mystmarimatt

Well. I'd been thinking it from the beginning, and last night proved it.

Brett Ratner is the second coming of Joel Schumacher.

I'd like to say I was disappointed by X3, but the truth is, I've been preparing myself for it for months. It was completely rushed the entire way, dropped storylines and character arcs like they were grenades, and moved so quickly, Ratner must have been running us away from trying to have a rational thought about it until the credits rolled.

It's funny, because I keep reading these home critiques, where the authors get incredibly defensive and start telling everyone to "stop over-analyzing it, movies are made to entertain us, ugh." And I can't help but feel bad, because in each article, they themselves admit thatfirst two films were brilliant, and they refuse to acknowledge what made them so: The fact that Singer didn't try to create "popcorn flicks," he actually strove to create films and focus upon the heroes themselves as characters, rather than the action, and it's no coincidence that X2 is often considered the best superhero movie of all time.

In an article I was just reading, Singer offers up a quote which indirectly shows precisely why he's such a great director. [On the scene wherein Iceman comes out to his parents, and is forced to leave on the jet]: "Instead of having the jet take off and spending the money on that, we just played it in a close-up on [Iceman]. You get more emotion out of it and save about $100,000."

In opposition to this is a general quote from Ratner, describing "Why do I need a final cut? A final cut is for "artistes" quote unquote--directors whose movies don't make a lot of money. Maybe Scorsese should have a final cut because a guy like Harvey Weinstein or a studio might change it to make it a little more accessible or a little more commercial but he has a vision of what he wants it to be. He wants it to be four hours long or whatever."

I'm not trying to intentionally railroad Ratner, but the issue for me is that it feels like he intentionally set to create something commercial, rather than something lasting and meaningful, and a refusal to at least attempt to create something better than "a popcorn flick," and it doing so, he loses precisely what made the first films great.

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Words of Wisdom:

If you could really get to know someone and know that they weren't lying to you, then you would know the world was real. Because you could agree on things, you could compare notes. That must be why people get married or make Art. So they'll be able to really know something and not go insane.