Week of Review - Apt Pupil (1998)

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I want to be upfront here; I went into Apt Pupil with “they can’t all be winners” mentality.  I’m aware that digging through forgotten C-list cinema is by no means a sure thing and there’s every chance that among the genuine gems like Needful Things and The Mangler you’re going to come upon stuff that’s problematic or dated like Thinner.  However, I was in no way prepared for just how terrible Apt Pupil was going to be, this movie makes Thinner look like The Shining.  

It’s a film that I fully expected to be dated, tasteless, problematic, uncomfortable and more and while it was absolutely all of those things it was somehow so much less as well. 

It’s a bad movie I’m kind of shocked we ever stopped talking about yet also completely unsurprised it’s been swallowed up by the dust bin of history and banished by its own mediocrity.  I mean, when you’ve got a movie about a teen boy sociopath who forms an unsettling relationship with an old Nazi and it’s directed by Bryan Singer the last thing you expect it to be is so damn boring. 

Panel Vision - Who Are The New Mutants

With X-Men: Apocalypse already slipping into the background of the national conversation, Fox has already starting teeing up the next installments of the franchise.   That’s more or less just how things work in the wake of Avengers monster success and the continuing domination of the MCU.  Nowadays, most action films, but especially superhero movies, need to make it clear to audiences there’s some kind of larger syndicated plan in store. 

That’s part of why Amazing Spider-Man was already teeing up Sinister Six and Bryan Singer was already trailing Apocalypse before Days of Future Past came out.  Currently, the X-Men’s future is a little more uncertain with the next confirmed X-Men film coming out in 2018.   Fox’s already talking Phoenix for that installment but there are two more Fox mystery movies in between.  It’s starting to look like one of those two is going to be the long rumored New Mutants movie as it finally has a character line-up, let’s meet them. 

Panel Vision - 10 X-Men Mutants Who Should Appear Next

Edited by Robert Beach

As I write this, the world is still sort of in the midsts of X-Men fever.  I say "sort of" because of this: despite the success of X-Men: Apocalypse, it’s not really dominating the popular conversations or the pop atmosphere the same way Jurassic World did last year or even Batman v. Superman did early this year. That’s not terribly surprising given the nature of the X-Men films. Add on that this entry was of middling value, it also lacked the stand-out characters that tend to act as focal points for online interest like The Force Awakens quartet of breakout characters or Black Panther and Spider-Man in Civil War.  

Regardless, people are still buzzing about X-Men: Apocalypse and what comes next for the franchise, so I’m keen to join in. Over the next 4 years, we’re expecting to see another Deadpool film, another X-Men movie, a New Mutants film, a Gambit movie, and an X-Force movie. That’s in addition to the two live-action X-Men TV shows coming next year. With all that in mind, I’ve combed the depths of the X-franchise to compile my list of 10 mutants who should appear in the X-Men quasi-universe and are not already confirmed. Let’s list them. 

X-Men: Apocalypse Trailer

Is it weird to say I don’t get the appeal of the X-Men movies?  X-Men is something that has been with me for basically my entire life as a nerd.  When I was a kid growing up in the ‘90s the animated series was in its heyday, I’ve seen all of the live action films at their premiere, watched X-Men: Evolution when it was coming out weekly, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Claremont, Kirby, and Morrison comic runs on the characters.  In my whole life there consuming and critiquing nerd culture content there really hasn’t been anything as continual as the X-Men and yet I’d never call myself a legitimate fan.

 A lot of that has to do with the X-Men’s status quo always coming off far too barebones and uninspired, in the sense that it’s considered some brilliantly cerebral superhero riff even though the subtext rarely factors into the actual story and the status quo is less about a clash of ideologies than it is just about having ideologies that have been arbitrarily assigned good and evil status.  That whole sort of “good enough” aesthetic has always translated over to the X-Men films to and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see some of it in the newly dropped trailer for X-Men: Apocalypse.

Fantastic Four/X-Men Crossover Coming?

So in a recent interview X-Men director Bryan Singer stated that some of the early machinery is currently working to develop an X-Men/Fantastic Four crossover film for Fox.  This has probably been in the works at Fox for way longer than anyone’s willing to admit.  Fox has basically been rendered the odd middle child of superhero films now that Sony has caved to Marvel in the wake of their amazingly embarrassing 2014.  This has put Fox into something of an awkward position as they actually aren’t that interested in making superhero films.  They certainly do it but ever since Wolver Origins Fox has been keeping their superhero work at arms length. 

X-Men: First Class was a quick and dirty job meant basically just to keep the rights to the X-Men away from Marvel and the same is true of the upcoming Fantastic Four movie.  It’s only recently with Days of Future Past that Fox seems at all invested in producing a superhero flick and even then it’s just because Avengers came out in the interim and Fox suddenly realized big budget superhero crossover romps could make mondo bucks once more.  That’s why they actually hired Mark Millar to develop a shared Fox universe around the time Days of Future Past came out and blew up theaters.