In general I haven’t felt the need to post much in the way of news on here lately–been trying to stick mostly with the reviews (1), but a piece of news that has sickened me to my very core has crossed my virtual desk and I needed to rant to you, my fine readers. All three of you.

It seems that Brett Ratner has been confirmed as the director of X-Men 3, replacing Matthew Vaughn, who realized he’d gotten in over his head with such a big-budget ensemble action piece for his second directorial job ever and jumped ship. Brett Ratner? Oh, jebus. The hack responsible for the Rush Hour movies is going to try to tackle the X-Men–with an already-approved script which supposedly took all of six days to write (2) and a shooting schedule kicking off pretty soon. He’s not that good a director to begin with, and he’s being set up to fail from the start.

I loved the first two X-Men movies. I thought both of them captured the spirit of the comics wonderfully and I think they proved to be very influential on later movies made from comic–it became acceptable to take the source material seriously again instead of treating it as a joke. The makers of the first two X-Men movies appreciated that their audience was made up of far more than just kids looking to buy action figures.

But man…there is nothing I’ve heard yet about the third one that’s giving me hope that it’s going to be anything less than horrifically horrid. Please, please, please let me be wrong about that.