X3 - X-Men: The Last Straw

[©brad]

i really hope he gets hit by a truck.

[polkablues]

Lets highlight some of the places where Brett Ratner makes shit up to make himself look better:

When I was shooting the movie it was 90 percent negative, and then it became 90 percent positive.

I wasn't, you know, worrying about what other people wanted.

All the actors loved the movie so much... I'm sure if there was an "X-Men 4," they would all show up if I was directing it.

I don't know where you read that, but I wasn't handed a finished script.

I hired all the new X-Men.

How did Roman Polanski like the movie, Brett?  Has Ingmar Bergman called to tell you it was his favorite of the year?

[Ravi]

Put this in the "where the hell have you been" category:

CAN DIRECTORS KILL FRANCHISES?
X, Rated
by Christopher Orr 
Only at The New Republic Online | Post date 10.10.06    

Great directors," said Alexander MacKendrick (who was one), "dissolve and disappear into the work while making other people look good." Best known for directing The Ladykillers and Sweet Smell of Success, MacKendrick meant that a director's contribution to a film is at once the most crucial and the most obscure: He bears partial credit for almost every element--the cinematography, the editing, the set design, the individual performances of the actors--yet full credit for none.

Little wonder then, that there is such confusion about what exactly a director does. Those who become celebrities--Hitchcock, Scorcese, Allen, Tarantino--are generally the auteurs who advertise their presence most aggressively, whether by writing their own scripts or hewing to a signature style or casting themselves in their films. For others, a film's overall success is the only credit they're likely to receive. Evidence of the ubiquity of this confusion can be found at the Oscars, where the Best Picture has also been deemed the Best Directed a prohibitive four times out of five over the last 68 years (in the awards' first decade they were more discerning), even when it entailed such inanities as imagining that How Green Was My Valley was better directed than Citizen Kane or that Ordinary People was guided with a surer hand than Raging Bull.

Thankfully, we at last have a laboratory-perfect experiment to help us disentangle a director's contribution from the resulting film. I refer, of course, to X-Men: The Last Stand, the third and (as its title advertises and its quality ensures) last installment of the mutant superhero franchise. The movie shares a great deal with its predecessors: a solid cast, with Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, and others reprising their roles as mutants both good and bad; a similar storyline, with political tension again erupting between normal human beings and mutants (this time, thanks to the invention of a "cure" that can suppress mutations); and the familiar thematic undercurrent involving the desire to eliminate the Other, either through assimilation or extermination. What has changed since the first two films, however, is the director--which is to say, everything.
   
Bryan Singer, who directed the first two X-Men films, may not be a great director, but he is clearly a good one, and he has a particular gift for elevating pulp to something approaching art. For all the laser-beam eyes, retractable adamantium claws, and (worst of all) leather jumpsuits, there is an underlying seriousness to Singer's mutant movies. In the opening scenes of X-Men, he explicitly compares his heroes' plight to the Holocaust, the Red Scare, and contemporary antigay bias--but does so with such earnest sobriety that the analogies hardly seem outlandish. The moral quandaries his characters face are rich and resonant; their losses and sacrifices possess surprising weight. He's abetted, of course, by fine performances from his cast, especially the casual magnificence of McKellan's Magneto and the gruff tenderness of Jackman's Wolverine. There are plenty of rough patches in the first two movies, but they stand, with the first Spider-Man and perhaps Batman Begins as the best that the burgeoning superhero genre has had to offer.

X-Men: The Last Stand, by contrast, is an object lesson in what can go wrong when a director gets in over his head. The director in question is Brett Ratner (the Rush Hour movies, Red Dragon), who inherited the assignment after Singer decamped to rehabilitate Superman and original replacement Matthew Vaughn pulled out at the last moment. The difference is palpable: In contrast to the tonal resonance and cohesion of Singer's films, every element feels slightly off-key and unfocused in Ratner's hands. The actors are less convincing, the plot feels more haphazard, even the score seems timid and tinny. Watching the movie bears a peculiar similarity to reading a screenplay: If you use your imagination, you can envision the film this was supposed to be, but Ratner has bothered to do very little of the work for you.

The movie opens competently enough, with flashbacks to childhood scenes of mutant self-discovery--first of Jean Gray, the X-Woman who (apparently) sacrificed her life to save the others at the end of the second movie; then of Warren Worthington (a.k.a., Angel), a new mutant who seems to have inherited Emma Thompson's wings from "Angels in America." But already, there are slight signs of trouble: The scenes seem a bit rushed; the performances, oddly testy. Shortly after the movie returns to the present day, dark clouds being rolling in, altogether too literally. As had been hinted, Jean (Famke Janssen) is not dead, at least not exactly. Buried under a mountain of water at the conclusion of X2, she survived as a kind of schizo superwoman. Shortly after she turns up, she--or rather her out-of-control alter-ego, Phoenix--begins tearing things (and people) apart, molecule by molecule. Magneto and his Brotherhood of Mutants, meanwhile, go back on the warpath to destroy the anti-mutant cure.

Singer thrived during such bleak times, giving his mutants a kind of tragic majesty. Ratner, by contrast, wilts. He seems uncomfortable with this kind of earnest grandeur, and flinches away time and again. The first X-Man dies about a half-hour into the movie; not only does Ratner not show the death, for a considerable stretch of the movie it's not even clear whether he is dead. Another X-Man, still better-loved, dies 20 minutes later, and while this time we see the death, we never feel it. Even the subsequent funeral scene has no weight, none of the tangible sense of loss that imbued a similar scene in Hellboy, or the (again, apparent) death of Gandalf in the first Lord of the Rings film. Instead, Storm (Halle Berry) gives a half-hearted eulogy as the orchestra murmurs wanly, almost embarrassedly, in the background. The other actors go through the motions of grief, but they seem like attendees at a stranger's funeral, dutifully sad but nothing more. Though Last Stand is by far the most tragic of the X-Men films, it utterly fails to convey the emotional enormity to which it aspires.

Indeed, Ratner creates little space for emotion of any kind in Last Stand. A jealous love triangle is implied between Rogue (Anna Paquin), Bobby (Shawn Ashmore), and another girl, but it never comes to life. When Rogue contemplates taking the mutant cure herself--her mutation has the unfortunate side-effect of preventing her from getting intimate with Bobby--it's clearly meant to be a momentous decision. But, again, the gravity of the situation never comes across. (It doesn't help things that the movie essentially forgets about Rogue altogether for perhaps 40 minutes, before returning at the end to present her final choice, now little more than an afterthought.)

Almost every scene in the film feels a beat or two short, cutting away just before it gives us a reason to care about what we've seen. What's missing are the moments that don't show up in a script, the moments when no one is doing or saying anything, when the actors, had they been allowed, might have used tools other than expository dialogue to show us what they were feeling. (It's largely due to the absence of such moments that Ratner's movie, despite a plot every bit as convoluted as that of X2, is almost a half-hour shorter than its predecessor, clocking in at just over 100 minutes.)

Other failings are more obvious still: The shot selection is unimaginative and without grace; the action scenes are under-choreographed and lack ingenuity. Although she is meant to be the central figure in the movie, Jean Gray spends about half her screen time staring blankly into the middle distance. (We're meant, I think, to understand this as a sign of Jean's confusion, but it comes across as if it's Janssen, not Jean, who's waiting for someone--hello, Bret?--to offer her some kind of direction.) Capping it all off, there is a howlingly inept continuity error during the film's final showdown, when Magneto and his mutant army make an assault on Alcatraz Island, where the cure is being manufactured. When Magneto pulls the Golden Gate Bridge from its mooring and bends it toward his destination (what, you thought he'd deign to take the ferry?), he does so in the bright, afternoon sunshine; when, fewer than two minutes later (in film as well as real time) he and his troops prepare to disembark, it appears to be midnight. Time flies when you're--well, apparently even when you're watching a fairly dull movie.

In X-Men: Last Stand, Ratner does a considerable disservice to his collaborators and to his franchise. On the plus side, however, he has provided a potent reminder that there is a craft to directing, even if he's done so only by showing us its absence.

[Derek]

This reminded me of Alien 3, not in tone, but how much it fucked up what had gone before it. In Aliens, Ripley's big mission is to save the orphaned little girl....then, at th beginning of the sequel, she's dead before the end of the credits and there's still a shitty movie to sit through!

It was as if (and I'm not going to pin this solely on Ratner) they couldn't wait to f*** this up. There was no rythym to the movie, just a bunch of choppy scenes rushing to the next choppy scene. And what a weak way to send off a few of the major characters.....if they were aiming for resonance, the mark was missed by a mile.

That said, can't wait for X4: Sweet Valley High!!

[MacGuffin]

Ratner Campaigns for "X-Men" Editors

Who says directors are selfish glory hounds who won't stick their necks out for their crew -- or at least send a mass email? Brett Ratner ("X-Men: The Last Stand") sent out an email plea to American Cinema Editor voters asking them to consider the scifi flick's triumverate of cutters for the 2007 ACE Eddie Awards. He even credits his editors with a little mutant creation. Here's Ratner's missive:

Dear A.C.E. Members,

I must draw your attention to the phenomenal editing in my most recent feature film, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND.  Editors Mark Helfrich, A.C.E.,  Mark Goldblatt, A.C.E., and Julia Wong went above and beyond my expectations in creating a film that is both exciting and emotional; A cohesive and fluid storyline is of utmost importance to me, and they achieved it with X-MEN: THE LAST STAND with passion and intensity  They were true collaborators in shaping the story, even conceiving and creating some of the mutants you see in the movie. And to top it off, they did this great work under an insane post schedule! The International Press Academy recognized their efforts – X-MEN: THE LAST STAND won the 2006 Golden Satellite award for Best Film Editing. I urge you to nominate X-MEN: THE LAST STAND for an Eddie Award in the Feature Film (Dramatic or Action) category.

Sincerely,
BRETT RATNER
Director, X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

[Ghostboy]

As a semi-professional editor, my semi-professional respect for Ratner just went up a few notches.

[polkablues]

Subtext:

These editors took the slapdash, poorly envisioned footage that I crapped out, and made a nearly coherent movie out of it!  Anybody can edit a well-directed movie, but these guys edited a movie that I, Brett Ratner, directed!  That's pretty fucking impressive, right?  Now excuse me while I go cheat on my supermodel girlfriend with a pair of aspiring actresses with low self-esteem.

Sincerely,
THE RATNER
Director, MONEY TALKS