The Importance of Being Idle

Random Thoughts From Someone With Too Much Free Time

So I was (semi-)watching Superman Returns again, and much as I love the film and think it's beautiful and all, I wonder if proper film is gonna get Bryan Singer back again. I mean this is the guy who directed the Usual Suspects for Christs sake, and yet with the exception of the little seen Apt Pupil he seems to have been spirited away to comic-book adaptation land. Now I'm not saying I'm not grateful for that, he did after all show that if you had a proper director, writer and cast then you could make super-hero movies that were actually GOOD and treated the subject matter with some respect. He opened the flood gates that led to the current flood of super hero adaptations, and whilst all this "me too"-ism is clearly no good, you can't blame Bryan 'cos everybody else is shite. I know he's currently shooting Valkyrie, and that's looking pretty exciting, but I wonder does he then have to go straight back to Superman world? Are the fans, or more likely, the studios, cutting down on the choices he has as a director just to get him back where they want him? Actually I doubt it's the studios; much as I loved Superman Returns, I am in something of a decided minority, and I don't even know if the movie has made back it's frankly ludicrous budget, let alone turned a profit. Anyway, I just wondered; does the future for Bryan Singer hold a constant superhero/non-superhero movie cycle, or will he be set free to do whatever he wishes. I kinda hope it's the latter.
In other news, I've been back to playing Halo 2 (AGAIN!). It's just under a week until Halo 3, and oddly (as I never really got on with 2, and don't have a 360) that has somehow rekindled my Halo interest. A little. I have to say that I've enjoyed playing 2 today more than I ever have in the past, and that may just be because I'm seperated enough from the hype to just sit down and play the game as it is. It still isn't great, not by any means, I seem to spend an awful lot of my time running around in levels that are so dark I can't see anything (and not in an atmospheric Doom 3 or F.E.A.R. kind of way, just in a stupidly dark way), and where you have to go and what you have to do seems to me to be both very confused and very confusing. And yet it does have a certain style, a level of production value which marks it out as something out of the ordinary. I think the architecture is what really impresses, oddly enough. Watching some of the documentaries on the collectors edition disc (as I was today) you see that it wasn't the game that Bungie were hoping to make either; they're very open about that after E3 2003 when they realise that what they've put together just isn't gonna work. And whilst they obviously salvaged something from the wreck, maybe even a lot of what they were going for, it just doesn't have the magic that the original had (and still has!). Even the soundtrack isn't as good!

posted by BadMonkey @ 4:31 PM