Two days sooner! (And X3)

Huzzah! Superman Returns, June 28th!

And the cool new trailer we saw in front of the really mediocre X-Men movie.

Oh, X-Men 3? Didn't care for it. I mean it wasn't Men In Black II and certainly not a Hayden Christensen Star Wars movie. There were some good bits. But almost all of them came from X-Men and X-Men 2 or were because of the great cast that Singer put together. (And 20th Century Fox seems pretty adamant that this is THE LAST X-Men movie, no matter HOW much money it makes. I haven't seen studio animosity towards a film like this since Buckaroo Banzai.) When it was over I was asking questions like "Why was Angel (no, not that one) in this movie?" And "Why was this BIG IMPORTANT THING given almost no weight in the movie whatsoever?"

SPOILER (click and drag mouse over to see):

Maybe James Marsden was late for the set of Superman Returns?

END SPOILER.

Kelsey Grammer was pretty cool as Hank "Beast" McCoy. Ian McKellan can read the phone book and be good. But nothing felt as real (the White House and the President for example - good grief, the guy looked older than Bob Dole. Hey! He was Larry in Close Encounters of the Third Kind! Poor Larry...) and no-one felt as human as they did in the last two. Magneto finally became the moustache twirling villain they managed NOT to make him in 1 and 2. ("They say you're the bad guy." "Is that what they say?") They wasted the Phoenix storyline, which had been given a fair amount of foreshadowing (your guide to quality literature) in not one but two previous films. Several BIG THINGS happen and you just don't CARE. (If you had to get your "care" from reading comic books written twenty-five (!) years ago, it doesn't count.) Pyro and Bobby were still good together (as opposed to Rogue and Bobby, who really weren't). (Again, baggage from the last movie doesn't count as "good".)

One review I read said that if you didn't care too much about the comics, you would like this movie. Look, I don't LIKE the X-Men comics (or at least I haven't since about 1982 - Joe Sweden comics not-withstanding). I don't CARE that Wolverine is too tall or that Rogue is too young (and standing in for Kitty Pride anyway - no wonder they're rivals in this movie). I loved the last two MOVIES.

She Who Is My Wife liked it a lot better before we watched X-Men the next day. Ten minutes into X-Men 1 she turned to me and said "No. Not even close." I love that woman.

I just hope they don't screw up Pirates II. (Or III for that matter.)