Revisiting DAREDEVIL obviously made me want to watch ELEKTRA again – this time in a director’s cut, but the differences are minimal compared to DAREDEVIL’s. It’s a different situation anyway because I actually did enjoy ELEKTRA when I saw it on video back in the day, and even wrote a review of it. So instead of “maybe I’ll like it better now” it was a “will I still like it?” situation. The answer is yes, I did.
That’s not a popular opinion. It was a big flop, and scoffed at from all quarters. Roger Ebert called it “a collision between leftover bits and pieces of Marvel superhero stories.” Manohla Dargis called it “The latest Hollywood movie to give comic books a bad name.” Mick LaSalle wrote, “It’s garbage” and complained that it was “twisted” to open with this contract killer character assassinating someone when “we don’t know what he did to deserve this.” At least David Edelstein said it was “only maybe two-fifths” bad because “these Marvel pictures are starting to blur together” (which now seems like a funny thing for someone to have said then), and he was wise enough to say it paled in comparison to A CHINESE GHOST STORY, THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR and THE HEROIC TRIO rather than X-MEN or SPIDER-MAN. Because that’s what it is: one of the American movies that’s not nearly as good as Hong Kong movies. But I still like them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Remember Darren Aranofsky was gonna do this new Wolverine movie? He’d done THE WRESTLER and he was the original director on THE FIGHTER and then he named it THE WOLVERINE, but he had to drop out to deal with The Child Custody. From the roll he was on I bet he would’ve made a hell of a movie, but his replacement James Mangold (COPLAND, 3:10 TO YUMA) came up with something pretty interesting too. For his movie the title is representative of the whole approach: strip away the convoluted series-connecting business indicated in the title of the last one (X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE) and just focus everything on this character, this Wolverine. The Wolverine.
