Saturday, June 04, 2011

Go See X-Men: First Class

So Brian, who is currently recovering from spinal surgery, does not take that fact as an excuse to miss a Marvel summer spectacle.  A week or so after his surgery, he hobbled to the theater and we saw Thor and yesterday, after a doctor's appointment, he insisted we see X-Men: First Class instead of going home.  We loved both films and the bar has been set pretty high for Captain America: The First Avenger coming out later this summer.  (Note: Lest y'all think the only movies I see feature *gorgeous* men with superpowers, I've also seen Bridesmaids and Kung Fu Panda 2 in the last month.  The former was hysterical; the latter was a video game commercial, albeit an entertaining one.)

The Good
  Michael Fassbender as Magneto.  Not only was he distractingly good looking, but his performance of a tortured survivor of a brutal concentration camp, not to mention his badassery in hunting down those who had tortured him, made his "kill all humans" philosophy completely sympathetic.  Also, his chemistry with James McAvoy's Charles Xavier was outstanding and a little a lot hoyay.

Completely unrelated to the film was the trailer for Hugh Jackman's new movie Real SteelIs it a sign of an unhealthy obsession with Jackman that I'm totally going to see this flick, which amounts to Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots: The Movie?

The Bad
Not really bad, but worth noting:  I cared so little about the first class of X-Men, outside of Charles and Erik.  Every time the story switched to the young recruits, I was eager to get back to the two friends destined to become enemies.  They all did a fine job, but we were all there to see Professor X and Magneto.

The Ugly
The one glaring misstep in the movie was the character of Darwin.  I won't spoil anyone who hasn't seen the movie, but considering this is a black blog and he is black character, you can imagine why I'm annoyed.

Still on the list to see this summer: Jumping the Broom, Winnie the Pooh, Captain America, Green Lantern, Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes (!), and probably some other stuff that doesn't involve superheroes or sci-fi.

4 comments:

Claire said...

Planet of the Apes! The summer of the prequel! I can't wait. And Iknow little about the X-Men but I think this one should be on my list as well.

Lane Hatfield said...

So glad you liked this movie!

I never really thought of Magneto as so sexy (the Argentina scene should not be a turn-on, and yet), or had quite so much sympathy for his position before. Whereas Xavier came off as a hypocrite, especially where Mystique was concerned. And I kept thinking about the scene in one of the earlier movies where Mystique gets shot with the "cure" and Magneto just looks at her and says "You were so beautiful." This movie made that scene even more heart-breaking.

What happened to Darwin was just unnecessary. I wasn't particularly thrilled with how little Zoe Kravitz had to work with either. Although, she's dating Fassbender now, so at least she got something good out of the whole thing. :)

Say hi to Brian -- I hope the surgery went well!

Conseula said...

Yes Lane--the Argentina scene should be emotionally intense and foreshadowing of Erik's evil ways, but all I could think was noone should look that good killing Nazis.

Claire said...

He was wearing some truly spectacular pants in that argentinian bart -- the most fabulous paiur of khakis ever....although I am more of a xavier person myself -- and even though they were hokey I liked the going bald jokes (b/c patrick stewart -- there is some yum).

Why do all the female characters (other than the goofy cia woman) end up on Magneto's side? They knew a bad deal when it was coming. And I loved Darwin -- and you would have thoughyt that he could have adopted to something cool.