SHUCK & JIVE OR SHOCK & AWE: It’s summertime! That means I need to do my patriotic duty and watch a big, loud, summertime movie. In other words, pretty much anything showing at the Arlington Theatre would be a good bet.
Right now, I think that’s Superman, which, despite all its vaingloriously red-white-and-blue, man-of-steel trappings, has been castigated for not-so-subliminal political preachiness. It seems the bad guy — Lex Luthor — happens to be a tech billionaire.
Superman as a comic book hit the big time just as Adolph Hittler was spreading his wings in Europe in the late 1930s. It’s not coincidental that Superman’s original creators — Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel — were kids of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who fled to the United States — Cleveland more specifically — to escape antisemitic violence. | Credit: Wikipedia
