Reviews:

Media, media, media… I am awash in a sea of mitigated experience. Jes bought us a PS 2 for my birthday and we have been playing a game called God of War, which is hands down the best video game of its type that I have ever played. It’s an action puzzle game akin to Tomb Raider. We stayed up last night until five a.m. solving puzzles and killing critters in a virtual, mythical ancient Greece.

We needed to vent some hostility, or at least I did, after a very painful viewing of X-men #3. Maybe if they’d hired a writer it wouldn’t have been so bad. There are a few special effects moments that I enjoyed, but for the most part it is a wait for video, or don’t see it at all, stink bomb of a franchise wrecker on a par with Cat Woman for worst film of the year (for many of the same reasons).

Our excited, Friday-night, huge theater crowd kept waiting for something, anything, to happen in this action movie with too much talking and not a talented scriptwriter for miles. If a film is going to be eighty percent dialogue you need to have the characters say a little bit more than yeah we’re X-men, yeah the school is worth fighting for, yeah (which is a succinct summary of all the speeches).

Eventually the crowd began to yell at each other because there was nothing happening on screen to channel their expectations into. The disappointment was tangible and after it was over there was a somber procession to the parking lot where tired parents tried to explain the unexplainable, how so many talented people could conspire to put such crap before a hard working and expectant audience.

I actually like the casting of Beast and his performance was one of the few, very few, redeeming qualities of the picture. It’s hard for me to write about the film because I had a horse in the race. I had a mountain of expectations and a familiarity with the world of X-men that was years in the making. The previous films had not only met, but had surpassed my expectations. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I hated this film.