the hawaiian good luck sign
i always had thought it a good idea to someday compile a list of movies with truly exemplary displays of the middle finger. flipping someone off can be a powerful statement indeed, and if artfully done, adds much to the movie. there, now doesn't this sound like an insipid introduction to some award presentation? anyway, i have to say that after having seen X2 last night, it has a fine addition to the pantheon of celluloid fuck-yous. and it was a pretty good movie, to boot. it wasn't quite as ass-kickingly good as i'd expected, though, to be honest. and maybe i lose something (yet again) by not being as literate as i should be. but it was still pretty darn good. (don't read further if you've not seen the movie)
i used to think of myself as a fairly literate individual, but in the past years, i find myself completely lacking in knowledge of a lot of things that wind up in pop-culture. like the lord of the rings trilogy, and the comic-book phenomenon, namely. but anyway, what i'm getting at is that the x-men movies have been very kind to the underinformed, with the truly lush characterizations of their inhabitants. they seem to make every effort to gently point out a character's past history, not through a clumsy flashback to an origin story, but a little at a time. if anything, this movie had an excess of character development, i'd say, but not in a bad way--when can you say that about a summer blockbuster?
the opening scene was profoundly cool, as was the big fight scene at the school. this movie was considerably less shy about spilling blood, too. magneto's escape from his prison was very cool. some of the other scenes kinda left me cold; the fighter plane scene wasn't anything special, in particular; the whole fight with wolverine and the she-wolverine (deathstrike, i think) was very darth-maul-esque, given that everybody knew it would be cool, she's ultra-badass, and has walked around being so for the entire film, and this is her only purpose, but at the end of all that, does it have any significance to the plot? a little, since wolverine winds up killing someone just like him. anyway, the other thing that kind bugged me was the repeated uselessness of professor xavier--isn't this two movies now that he's been something of a liability? and the other thing was the plot of it. i liked where they were going with the first 10 minutes, but given the whole mutant-attacks-president situation, the reaction of the general public was very, very underplayed, save for the little incident at bobby's parents' house; after that, the significance of the events in the movie to the world at large is not sufficiently illustrated, making the payoff at the end somewhat lesser, imho.
anyway, i'd have to say, it's a damn good movie, and is very immersive, but perhaps it wasn't quite as involving as it might have been. and damn, i wish i was blue and could appear and disappear at will...
