X-Men: First Class (b a b y day?)

Get excited! My lovely husband graciously accepted my offer to blog about his most recent movie-going experience. This week he attended Baby Day at the Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek with our niece (ok, and her parents) while I was slaving away at work, supporting his lifestyle. Such sacrifice!! Anyways...onward!

"So, prior to yesterday, I was still fuzzy on some of my history facts. I am a schoolteacher, but I don’t teach history, so bits and pieces have gone by the wayside. That’s okay, though because I went to go see X-Men: First Class, a, from what I can tell, completely historically accurate retelling of world history (I’m pretty sure Sarah Palin was fact-checker on the side), but that’s beside the point.

Yes, I had checked out http://www.imdb.com/ and looked into the newest movie in the X-Men franchise and tried to do a little sneak peeking to see what Marvel would be bringing me/the world. And, I guess I didn’t pay enough attention (see back to the history lessons I also didn’t pay attention to) to cast members/mutants that would grace the silver screen, because I was still in for some surprises.

As far as major plot points go, this film (I’ll throw that word around) basically sets up the world of X-Men that we knew about from the year 2000 (picture Conan O’Brien singing that without getting sued by a major network) when the first X-Men movie fed our superhero-needing senses. For most people that I know that were excited for the first movie 11 years ago, my fellow nerds and I had a pretty firm grasp on who the main characters were, what a lot of their non-mutant aliases were, etc. I was excited to see X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, and even X-Men Origins: Wolverine (I personally feel that Hugh Jackman is a fantastic embodiment of the Wolverine character). With some slight, okay pretty glaring, graphical shortcomings in the Wolverine movie, I started to feel less excited about the prospect of a future X-Men movie (unless it centered around Ryan Reynolds’ character, Dead Pool). However, my brother-in-law and I had seen several of these movies together and decided that we would go to see X-Men:First Class together in the theaters.

I’m glad that I did see it in theaters, the action scenes were pretty great, and the graphics were much better than X-Men Origins:Wolverine. My only real complaint about the graphics in this new movie were with ships in the open ocean – I’m fairly certain that with the money Marvel has made on all of these movies that they could have afforded to at least make a scale model of a ship and have it float in an ocean made for a sound stage so that the wake and sides of the ship would look like somewhat realistic, and not like I was messing around with PhotoShop and putting a 3-D mockup of a boat into an actual picture of the ocean. Otherwise, though, the graphics and action were pretty great.

My biggest surprise (which IMDB had no thoughts about hiding, I’m just slow on the uptake, and not big on reading) was Kevin Bacon! He was phenomenal from start to finish. I assumed he was just a cameo in the beginning, maybe a long-time fan getting in touch with Matthew Vaughn, director, or one of the four collaborating writers for a bit part, but no, he was the real deal, and he owned his character. My wife and I had seen Winter’s Bone earlier in the year (or the end of last year), so it was nice to see Jennifer Lawrence acting in a very different role and showing that she can in fact pull off all blue body paint (very important fact to know about yourself). James McAvoy, you had big shoes (or a big wheelchair seat) to fill as Charles Xavier – since this movie is the beginning, a roll that would “later” be played by Patrick Stewart. There was good writing with little one-liners that foreshadow things that happen to the Professor X character. Aside from Kevin Bacon stealing the show, I think Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto) was played to a T by Michael Fassbender (who you may remember from Band of Brothers or Inglourious Basterds). Fassbender took the painful rise of Magneto and played it straight and almost had me rooting for the bad guy I know he, spoiler alert, turns out to be.

So, it’s hard for me to give this movie 5 out of 5 stars, but I could give it a solid 4 with the quality of acting, the good mutant character development, and unreal historical accuracy.

-Guest blogger (the husband)"

Just popping back in...

I have been negligent, but I wanted to pop in and pass along this article I came across today discussing changes in Oscar categories for next year. The most significant change? The Best Picture category will have from 5-10 nominees. Films that receive 5% or higher of the votes on the initial AMPAS ballot will receive a nomination (in past years this would have meant a field of 5-9 nominees). Thank goodness!!

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Nominations will be announced January 24, 2012 - mark your calendars!!