Smallville: Love The Actors, Hate The Writers, Directors and Makeup People

After watching the Smallville season 8 premiere I was in complete shock. Actress Cassidy Freeman is now cast as the Lex Luthor stand in, the regular villain. Not bad, she's a lovely woman and a decent actress.

What had me in utter shock was the abysmal makup job the crew did with her! Maybe the lighting was bad for as well, because for the first time in my entire life I exclaimed; "HOLY SHIT SHE'S UGLY!" It was out loud, I'm sure neighbors heard me. The makeup and lighting people must hate her. I hope her agent is looking for an out clause in her contract and a better job.

I understand the concept of taking a lovely, talented actress then using makeup and lighting to make her look freakish. It's an old, cliche, tired visual device that belongs in films that can actually pull it off like Monster, for example. In this situation the worn out quality of "uglying up" your actress shows in spades, turning this actress into just another example of cheesy visuals. The more brilliant turn in a villain, to me, was taking something absolutely beautiful and demonstrating that the character at the core of that visual presentation is absolutely rotten. Why not challenge and surprise your audience? Smallville has done that in the past and the ratings were fantastic.

These new producers, writers and costume designers fail in such a painful fashion that the premere of this season's Smallville is very near a good example of what not to do with a long running series. Sad costumes, terrible lines for the Justice League folks, and yet another power for Chloe. On top of it all the directing style was like a cross between 24 and Xena Warrior Princess. I love Smallville, I think there is a lot of talent working on the show as well. I hope with the departure of the original show runners this thing doesn't tank.

I expect this will be the last season for Smallville. They should have let the original show runners write and execute the ending. This is turning into a bad ripoff of Lois and Clark (the Superman TV series that came before).

RL