S P O I L E R S, B I T C H E S! ! ! ! !
Yeah. I saw X-Men: The Last Stand again the other night. I felt I had to give it another shot after the uncomfortable way that my night started last week. Guess what?
It still wasn't that great. At least this time, I went in just expecting big fluffy summer blockbustery fun. And that's what I got. I noticed a few more things that I may not have mentioned. Why was Wolverine's character completely wrong? He was a little bitch! Wolverine doesn't drop to his knees and cry and have Storm console him.
The horrid dialogue didn't help the pencil thin plot. Last line of dialogue in the film is Wolverine seeing Beast on TV and saying, "Way to go, furball." Well, actually, the real last lines are if you stayed after the credits. I wont spoil that for you though. Just stay until after the credits.
Great action and fight scenes. Fun CGI. Good supporting roles. Colossus was cool. Didn't give him enough to do. And,I'm telling you...that Ellen Page as Kitty Pryde. She's going places. She out acted everyone on the screen. Loved her moment with Juggernaut (Vinnie Jones) when he yells, "I'M THE JUGGERNAUT, BITCH!"
Anyway, it's a comic book movie. So, of course, I want you to go see it if you haven't. It made a crap load of money, so I seriously doubt it will be "the last stand." You'll see.
Next up, X-Men 4: Electric Boogaloo.
What's rubbing me the wrong way about most of the positive reviews I'm hearing from critics, blogs, friends, and co-workers is the whole old "Well, it's a COMIC BOOK movie - it's SUPPOSED to be wacky and fun and stupid!" That drives me crazy. Exactly what I liked so much about Singer's direction in the previous two movies was that he was steering people AWAY from that stereotype. Yes, it's a movie about superheroes in costumes fighting supervillains in more costumes, and they flew around in jets and stuff, but the stories and and characters held some seriously heady stuff. What Singer did for comic book/superhero movies deserves to be considered on the same plain as what Eastwood did for westerns with "Unforgiven", or what Ang Lee did for wire-fu-sword-fighting movies with "Crouching Tiger", or hell, what Kubrick did for sci-fi with "2001" - taking typically cheesy genres and crafting out of them films of unexpected grace, subtlety, and yes, even depth (though Ang Lee really crapped himself I felt by following up "Crouching Tiger" with the uber-silly "Hulk").
Funnily/ironically enough, a co-worker of mine who is THE biggest Kubrick fan and THE biggest 2001 fan (he's got posters and stuff all over his cube, goes to see it every time there's a revival or screening, and has now seen it on the big screen something like 23 times) LOVED X3 (he actually used the word "LOVED", and not just "loved", but "LOVED"). I asked him if he didn't feel that as a whole it was just kind of silly and stupid. His answer, of course, was "Well, it's a COMIC BOOK movie - it's SUPPOSED to be wacky and fun and stupid!" I wanted to ask him what Kubrick would have said had some studio dude told him when he was making "2001", "Well, it's a SCI-FI movie! Throw in some laser cannons and chicks in loincloths and some vaguely-Chinese emperor-types!" He would have spat in their faces. Or, more likely, he would have smiled, agreed, and then turned around and made the fucking movie however he wanted to fucking make it anyway.
Just my little 2 cents on a lazy Friday morning....
Posted by: mike. | June 02, 2006 at 10:29 AM