Observations Of The Human Animal In Nature

Pray For Mojo - A Prologue

Do you remember back in 2006, when 20th Century Fox and the amazing Bret Ranter unleashed that celluloid nightmare X-Men: The Last Stand on an unsuspecting world? Remember how all of your nerdy friends threw their hands up in disgust because of this atrocity? How dare Bret Ratner take Bryan Singer's beloved cinematic mutants and flush them all down the toilet? those were the days, weren't they?

Because fuck Bret Ratner. He's a fuzzy little turd who brings absolutely nothing unique or compelling to the motion pictures he directs. And Bryan Singer... he's a visionary, right? Right?

I'm not here to debate the dubious merits of Bret Ratner's entry in the X-Men franchise. Because there are few. Honestly, the only positive I can put in Ratner's column is Kelsey Grammer's portrayal of everybody's favorite furry egghead, Hank McCoy.

The make-up he's saddled with isn't going to set the world on fire, I grant you. But whenever I read any X-Men comics growing up, I always heard Kelsey Grammer's voice in my head whenever Beast reared his giant head. Frasier Crane and Hank McCoy were like peanut butter and jelly to me. When I heard Grammer was cast as Beast in Ratner's film, it seemed like spot-on casting, just like Patric Stewart playing Professor X. And he did not disappoint me in the finished product.

Just about everything else, however, did. In short, X-Men: The Last Stand is garbage. The only thing that surprises me is why Bryan Singer's previous entries are regarded as a high water mark in the comic book film genre. I got news for ya: they're not. Both of Singer's X-Men films are plagued by lazy plotting, stiff performances, mediocre TV-level action sequences, and Halle Berry. Also, they focus on Wolverine.

This badass makes the fictional "Wolverine" look like Donald Duck.

When I was a wee lad, Wolverine was the cat's pajamas. A badass, cigar-chomping, unkillable midget with unbreakable bones and chronic bedhead was just what the doctor ordered for a chubby outcast in need of his four-color power fantasy fix. But then I grew up, and the mysterious Canucklehead lost his appeal to me. The love affair was over.

The last time Wolverine was cool.

Of course, it didn't help that like the inexplicably popular Venom (and to a lesser extent, his psychopathic offspring Carnage), the Marvel Zombies had massive, throbbing erections for the anrgy runt. Wolverine became the de facto face of Marvel Comics, appearing in nearly every periodical the company published. At one point, he was a member of at least three specific X-Men teams, a member of a new X Force team, and a member of the fucking Avengers! Give me a break. Overexposure is a terrible thing.

Naturally, the inevitable X-Men films took their lead from the floppies and made Wolverine their focus, at the expense of every other character in the films. It's a travesty. Dazzler deserved better.

I guess I'm trying to say that none of the X-Men films are particularly good, so Bret Ratner didn't really come along and sink the franchise. He just made a slightly worse, slightly more insulting sequel. And that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a fucking abomination. Just an absolute disaster.

How hard is it to fuck this up?

So last year, 20th Century Fox decided the best thing they could do with their struggling (creatively, not financially) franchise would be to make another prequel, set in the early 1960's, focusing primarily on the relationship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr before the shit hit the fan. And they got Matthew Vaughn, the man originally slated to direct X-Men: The last Stand to direct it. So did these people finally get their shit together and actually make a good X-Men movie?

Mad Mutants - The Story Of X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is all about beginnings. The film opens in familiar territory, with young Erik Lensherr being torn away from his mother's arms in WW II-era Poland. This sequence is almost an exact replica of the opening moments from Bryan Singer's original X-Men film, only now we follow Erik beyond this traumatic experience, into another traumatic experience.

Erik is brought before a very creepy, moustache-adorned Dr. Schmidt, who is working with the Nazis, basically using their resources to find mutants. He attempts to placate young Erik with chocolate, before asking the boy to move a coin on his desk with his newly discovered magnetic powers. When Erik fails, Schmidt has some stormtroopers bring in the boy's mother, and he threatens to shoot the defenseless woman if Erik fails to move the coin again. Buckling under pressure, Erik can't even budge the coin, and Schmidt ventilates the hapless mother.

What commences is an orgy of rage-fueled magnetism, with a screaming Erik laying waste to the entire office, even crushing the helmets of the stormtroopers, destroying their delicate skulls in the process. Dr. Schmidt is very pleased.

We are then introduced to young telepath Charles Xavier at his home in upstate New York, sneaking into the kitchen for a late-night snack. He runs into a homeless blue little girl called Raven, and being delighted to discover another "gifted" young person, he immediately invites her to live with him. At first I wondered what his parents would think when they discovered their son's new live-in playmate, but then I realized that little Charlie probably just fucked their brains with his nifty ability, and they'd probably never even  know that Raven was living there.

Jumping forward to 1962, we catch up with Erik, now fully grown and very pissed off. He spends his free time traveling the world, killing Nazi war criminals in inventive ways, on a quest to find that bastard Dr. Schmidt and avenge his poor Polish mother. He's also become English, somehow.

That's one of the things about the X-Men movies that always stood out for me. Why is Magneto a brit? He's a Polish Jew. There's never any indication that following his time in the care of Dr. Schmidt that Erik ever spent any real time in the U.K. Shouldn't he be speaking with at least a slight Polish accent? It's not even really a nitpick for me. It's just something that I've noticed.

In England, Charlie has just graduated from Oxford, and he spends his free time hitting on chicks, using his telepathy to order them drinks and shit. He's an idealist!

Back in the good old U.S.A., novice CIA agent Moira MacTaggert, who does not have an Irish accent, is following a U.S. Army Colonel into some place called "The Hellfire Club" in Las Vegas, where he meets with Dr. Schmidt, looking as yothful as he did back in the 1940's and calling himself Sebastian Shaw. Shaw is forcing the Colonel to advocate for the installation of U.S. nuclear missile sites in Turkey, a move that will seriously piss off the Soviet Union.

MacTaggert sees some bizarre shit while she tails the Colonel, including a red-skinned dude named Azazel who teleports the Colonel from Las Vegas directly to his meeting with military intelligence in Washington D.C. to follow Shaw's orders. After the Colonel has served his purpose, Shaw kills the poor stooge, showcasing his own mutant ability to absorb energy, which he has used to maintain a youthful appearance.

MacTaggert, her mind completely blown by all of the weird shit she's just seen, tracks down Charles Xavier, who has recently published a thesis on mutation. Taking Charles and Raven to CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia, MacTaggert attempts to convince her superiors that these wacky mutants are real, and that Sebastian Shaw is a clear and present danger. The mysteriously nerdy "Man In Black" (Oliver Platt) decides to sponsor Charles in his attempts to find and recruit a team of mutants to take down Sebastian Shaw and stop him from fomenting a full-scale war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Christ, that feels like a lot of story. And it's barely the first 30 minutes of the film. In the interest of time, I am now going to break down the rest of the plot as quickly as possible.

Charles meets a young scientist named Hank McCoy at the CIA "X Division" headquarters, a young mutant with giant monkey feet who has designed a machine called "Cerebro" that Charles can use to find other mutants. Erik catches up to Schmidt/Shaw on his submarine, and Charles uses his telepathic ability to talk Erik down before he drowns himself attempting to stop it in the open sea. They become quick friends despite their differences in opinion regarding authority. They team up to track down a small team of mutants, recruiting from across the country.

These mutants include a stripper with insect wings named Angel, a taxi driver with adaptive abilities named Armando, an Army prisoner who can project energy bursts from his chest named Alex Summers, and a young man who can emit supersonic screams named Sean Cassidy. They all get to know each other for a little while before Shaw and his cronies show up at X Division HQ to recruit them, killing a whole lot of people in the process.

The team refuses to ally themselves with this genocidal madman, all except for Angel, who is a stripper, and therefore evil. Armando, being an idiot, tries to rescue Angel from... herself (?), convincing Alex to zap Shaw while he turns into Rockman to protect Angel from the blast. Shaw, being an energy-absorbing mutant, is unscathed. Being black, of course Armando is the first mutant to die at the hands of Sebastian Shaw. Angel, seeing one of her friends horribly murdered by this asshole, decides not to change her mind, and fucks off with the bad guys.

Charlie and Erik, being away in Russia capturing Shaw's companion Emma Frost, arrive back home to find things in disarray. Charlie relocates the team to his home in New York, where a kick-ass training montage begins. Hank creates nifty new uniforms for everybody, then he injects himself with a serum he has invented to hide disfiguring mutant abilities (like his feet and Raven's skin), but it backfires and turns him into a were-smurf.

The Cuban Missile Crisis kicks off, bringing the world to brink of total annihilation, with Shaw exacerbating the situation with his antics. The newly-trained and super suit-wearing crew jets down south to save the world. Everybody battles everybody else, Erik pulls Shaw's submarine out of the sea and strands it on a beach, and climbs in to confront his nemesis. Charles remotely immobilizes Shaw with his devastating mind snare, and Erik slowly pushes the coin he kept from the concentration camp through Shaw's skull, preventing it from building up enough kinetic energy for the villain to absorb.

With the bad guy dead, everybody should be happy, right? But both the U.S. blockade fleet and the Soviet warships collectively piss their pants at the amazing display of power that they just saw, and fire all of their missiles at the people who just saved the world. Erik stops the missiles from hitting their mark, turning them back on the fleet, but Charles prevents his friend from destroying them. Mactaggert shoots Erik, but he deflects the bullets, and one of them striked Charles in the spine, paralyzing him.

Feeling bad about his actions, Erik nonetheless figures now is the perfect time to get the fuck outta town, taking Shaw's surviving cronies and the worthless Angel with him. Mystique, who has fallen head-over-heels in love with Erik after he said one nice thing to her, immediately leaves Charles, her oldest friend and the man who has taken care of her for most of her life, writhing in pain on the beach, a broken man. But not before she spouts some bullshit "pro-mutant" line at Hank, who just kind of stares at her, wondering when she became such a bitch.

Later, Charles is back home in New York, rocking a tricked-out wheelchair with garish "X" wheels, yammering about founding a school for mutants. He used a patented "Superman Amnesia Kiss" on Mactaggert, erasing her memory of recent events, so that she wouldn't be able to tell her CIA superiors where Xavier and the mutants went. This doesn't make any sense to me, considering Charles is just hanging out at his house. How hard can it be to find him?

The film ends with Erik, now calling himself "Magneto" and wearing a helmet right out of 1963's X-Men #1, busting Emma Frost out of the big house. Roll credits!

Yeah... that wasn't nearly as concise as I thought it would be.

Homo Sapiens-Superior - Analysis (?!)

They finally made a good X-Men movie. It only took 20th Century Fox five fucking attempts, but congratulations, fellas! And thanks to director Matthew Vaughn and his Kick-Ass writing partner Jane Goldman for sprinkling their pixie dust all over this stagnant property. The story really is a lot of fun.

Introducing young Erik Lensherr as a kind of pissed-off mutant "James Bond" character, galavanting around the world, picking off Nazi war criminals, was rather inspired. When are we going to get our
X-Men Origins: Magneto film, where we follow the globe-trotting mutant as he eradicates the remnants of the Third Reich, one villain at a time? I would gladly see that movie.

The story thrusts our heroes and villains right in the middle of one of the defining moments of the last century, being the Cuban Missile Crisis, even going so far as to place the film's central villain in the mix as the catalyst for the entire ordeal. Perhaps some people may take issue with this. They may see this as a trivialization of one of the most important events in modern world history.

Those people don't want to be entertained. It's a clever way to bring the story's characters together to thwart a diabolical villain bent on eradicating the human race. They're superheroes. They're supposed to save the world. It's a work of fiction, man. Like the moon landing. Am I right?

Admittedly, the film spends most of its time dedicated to the doomed friendship of Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, with a sizeable B-plot involving a potential romance between Raven and Hank McCoy, and this tends to marginalize the supporting mutants. We don't get to know the other team members terribly well, and this can be problematic. But everybody gets their own little moments here and there, and we do learn a few things about them along the way.

It's not enough to give the supporting cast the depth they need to feel like fully formed characters, however, and as such it's impossible to really make a connection to them. A misstep, but one that doesn't really register until after the film has ended, because the story is entertaining enough to disguise faults like this until one has time to sit and actually think about it.

And it was so great for me to see the endless parade of bit players in this movie. Every five minutes, I was introduced to another beloved character actor in a walk-on role, until it seemed like director Matthew Vaughn was trying to fuck with me. X-Men: First Class gave limited screentime to Matt Craven, James Remar, Michael Ironside, Tony Curran, Ray Wise, Glenn Morshower, Rade Serbedzija, and Olek Krupa. This is fantastic casting.

Not to take anything away from our main players, however. James McAvoy is great playing a younger, more hirsute Charles Xavier. He's an idealistic young man with working legs who wants to believe the best in people, despite all evidence to the contrary. Some may call this naive behavior. And they may be on to something. Because Erik's rather pessimistic worldview was completely justified in this movie.

Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is a man who does not trust authority. And why should he? He had a front row seat to the horrific atrocities of the Third Reich. His mother was gunned down before his eyes by a bureaucrat who wanted only to control him, to mold him into a weapon without humanity. When Erik is introduced as an adult, he's dedicated his life to a quest for vengeance on the man who destroyed his life. He always suspects the worst in people, and never trusts a person's seemingly selfless motivations. Until he meets Charles Xavier.

In Charles, Erik finds a friend who can temper his rage, who shows him that there are people in the world who can be trusted, people who aren't always looking for new ways to control others. It impresses Erik that this man is a powerful telepath, someone who can literally control other people like marionettes if he wished. Charles Xavier could rule the world if he chose to, but he chooses to trust in others to make the right decision on their own terms. Erik thinks his friend is perhaps a little short-sighted, but he desperately wants to believe that Charles is right.

When Erik's worst fears about human authority are confirmed at the film's climax, it's easy to see why he retreats into his own militant mindset, turning into the villainous Magneto we see in the later (earlier) X-Men movies. After he and his companions literally save the world from nuclear destruction, the frightened human beings aboard the opposing American and Soviet fleets unite in their collective fear to annihilate the mutants who risked their own lives to save them. This is what Erik has been expecting all along.

It's a rather brave stance for the film to take, considering it justifies the philosophy of the franchise's eventual villain (in this case). Why should Erik ever trust humanity again? Why (in Erik's mind) is Charles so blind that he can't see the world the same way? When he leaves Charles on the beach, having inadvertantly paralyzed his friend, he is filled with sadness and regret, but also with a grim determination to never allow anyone to harm his people (mutantkind) again. This creates a perfect bridge to the Magneto portrayed by Ian McKellen in the X-Men trilogy, and Michael Fassbender is brilliant in the role.

Most everybody else is great in their respective roles. Jennifer Lawrence (who was amazing in Winter's Bone) is very good playing Raven, the shape-shifting mutant who turns her back on her dear friend Charles to join Magneto's crusade against the human race. She never falters in her performance, but the script lets her down in the third act. Her eventual betrayal of Charles Xavier never feels completely organic. She barely spoke to Erik, and despite the events that took place on the beach, why would she abandon the man she calls her brother in such dire straits? He never did anything to personally alienate her.

Also, a small nitpick: her "Mystique" make-up is never terribly convincing. It tends to make her look bloated, which is not (I hope) the desired effect.

Everybody else is just fine in their roles, really, with a special shout-out to About A Boy's Nicholas Hoult playing Hank McCoy with a near-flawless American accent. Good work, there. Well, I say "everybody else", but there are two glaring exceptions: Zoe Kravitz and January Jones.

Zoe Kravitz, spawn of Lenny, brings almost nothing to her role as the acid-spitting bug lady Angel Salvadore. She looks pretty, and... that's it. I suppose it doesn't help that the story treats her character like it doesn't know what to do with her. She's committed herself to Charles Xavier's team, training to take down the supervillain Sebastian Shaw, until he shows up at X Division HQ and kills a whole bunch of people trying to protect her from harm. Then she can't wait to switch teams. After her friend Armando dies trying to save her (I still don't get it), she still decides that Team Shaw is on the up and up.

Maybe this role reversal could have felt more realistic if the actress could sell the character's inner conflict, but Zoe Kravitz manages to do nothing more than recite her lines and hit her mark on camera. Although this problem is quickly forgotten, because her character is barely featured in the film.

January Jones, however, has substantially more screentime, and she accomplishes absolutely nothing with any of it. What the fuck? I spent some time discussing this actress's amazing lack of talent in the past, so I won't go on at length about it here. Suffice to say that Jones attempts to play Sebastian Shaw's resident telepath/arm candy Emma Frost in the film, and she fails. She is worthless. If Zoe Kravitz is one-note, then January Jones is white noise. It's astounding to me that she manages to find work outside of the odd SyFy original movie or the latest mockbuster from The Asylum. How does January Jones exist?

Those last few paragraphs were pretty downbeat, and I don't want to leave you with the impression that I don't like X-Men: First Class, because that's simply not the case. The movie is great. It's a fun, occasionally clever, and highly entertaining motion picture. It also features Hugh Jackman's greatest performance as Wolverine in a cameo that made me laugh hysterically. That meant a lot to me.

It's sad that the movie is underperforming at the box office, because I would love to see more films that explore the X-Men in the swingin' '60's. Alas, it seems that it's not meant to me.

P.S. - I saw Super 8, and I'm going to talk about it soon. This is a warning.