Knight & Day was pretty godawful. This pretty much confirms right now that Hollywood will maintain its consistent mucking-up of films featuring Wolverine.

Walk The Line did the most aggressive job of making an interesting life story dull that I could ever imagine.

Alexhead wrote:James Mangold? Yawn. About the most drab studio employee director you could find. That particular comic deserves better.

Well said sir, well said.

Started with a bit of promise, I kind of liked Heavy and Copland, but since then he's shown less and less style, not to mention no particular emotional attachment to the material he's working with. And yeah, Knight and Day...Jesus, we watched some of that on HBO the other night. Yawn. This could be so cool in the right hands...but it should've been the first one they made.

jeez, all the hating on knight & day. i watched it on cable a bit ago too. what exactly did you expect? i thought it was mildly amusing and was glad i didn't pay for it, as i never would have anyway. i've seen far worse shit on cable. but i will say i'm biased as i quite like diaz, usually.

anyway, yes - it SHOULD have been the first one they made. there is no excuse for that previous abomination, but they can't un-make it. that being said, this one had better be right.

Now you do make a good point in the "what did you expect" category, and there was a bit of a pang that I feel when movies like this and (believe it or not) Date Night attempt to bring back the whacky 80s action comedy, but no amount of Diaz can distract from the huge freakazoid distraction that is now Cruise. Cruise getting splayed by Cthulu under the direction of Del Toro is about the only thing left he needs to do on film before he dies in my opinion.

Alexhead wrote:Cruise getting splayed by Cthulu under the direction of Del Toro is about the only thing left he needs to do on film before he dies in my opinion.

ftfy

of course, mission impossible 4 looks insane... and he does get a bit of a pass for his work on EWS, yes?

TC wrote:

Alexhead wrote:of course, mission impossible 4 looks insane... and he does get a bit of a pass for his work on EWS, yes?

Also Collateral and Risky Business. But I think the problem is Cruise has gotten to the point where it's hard to seperate his personal life from his films.

darkness wrote:

TC wrote:of course, mission impossible 4 looks insane... and he does get a bit of a pass for his work on EWS, yes?

Also Collateral and Risky Business. But I think the problem is Cruise has gotten to the point where it's hard to seperate his personal life from his films.

yeah, exactly. i actually really like a lot of his films. he has made some good choices.

TC wrote:mission impossible 4 looks insane...

Man, 2011 is turning out to be a year of full-on early '00s nostalgia. Limp Bizkit is back, Fear Factor will return, Tom Cruise is trying to revive the MI franchise — the trailer even makes use of Eminem. Am I getting a Dell next, dude?

I dig Jeremy Renner a lot, but I'm not sure that's enough to sit through yet another Mission Impossible movie. The last one was the best of the series, but even that distinction doesn't cut much ice.

As for Cruise, the guy is not aging well. He's just, well, weird. I can't think of a better way to put it. His last good film was Collateral, which also happens to contain his best performance, one that really made the most of that ice-cold narcissism and vanity he has in abundant supply. Other than that, there's EWS, parts of Magnolia and Jerry Maguire, Born on the Fourth, Rain Man... his strongest work is a couple decades old, mostly.

i contend that tropic thunder had some of his best work.

MI3 is actually the only one of the series i watched. i liked it for what it was.

watched this last night. i was extremely pleasantly surprised. i agree with all of the comments in the reviews i quoted above. it's a good film, not just a good comic film. but yeah, it was also easily one of the best of the xmen films, even with the "lesser"/lesser-known mutants. really, there weren't a lot of mutant battle scenes anyway. in that sense, it wasn't really a "superhero" film. i keep coming back to, "it was just a plain good film" - no need to qualify it beyond that. granted, there were a couple spots where my eyes rolled at the cheese, but literally just a couple. i was expecting the whole movie to be like that. the marketing for this film did it absolutely no favors. whatever you think you know about this film from the awful posters and trailers, forget it and just put it on. really surprising, happily. i'd easily watch it again.

Saw it the other day. January Jones was fucking awful. I'd like to punch whoever came up with Emma Frost's diamond form. I liked most of it, though.

i'll agree with that.

Will probably rent this over the weekend and take a look-see.

io9 wrote:The Wolverine

Hugh Jackman promises that the only reason for The Wolverine's current delay is his new commitment to Tom Hooper's Les Miserables:

"If it wasn't for ‘Les Mis,' we're ready now. Now that Jim [Mangold]'s on board, we're ready to go. For ‘Les Mis' to work, we would have had to start "Wolverine," basically, yesterday. So when we needed to press the button, we weren't quite ready. So it will happen straight after."

He then discusses director James Mangold, who is replacing original choice Darren Aronofsky:

"Many directors wanted to do this film, I'm happy to say, because of the strength of the script. When he came in he just had such a clear vision of where this movie should go. He had the best take. He's done many, many genres. I look at ‘3:10 to Yuma,' and when he started talking about ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales' I was like, ‘Okay, now we're on the right track." He had a couple of things which, I think, even in Darren's version of the script, hadn't been solved that he just knew he had the key."

Jackman also explains why Mark Bomback was brought in to rewrite Christopher McQuarrie's script:

"When a director takes over any script. they need to make it their movie. So Jim hired Mark to help him make the movie his own. Darren had worked on the script himself and taken it in a certain direction that was right for him. And that would have been a great version of the movie. I've seen Jim's version now and, you know, Jim saw things that weren't working for him that were working for Darren. And I've got to hand it to Fox and to Jim, it's easy when you start with the best script we've had from Chris McQuarrie. Which is why Darren signed on. So once you have that, that's 80, 85 percent of your movie.

He also says that the film does indeed following Frank Miller's Japan-set run on Wolverine, although it will be a little darker and more streamlined (cutting out some extraneous X-Men related stuff). There's more at the link.

good news.

Also, Wolverine is a rich business tycoon and uses a lot of gadgets to fight his enemies. I'll be surprised if one of those doesn't end up being true.

official synopsis:

Based on the celebrated comic book arc, THE WOLVERINE finds Logan, the eternal warrior and outsider, in Japan. There, samurai steel will clash with adamantium claw as Logan confronts a mysterious figure from his past in an epic battle that will leave him forever changed.

this poster = yes.