Movies from Last Weekend

I saw five movies last week­end; three were on TV as I con­va­lesced from a stom­ach flu, and the oth­er two were:

X‑Men III
I don’t know X‑Men canon. I don’t real­ly care about X‑Men canon. With that in mind, I enjoyed this movie. It was fast-paced, most­ly, and well-act­ed, gen­er­al­ly. Kelsey Gram­mer in par­tic­u­lar sur­prised me; I quite liked his char­ac­ter, both the on-screen per­sona and Gram­mer’s por­tray­al of him.

In addi­tion, no mat­ter what else you like or dis­like about the film or the fran­chise, I must say this: Mag­ne­to is one of the most com­plex vil­lains I’ve ever seen on screen, in any movie, of any kind. Not a bad accom­plish­ment for a super-hero film.

and

The Da Vin­ci Code
Some­times I get the feel­ing that I’m a mem­ber of a super-secret soci­ety with a rather short mem­ber­ship list: the peo­ple who have nev­er read Dan Brown’s nov­el The Da Vin­ci Code. I tried, O how I tried, to read it; but some­where before the hun­dredth page, I got fed up with the expo­si­tion, the every-chap­ter-has-a-cliffhang­er, and the sense that the whole thing tot­tered on a set of, oh, nine hun­dred inter­lock­ing con­spir­a­cies from down through the ages, the dis­proof of even one of which will set the whole thing at nines, leav­ing a scat­tered mess of half-baked ideas and loopy fallacies.

The movie’s kind of the same way, only I did­n’t leave at the half-hour mark. But the expo­si­tion is still a huge part of why I did­n’t like the film; there was one scene in par­tic­u­lar where Tom Han­ks looks Audrey Tautou in the eye and essen­tial­ly says, “Now lis­ten close­ly, Audrey, because the audi­ence needs to know this”, and then pro­ceeds to spew forth a piece of pure info-dumper­a­tion, com­plete with words you won’t find out­side of the Oxford dic­tio­nary. No one in the world–not even a Har­vard pro­fes­sor of Reli­gious Symbology–would use words like that in conversation.

So: Meh. Now at least I know how the nov­el ends, and all with­out hav­ing to, you know, read it.

Oh, the movies on TV? Chas­ing Amy, which I had­n’t seen since when­ev­er it first hit VHS; Gat­ta­ca, my DVD copy that my dar­ling wife bought for me; and one of my all-time favourite movies, def­i­nite­ly my favourite action movie ever, The Road War­rior.

G’night!