Ten Statements About....X-MEN FIRST CLASS (2011)

Michael Fassbinder proves this is his movie by looking coo'
even when wearing that silly helmet.

"Listen to me very carefully, my friend: Killing Shaw will not bring you peace."

"Peace was never an option."

1) I would pay full price at the theaters to watch a movie set in the late 50's featuring Michael Fassbinder's Magneto hunting down Nazi war criminals. Hell, I'd buy the DVD and the Blu-Ray (and I don't own a Blu-Ray). Fassbinder makes the character work, and those early scenes are probably my favorite moments in the movie. That being said...

2) We once again have an X-Men movie that isn't what it says on the tin. It's a Magneto movie just as the previous trilogy were Wolverine movies. Of the other characters, some of them (Charles, Mystique) only seem to get development in relation to who they are to him, and others--including two of my favorite X-Men of all time--are ciphers.

3) Even though they make all these references to the previous trilogy, it's better to just assume that this is taking place in some alternative universe. For that matter...once Sebastian Shaw escapes in his private submarine, I realized that the best way to treat this film was as the world's most insane 60's set James Bond pastiche. Once you accept that, the film works flawlessly.

"I have fantasies about Emma Peel.  I've met Diana Rigg.  You,
January, are no Emma Peel..."

4) Could somebody please find the mannequin warehouse January Jones escaped from and return her to it? I just don't get why so many men drool over her--she's not all that attractive, and she has this sucking black hole of anti-charisma that follows her wherever she goes. Her Emma Frost is so dreadful, she drags the film down every time she shows up. The only way I could escape from that black hole was picturing Rosamund Pike, who was originally cast as Frost, in Jones' place.

mmmmmm....Rosamund Pike....

5) You know--I have to admit that, for a movie that has as one of its themes racism, killing off one of its minority cast members and having the others be evil henchmen is kinda hinky.

6) I understand that a conscious decision was made to have Shaw's minions bear echos of Magneto's Brotherhood from the first film (just as Shaw bears echos of Magneto himself), which means that two of them are ciphers..but Azazel and Whirlwind/Riptide Guy aren't ciphers--they're just place settings.

7) Just as I think that Agent Coulson should be Jasper Sitwell, they really should have just gone all in and named Oliver Platt's Man In Black character Fred Duncan. That's who he was, after all.

James McAvoy, the world's first temple-based actor...

8) I give the script credit for not shrinking away from the fact that, as good as Charles Xavier's intentions are, he's a bit of a dick. He violates his own principles a number of times to achieve his goals--and that ultimately results in his losing both his oldest and closest friends.

9) Maybe it's because we get a chance to actually walk around inside her version's head, but I actually preferred Jennifer Lawrence's version of Mystique to Rebecca Rojin. And even little, maybe unintended touches like the Lawrence Mystique choosing to be more curvy than the super-models around her is...charming.

10) Maybe it's me, but the whole assault on the secret compound seemed like overkill to me, especially given how we've been led to believe that Shaw is more a manipulator than a brazen mastermind. And it makes the character turn for Zoe Kravitz' Angel seem off and abrupt. But then--as per my Second Statement, Angel is treated as little more than a cipher (better than Banshee and Havoc and Darwin, but not by much more), which might explain how arbitrary her character arc seems.

Overall...there are flaws here, not of the least of which is the fact that so many of these characters are blank slates. But it's still better than the third film's ham-fisted clusterfuck, and has a certain flavor of its own that makes it enjoyable.

It was back to the Atlas today...and the first time I paid $9.50 for a matinee. At least the staff is back to being the courteous, friendly people they used to be. Amongst the trailers was the surreal back-to-back of watching Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern followed by a reminder of why I can't stand him in The Change-Up; one for Mr. Popper's Penguins, which may be the first film with Carla Gugino in it I will never watch; one for Rise of The Planet of The Apes that killed what little enthusiasm I had for the project once I beheld those thoroughly awful CGI chimps; and--on the postive side--the absolutely mind-melting assault of a trailer for the David Fincher Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Of course, the absolute lowest point was that moment during The FirstLook where we were, ummmm, treated to a sneak peek of the Kevin James abomination Zoo-Keeper, further proof that if there is a higher power, he is very, very mad.

Flat And Red And Shiny Inside: Welcome To Bizzaro-Sunnydale!

(Note: This is one of ten essays I did for my old LiveJournal prior to my adopting the 10 Statements format. Since most of them are pretty funny, and many of them have some interesting insights still, I'm going to be posting them here. If you want to say it's for 'historical significance,' that's cool.)

Once more, my Netflix queue works in mysterious ways. As I'm working my way through the complete Buffy The Vampire Slayer series, I receive the second of three discs covering the first season of...Hex. Why I didn't get the first disc first I will never know.

What is Hex? Hex is a British series co-produced by Sony which represents the peculiar obsession British television has with finding every possible way to rip off Buffy, something they've been doing since Russell T. Davies patterned the revival of Doctor Who after the Whedon-verse.

(According to Paul O'Brien of If Destroyed, Still True, this isn't the most baldfaced rip-off of Buffy the Brits have produced. That honor goes to ITV's Demons which, among other things, features a mentor figure named...Rupert.)

I would seriously, seriously like to listen in to the pitch meeting for this series. "Well, you know, everyone loves that Vampire Slayer show, right? Well, what if we do something like that and set it in a boarding school 'cause, you know, that would make it exotic to the Yanks, right? We can make the girl a...a WITCH, that's it! Not only a witch, but the latest in a long line of witches, you know, like the Slayers only with magical powers. Besides, they've got a witch on that show, and everyone loves that series with the three hot girls who are witches, what do they call it? That's right...Cursed. And her best friend...well, she can't be a witch anymore, so--I know! We'll have the mysterious boyfriend type kill her so she can be a...a ghost, and the great thing is we can still make her a lesbian like the best friend on that show, and give her a crush on the heroine, and a girlfriend who's also a ghost! And that boyfriend type, we should show how edgy we are by making him the chase villain...and he can be...I know! Everyone liked Angel, right? So we can make him a....a fallen angel! That's different from a vampire, right? And since we're going to be making it for you, we can put in more violence, and have our heroine swear and all, 'cause that'd make our show more edgy, you know?"

Jeez-us.

Watching Hex is like watching what Buffy would be like if it was being produced by Dan DiDio. We're talking a series that lasted two seasons that piles on the sex, violence and curse words (I actually had to rewind one segment of the show to confirm I heard Cassie, the main character, utter the word 'fuck') since the producers felt it would make Hex more adult, not realizing that the characterization and plotline of the show is...

No, we're not trying to be Buffy..why you ask?

Well, there is not much in the way of characterization and plotlines. Our Buffy analogue, Cassie (played by vacuous blonde Christina Cole), spend far more time having things done to her than doing things. In the three stories on this disc, she is possessed by some sort of bitch-creature so she can have sex with the boyfriend/chase villian Azazael (played by the thoroughly bland Michael Fassbinder) so she can become pregnant with his child so she can have said child aborted so it can be claimed by Azazael and raised as his son Malachi.... Given that the series ascribes telepathic and telekinetic abilities to Cassie, she does absolutely nothing with them, preferring apparently to be terrorized and traumatized by what happens around her. She does so little, in fact, that the third of the episodes on the disc drags in a Faith analogue in Ella (Laura Pyper, who looks uncomfortably like Shannon Doherty...who was in Cursed, come to think of it) to do all the bad-assery stuff.

The thing that is at turns the funniest and the most risible thing about Hex is watching the segments that obviously were inspired by similar scenes in Buffy. The episodes are rife with scenes of Cassie and her best-friend-turned-ghost Thelma (the rather...healthily endowed Jemima Rooper) walking the grounds of the school talking and joking. Unfortunately, those scenes show that while the series was meant to be Sky One's answer to Buffy, they didn't understand the question in the least. And the break-up scene between Cassie and normal boyfriend Troy (Joseph Morgan, who looks uncomfortably like William Katt), it's obvious its meant to resonate with a similar scene between Buffy and Riley in Scene Five--only we know so little about both characters that it doesn't work at all. Even the opening credit sequence is a much, much too uncomfortable for my tastes emulation of the one for Charmed, with Garbage's "#1 Crush" swapped in for Love Spit Love's version of "How Soon Is Now?"

I'm of two minds here about continuing. The episodes are so uniformly dreadful that I'm tempted to remove the other two discs from my queue. And yet, there's a certain train wreck fascination to the series, as you wonder if they can get anything more wrong than they already have. It's like Hex is the mildly retarded cousin of its inspiration, and she's trying her best to fit it; you just can't help but forgive her ineptness.

Ten Statements About....CENTURION (2010)



Stabby stabby!

1) Even though most people would write this off as a 300 rip-off, and it is based on a somewhat dubious historical incident (the end credits refer to it as a '2000 year old legend), Marshall is unapologetic about where his inspiration lies--just as Doomsday was his fusion of Escape From New York and The Road Warrior, this is his ancient British take on Walter Hill's Southern Comfort. He even thanks Hill in the acknowledgements....

Cast out for witchcraft, or lounding Loreal?  You decide....

2) Apparently, Imogen Poots (still the most unfortunately named actress ever, and prolly will remain so unless one emerges named Evelyn Farts) was cast out of the Pict village not for being a witch, but for discovering modern day cosmetics....

3) Now having seen her as main villian Etain, I have to say I like Olga Kurylenko better when she doesn't have to talk. Or pout. Or do much other than beat people up and stab them through with a big pointy iron spear. You can almost Etain being the ancestor of Doomsday's Drop Dead Girl.

4) Even though Marshall favors lots of quick cuts in his action scenes, I appreciate the fact that he doesn't just go all-in with the shakey-cam.

5) Wow...seeing Noel Clarke as one of the Legionnaires is kinda disconcerting. All I could think during the action sequences was 'wow, Mikey can haul ass.'

6) I think that Marshall is very much aware of the parallels this story has to some of the situations our troops overseas are going through each day....but he doesn't draw attention to it.

7) I can just picture how there was pressure on Marshall to give us a happy, happy ending--but even though Michael Fassbinder's Quintus does have a happy ending with Poots' Arianne, the bitterness of how he gets there resonates with the audience long after that kiss fades from memory.

8) Thankfully, this is a historical film where people actually talk like historical personages--no modern day speech here, thank God.

9) For a film full of blood and gore and hacked off stuff, it's gorgeously shot, utilizing Scotland to its fullest effect. Its natural beauty acts as a counterpoint to the carnage that occurs within its borders.

10) Whether he intended it that way or not, the line about Hadrian's Wall is amazingly funny.

Overall...better than Doomsday, but not as good as his two horror films, this is still an effective historical adventure tale with a very dark center. I'll still follow Marshall into his next movie.

This was the first time in a long time where I went to the Angelika Film Center to see a movie (really; the last movie I went to see there was Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer). A serious bit of culture shock, as I was treated to an actual waiting room to relax in before the auditorium was ready, no stupid Firstlook bullshit, and an actual short film to watch...my only complaints were the non-stadium style seats and the annoying ten-minute loop of music that played the same song by JP, Chrissie and The Fairground Boys three times, reminding us each time it was based on Let The Right One In...