- Mark Twain (Wikipedia)
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), best known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced”, and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature”. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the “Great American Novel”. Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
- We believed a man could fly (rogerebert.com)
The first time we see Superman in his red, blue and yellow uniform is nearly an hour into “Superman.” Perhaps the filmmakers agreed with Spielberg’s famous statement that “Jaws” would work better the longer he kept the shark off the screen. That means the film doesn’t open like most superhero movies or James Bonds with a sensational pre-title sequence. To be sure, it opens on the planet Krypton with his father Jor-El preparing him to be launched into space. But those aren’t action scenes; they provide weight to the origin story every superhero requires.