
I Rewatched "Smallville" Because David Corenswet Said Tom Welling Was His No.1 Superman
While waiting to see the film yet again in theaters, I've consumed every bit of media from the Superman cast, including this interview with Vanity Fair:
In this interview (and many others), David Corenswet has gone on the record to say that Tom Welling's Superman from Smallville was his favorite growing up.
Me and David have that in common.
Now, I grew up watching Smallville — a staple in big brother/little sister '90s households, IMHO — but I haven't watched it since it aired! So, I figured, now is as good a time as any to rewatch Smallville and give you my honest thoughts!
It's what David would want.
So, without further ado, here's every thought I had while watching the first episode of Smallville in my adult life.
Before we jump in, here's the synopsis Hulu gives for Smallville in case you know nothing about the show:
Ah yes, Smallville, the creamed corn capital of the world!
Population is about to go up to 25,002!
Who is this topless man and why is he tied up in a corn field?
More on him later!
OK, Smallville was devastated by the meteor shower that hit their town, the very same shower that brought Clark Kent into Jonathan and Martha's lives:
It also took the lives of Lana's (Clark's future love interest) parents and all of Lex Luthor's hair (hence his life-long obsession with the meteor shower and, therefore, Clark!)
Oh, look at this precious lil nugget!
All Martha and Jonathan wanted was a kid of their own, and now they got one! I, personally, would've asked a few more questions, but to each their own!
Precious lil nugget grew up NICEEEEEEEE:
I cannot believe that a boy with a face like this isn't the most popular kid in school.
Enter Miss Lana Lang!
Chloe, one of Clark's best friends, says that it's "scientifically impossible for Clark to get within five feet of Lana Lang." Lo and behold, it's because she's wearing a kryptonite necklace!!! But Clark doesn't know that that's his only weakness (yet!!!)
Remember that topless man from earlier? He's back!
It's a tradition at Smallville High. Every year, for the Homecoming game, the football team picks a poor freshman to tie up — sans clothes — in the cornfield and paints an "S" on his chest. Even though the meteor hit town over a decade ago, the original freshman that Lex saw in the cornfield — unaged, I might add — has come back to take his revenge!
Not entirely sure why Clark was hanging out by the highway, but good thing he was, because he was there to save Lex Luthor when his car accidentally takes them both off the road and into the lake:
He's not even Superman yet and he's already out here saving lives!
Lana's giving her forgettable jock boyfriend™ her kryptonite necklace...which means...that Clark can go near her!
EEEPPP!
Ahh, topless man is going around and killing the men responsible for tying him up all those years ago:
Hell hath no fury like a high schooler scorned.
OMG! Clark knows he was adopted, but not all the details...so he's known he was different all his life, but not why...and now he knows HE was the meteor attack that hit Smallville all those years ago:
Can't blame the Kents...how do you tell your son that you found him on the side of the road after he fell from the sky?
Nice to know that just 'cause you're an alien, that doesn't mean you're immune from teen angst:
Superheroes, they're just like us!
BUT IT IS HIS FAULT! Not the best start to a budding romance...
...but their love will prevail! I know I'm jumping ahead of myself, but I love their love! Lois Lane can wait!
I SHIP, YOU SHIP, WE SHIP!
Move over Lana's forgettable jock boyfriend™, there's a new sheriff in town!
LOL, Lex...It's not that Jonathan doesn't like you 'cause you're bald...it's 'cause you're an asshole:
LutherCorp isn't exactly a friend to the little man. Big corporations and small family-owned farms tend not to mix well.
Why does this sound like a threat?
On one hand, I get that Lex is thankful to Clark for saving his life...on the other hand, Lex, you're a grown ass man talking to a high school-aged kid. Relax!
Shout out to Chloe and Pete for solving the mystery of the topless man before anyone even knew there was a mystery to be solved:
Looks like the topless man was in a coma after the meteor shower/Clark's arrival. There was an electrical malfunction at the hospital where he was staying, and when it was resolved, he was gone! Hence why he has the electrical powers and why he hasn't aged. By George, I think she's got it!
I'll say...
Chloe, documenting all the weird happenings around Smallville since the meteor shower may not be the best use of your time...but I digress!
Poor not-so-lil-but-still-precious-nugget:
You didn't know, Clark!
Ah, forgettable jock boyfriend™ is jealous of Clark and Lana's budding romance, so he's making Clark this year's scarecrow:
After what happened to the topless man, I'm surprised they haven't done away with this hazing ritual. No? Just me?
OH NO! Clark tried to beat forgettable jock boyfriend™'s ass, which would have been brutal since he's, you know, Superman, but FJB™ is wearing Lana's necklace!
Throw that thing in the trash.
The irony of them painting an "S" on Clark's chest when he's at his weakest — and YEARS before he'll adopt the symbol as his own — is not lost on me!
It's a little poetic, if you think about it. "S" for Smallville? "S" for Superman? "S" for stop with this dumb ass ritual? All of the above.
OMG Lex recognizes the topless man from his youth!
When Lex was younger, before the meteor shower, he followed a voice that said "help me" into the corn field. Now, twelve years later, he's following that same voice, but instead of saving the OG topless man, he's saving Clark. POETIC!
The necklace falls off Clark when Lex rescues him...but that means that Lex is now in possession of Clark's one weakness!
Lex may not know that yet, but, spoiler alert, he finds out soon enough!
In a kinda anticlimactic turn of events, Clark races to the Homecoming dance and stops the topless man from killing all of Clark's classmates. In the ensuing fight, the no-longer topless man gets re-electrocuted, loses his memory, and is seemingly no longer out for revenge:
It's giving deux ex machina — emphasis on the machina — but there are only a few minutes left in the episode, so time to wrap it up!
Clark may have lost the battle for Lana's heart, but he will win the war!
Mark my words!
Safe to say, I wholeheartedly agree with David Corenswet — Tom Welling's Superman is def a fav. Like, when else are we ever gonna see Superman save lives as well as struggle with A.P. Calc?
Good thing the entire series is on Hulu, because I'm in it for the long haul now.
Stream Smallville on Hulu.

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Atlantic
an hour ago
- Atlantic
Four Superheroes Who Deserve a Day Off
This was supposed to be the summer superhero movies became fun again. At first, that appeared to be true: Superman, released earlier this month, relaunched DC's previously dour cinematic universe as a brighter and bouncier affair; the film zips from one encounter to the next with sincere aplomb. Now, two weeks later, comes Marvel's The Fantastic Four: First Steps —which, coincidentally or not, seems similarly positioned as an injection of Technicolor fizz into a progressively more leaden franchise. Dispensing with continuity from previous installments, the film is set on a retro-futuristic version of Earth where everything looks as if it were designed by Eero Saarinen. As an effort to breathe new life into a particularly moribund title—there have been four prior takes on these characters, all of them bad — First Steps is essentially successful. What it somehow can't manage to do is have much of a good time in the process. First Steps, directed by Matt Shakman, has several things working in its favor. It's quite handsome to look at, and features an elegant ensemble of actors who are capable of the big, dramatic moments thrown at them. Its action sequences also achieve a true sense of scale, something chintzier Marvel entries often struggle with. But First Steps zooms past the Fantastic Four's origins and, more detrimentally, their odd family dynamic. Instead, it dives headfirst into a portentous, celestial story in which Earth's apocalypse is almost immediately at hand. There's no time for the characters to engage in era-appropriate diversions (such as, perhaps, kicking back with martinis) or match wits with colorfully costumed adversaries. This adventure is all end-of-the-world menace, all the time. The lack of breathing room is striking. After all, these characters come from one of comic books' richest texts: The Fantastic Four are the original Marvel superhero team, created by the legendary writer-illustrator team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The comic kicked off the company's 1960s revival and redefined the medium for an entire generation. Mr. Fantastic, a.k.a. Reed Richards (here played by Pedro Pascal), is the irritable, busy father figure; he's also a genius scientist who can stretch like rubber. (He mostly uses his power in this adaptation to fill many wide chalkboards with math equations.) His wife, Susan Storm, also known as the Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), is able to vanish and throw force fields around everything; her brother, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), is the Human Torch, who can burst into flame and take to the skies. The trio's best pal is Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a human turned orange, rocky beast known as the Thing. First Steps begins a few years after the foursome's brush with a cosmic radiation storm, which transformed them into superhumans. The crew now keeps New York City safe from costumed villains and subterranean monsters, while enjoying their status as chummy celebrities; they're cheered by teeming audiences holding pennants everywhere they go. Shakman whisks us past all of this information, perhaps assuming that viewers have picked up the gist from past cinematic efforts and wouldn't want to sit through all that backstory again. (Maybe the director was also hell-bent on keeping the run time under two hours—an impulse I do approve of.) But Shakman's endeavor to pick up the pace means the movie loses its grasp of what makes the source material so special: the genuine, sometimes fraught chemistry of this found family. Johnny and Ben are usually depicted as bickering surrogate brothers, the hotheaded youngster and the curmudgeonly elder; Susan is a pragmatic force, with Reed often lost in his own world. In First Steps, however, the characters felt flattened out to me, while all four performances are muted and somewhat excessively grounded. An early scene sees Ben cooking tomato sauce with the group's helper robot, H.E.R.B.I.E., crushing garlic gloves with his gigantic fists 'to add a little bit of zip.' It's a cute moment, but an oddly underplayed one; in scene after scene like this, I kept wondering—where's the extra zip? Instead of playful banter, First Steps serves up deep, emotional conversations about the meaning of parenthood and the heroes' deepest fears. The plot kicks off with the reveal that after years of trying, Susan is pregnant, a joyful realization that, for Reed, quickly turns into worry that their child will also be superpowered. Soon after that, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner)—a shiny interstellar being riding a big surfboard—appears, zooming from the clouds and proclaiming Earth's doom. She heralds Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a skyscraper-size villain from space who cruises around the universe eating planets whole; his arrival immediately plunges the Fantastic Four into a crisis that they spend the rest of the film trying to untangle. The Galactus saga is the most famous in Fantastic Four lore, but it's also a conflict the comic built up to in the 1960s, churning through sillier villains before introducing a more impassive, terrifying force. He's a tough first challenge for this new on-screen team to take on, one that drives Reed into instant misery as he struggles to fathom how to confront an enemy who cannot be bargained with. Pascal is smart casting for the role—he has the right air of sophistication and maturity—but the script engulfs his character in such a dark crisis of confidence that the actor's charisma can't shine through. The same goes for Kirby as the joyless Susan, who impressively handles all the steeliness required of her. Quinn, who charmed me in recent blockbusters such as A Quiet Place: Day One and Gladiator II, feels too tightly wound as Johnny. Moss-Bachrach does quite lovely work as Ben, but the movie is perhaps overly focused on the hardened fella's softer side; it largely ignores the character's more tormented feelings about his physical transformation. First Steps is also shockingly comfortable to go long stretches without big action; the centerpiece is a space mission with shades of Interstellar that is genuinely thrilling, but some members of the team (particularly Mr. Fantastic) get few chances to really show off their superpowers. As surprisingly downbeat as it is, I appreciated the fundamental message of the film, which is set in a more hopeful world. When a crisis arises, Reed and company are actually capable of rallying the world to help save itself. Multiple times in First Steps, Shakman emphasizes the power of a global community, the kind he's clearly longing for in our world. Those are the zippiest ingredients he tosses into the sauce; I just wish he'd allowed the heroes to loosen up.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Ernest Kingsley Jr. Praises ‘Washington Black' Costar Sterling K. Brown's Offscreen ‘Mentorship'
Ernest Kingsley Jr. is grateful that Hulu's Washington Black offered him the chance not only to share the screen with Sterling K. Brown — but to be mentored by him as well. During an exclusive interview, Us Weekly mentioned to Brown, 49, how much his costars praised him for the support he provided on set. Kingsley Jr., for his part, shared his own experience getting to work with Brown after admiring his work. "First of all, I feel like I kind of dragged Sterling into being a mentor. I just kind of asked him so many questions, like, 'Hey man, how are you doing? It's 1:00 a.m. but I need your help,'" Kingsley Jr., who plays adult Wash, joked to Us while discussing the show, which premiered on Wednesday, July 23. "It was natural, to be honest. It was naturally built." Kingsley Jr. pointed out how Brown "operates with vulnerability in such a powerful way," adding, "Sterling operates with a sense of power, and he encourages and incites it in you. It is this sense of, if you open up to that [kind of vulnerability yourself] then it will be held and cared for and loved. I feel like he spread that out across multiple cast members and across the crew." What to Know About Sterling K. Brown's 'Washington Black': From Cast Details to Book Connections He continued: "Just his presence was a mentorship and getting to see him every day. It was a blessing and a gift to have him on set. Also, just to have him in my life. Now he can't get rid of me." Brown, meanwhile, attempted to play off the praise, quipping, "I paid them all. That's really the bottom line of the whole thing. I walked their dogs when they needed me to. I do special favors so they say nice things about him." Based on Us' other interviews with the Washington Black cast, the confidence in Brown as a costar and executive producer was universal. Iola Evans recalled how Brown was "very generous with his time and energy" on set. "For someone who's got a lot on his plate to be very, very open and who encourages openness, that is really nice for actors and was always very, very positive," she shared. "He really leads with positivity and on a set. When you're on really long days, I think energy is really important. So you are really grateful to have someone who's a really great spirit." Edward Bluemel felt the same way. "There was an aura of safety around him and of confidence. He's so experienced and obviously so well known," Bluemel, 32, noted."But he's ultimately incredibly positive and kind. When you're at the top of a production like that, I think having that attitude really rubs off on everyone around you." Based on Esi Edugyan's novel of the same name, Washington Blake partnered Brown up with Selwyn Seyfu Hinds on a TV adaptation following George Washington Black (Eddie Karanja and Kingsley Jr.) through past and present timelines as he is raised under the shadow of slavery before catching the attention of the sugar plantation owner's brother. A young Washington is recruited to help the owner's brother, leading to an adventure around the world. Washington in present day goes by Wash and lives in Nova Scotia, where he is taken under the wing of town leader Medwin Harris (Brown). "Sterling is an amazing actor. He's an amazing producer as well. He knows how to get the best performance out of an actor. Him being an actor himself and him being at such a high level really helped to elevate us performance wise a lot," Karanja, 16, gushed to Us. "Sterling taught me to take my time as an actor. There's no rush if you don't need to think about getting it perfect. Sterling is a very zen guy. I really did get that vibe from him — and it's infectious." TV Shows Based on Best-Selling Books: From 'Big Little Lies' to 'The Handmaid's Tale' In addition to expanding Medwin's role in the show to allow Us to spend more time with Brown, Washington Black also highlighted Kingsley Jr.'s breakout performance. The actor's scene-stealing presence as adult Wash allowed him to elevate material he was very passionate about. "The book sets an amazing foundation for the creativity and the hero's journey. Where the show leads on from that is you have a much more explorative, innocent and fantastical element to the show. It kind of builds upon what's already been put down in the book," he teased to Us. "It's epic, it's wondrous and you definitely get to see more characters fleshed out as well. You get to really see character relationships develop more and how those characters influence Wash's life and his journey to seek that life of freedom." Kingsley Jr. is thrilled that audiences are finally getting to see Washington Black. "There were definitely times where I was in my room thinking, 'Man, when is this show going to come out?' But I'm also overwhelmed with gratitude and just the excitement of introducing this project to the world," he added. "So many hands were poured into this and so many passions are poured into this. Just being able to see that work and take pride in it, this is a huge thing for me." Washington Black is currently streaming on Hulu. Solve the daily Crossword


The Verge
2 hours ago
- The Verge
Superman's Fortress of Solitude is a Silver Age man cave inspired by nature's beauty
James Gunn knows that most people are familiar with Superman's origin story, which is why DC Studios' new feature about the Man of Steel opens at a point when he has already become a world famous superhero. Instead of rehashing the tragic beats of Krypton's destruction, the movie is punctuated with moments that show you how deeply Superman cherishes the few remaining pieces of his homeworld. He loves his Kryptonian family crest and his out-of-control superdog. But the most impressive and alien keepsake that Clark Kent holds close to his heart is a massive stronghold buried deep beneath the ice in Antarctica. The Fortress of Solitude (which originated in Street & Smith's Doc Savage pulps from the 1930s) has been part of Superman's lore since the Golden Age of comics, when it was first introduced as a hidden citadel tucked into a mountainside by Metropolis. Over the years, the Fortress has been located in a variety of places and taken on different forms, but Gunn's Superman presents the structure as most people know it — a gleaming cluster of gargantuan crystals situated in the frozen wilderness. Everything about the Fortress is so grand and otherworldly that one could easily assume that DC Studios would have elected to create the whole thing with VFX. There are digital elements to the new Superman's take on the Fortress, but Gunn has always been a fan of practically created effects. Having worked with Gunn on The Suicide Squad, The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, production designer Beth Mickle was intimately familiar with his filmmaking sensibilities. Mickle could see Gunn's vision for a Superman movie that was modern but nostalgic and vibrant like a classic comic book. When I spoke with Mickle recently about her work on Superman, she told me that creating the new Fortress of Solitude wasn't just difficult — it was an exercise in patience and experimentation. Mickle was certain that going the practical route would result in a much more magical final product, but she wasn't always sure how she and the rest of Superman's production team would pull it off. 'I've been on those sets where it's just a full blue screen and the poor actor is sitting there looking at a blue tennis ball, trying to figure out how they're supposed to be reacting to it,' Mickle said. 'I feel like, no matter what, practicality comes across in the filmmaking and in the performances. But it's really tough to pull practicality like this off seamlessly.' Like Gunn, Mickle was a big fan of Richard Donner's first Superman film, in which Christopher Reeves' Clark Kent summons the Fortress of Solitude by tossing a green crystal into Arctic waters. Though she wanted to pay homage to the 1978 classic, Mickle was also interested in exploring how else the Fortress could be depicted. 'I started looking at the way that crystals sometimes grow naturally from rocks, where they kind of splay upward and have this propulsive, explosive feel,' Mickle explained. 'I thought to myself, 'You know, that actually feels a bit like Superman, exploding up into the sky.'' Mickle's ideas about the Fortress as a crystalline eruption also got her thinking about nature and how the structure's shape could be inspired by things like the ocean and the way that sprays of water can freeze in mid-air in the right conditions. Photographs of crashing waves gave Mickle a general idea of what the Fortress' silhouette should look like from a distance. But for the building's interior, Mickle turned to DC's Silver Age comics from the '50s and '60s — an era that depicted the Fortress, as Gunn described it, as 'Superman's man cave.' 'In those comics, the Fortress is where Superman has his lab set up to do experiments, and he's got a zoo of all the interplanetary plant life and animals he comes across,' Mickle said. 'Once we had committed to the Silver Age visual reference, we started looking at a lot of beautiful, mid-century, minimalist, Frank Lloyd Wright-style interiors for more inspiration. That helped us figure out the multilevel, terraced layout that our Fortress has.' From there, the creative team had to decide where the crystals would go and how they would make the ethereal, translucent pillars. The crew spent about three months on research and development into different methods of using resin to build the Fortress of Solitude piece by piece. There were plenty of hiccups early on. Many of the larger resin crystals — which ranged in length from 12 to 40 feet — would crumble under their own weight or require a certain kind of ribbing to maintain their shape that was too visible to use on film. As other parts of the Fortress' interior were being constructed on a soundstage in Atlanta, Mickle's team was trying to figure out how to get the crystals to work. And at one point, she contemplated something a bit more elementary. 'After one sleepless night, I asked my art director, 'Would it be crazy to actually build this out of real ice and just keep the stage really chilled?'' Mickle recalled. 'We both laughed at the absurdity of it, but in that moment of desperation, I was like, 'I don't know, do we bring in ice sculptures?'' In the end, Mickle and construction coordinator Chris Snyder developed a resin pouring method that, while more involved, resulted in crystals that were strong enough to work with. Rather than pouring the resin to make single columns, the team began pouring them as halves, letting them dry, and then bonding them together afterward. This had the added benefit of giving the crystals an unintentional shimmering luster that was in line with the film's aesthetic. While all 242 of the crystals now looked great, the next hurdle was getting them positioned to evoke that explosive, propulsive feel that Mickle aimed for. To resemble naturally forming crystals, the resin pillars needed to splay out at various angles. But because the pillars are translucent and backlit, rigging them with internal framing would have broken the fantastical illusion. That kind of internal framing could have been edited out digitally, but Mickle and the team opted for something more analog. 'We actually hung aircraft cable from the ceiling and put a little pick point on the top of each of the crystals,' Mickle explained. 'We would put a crystal on its little metal base, lean it to whatever angle we wanted it to be, and then we would have a little point at the very top of the crystal that was attached to the aircraft cable so it would lock it to that exact space.' Even though it sometimes felt like an uphill battle, Mickle said that she loved the explorational element of building it, and she's excited to learn what else Gunn has planned for the franchise — especially when it comes to the weird and fantastical. 'I really loved the fantasy worlds here, and it was really fun getting to dive into the pocket universe of it all with Lex,' Mickle said. 'We did a lot of that in Guardians of the Galaxy, and it'll be fun to see if there's opportunity to do stuff like that with any of the upcoming DC work. It'll be an exploration for all of us.' Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All by Charles Pulliam-Moore Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Entertainment Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. See All Film Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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