Updates:

• Charlie's French Cinema Nudity Site is updated.

X-Men: The Last Stand (2006):

The Last Stand concludes the X-Man trilogy, or perhaps I should say the FIRST X-Men trilogy, in spectacular fashion. Humans have found a "cure" for the mutant gene. They offer it to the mutant community. Magneto and his minions are offended, and declare war against humanity. The X-Men end up siding with the humans. It all comes to a head in a spectacular battle sequence on Alcatraz Island, which has been made easily accessible by Magneto's having relocated the Golden Gate Bridge.

Usual stuff.

The wild card is that Jean is no longer presumed dead, and has morphed into a stronger incarnation of herself called Dark Phoenix, the most powerful mutant ever, possessing powers which Professor X had previously hidden in her subconscious, but which her near-death experience has brought to the surface. Both Professor X and Magneto are interested in her, each for his own set of reasons.

The film really has only one major weakness. It allows the usually brilliant and calculating Magneto to become less than what he has been. No longer is he the leader of an oppressed minority. Now he's a genocidal maniac, the same thing that he once accused humans of. He's not even rational. At no time in this film do the normal humans ever suggest that the mutants are required to take the magic potion. They are simply offered a choice. If the screenplay had been developed properly, Magneto would have first become paranoid that humans would eventually make it mandatory, and would then have been set into action by some foolish human actions which confirmed his fears. Instead of following that course, the film has Magneto become offended that science would even create such a concoction in the first place. Frankly, that's bullshit. The concoction offered mutants the choice to stay mutants or to become human. Many of the mutants (Rogue and Jean, to name two) were unhappy as mutants and considered their powers a curse. Others considered their mutated genes to be an intrinsic part of their nature, and a step in human evolution, and were happy with their status. In theory, the magic potion left them all free to pursue their own destiny, their own happiness. The only mistake made by the humans was to call the elixir a "cure," thus implying that mutants were merely sick humans rather than coexisting equals. That was certainly offensive to the mutants, but they over-reacted dramatically. After all, if some mutants would rather be human, well, why should the other mutants prevent that? In fact, if they liked the power involved in being mutant, they should encourage as many mutants as possible to turn human, because that would leave the remaining ones with more power, relatively speaking, since there would be fewer powerful beings to oppose them.

If the film had been concocted from a recipe a bit more to my liking, it would have had fewer characters and more screen time for the important, eloquent and amusing main characters. Wolverine could have been sassier, for example, and Magneto more thoughtful. But I think it's fine as it is, just not exactly as I would have preferred it. It actually out-performed the previous two at the box office, so movie audiences obviously took to it.

For some bizarre reason which I don't really understand, but obviously unrelated to the quality of the movie itself, there is a dedicated cadre of X3 haters out there. Check out these IMDb scores:

 

	X-Men 1	X-Men 2	X-Men 3
% of voters awarding tens	12.1	21.3	21.1
% of voters awarding ones	0.9	1.2	4.3
Overall score	7.3	7.9	7.0

 

4.3% of the voters, nearly 2000 people, have decided that the proper score for X-Men 3 is 1/10. What is that all about? Are they people who have never seen any other movies? Are they Bryan Singer's relatives? Are they people who just have to hate? Are they hard-core comic fans disappointed that the film didn't follow the same storyline as the source material? Who the hell can say. The one thing you can conclude is that they are simply not rational thinkers. They have allowed some emotional issue, whatever it might be, to cloud their reason.

The final chapter in the X-Men saga is more or less indistinguishable from the previous two. As you can see from the "percentage of tens" in the table above, it inspires about the same amount of true love as the second one, and much more than the first.

The complete summary chart for the series is as follows:

	X-Men 1	X-Men 2	X-Men 3
Ebert	2.5	3	3
Berardinelli	3	3	3
Yahoo voters	B+	B+	B+
IMDb voters	7.3	7.9	7.0
% of tens at  IMDb	12%	21%	21%
% of positive reviews (RT)	80%	87%	57%
Per 100, average review (Metacritic)	64	68	58
Domestic box office ($M)	157	215	234
Foreign box office ($M)	139	192	221

I guess I'm about in the same boat as Ebert. I don't see any dramatic decline from #2 to #3, and I like both of them better than the first one. All three are more than simply genre pictures, but are good entertainment pictures in general.

Is this really "the last stand"? Of course not.

• First of all, look at the box office results. Studios do not abandon blockbuster franchises which are grossing more with every film. You think they can just afford to leave all that money on the table?
• Second, watch the ending credits of this film and see if you think Magneto and Professor X have met for the last time.

Look for a Wolverine solo film, and as many other X-Men films as the cast will agree to.

 

Rebecca Romijn. Oh, sure I like Wolverine, But here's my favorite mutant right here.

V For Vendetta (2006):

Mr T's contribution yesterday got me to drive to Blockbuster and look at this DVD. Here are some more captures from the film:

Natalie Portman

As for the movie ....

All of these groups are rating the same movie:

• British critics 33/100
• Metacritic 62/100
• IMDb top 1000 voters: 7.2/10
• IMDb overall: 8.3/10 (top 150 of all time)

So it's either a laughably bad movie, or a mediocre movie, or a solid performer, or one of the greatest movies ever made. Take your pick.

It has been my observation that there are certain types of movies which are invariably overrated:

• 1. Mediocre movies which passionately present a point of view that the reviewer passionately agrees with. (The Life of David Gale Syndrome). Scoop's First Law states that there is no harder film to evaluate than a heavy-handed one which has a viewpoint you wholeheartedly support. Every fiber of your being wants to praise it.
• 2. Mediocre movies which are created by people customarily acknowledged to be geniuses. (Eyes Wide Shut Syndrome.)
• 3. Mediocre movies which are remembered fondly from childhood. (The Return of the Jedi Syndrome)

V for Vendetta qualifies, to some extent or another, on multiple criteria, thus causing it to be wildly overrated by certain audiences. Let us take, for example, the ratings given to this film by voters who are either of high school age (9.0) or college age (8.4). The film is a thinly-disguised attack on the various follies of the Bush administration, and it was produced by the Wachowski brothers, creators of the Matrix films, and directed by their hand-picked assistant. In addition, it has the trappings of an intelligent movie, or at least one for intellectuals: faux-poetic dialogue, romanticized ideology, imaginative settings, a larger-than-life hero, literary allusions, vague historical references, quotes from Shakespeare, and so forth. Mining the rich vein of Bush hatred with flowery speeches and half-baked idealism, it is just about the perfect movie to be overrated by the young.

Does that mean that the British critics were right and it's a bad movie? Not at all. The British critics were, in my opinion, far too harsh. It has some irritating elements which really got under their skin. For one thing, its viewpoint reflects the typical American stereotyping of U.K. denizens who, truth be told, sometimes do other things besides watching Benny Hill and quoting Shakespeare. For another, it features Americans and Australians portraying England and Englishmen, often with inauthentic perceptions and bad accents. It is not difficult to read  between the lines of these reviews:

The Observer:

There is a sub-genre of kitschy, dystopian science fiction that's been with us at least since Logan's Run 30 years ago and might well be called dystope-opera (or just dystopera). The latest example is V for Vendetta, adapted by the Wachowski Brothers from David Lloyd and Alan Moore's British cartoon strip and directed by an Australian, James McTeigue, who cut (or blunted) his teeth as an assistant on the Matrix series and on Star Wars II. An eclectic affair, it brings together Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Phantom of the Opera and garnishes them with references to 9/11, avian flu, 'collateral' and 'rendition' in a totalitarian future Britain.

The Guardian:

The British people are living in a state of resentful oppression and dental disrepair: and they are represented in various scenes by about a dozen or so Equity members, quaintly shown at the pub or in their prole front rooms, glumly watching the state television network on which propaganda is pumped out. V has a friend, ally and, who knows, perhaps even a beauty-and-the-beast-style love interest in a young woman called Evey - geddit? - a television researcher played by the reliably terrible Natalie Portman. Portman for some reason has a thin, wittering South African accent as Evey, which may have been superior to other thin, wittering accents she tried out in rehearsal.

V For Vendetta is such an odd mixture: partly naive post-punk posturing, betraying the original's 1981 origins, and partly well-meant (but very American) condescension towards London and Britain. Like tourists with a phrasebook, the Wachowskis get people to say "bollocks" a fair bit, and there is a pastiche of The Benny Hill Show. On the higher end of the cultural scale, V declaims Shakespeare, and in honour of Guy Fawkes's subversion in the age of James I, reels off lots of Macbeth. But he fails to quote the only appropriate lines: the ones about it being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Not all the criticism of the film was unjustified. V does indulge in the very demagoguery it condemns, painting the representatives of authority as either corrupt cynics or drooling idiots, casting everything in the world into black and white corners, oversimplifying every issue, and blatantly ripping off 1984. Moreover, it makes no effort to create a symbolic world which also makes sense in the real one. How does one man create so much havoc in a city of ten million people? Don't bother to try to figure out the practical details.

Here's a fact that tells you a lot about the avowed anarchist who wrote the story: "Alan Moore is a practicing magician and worships a Roman snake deity named Glycon." And that guy didn't cooperate with the film because, in his words:

One of the things I objected to in the recent film ... sort of recasting it as current American neo-conservatism vs. current American liberalism. I didn't want to stick to just moral blacks and whites. I wanted a number of the fascists I portrayed to be real rounded characters. They've got reasons for what they do. They're not necessarily cartoon Nazis. Some of them believe in what they do, some don't believe in it but are doing it any way for practical reasons. As for the central character of the anarchist, V himself, he is for the first two or three episodes cheerfully going around murdering people, and the audience is loving it. They are really keyed into this traditional drama of a romantic anarchist who is going around murdering all the Nazi bad guys. At which point I decided that that wasn't what I wanted to say. I actually don't think it's right to kill people. So I made it very, very morally ambiguous. And the central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad?

In other words, an anarchist who worships a snake deity thought the script based upon his story was lacking in subtlety. Are you surprised that teenagers think it's a great movie?

To be honest, the film is neither a great film nor a bad one. My thoughts upon leaving the theater were these: "Well, that wasn't subtle or sophisticated, but it was completely different from any other movie I've seen in the past five years. Just the fact that it is not run-of-the-mill made it kind of a special experience."

 

THIRD PARTY VIDEOS:

Club Dread (Movie House Commentary). Terrific HDTV clip of Jordan Ladd. (Zipped .avi). You picked this as the fifth best nude scene of 2004. (2004 Rankings)

The Gift (Movie House Commentary). Terrific HDTV clip of Katie Holmes. (Zipped .avi) You picked this as the very best nude scene of 2000. (2000 Rankings)

 

 

OTHER CRAP:

Movie Reviews:

Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe). White asterisk: expanded format. Blue asterisk: not mine. No asterisk: it probably sucks.

"Reeker" (2005):

 imdb: http://imdb.com/title/tt0393635/

- Arielle Kebbel

"Shadow Man" (2006):

imdb: http://imdb.com/title/tt0448114/
 

- Eva Pope

- Corina Toader

Jenya Lano in Stealing Candy