Where are the heroes?

This on DVD today, and because I wrote this and forgot to post this back when the movie actually came out, I figured I might as well post it now.

X-Men: First Class has a classic story arc, above average performances, and it does a pretty impressive job of weaving its own story into that of the (inarguably compelling) Cuban Missile Crisis. Unfortunately, the virtues that make the X-Men so interesting fifty years later–tolerance, celebration of diversity, and self-acceptance–are embraced, it seems, only by the villains.

Though we are always meant to sympathize with Magneto (who can blame a Holocaust survivor for losing faith in humanity?), I’m a little baffled by the idea of recasting him as the hero for mutants. His violent methods should hurt the mutant cause more than they help it. Everything he does reinforces the  stereotype that mutants are dangerous, and inflames public sentiment that mutants should be hated and feared. And yet, by the end of this movie, the audience is with him.

And this is why the movie ultimately fails. [Cut for spoilers.] Read more »

Looking back on Back to the Future

Today (right now, in fact, at exactly 1:21am) marks the 25th anniversary of the events in Back to the Future and this weekend I got the opportunity to see it on the big screen for the first time. Back to the Future is a very special movie to me and it’s probably as close to a perfect film as I can think of. It also has the distinction of being the most difficult movie to summarize without sounding like a raving lunatic.

(So this teenage boy has a best friend who is kind of a mad scientist and the friend made a time machine out of a DeLorean but to make it work he stole some plutonium from Libyan terrorists who then kill him and the boy accidentally goes back in time to 1955 and runs into his parents and his mom winds up liking him so he has to make his weird nerdy father attractive to his mom and ensure that his parents get together while figuring out with the younger version of his mad scientist friend how to get back to the future in time to save said mad scientist friend. See?)

It’s patently absurd. But every part of that movie works. We have two time periods, two stories, and two versions of most of the characters. By all accounts it should be a mess and yet all the parallels synchronize perfectly.  Why?

Read more »