Damnit, Missed One

There should have been a blog post for the 30th, but I'm a bit rubbish and didn't get round to starting it at the right time. As my regular readers may well know, I'm a terrible one with my retentive sticking to lists, schedules, formulas and plans. Well, I try to stick to them somehow. Since I was aiming at doing 5 of these a month, I was trying to post one evey week on the last chance I have of 5 days in a row of a month.

That doesn't make any sense, does it?

Look on your calender for July. The right-most day that still has five occurences in the month is Sunday in July, hence why I'm trying to write these on a Sunday. In August it'll be Wednesdays. Just keeps it all working on a different day each month, but then that's because I like to make things slightly more ridiculous for myself. Why do people even talk to me? It makes me question, sometimes, it really does.

I'll try to be less retentive in the future.

Who am I kidding? I'm only gonna get worse.

X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

You know, at first viewing, I didn't really get on with this movie. It was far too remeniscent of Connery-era James Bond (which is one of my particular dislikes), there were far too many characters for me to care about most of them (the normal failing for an X-Men movie or comic) and I felt that the villain of the piece was a rather weak offering.

On relfection, I'm willing to reconsider overall opinion, it's by no means a bad movie, but I stand by my particular weaknesses, as they're still prevelant. So I'll start with them. Bond. A lot of people like Bond, I... I don't anymore. When I was a kid, I suppose I did like Bond movies, but I think I most certainly grew out of them a decade ago.

That being said, I still think there are three good ones, see if you can guess what they are.

As for characters, it's not neccessarily the amount of them, it's the amount of disbelief I'm supposed to suspend. So one guy can shoot subsonic waves, one guy 'evolves to survive', one guy thows power-ring blasts, one guy that's Nightcrawler but red (cop-out) and one girl that grows wings and... serves no other point in the movie really? My problem with X-Men as a franchise has always been the utter cop-out writing that is 'they're mutants'. Mutants? The next stage of human evolution? Bollocks. I mean, really, bollocks. Even by super-hero standards, that's just poor. Humans are going to start shooting red laser beams out of their eyes and gain the sudden power to control the weather? Ahm... no. Just no. So that's the real problem with having too many characters in this kind of film, Xavier and Magneto are one thing (both are well characterised and their abilities make up for their unbelievability by being really cool), but Riptide, Banshee and Emma Frost? Nah, I'm good thanks.

Notable exception to this are Mystique and Beast (most likely saved from my condemnation by the outsanding performances by Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult), who add a fair amount of soul and compassion to the film, especially Beast's transformation. So those four (and Oliver Platt) are worth watching the film for, that's for certain.

However, Kevin Bacon's Sebastian Shaw most certainly isn't. He very much phoned this one in and the massively disappointing plot behind his grand scheme is exactly the same as Magneto's always has been, degrading both characters by association. His team (Azezal not included, not that Americans can pronounce his name right) were pretty weak as well.

So... how do I feel about this film? Since X-Men seems to be a shaky franchise all in all?

I'd recommend giving it a watch, but don't be surprised if it lets you down, as far as I'm concerned. There's at least two genius cameos worth watching out for, as well as some great performances, but there are some pretty crap ones as well, so don't say that I didn't warn you. Not that you listen to me, I mean, why should you? Everyone else liked it.

Next up: PIRATES 4.