October 13, 2009

Today's News: Bryan Singer might want to make more X-Men movies, 'Moon' eclipses all others at a Festival, and more...

In the news:

Could we be seeing Bryan Singer return to directing X-Men movies? It appears to be at least some level of a possibility, so stay tuned.

Duncan Jones' 'Moon' swept the Sitges Film Festival of Catalonia, winning among other awards best picture, actor (Sam Rockwell) and screenplay (Nathan Parker).

Director D.J. Caruso may next be teaming with Star Trek's Chris Pine on a film, a fact-based drama about the rise of a counterfeiter.

Finally, Neil Marshall's next movie will be a 3D horror film about an entity that causes its victims to spontaneously combust...count me in.

-Thoughts?

5 comments:

  1. God, Singer returning to X-Men would be a dream come true. But it's not without a few problems. First of all, X-men 3 and Wolverine kind of screwed up some continuity issues, especially if Marvel plans to do a Deadpool movie with Ryan Renolds (one that Renolds reports will be a reboot and not have anything to do with the crap that they did to the character in Wolverine). Seems like the more distant Singer can be from a project, the better the film.

    Superman Returns, in my opinion, was highly underrated but seriously flawed. The main issues boiled down to Singer's undying reverence to the source material that instead of helping keeping the franchise true to the spirit of the character, felt like one big love letter to Richard Donner. That, and a much too melancholy tone and serious lack of any exciting action (sans the airplane sequence), led to a movie that collapsed under the weight of its own ambitions and reverence to the Richard Donner films. Its a film I can appreciate and respect for its ambitions, and I even enjoy it, despite it not being very exciting, but its definitely flawed.

    Singer clearly knows how to direct action. X-Men 2 showed that. Superman Returns and Valkyrie suffered from a similar problem; a lack of anything being exciting or thrilling. While Valkyrie was interesting form a historical standpoint, I never once was really able to forget the inevitable outcome due to the lack of any real suspense. Like I said, Singer obviously is no amateur director. He knows how to shoot action (like in X-Men 2) and he knows how to create really thrilling suspense (in The Usual Suspects). But it seems like the bigger the budget and the more personally invested he is in the film, the less compelling it turns out.

    However, whether or not Singer comes back to X-Men, I think the fundamental problem any future X-Men films face is that 20th Century Fox is a joke of a studio that has ruined more films with the greatest of potential than any other studio in recent memory (see Kingdom of Heaven and compare the theatrical version to the Director's Cut) and in all honesty, I think X-Men may be played out. There just aren't many stories left that would make a good film. You can only really make a movie about Wolverine so many times (3 to be exact, X-Men 3 had no focus whatsoever). The mutant's rights topic would be a place to start, but you would have to do the whole Sentinel creation story line, where the X-Men become fugitives for some time, a story I think would really only work well for fans, not the unwashed masses. Unless Marvel studios can somehow get the rights to X-Men out of Fox's hands, I'm not sure I would really be thrilled about any future X-Men films. But at this point, I don't see that happening, since Marvel Studios have their hands full working on Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America, and The Avengers movie. Until I hear otherwise, franchises like X-Men and Spider-Man will not be something I am looking forward to, especially not if they aren't changing hands anytime soon.

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  2. Well, that missive was certainly a complete look at things...definitely good points there

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  3. LOL sorry for the epic comment, just needed to get my thoughts on the state of the X-Men franchise out there. There are good stories to be had in the X-Men mythos, but Fox insists on getting in the way of any film actually being good. Which is so weird, considering the incredible quality of film released by Fox Searchlight, a la The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, etc. Must have completely different CEOs.

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  4. I remember 20th Century Fox's glory days. The produced the original Star Wars trilogy, the Alien films (though I only count the first two), Fight Club, Die Hard, MASH, The French Connection, and many more. Then again, that was when Richard Zanuck was in charge. Good times.... lol

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