MY MOVIE SHELF: X-Men: Days of Future Past

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 1 Days to go: 3

Movie #439:  X-Men: Days of Future Past

X-Men: Days of Future Past is where the two separate X-Men franchises collide, and it is masterful. The characters we know from the first three X-Men movies (or some of them, at least, as well as a few we’ve never met before) come together in the future to stop an event from happening in the past — where most of the characters from X-Men: First Class are still running about — that will eradicate all mutants (and many humans) from the face of the earth. It plays with time, it plays with space, it plays with inevitability and free will and second chances, and I love it a whole lot. If not for a few complaints, it would easily be my favorite, but the things I find fault with are also the result of Days of Future Past‘s enormous ambition, which should be rewarded even if it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

In this film, the future is a war-torn dystopia and what few mutants remain are constantly on the run from weapons called Sentinels — transformative robots made from non-metallic polymers that can adapt to a mutant’s power to more effectively destroy it. Determining that the Sentinel program came from a moment back in 1973, the Professor (Patrick Stewart), who revealed he was alive again in the epilogue of The Wolverine vis-à-vis some sort of squirrelly magic that isn’t really explained all that well, and Magneto (Ian McKellen) convince Kitty (Ellen Page) to send Logan (Hugh Jackman) back in time in order to stop that event from happening and change the course of history. (Logan is the only one who can make such a trip, since he heals as fast as he’s torn apart and this journey of his consciousness will wreak havoc on his mind.)

So Logan’s consciousness goes back and he has to enlist young Charles (James McAvoy) and Hank (Nicholas Hoult) into helping him, which includes breaking Eric (Michael Fassbender) out of a prison beneath the Pentagon. For this they go to Quicksilver (Evan Peters), which I mention simply because it is my absolute favorite sequence of this or any X-Men movie, and it is entirely too short. Slowing everything else down to show Quicksilver working in his super-speed at a pace we can actually see is amazing CGI at work, and I want so much more of it. Why he’s not invited along to Paris or even just brought back at the end for their D.C. showdown is beyond me. He’s so great! Why would you introduce him, blow everyone away with his playful machinations, and then forget all about him for the rest of the film? It drives me crazy.

Not that the rest of the film doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to contend with without adding Quicksilver to the mix. Peter Dinklage (who makes everything better, let’s be honest) is here as Dr. Bolivar Trask, the scientist behind those nasty Sentinel machines, and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) aims to kill him. Unfortunately, when she does (in the past) it sets off a chain reaction of events in which her actions are used as proof of a mutant threat and her DNA is used to enhance the Sentinels. Logan’s troupe goes to stop her, of course, but the movie brilliantly plays with images so that some of the things we saw in the image of the past are duplicated in this scenes Logan is supposedly changing, raising the question of whether this is all happening as it always did, as it always was meant to. Hank brings up that question himself, of whether time is immutable and unchangeable — a common theme in time-travel tales — so somehow, some way, whatever happens will always happen and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Naturally, Charles takes a different view, because despite his current (1973) disillusionment, in which he treats himself with a serum to give him back the use of his legs in exchange for losing his powers of the mind, he’s still the optimist. He still believes in Mystique as a good person. He still mourns Eric’s insistence of distancing himself from goodness. And he still has faith in the human (and mutant) spirit, believing good will prevail if he only choose it.

Ultimately, the movie takes this view too, as it shows us Mystique changing her path and gives us a star-studded happy ending — incredibly, like, nearly EVERYONE is back and alive and awesome for this tiny little closing scene. At the same time, it also opens the door for ALL NEW STORIES about Mystique, about Jean (Famke Janssen), about Logan, et cetera. There are honestly not that many movies that can pull off something that impressive, and I give it a lot of credit. Meaning I forgive it a lot of its blurry areas — where things are most glossed over like LA LA LA DON’T ASK TOO MANY QUESTIONS ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE — even though they annoy me personally. I choose for goodness to prevail.

MY MOVIE SHELF: X-Men: First Class

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 2 Days to go: 4

Movie #438:  X-Men: First Class

From what I understand, comics get rebooted all the time, with a new set of stories that can have little connection to whatever came before. Movies about comic book characters do this too, with every new director’s vision of Superman, for example, or Batman or Spider-Man. These franchises often, in fact, tell the same stories over and over again, such as the hero’s origin story. What makes X-Men: First Class interesting, therefore, is its attempt to reboot the series while also a) telling a whole new set of stories about these characters, from a completely different time in their lives, and b) keeping a connection to the earlier series.

In X-Men: First Class, we meet Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Eric Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) as children (played by Laurence Belcher and Bill Milner, respectively) and then as young men. Likewise, we meet Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) as a little girl (played by Morgan Lily) who grows up with Charles in his home after he catches her alone and hungry and looking for food. These people who were linchpins to the original series of films — power players with clearly alluded to long and significantly linked backstories — are getting, in essence, their origin story. We’re introduced to their very different histories, and we’re shown how they grew together and apart in the span of a very critical time in world history.

There are things I really like about the film, and things I don’t like so much, putting it actually on par with perhaps The Last Stand with regard to my preferences. The mutant villains, for example (because the film is truly about mutants versus mutants, in the long run — humans are sort of incompetent bystanders to the whole thing), are lacking in the kind of charisma that makes Magneto himself so compelling in later films (and in this one, too, as Eric shares a lot of their beliefs and even converts Raven to embracing her Mystique self), making it incredibly lopsided. Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) is despicable, and he doesn’t make a good leader. He tells Emma Frost (January Jones) that they don’t hurt their own kind, but he spends a lot of time doing just that — especially when he kills Darwin (Edi Gathegi) for no good reason. Beyond that, his superpower just makes him look gross, like when his head and hands get inordinately big as he absorbs energy. It’s not attractive. Emma Frost herself is also disappointingly bland, and she’s the only one of Shaw’s minions who does anything interesting. The rest don’t even have lines, I don’t think. And Angel (Zoe Kravitz) doesn’t even bat an eye when Darwin is killed, so forget her.

What it gets right, though, is awesome. The performances of McAvoy and Fassbender (and Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult as Beast) are phenomenal and moving. Fassbender and Lawrence, especially, bring every ounce of emotion necessary to their character arcs — all the pain, all the anger, all the frustration and isolation they’ve felt over the years. It’s essential to developing who they are and who they become, and both actors are incredible. Beast has a similar, if not as deeply developed, history of feeling like a freak, and Hoult delivers on that. Xavier’s past is not as fraught with hardship, as his life has been filled with financial privilege and his mutation is a strategic advantage in most situations, explaining his much more positive outlook on humanity and reinforcing his desire to work with it instead of against it. I’m also a big fan of Rose Byrne as Moira, not only because she’s an undervalued member of the CIA — being a woman — but because she’s not afraid to use her undergarments to get her into a club for some good old American spying.

The time period also lends itself well to the tale of potential mutant uprisings, I think, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was indeed a very tense moment in our collective history, and one that is taught to have been resolved as if by a stroke of luck, at the last moment, almost out of nowhere. There’s an air of mystery to it that, to be perfectly frank, a secret mutant storyline fits squarely into. It’s kind of brilliant.

I also LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE the cameos by Hugh Jackman (as Wolverine) and Rebecca Romijn (as older Mystique), because they are awesome. Like, I literally clapped my hands with glee the first time I saw them. And I maybe still do for Wolverine.

Obviously loving and hating so many different things about it means X-Men: First Class isn’t my favorite of the X-Men films (that would still be X2), but I applaud its ability to create a whole new franchise inside an existing one, and I really do love where this new line can take us. As the next one will attest, most anything is possible.

MY MOVIE SHELF: Inglourious Basterds

The Task: Watch and write about every movie on my shelf, in order (Blu-rays are sorted after DVDs), by June 10, 2015.  Remaining movies: 44 Days to go: 33

Movie #396:  Inglourious Basterds

When everyone was arguing between Avatar and The Hurt Locker for Best Picture, I was telling anyone who would listen that the best movie of the year for me was Inglourious Basterds. (Though I supported a Hurt Locker win because Avatar is awful.) Just as Aldo (Brad Pitt) thinks his final carving might be his masterpiece, so do I think Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s. And this is coming from someone who is going to write a freaking novel about Kill Bill in three days’ time.

Inglourious Basterds, though. Man, what an incredible film. It’s largely a revenge fantasy, in a lot of different ways, with that particularly dark and quirky sense of humor Tarantino favors so much, but the place where it excels are its scenes delineating tension, and there are several. From a dairy farm to a Paris restaurant to a basement pub to a movie theater, tension bubbles over in this film from every corner, inescapable and stifling. Often, because we’re dealing with enemy combatants in occupied France during WWII, the tension explodes into deadly violence, with very few players being left alive at the end. And because it’s a Tarantino film, the violence is gruesome and horrifying and exaggerated for effect. The delicious waiting, however, is pure skill. It’s Tarantino showing that not only can he make a loud, raucous, bloody film, he can make a quietly terrifying one.

The opening scene, for instance, in which SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) sits down in the home of dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Ménochet) to discuss some unaccounted for Jews he assumes are in hiding, is so tightly wound and painstakingly drawn out, it’s nearly impossible to not squirm with trepidation. As an audience member, you know nothing about these missing people or where they might be hiding — if they are hiding at all — for most of the scene, but the implication that is floated but never stated outright that they are hiding there, is thick in the air. Landa is personable and courteous to a fault, LaPadite is stone-faced and gives nothing away, and yet Landa’s mere presence makes the skin crawl. His polite cheer and friendly demeanor belie a murderous, unforgiving agenda, simmering just under his skin.

The scene is quiet until the coup de grace, when music grows and booms with the thunderous report of machine guns. And as young Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent) escapes the massacre, it is clear it’s only by Landa’s whim that she survives. “Au revoir, Shosanna!” Its English equivalent is “Until we meet again.”

When they do meet again it is a glaring shock to Shosanna, who remembers the man who slaughtered her family. They are at a restaurant, where Shosanna, now hiding in plain sight in Paris under the name Emmanuelle Mimieux, has been strong-armed to by Gestapo, as a ruse for getting her to meet up with a pushy German soldier named Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl) who won’t take no for an answer. He’s interested in her and thinks his notoriety as not only an occupying army member but a somewhat famous war hero at that, should guarantee him the right to court her and he’s gotten it into his head that this big movie he’s in about his battle exploits should be premiered at the theater she owns and instead of asking her about it (because who cares about a woman’s opinion on her own life or business, am I right?), he plops her down in front of Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) to see if she meets his approval. She also has to meet the security head’s approval, though, and that’s where Hans Landa comes in.

It was a tortured, frustrating meeting before his arrival, but as Shosanna hears Landa’s name (with the camera tight on her and only his torso visible — not his face — as he stands behind her), she stops breathing. Everyone leaves the table and it is just the two of them and the question hangs in the air — does he recognize her? Does he know who she is? There’s not a drop of sound from any other source. No musical score, no background conversation, nothing. There is just the two of them and the clink of their forks against the china as he orders strudel for them both and pointedly includes a glass of milk for her. She betrays herself slightly here and there with small hesitations or looks of surprise, but mostly she is stoic and unmoved by his conversation. It isn’t until he leaves her — either oblivious of her identity or once again amusing himself by letting her live — that you realize how taut her muscles were. She shudders out a breath and tries to shake off the fear. It was a close call this time.

Then, of course, there are the Basterds, a guerilla team of soldiers who operate behind enemy lines killing Nazis. Run by Aldo “The Apache” and his comically absurd accent, the team is made up of mostly American Jews (with a couple German recruits as well), operating outside of traditional military maneuvers. Every one of Aldo’s Basterds joins up owing the lieutenant a hundred Nazi scalps, and he means to collect them. (If the “Bear Jew” Donowitz — played by Eli Roth — hasn’t bashed the scalp in too severely with his baseball bat, that is.) For those Nazis they don’t kill, however, they carve a swastika into each one of their foreheads, as a lasting reminder they can’t ever take off or wash away. They’re rough and tumble guys and unapologetic killers with a bit of a comedic tilt. (Nearly all the laugh-out-loud lines are Aldo’s.)

When British military intelligence gets word of all the highest ranking German officials meeting in Paris at Shosanna’s cinema for Fredrick’s movie premiere, they send a spy named Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender) to meet up with the Basterds and double agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) as part of Operation Keno — to kill all the leading German officers in one fell swoop and end the war. The only problem, of course, are the Nazi officers present at their meeting spot who complicate the plan. Once again, the tones are friendly but the air is tense. Hicox, knowing the danger they’re in, wants to get out as soon as possible. Von Hammersmark wants to ride it out and avoid detection. Both are denied their wish. And as their disguise crumbles and the jig is up, there is a sort of calm, relaxed acceptance of the bloodbath to come which only lends itself more to the building anxiety of the scene. Will anyone survive? Will they be able to salvage Operation Keno?

The closing chapter is a grand, magnificent one, as all the competing forces come together in Shosanna’s cinema, each with their own agendas, their own covers, their own missions. And it plays out extravagantly, with flames and demonic laughter and almost a farcical amount of overkill. But there are terrifying moments too, and devastating ones. Landa demonstrates the wicked force and hostility he has within him, Fredrick seems to humble himself but then oversteps his bounds, Shosanna is resolute until the end, when her softness betrays her, and the whole place erupts in death and destruction. But the most impressive thing about this outsized display, perhaps, is how the entire movie has built to it, just as its individual scenes have built to their own eruptions of violence or release. In fact, as the movie progresses, the tension in each scene is broken by greater and greater explosions, that become more horrifying the closer we get to the end. If the encounter is not scary, per se, it is undeniably gory — Tarantino’s blood lust is never quenched — and often it is both, culminating in one of the most brutal and graphic depictions of gunfire shredding a human corpse I ever hope to see. (It should be noted, though, that as this violence is highly stylized, it’s not necessarily as realistically frightening as some other films. Just gross, from time to time.)

And if you think Landa is going to get away to a well-appointed home on Nantucket Island, well Aldo and Utivich (B. J. Novak) have a thing or two to say about that.

“Now that, I can’t abide. How ’bout you, Utivich? Can you abide it?”

“Not one damn bit, sir.”

Let’s just say he gets what he deserves. (It’s okay. Aldo’s been chewed out before.)