X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class

I have mixed feelings about the X-Men movie franchise.  Maybe I was just picky because the X-Men were my favorite comic team when I was growing up.  And while I felt Bryan Singer did a fairly good job with the first two X-Men movies, they never truly soared like say Spiderman 2 or The Dark Knight.  They were just two really solid comic films.  And then the third movie came out, a horrid, ill-conceived mess, and I became very worried about the direction of the franchise.  When they announced First Class, I was wary.  I did not think going back to do a prequel was a very good idea.  I wanted the studio to fix the mess they had made with Wolverine, Rogue, and Storm.  I didn't want to go back and see why Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr became Professor X and Magneto.

But the studio was smart, bringing a crew together that wouldn't hack a movie together.  Matthew Vaughn (Kick Ass) was a fine choice as director, with a fun style and strong visual flair that generally enhances his storytelling instead of distracts from it.  Vaughn went on to assemble a remarkable cast, including James McAvoy (Atonement), Kevin Bacon (Footloose), Rose Byrne (Troy), January Jones (Mad Men), rising star Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games), and my favorite up-and-coming actor Michael Fassbender (Prometheus).  Together, they really put together a stylish and fun flick.

During the height of the Cold War, Erik Lehnsherr (Fassbender) is a Holocaust survivor, traveling the world and using his mutant abilities to control metal to hunt and kill escaped Nazi war criminals.  His primary target is Sebastian Shaw (Bacon), the German scientist who killed Erik's mother and performed horrible experiments on the boy in his concentration camp laboratory.  But Erik is not the only one seeking out Shaw.  Special agent Moira MacTaggart (Byrne) suspects Shaw is playing the USSR and the US against each other in an attempt to jumpstart World War 3.  Once she discovers she is dealing with mutants, she asks for help from the world's foremost mutant expert, telepath Charles Xavier (McAvoy).  The stage is set.  Let super heroics ensue! 

There is a lot to like here, but what I like the most is that the film really gets to the heart of what the X-Men are all about – how can the world deal with the existence of mutants?  Vaughn and Company touch on with some of the smarter issues from the comic, such as the debate of assimilation vs. segregation.  Some mutants can “pass” as normal; some look too bizarre to ever really join the rest of humankind.  I also like how they play off Xavier and Erik's opposing philosophies.  Xavier is a man of peace and acceptance.  He fights for a world where mutant and man can live in peace and harmony.  To Erik, that is a load of crap.  He lived through the Holocaust and he knows the horrors that mankind is capable of, and he will not forgive them for that capability.  The X-Men were always an allegory for prejudice and discrimination, and First Class does a terrific job of making that struggle central to its story.  

Not that the film is all serious.  It still has fun.  Vaughn has created a cool retro vibe, successfully recreating the 1960s with a fun James Bond feel.  The sets have iconic Ken Adams' influence all over them.  And that is super cool.  The actors all put in terrific work, especially McAvoy, Bacon, and Fassbender.  I will say the movie is not perfect.  There are some things that keep it from achieving the greatness of the BEST comic movies...at times, I found the scenes with Xavier's young mutant recruits a bit superfluous.  The actors are all fine, but their scenes occasionally drag.  Besides, the heart and the meat of this movie are both firmly with Magneto and Xavier...the actual "First Class" is almost a distraction.

I also HATED the makeup for The Beast.  He looked like a giant blue Ewok.  I just couldn't take most scenes with him seriously because of this.  Kelsey Grammar's Beast makeup in the previous X-Men film was much better, and I was surprised to see these kind of effects taking a step backwards.

But these are small complaints, right?  Overall, the movie was really quite good and I definitely recommend it.  Not only did they make a smart and fun super hero movie.  They saved a franchise.

MVP: 
McAvoy is superb, so the choice is not as easy as I would have thought, but this is still Fassbender's movie.  He gets my MVP for playing Erik.  He puts in superb, conflicted work as a good man at heart who is understandably twisted into eventually becoming the villainous Magneto.  I like how seriously Fassbender embraced the conflicted nature of the character.  And while the rest of the movie is good, the first half hour features the best sequences of the film, by far – and I am referring to Erik's ruthless hunting down of Nazi criminals.  I seriously could have watched an entire film called Magneto: Nazi Hunter.  So that makes for a decisive MVP win for Fassbender. 

P.S. Between his performances in Inglourious Basterds and X-Men: First Class, it is clear that Fassbender should be the next James Bond.  Daniel Craig is terrific and I am in no rush for him to retire, but I hope Eon has their eye on Fassbender for taking the mantle when the time comes.

BEST LINE:

Xavier: We have it in us to be the better men.
Erik: We already are.

TRIVIA:
Once cast as Charles Xavier, James McAvoy immediately shaved his head...only to learn that the film intended to feature Xavier with a full head of hair.  For the first month of filming, he had to wear hair extensions.  Oops.   

War Horse

War Horse

War Horse is a tough film to review.  It certainly isn't the best film in the world and yet I find myself often defending it to my friends.  Maybe I just don't agree with the reasons they don't like it...or maybe I'm just being fussy in my old age.  Either way, War Horse is definitely a mixed bag.

Joey is a special horse (as we are reminded constantly) and develops an immediate bond with young English farm boy, Albert Narracott (Jeremy Levine's debut performance).  But the farm is destitute and Mr. Narracott is forced to sell Joey to the English army on the eve of World War I.  Little Albert is shattered and swears he'll see his horse again.  What follows is the episodic adventures of Joey as he navigates his way through war torn Europe and hopefully back to Albert.

A problem with most episodic movies is that they are full of a lot of short little stories, and if some of these episodes aren't strong, it can drag down the whole movie.  I definitely think this is the case of War Horse.  Some of the stories are terrific, especially the World War I excerpts, such as when Joey serves as the cavalry mount of dashing British Captain Nichols (Thor's Tom Hiddleston channeling a killer T.E. Lawrence vibe) and when he is forced to pull literally tons of heavy artillery up a steep slope to their firing positions.  These sequences are truly superb and depict some of the best representations of World War I that I have seen.  But then we also have a story where Joey becomes the pet of a precocious little French girl (Celine Buckins), that I suppose is sort of cute, but completely drags the momentum of the movie down.

The other major complaint about the movie, and one that I agree with, is that it tends to be overly sentimental.  Spielberg has always worn his heart on his sleeve as a filmmaker and I admire the fact that he doesn't restrain his emotional side, but he goes overboard here, especially in the last act.  Everything following the superb barbed wire scene right up to the sunset finale is just thick, thick syrup - and too much for me to handle without rolling my eyes.  It's just started to be a bit too much.

But I've also heard a lot of people complaining that the movie is just unrealistic.  It bothered them that with hundreds of thousands men being slaughtered, why does everyone care so much about a horse?  It's just a horse!  I don't think that is the right way to look at the movie.  War Horse isn't realistic.  It's a fable and the horse is a metaphor, a symbol of an earlier, simpler time - when people were tied to their land, and when there was a certain nobility and chivalry in combat, before the world was violently dragged into the modern world by the horrors of mechanized warfare.  World War I was the transition to modern war and that transition is handled brilliantly by Spielberg and Company.  The characters in the film yearn for the world of yesteryear, for a happier time before barbed wire, mustard gas, and trenchfoot.  It makes sense that everyone in the film is touched by Joey.  He is a symbol of everything they have lost.

Overall, I think the movie's greatest strength is how old fashioned it is (which is ironic because I think its greatest weakness is how old fashioned its sentimentality is!).  I think this is Spielberg's John Ford film.  Truly, I think if John Ford had made War Horse in 1948, it would have been remarkably similar to what we ended up with 2011.  It's the classic style of the filmmaking, and it's the way the camera sets the characters against the landscape, tying them intrinsically to the earth.  I admired that.  There is actually a lot to admire about War Horse.  If the story had been just a bit tighter, and if the attempts to yank on our tear ducts had just been a bit more subtle...well, we would have had something terrific.

MVP:
Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg's Director of Photography, is the clear MVP here.  He's brilliant with the camera, both with his framing, and his great use of filters and lighting.  He gets the MVP for two moments in particular - the first is an insane sunset at the end of the film, a return to the English farm set against a blood red sky.  At first, I grumbled, because I thought, "why did they use CGI for that sunset??"  Except then I read that it was actually a real sunset and that the colors in that part of England are that insanely vibrant.  It's a heck of a great shot.  But my favorite shot is actually earlier in the film, when Joey makes a dash through the trenches.  We are treated to a superb tracking shot, the camera keeping just ahead of Joey as he twists and turns, men toppling to each side, explosions filling the air above him.  It's a brilliant shot and I'm not quite sure how they did it.  Kaminski is the Man!

BEST LINE:

Geordie: How are things in yonder trench?
German: Delightful.  We read.  We knit sweaters.  We train our rats to perform circus tricks.

TRIVIA:
Fourteen horses played Joey in the film.  The primary acting horse, Finder, also played Sea Biscuit.