One of our consistently most popular posts is our review of January Jones’ turn as host of SNL from November of 2009, titled January Jones Was the Worst Host Ever on the Worst Episode of ‘SNL’ Ever, so it’s not surprising that among today’s top search terms is “january jones worst host.” But we’re not going to talk about how terrible she was that night (we’ve spent enough time on that), nor are we going to discuss how horrible we thought she was on Mad Men. No, today we’re going to talk about an upcoming January Jones project that we fear might be just as bad.
Earlier this week the first images from X-Men: First Class surfaced, featuring January Jones as the White Queen Emma Frost, and it doesn’t look promising. To Jones’ credit, the whole photo is panic-inducing, not just her part of it (although the look on her face doesn’t help).
To be fair, director Matthew Vaughn has shot back asserting that this is an unofficial photo that does not reflect the look of the film. Which is somewhat reassuring. Still, that doesn’t make us comfortable with the idea of Jones as Frost, and nor does it assuage our concern that once again an X-Men movie has chosen to neglect the many proven storylines in favor of a hodgepodge of plot points and characters from the comics combined with an original narrative. It just seems silly to disregard so many revered and beloved stories. And by setting this film in the 60s, and including characters who appear in the other films or are related to characters in the other films, it totally confuses the cinematic timeline. We won’t get into the geeky specifics here, but this is why bringing a comic book to the screen can be so complicated. In the comic book world super heroes really don’t age, so it’s no big deal for someone to look the same in 1965 as they do in 2005. But it becomes much trickier with movies, and we think setting this film decades before the previous X-Men films invites too many contradictions. But we’ll just have to wait until June to find out.
And come back here then to read our review, “January Jones Was the Worst Actress in the Worst X-Men Film Ever.”
Jumped The Snark 