it's super expensive and this sort of budget actually killed the FOX Animation division.

The SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN series used very simple character designs for fluid animation. But SMALLVILLE needs the likenesses.

A CG animated series might address this problem, however; the Nickelodeon NINJA TURTLES series has a delightful sense of characterization in all their character models and movements for each Turtle and the human characters. However, there is often the sense that these aren't living beings as much as highly expressive children's toys; they would be a (loving and artful) caricature of Welling and Rosenbaum if that style were used on a SMALLVILLE animated show.

I was a big fan of the SMALLVILLE Season 11 comic books, but I have to say, there was a point towards the last 1/3 or so of the run where it stopped working. The problem: the comics stopped using the likenesses of the actors. Originally, there was a lot of effort to showing Tom Welling and Erica Durance's faces as Clark and Lois with Michael Rosenbaum as Lex. However, due to sales not being terrific, the budget and schedule for the comics got lower. Newer artists were brought in to finish the run.

The newer artists were very good, but they were made to work faster and didn't do the careful photo referencing to maintain the likenesses. Tom Welling's wide face, full lips and lengthy hair were lost; he just had the usual DC Comics Superman face with the square-jaw and short-hair. Erica Durance's distinct nose and cheeks were flattened into her being generically female. Justin Hartley's spikey hair and sculpted cheeks became a bland rectangle with a mop of blond hair; Allison Mack's face lost all definition beyond being a blonde girl -- it wasn't the SMALLVILLE actors any longer.

The writing was strong from start to finish. But visually, SMALLVILLE's comic book run concluded in a disappointing yet oddly appropriate fashion: it looked like pretty much any other Superman comic book by the end. I'd hope that a SMALLVILLE cartoon could avoid that.

Couple things.  Firstly, an animated series is only as good as its production team.  If they get one of the typical ones, it will be fine.  Rosie is a voice acting pro by now, and he knows everybody including famed voice director Andrea Romano.  I'd definitely watch. 

Allison got 3 years in prison, though obviously she'll likely only have to serve half of that or whatever.  She was clearly mentally/emotionally broken in various ways, and was manipulated by Raniere.

Ha ha, look I'm not trivializing what she's done; however, when one is in a runaway cult, crazy crap goes down.  It's a Lord of the Flies mentality.  Look at January 6th!

As for me, hey I was happy at the time to be at a play of John Glover's, and she randomly was there too.  I'd follow John right into the apocalypse!  He beat those Gremlins once, and as for the walking dead....

I was listening to Michael Rosenbaum's latest podcast, INSIDE OF YOU. Rosenbaum got COVID-19. He was fully vaccinated. He didn't realize he had COVID-19; he was recovering from back surgery, experiencing exhaustion and thought he was just tired, but when his tiredness got worse and worse, he got tested and tested positive. He stayed home for two weeks and made a full recovery. He didn't need to be hospitalized; he never needed a ventilator; the vaccine enabled him to build the antibodies needed to fight off COVID-19 and all he had to do was rest and take extra vitamins.

**

I'm not sure if I can wholeheartedly recommend spending about $90 on buying all the SMALLVILLE comics. They start out really, really well, but as I explained, with all the art shifts and reduced budgets, the artists were no longer able to maintain the likenesses of the actors for all the characters, so by the last third or so of the SMALLVILLE comics, they stop looking like a SMALLVILLE comic book series. They just look like any other SUPERMAN comic, sadly.

However, Tess is revealed to be alive after her death in "Finale," so that's nice. I remember after "Finale" aired, I was appalled by Tess' death and pointed out that Tess had died like three times already and surely this fourth death would be undone as well in a future season of SMALLVILLE. Other fans pointed out that there wouldn't be any future seasons of SMALLVILLE, but I petulantly insisted that Tess would be back and I was mildly astonished to be proven right because I wasn't actually being serious.

Serinda Swan, who played Zatanna on SMALLVILLE, was one of the worst actresses I'd ever seen, performing a stilted, overposed character who seemed more like a shop window dummy than a human being. I could always see Swan thinking how to best frame her body for the camera instead of behaving like a person.

I recently saw Swan in the new series CORONER where she plays a medical examiner who has experienced some severely traumatic events. Swan's performance is riveting and sincere; she plays a panic attack with such gnawing agony. Her acting is incredible and because she's cut her hair short and is dressing like an adult professional instead of a comic book cosplayer, she's almost unrecognizable.

My actress friend tells me that a lot of what I describe of Swan's acting is something male directors often ask female performers to do and it's possible that Serinda Swan was always an amazing actress but getting terrible direction until now with CORONER.

**

Finally got around to watching a few episodes of Kristin Kreuk playing a police detective in BEAUTY IN THE BEAST and oh my goodness, Kreuk's ability to sell non-superpowered fight scenes is quite impressive.

Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum will be recording a podcast covering every episode of the second worst television show ever made, SMALLVILLE. https://www.talkvillepodcast.com/

SLIDERS probably remains the worst television show ever made. I am sorry, but I do SLIDERS no favours by pretending that "This Slide of Paradise" didn't leave it at the bottom of the pile.

I listened to the first episode. Welling and Rosenbaum are avoiding saying the words "Chloe Sullivan" and "Allison Mack", not discussing any of her scenes or character. It'll be interesting to see how long they can maintain that avoidance of a critical character and performer who has ended up exactly where she deserves to be (jail).

Very interesting recollections with Welling and Rosenbaum remarking that Lex has barely interacted with Clark at the point when Lex is declaring that the Clark/Lex friendship will be "the future" and Rosenbaum noting how weird it is that Lex is clearly meant to be a college graduate who is almost seductively befriending a high school student (who, despite Welling's age, spends four seasons in high school and is therefore 15).

Welling and Rosenbaum say SMALLVILLE had no choice but to do monster-of-the-week episodes in almost every single episode of the show's lifespan. That is nonsense and it speaks to how neither Welling nor Rosenbaum are showrunners or television writers. Welling was a good producer in Seasons 8 - 10, but he was not a writer. The television shows GILMORE GIRLS and EVERWOOD were set in small towns and neither needed to introduce monsters of the week. SMALLVILLE could have told stories about the crises facing Smallville as a small town: farms getting squeezed out, the gradual breakdown of services and local businesses, the menace of Lexcorp, prejudice, poverty, education, loneliness.

SMALLVILLE was unfortunately showrun by two privileged, wealthy residents of Los Angeles who had likely never set foot into a small town and did no research whatsoever on what stories could be told in this setting, nor did Alfred Gough and Miles Millar devise and execute any ongoing character arcs and conflicts.

The argument that SMALLVILLE needed weekly freaks-of-the-week for superhero action sequences was soundly disproven over 10 seasons. SMALLVILLE never had a real superpowered fight. It never had the budget to pull it off except in brief flashes. This repetitive plot device to create enemies for Clark to fight was pointless. SMALLVILLE never pulled off superhuman combat; it was only good at doing the supersaves as Clark pulled people out of crashing cars or yanked them away from bullets and train wrecks and collapsing buildings and explosions.

SMALLVILLE fell into this error because the pilot was scripted with little to no thought as to how the ongoing series would work. Welling and Rosenbaum have noted how the age difference between Clark and Lex was not considered for their weird friendship nor was it ever really explored. Jonathan took issue with Lex's presence in Clark's life, but he never said anything as cutting as remarking that surely Lex could find some twentysomethings to be friends with instead of a high school student.

The other lack of thought: SMALLVILLE made Clark invulnerable right from the start and gave him superspeed that let him transform into a red blue blur. This made Clark so powerful that SMALLVILLE struggled to come up with situations where Clark would struggle to save someone or defend himself. IF SMALLVILLE had kept teenaged Clark Kent's powers at the level of Angel on ANGEL (enhanced strength but not enough to lift trucks; able to leap 1/4 of a tall building at a single bound, injured by gunfire but able to recover over days), Clark would have been a lot easier to write and his powers could have increased gradually over time.

Writer Doris Egan offered Gough and Millar a solution: the Kryptonite freaks had Kryptonite in them, so they could be more capable of hurting and injuring Clark. Gough and Millar refused, insisting on Clark being invulnerable which then required a level of threat for Clark that the show could never produce. Egan quit after Season 1 along with most of the Season 1 writers.

Throughout SMALLVILLE's lifespan, the actors and directors and set designers and costumers and effects artists -- basically anyone who worked in Vancouver -- seemed to be super-invested in the series. However, the showrunners -- who worked in Los Angeles -- seemed deeply uninterested in their show. In Season 8, the oriignal creators left and that changed, but in Season 10, the writers being at a distance from the Vancouver set caught up with them again.

Watched the first four episodes of WEDNESDAY. It's better than SMALLVILLE. I would even say it's good.

Alfred Gough and Miles Millar are clearly involved throughout the show, writing scripts that are above average but... not great. Their dialogue occasionally has some brilliantly morbid lines for Wednesday Addams, but they generally default to low-key, more gently paced conversations lack the rapid fire speed and relentless wit of the Paul Rudnick scripted ADDAMS FAMILY films directed by Barry Sonnenfeld.

The scripts aren't bad, they're good enough. Gough and Millar are professionals who do perfectly adequate work, writing decent setpieces that drive an interesting story, crafting satisfactory dialogue that is only occasionally brilliant but allows an actor to really make it their own whether it's Michael Rosenbaum in the SMALLVILLE pilot or the excellent Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Addams.

In terms of the writing, WEDNESDAY is a functional, passably good ADDAMS series, but the writing lacks a truly joyful thrill of macabre and is not driven by any real perspective on the human condition or revealing any insights or ideas. The writing is simply a technically proficient exercise in teleplay production for a previously-existing copyright, much like Gough and Millar's previous work on properties like Superman (SMALLVILLE) and Spider-Man (SPIDER-MAN 2) and less proficiently with CHARLIE's ANGELS.

However, WEDNESDAY as a TV show is somehow better than its scripts. This is largely because Tim Burton, while not the showrunner, is handling the visuals by directing half of this eight episode series and overseeing the other half, and Burton is able to infuse the onscreen action with the charm, darkness, mystery and danger that Gough and Millar's scripts don't provide (but also don't prevent). In addition, actress Jenna Ortega is able to perform Gough and Millar's adequate but undistinguished dialogue with the darkly wry wit of the Wednesday character that isn't entirely on the page.

It also helps that Gough and Millar are running the show and ensuring that scripts never fall below their baseline standard. SMALLVILLE was often a very poorly written show, but that often seemed to be due to Gough and Millar not being very involved in SMALLVILLE and only writing nine scripts out of 152 episodes across their seven seasons. Most of the scripts from Season 2 onward lacked the touch of their rewrites. The nine episodes they did write personally across Seasons 1 - 7 were enjoyable, capable stories.

Gough and Millar didn't seem able to run a 20 - 22 episode season of a TV show. On SMALLVILLE, they seemed to just stop showing up after Season 1. WEDNESDAY is operating on the eight episode per season model and they seem more inclined to put in the work.

WEDNESDAY is really only above-average in terms of its writing, but the acting and directing are able to raise it to a level of greatness that is well-above the quality of the words on the page.