Bryan Singer has done precisely two good things, The Usual Suspects and producing House. Aside from that, the guy destroys everything he touches.
Honestly, they should be trying to figure out how to convert the Flash into a good movie. Of all the DC characters, he should be a priority second only to Wonder Woman.
X2 was very good, not perfect but much better then what came before and what came after it.
with X-3 being the lesser of two evils. Not knocking Superman Returns. I mean it was a well made movie but damn that shit was dull. I’m not even asking it to be like x-men, spiderman or any other comic book movie but Superman Returns didn’t really keep me engaged.
An origin film? Wasn’t the movie supposed to be built as a sequel to Superman 2/prequel to Superman 3/whatever the fuck it fits in the timeline? I mean, even the whole movie speaks about Superman’s past antics and Lois Lane having a kid (SUPERKID, no less!) and Lex Luthor doing his usual “break out of prison/get rich again” gig.
I mean, it’s not like Superman is the HARDEST comic book character to figure out. He doesn’t have a complex/shady past (despite what Dawson’s Creek…er, I mean Smallvile wants you to believe), his powers are pretty run-of-the-mill (YAY, super strength! I bet NOBODY has that power!), his personality is bland (HERE HE COMES TO SAVE THE DAAAAY!), and his weakness is pretty drawn out and simple (green shiny minerals, oh my!), yet still ALWAYS seems to overcome this simple weakness.
The whole movie would be in bullet time, but I agree. 
I really want to see how they handle Green Lantern, though. A huge problem with movie Superman is that he’s basically invincible, save for a completely ridiculous weakness. GL is arguably more powerful and more invincible, with an even more stupid weakness. I mean, yeah, the first movie will probably be about his origin and the Corps, but how do they move forward from there (I can imagine them just shifting focus to another major Lantern, like John Stewart and Kyle Raynornot so much Guy Gardner or the non-humans)?
I remember you trying to defend it by your lonesome by trying to hijack a Batman movie thread…but the Haterade on the Singer film was deserved. You are right on the Reeve movies though, they made the superhero movie genre because the first few were great.
It wasn’t that rebooting the Donner Superman series was a bad idea, the problem was they were a step below the first two movies. Superman II had Zod and company tearing Metropolis apart… and despite 25 years of evolution in visual FX, there was no attempt in Returns to top that scene. Superman I had Supes vs Lex thwarting a nuclear strike that ravaged the West Coast, forcing Superman to do some time traveling. In Returns, Lex… made a giant Kryponite rock.
Returns had the dullness of a comic hero origin movie, in what was supposed to be a continuation/sequel. I thought the point of rebooting the Donner series was because we’re all familiar with the iconic Reeve Superman, and general audiences could hit the ground running with another installment. But they treated the movie like we were back to square one. Anyway it was just horrible execution, for a novel idea (really, is there a better replacement for a Hackman Lex than Kevin Spacey?).
It’s too bad that a modern Supes won’t be realized onscreen anytime soon. I guess it not only proves it’s a huge task for a filmmaker to handle, maybe it’s a project nobody’s interested in to begin with.
OMG, I just remembered that whole “spin around the Earth” scene from the first Superman movie. Made NO sense at ANY level.
Bar none, one of the DUMBEST scenes in cinematic history.
haha.
I’ve been curious about what the general reaction was to Smallville; whether it was worth watching or not. Haven’t seen any lately, as I don’t watch television.
The first few seasons are worthwhile.
Origin wasn’t the best word to use, but for a lot of people seeing that film, it’d be their first experience of a Superman film.
What happened after that?
Go fuck yourself, Bryan Singer essentially CREATED the entire comic book movie genre.
Or at least brought it back to life after those last few shitty Batman movies killed it.
X-Men - the original first movie - still stands as my favourite comic book movie of all time. It single-handedly launched the entire genre of the modern comic book movie, Marvel’s entire movie studio (which is responsible for essentially all of today’s modern comic book movies), and it’s the reason why Hollywood producers are still scrounging for miscellaneous comic books to turn into movies, like Whiteout and 30 Days of Night and etc.
Aside from the Chris Nolan Batman movies, nothing even comes close to the X-Men movies. (I don’t count X3, that was something else entirely.)
Not a single comic book movie since has translated a comic book property to film better than X-Men and X2 did. I’d also argue that no comic book property is HARDER to translate to film than the X-Men.
If Bryan Singer (and Wolverine and Captain Picard and Gandolf) don’t pull off X-Men properly, the comic book movie genre is dead in the water and is limited to just shitty Punisher remakes over and over again. It launched the entire Spider-Man series, which made enough money for Marvel to continue to make every other people they’ve made or will make since. If X-Men sucked, Iron Man doesn’t get made, and all those Captain America and Ultimates movies they have planned are just pipedreams.
It wasn’t without its faults (all the action sequences were pretty wack) but no other movie since has nailed the characters and the entire comic book property as perfectly as X-Men did. But even Batman Begins had Katie Holmes and that wacky Rachel Dobson character and all those puke-inducing action sequences to weigh it down.
(Dark Knight was as close to perfect as you can get though…that movie was kickass.)
It became dawson’s creek … with superpowered teenagers.
Singer’s X-Men also deserves credit for launching Hugh Jackman, an underappreciated actor who unfortunately fails to make money as a headliner, unless he wears knuckle-claws. The villain in Mission Impossible 2 signed on to be Wolverine, but he broke his arm or something before filming started.
EDIT: It really didn’t matter if X-Men was made or not, since there were a bunch of comic hero projects in development in the mid-to-late 90s… but a superhero movie had to succeed for the floodgates to open. Spider-man was in the works for years-- if the Cameron/DiCaprio project was greenlit and succeeded, everything else would’ve fallen into place. Then again, if X-Men failed, every other comic hero project would freeze up. So Singer deserves all the props in the world for handling X-Men on the big screen, AND making a hit franchise out of it.
yes and that’s my point. everybody knows brett ratner is ass. instead of sticking with the franchise singer was doing well with he jumped ship to superman and doomed the x-men franchise.
Agreed 100%. The hate on Returns is nothing new, but since when is it cool to hate the (good) X-Men films. X2 is still one of my favorite comic book movies, after TDK and Iron Man.
First problem: they passed on a golden opportunity to write out a character who had, by that point, reached the end of her purpose. Second problem: they derailed a very compelling story thread in which Clark is learning about who he truly is and figuring out his role in life, in favor of a really weird plot about the spirits of long-dead witches that didn’t have a fucking thing to do with Superman by any stretch of the imagination. Third problem: Clark was 18 or so by this point, if my math is good. Not only does he not grow a pair and start making some real progress (we all know who he’s supposed to become), but he somehow becomes even more gutless and indecisive.
Aside from a very touching moment in season 5, I don’t think the show ever recovered. Clark remains a wuss and the soap opera elements go into overdrive.
Well to be fair, you could say it started with Blade, but it didn’t kick into high gear until X-men came out.
I enjoyed most of the character portrayals in the first couple of X-men movies. Some, like Wolverine(height difference aside) and Xavier are pretty damn perfect, Magneto and Jean Gray had a particular hint of class to them, Nightcrawler was fantastic, etc.
But Storm sucked. Hard. It wasn’t just that her character was changed up(because they changed Rogue from her southern belle attitude, but it makes sense that a girl who can’t touch people would be a little emo bitch), Halle’s acting was God awful. And who can forget that “Toad hit by lightning” line? Can’t believe Joss Whedon wrote that and thought it was good(he always wrote that “You’re a dick” line, which was the best in the movie, so I guess thats ok). Also, my boy Cyclops doesn’t get to do a whole lot.
X-men 2 is one of my top 5 favorite live-action comic book films, I thought they well they juggled a couple of dozen different characters(particularly in the third act) and all giving them something important to do was quite masterful. Great villain in Brian Cox’s William Stryker too. Plus, Nightcrawler opening/Mansion Assault(whee Kitty Pyrde/Colossus cameo!) were really fun. Too bad Cyclops still gets treated like crap with like…5 minutes of screentime. Never mind the fact thats he’s killed off in ten minutes of the third film. FUCK THAT.
Seriously, fuck that X3 movie. I don’t wanna go into all the bullshit with that movie. Ok, I probably will at some later time.
Still, too bad about DC’s inability to use Superman, I was hoping one day they’d figure out how to make a great Supes film.
I definitely don’t count it as a slight against the movies that Cyclops didn’t get any real time. In a two hour movie, the entire purpose of the character is as a foil to Wolverine (the cooler more interesting character) - there’s just no time for Cyclops between the main plot, Wolverine’s stuff, and all the Picard/Gandalf stuff.
Or you could even take a step farther and say that it actually made the movie even more accurate towards the books - Cyclops getting punked in the movies is a direct port from the comic books, where he is perpetually the asshole leader no one likes (the Leonardo Syndrome). Astonishing X-Men was pretty much literally the first time he had been featured in any cool way since the Dark Phoenix Saga.
Storm sucked, yes. But she provided some quality unintentional humour and only appeared for like ten total minutes in both movies, so who cares? (What the fuck was up with that half-assed accent? Halle Berry would go on after this to make Catwoman AND win an Oscar? You are shitting me!) It’s like saying the Lakers suck because their waterboy was slow.
I should clarify when saying comic book movies - I really mean superhero comic book movies, of which Blade had absolutely no effect on. It was just almost coincidentally it came from a comic book as well. Before Wesley Snipes came out, no one had even read a comic with Blade in it since like the early 90’s. Wesley Snipes Blade is a completely different character entirely as well - the comic book Blade (Back in Nightstalkers - remember Nightstalkers!?! Of course you don’t, NO ONE does.) was just an ordinary human who was immune to vampire bites - that was it. He wasn’t a half vampire like in the movies and in current comic books.
X-Men and X2 were objectively awesome, and in the context of history they become even more awesome. To say that a director sucks because he’s “only” done Usual Suspects and the X-Men movies…I mean, that’s pretty good. There’s a lot of directors out there right now that wished they could have “only” done those things.
How fitting it is that the gay acting community was so beneficial to the X-Men film franchise, a property that deals extensively with how society discriminates against what it hates and fears? You had Bryan Singer, Gandalf, Alan Cummings as Nightcrawler, Hugh Jackman is probably gay…the homosexual thespian community essentially launched modern day superhero movies.