X-Count 1

Are the X-Men films aimed at fans or a general audience? And what does it assume people know?

Well, clearly it is a general audience, with nods to fans, but it plays on what the audience knows. Or doesn't know. In this case, who the characters are? Specifically, do we know them as their human names or their X-Men names?

I watched the movies, and counted for the main cast, and here are the results of the first movie.

Logan is Logan, Rogue is Rogue, Scott can be either, but Storm is Storm. She has an actual name, you know! And Eric is more Magneto than Eric.

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Witch Hunt

It's the sort of sequel to the Lovecraftian Film Noir movie... and it definitely feels like the typical sequel.

It's the 1950s, and magic is used in Hollywood. Lovecraft, the detective, is brought in to find out what's going on when a movie mogul is killed, and ends up... caught up in a small time political machination that has a big moment of witch burning.

It just doesn't work very well. The story just doesn't feel climatic in the same way that the previous one did, and the big thing is 'we don't like magic'. Er... what? How is that that exciting? At least there are some names such as Dennis Hopper, Eric Bogosian, Julian Sands, Alan Rosenberg... and yet, we aren't talking that big a name (aside from the first one). Just... blah.

That's what I feel, and let's see what you think.


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Cast A Deadly Spell

It's a Lovecraftian Film Noir movie... but of course it is!

It's 1948 and everyone is using magic. Except for the detective Lovecraft. He's called in to track down someone who stole some book called the Necronomicon, and along the way he gets caught up in an attempt to raise the Old Ones.

It's not what you would expect to see, but there you go. There's Lovecraft and magic and a large book, and dames and smoking and drinking and bent cops. It is quite a good mixture of genres, and there also quite a list of stars. Fred Ward, David Warner, Julianne Moore, Clancy Brown, Charles Hallahan... of course their star power may be different these days.

Quite a decent movie... and you can watch it too!


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Starring 10th Trek

Here we hit peak Star Trek... and by peak, I mean the final movie before the reboot.

We've done the Klingons and the Borg, so let's go for the other classic race, the Romulans! Lead, obviously, by a white human, because of course. And he turns out to be a clone of Picard, despite that Tom Hardy looks nothing like Patrick Stewart to my eyes. Once the players are in place, it's then a large starship chase until the ramming (no-one says "Ramming Speed", boo!) and finally Data is replaced by who will be the same person.

In contrast to everything else I've said about this series, in this case I will say that the light hearted stuff is far better than the drama. So much of this story revolves around the surprise that Shinzon is Picard that if you don't care about that, a lot of this movie falls down. And it doesn't mean anything to me, and it doesn't feel like the movie really tries to build it up either, it just assumes that this will be meaningful. And thus, it is flat.

Brett Spiner nearly gets something decent to do, but Data is undermined by clearly having a replacement in B-4. And by the fact that Brett is 53 at this point.

With that, this isn't a terrible way to see out the series, but this has been an up-and-down tour of Star Trek movies.

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Cul de Sac, The 5

Oh, this nearly could have been something the whole series was about!

The parents are back. But it is immediately obvious to anyone who is watching that these adults are evil, clearly pod people. And so we spend half of the episode waiting for everyone else to catch up. And when they do, it is nearly scary, however the scare is undercut by having the heroes be able to revert back to themselves with no problems what so ever and never seeing the adults as a threat represented by their parents again.

Kids with replacement parents that are evil have plenty of potential, and this is wasted here. The wave could have converted adults to evil selves, and slowly more is revealed about that, but instead it's blown in one go. Sigh.

One episode left, and I'm not seeing anything good come out of this.

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Hebrew Bible

This is the other series by Shaye Cohen I saw on iTunes, and it is about how Judaism and Christianity view the Bible.

And the first thing I feel to point out is that this Christianity isn't one we would largely recognise from modern day, but from a more theological viewpoint. To pick one example, consider circumcision. This is seen as a mark of the Jews, and Christians would say 'Jesus was circumcised so we don't need to be', and yet circumcision is largely mainstream these days. And don't tell me it's for medical reasons, it's from religion sources because the medical science ain't in on it, and yet it happens anyway.

Also there are a lot of fine points about why Christians view things differently, and how Jews react to that, but I highly doubt most people think from that perspective. Instead it's just what we are taught, and largely take on board by a kind of osmosis in church teachings. Some things Christians do have as a cultural idea, of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb, of Jews being responsible for Jesus' death, and so on, but I doubt largely anyone would be able to cite the sources discussed here.

So while this is interesting, I would like a course about modern day Christianity. Actually, speaking of courses I would like, one that goes into the differences between the different types of Christianities, for example Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, etc, etc… There's a decent lecture for you!

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Xmans Apocylisp

It's a big movie featuring a lot of character we are supposed to care about! At least, the movie assumes we do, because it doesn't do any work to suggest that to us for itself.

The first mutant comes awake due to an amazingly convenient shaft of sunlight, and the big brain guy completely misses the arrival of someone with all this power. The hell? Anyway, Magneto's evil switch is flipped to on in the most obvious and stupid way ever, and he and others join forces with Apocy in order to... well, be evil, as near as I can tell. Fortunately, the good guys get a lot of new recruits that we should recognise, and eventually everyone gets into a big battle. A big CGI battle. With actors standing in poses against green screen no doubt, while everything around them, and bits of them, are replaced with graphics.

Basically, it's a movie, and it's going through its paces, with set pieces to bring people together and moments to introduce characters. Without any real sense of caring, as though the movie thinks that just having these people we know is enough to generate a sense of investment. Can't say it worked for me.

Not to say that this was a bad movie. Just that it wasn't anything impressive. There were a few nice sequences visually, but nothing really emotional to stick with you.\

And then the movie ended.

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