Tag Archives: Bryan Singer

Movie News & Opinions

‘X-Men: Days Of Future Past’ Loses Vaughn As Director!

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Admittedly I’m not the biggest X-Men fan in the world. However I loved X-Men: First Class, and thought it was the movie the X-Men films always should have been. After having recently read the famous ‘Days Of Future Past’ arc on which this sequel will be based, I found myself getting pretty excited for it. Time travel stories are always great in my book, and Michael Vaughn brought us a group of mutants who actually fought people, used their powers in cool ways, and did things other than talk each other to death.

From where I’m going with this, I’m guessing you can surmise that I wasn’t a fan of the original X-Men trilogy. Especially the second, which nearly everybody else in the worlds seems to think is a masterpiece. I found it flat, boring, and pretty unremarkable considering the storyline it was supposed to be setting up. X-Men 3 at least had mutants fighting and doing things, rather than sitting around and talking about stuff all the time. It was a piece of crap, but it was an entertainingly bad piece of crap. That assessment I just made usually makes most X-Men fans turn off their brains to me once I see it, but I express it to show you just how much I truly loved First Class, and how sad I am to see Vaughn go.

via [EW]

[quote]EW has confirmed that Matthew Vaughn has decided not to direct the film, which he co-wrote, titled X-Men: Days of Future Past. The movie is a spinoff of last year’s X-Men: First Class, which Vaughn directed and also co-wrote.

While Deadline reports that Bryan Singer, who launched the X-Men franchise with 2000′s X-Men, is on a short list to helm the sequel, Singer’s reps at William Morris had no comment when reached by EW. Singer is already named as a producer on X-Men: Days of Future Past. He also co-produced X-Men: First Class.

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I have nothing against Singer per se, and in fact I love his other non-X-Men related work immensely. However, the thought of Bryan Singer bringing his cerebral, talky, overly serious style back to this franchise leaves me cold. That’s not to say that I’m hoping Brett Rattner picks up this project, because I would rather have a talky, boring, mutant time travel story, than a f***ing stupid one that makes no sense and is acted horribly. I suppose no matter how I look at it though, it’s a lose-lose for me. One one hand, I’m either going to get another mutant related snoozefest, or some other person is going to pick it up and bring some kind of style to it that will pale in comparison to Vaughn’s.

If I had to choose a new director, I guess I’d pick Rian Johnson. Looper showed us that he knows how to handle a time travel story, emotional pathos, and action to boot. In fact that sounds almost better than the thought of Vaughn doing it. If you’re gonna show us big scary sentinels snatching people up, a dystopian world where mutants are outlaws, and everything has gone to hell, please please make it good. If Singer does get the project, I’m hoping he’ll prove me wrong and make an exciting, exhilarating film. I hate being that guy who hates everything everyone else likes, but boy it sure does seem like it’s gonna be that way with this flick.

THE INTERWEBS

Bryan Singer’s Latest Project: “H+ The Digital Series:

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Where were you on April 23rd, 2005? I don’t remember where I was. Hell, I don’t remember what I was doing yesterday, much less seven and a half years ago.

Thankfully we do know where this guy was.

Jawed Karim was uploading the first ever video on YouTube.

Since that day YouTube has become an ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. According to Alexa, YouTube is the third most visited site on the internet. Not hard to see why, as not a single day passes where I don’t look something up on the site. It can range everywhere from the completely absurd, to the extremely useful. A good amount of the time it is for either a music video or web series. In the past year or so, YouTube has made a conscious move from being a bastion of baby crying videos to being a viable entertainment option. With everything from live streamed concerts to “web tv” style channels, they’ve started their march, and with big names coming to play, the future is looking bright.

One of those potential bright stars is a new offering from director/producer extraordinaire Bryan Singer and his production company, Bad Hat Harry.

Welcome to H+, The Digital Series. It is directed by Stewart Hendler of Sorority Row fame. Okay if Sorority Row doesn’t blow your skirt up, he is also the director of the upcoming Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn.

The premise? Well it’s simple- an implant is developed and released to the public that enables them to turn their brains into computers with a heads up display. The idea is based on the transhumanism ideology that man is in a constant move forward and that in the not too distant future, technology will play an even larger role in that evolutionary move. Played Deus Ex? It’s sort of like that, but not really.

So pretty much everyone has these implants and they can bring up their iTunes library while walking down the street, or watch a football game while driving, although this is dangerous and apparently illegal. Their vital organs are being constantly monitored which conceivably stave off preventable diseases such as diabetes.

Sounds great. It is great. It’s great until “The Event”.

And that’s all I’m telling you. Mainly because I don’t know much beyond that myself. The series debuted on August 8th and has put up an episode, each roughly 4-6 minutes long, every Wednesday since then. I sat and watched them in sequence and truthfully, was sort of frustrated because I so badly wanted to like it. Each episode was of a different time and different place, and different people. Then it jumps back to the original group/time. The disjointed storytelling just wasn’t doing it for me.

Then I watched this vlog from John Cabrerra, one of the creators and writers of the series (who also was on Gilmore Girls which I could not place for hours until it finally came to me as I ate a bowl of peas- and there’s a glimpse into my daily life, welcome) and after a few tweaks, I was really enjoying the series.

See, H+ is not your normal web series in which you sit down and watch episode a through z and it all forms a nice, compact, linear story. Instead, this series is composed of “moments of time and space” that you can move around to however you desire. I set up a playlist for myself where it was linear and each location told it’s story at one time. However, no one is forcing you to make your own playlist- if you want to watch them as they air, have at it. Whatever floats your boat.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! You can head over to hplusdigitalseries.com and see pictures, short bios, and an interactive map which did clue me in that the locations we’ve already seen, are not all there are. Something to look forward to.

I know another thing I am looking forward to seeing is fellow St. Louis native, Sean Gunn,  (I’m not really a native but I did graduate from high school there, same as Mr. Gunn) also a Gilmore Girls alum. As far as I can tell so far, he plays some sort of technology hating man who has to rely on some sort of technology to get around. Yay conflict!

Check out the existing episodes on their YouTube page and tune in on Wednesdays for new episodes.
And let us know what you think- are the transhumanists right and we are headed for an inevitable takeover by technology in our day-to-day lives? Or is the iPhone5 about as far as we are going to get?

Either way, it’s an interesting conversation to have and an entertaining series to watch.

Movie News & Opinions

‘X-Men: First Class’ Sequel – Subtitle Alludes to Classic Storyline

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I have a confession to make. Despite being a comics fan, spending nearly 50$ a week on comics, collecting comics memorabilia, spending large amounts of time in a comic shop to the point where the employees and the people who are regulars there are now close friends who I see outside of the store, and just generally being admittedly a comic book nerd, I, am not that big a fan of the X-Men.

In fact, I’ve only cursory knowledge of them at best, no better really than the average, yet slightly more dedicated than usual, “Movies Only” X-Men fan. I know which characters are what, but some of the more obscure ones are lost on me, (X3 was a guessing game for a lot of characters I was clueless about), and I generally understand what their comic characterization is, but on the whole, I couldn’t recite to you a cavalcade of GREAT X-Men stories like I could for Superman or Green Lantern. In fact, when I first read this news, I had no clue of the significance of the source material until reading about it, and it’s inspiration to the tons of media that would follow it. So hearing about the X-Men: First Class sequel, was exciting, and also a bit perplexing, because while I loved First Class, I had no idea what the sequel’s “story” was based on.

Let’s get down to the details, according to [EW], the sequel will be based on ‘Days Of Future Past’, which was a story arc I’ve never heard of, or read:

For the newcomers in the audience: Days of Future Past was a time-travel story released in the early ’80s. In a bleak dystopian future, the mutants of the world are hunted down and sent to internment camps. Most of the X-Men are dead; the ones that are still alive are on the run. In the original story, the future version of Kitty Pryde time-travels back in time into her young self’s brain and works with the present-day X-Men to prevent the atrocity that kickstarts the whole miserable future. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Days of Future Past has been frequently imitated in pop culture. (Remember “Save the Cheerleader, Save the World”?)

Now I gotta say, that sounds pretty awesome. I know I’ll be losing some nerd cred by admitting I haven’t read it, but I’m a firm believer in manning up and admitting what you don’t know, rather than bullshitting people about what you do. To that end, First Class was by far the best of the previous X-Men movies, and was a welcome change from the dull talk tests that were the Bryan Singer X-Men movies. X3 was like weird retarded offshoot, that managed to entertain me more by simply being really dumb, but whenever I think about X-Men 1 or 2, my eyes start to glaze over. I think that’s always been why I could never get into X-Men period, because you have all these amazing characters with mind blowing powers (sometimes literally), and all they ever do is talk each other to death. [Ed. Note – X2 is still one of the 10 Best Comic Movies ever] I’m probably showing my ignorance here of all the tons of badass X-Men stories out there, with huge epic battles, but in my experience, picking up any form of X-Men media, be it a comic, movie, or even that animated Fox cartoon from years back, was an exercise in Mutant-related diplomatic relations, carried out slowly to avoid some really big, really important, impending threat thats juuuust on the horizon, but oh no will-they-talk-it-out-first- it’ssoimportantohmygodohmygodwilltheyfight??!??!  BUT no, they never do.

Anyhow, my bitching aside, the movie sounds really good. I’m excited for it. I just tend to complain about things no matter what. You can watch an interview with Bryan Singer about the movie below:

TV

The Munsters are Back in ‘Mockingbird Lane’

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Because the world apparently demanded it, NBC has in production a pilot for a remake of The Munsters. Called Mockingbird Lane – the street where The Munsters live – it is  being produced and written by Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies) and directed by Bryan Singer.

For anybody who doesn’t know what The Munsters is (I don’t want to be your friend): first shown 1964-1966 it was a sitcom about a family of monsters – Dad, Herman, was basically Frankenstein’s monster from the Universal movies, and Grandpa was Dracula – who lived a normal (as far as they were concerned) life on a quiet suburban street and couldn’t understand why everybody ran away screaming. The new series will be, to a certain extent, the same and the pilot will show them moving onto Mockingbird Lane.

The family has all been cast – and we have a couple of publicity shots to show you. Head of the household, Herman Munster, is to be played by Jerry O’Connell (Sliders, Stand By Me, Piranha 3D); Grandpa is to be played by Eddie Izzard – we have a photo of him here at a costume fitting; Portia De Rossi (Arrested Development) is Herman’s wife, Lily; Mason Cook (Spy Kids in 4D) is the son Eddie; and, finally, the non-monstrous niece Marilyn will be Charity Wakefield (The Raven) – here is a publicity still for her.

Other announced cast are Beth Grant (Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies, both with Fuller) who will play Maryanne – the wheelchair bound next door neighbor who is suspicious of the Munsters – and Cheyenne Jackson (30 Rock) who will be guest starring as Scout Master Steve – Eddie’s charming, cheerful scout master who becomes smitten with Marilyn.

This all sounds very intriguing, but the words ‘edgy and dark’ are being used in conjunction with it all, which is worrying. Fuller has described it as a “dramatic departure from the tone style” of the original. He has said he wants the revival to be “an American Harry Potter. To have the sense of a magical world that you get to go to with your family and find stories told in a fantastical way that are instantly relatable. It’s a ‘American Horror Story’ that the whole family can watch.”

Eddie Izzard in prep to play Grandpa Munster.

I’m not sure how well The Munsters will work as a drama – even if it is a comedy drama – rather than a sitcom. Hopefully the two Bryans will manage to make something worth watching.

MOVIES

Grizzly Review: X-Men First Class

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Let me start by saying, I really enjoyed the first 2 X-Movies, especially X2 which I’d put among my ‘Top Ten Comic Movies’ for sure. What Brett Ratner did with X3 however, and the terrible Wolverine movie that followed, inexcusable. Coming off of those 2 colossal disappointments I have to admit my expectations were severely lowered going into First Class. But what Matthew Vaughn delivered, well, it’s fully restored my faith in the franchise.

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