… so for some reason I started up “X-Men 3” via mplayer … perhaps boredom. I know I should pull a book off the shelf, either fiction or non-fiction for my work … or non-fiction that’s unrelated to my work … but instead I feel as if (after my talk with Hans) that I have a “new lease on life” in a sense, and while that means I should be doing work and doing it as if nothing else in the world mattered, I instead feel the desire to watch movies.
I watched the recent (2006) “Superman Returns” this afternoon, and it was better than expected. It didn’t end with the punch with which it began, but oh my, with the plane and shuttle, what a great ‘set piece’ of sorts. Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor was inspired, as was the almost campy, definitely witty, and often dangerous performance. The guy playing Superman was quite good, had the right look, was bumbling as Clark, and charming as Superman, with just the right amount of Christopher Reeve channeling.
Thereafter, later in the evening that is, decided to re-watch “Batman Begins” … a DC Comics adaptation in a considerably different vein. It’s the Christian Bale show, but it’s tied to such great characters and character actors that the gravitas is not just from the script but from the performances. And it’s an “origin tale” and spends the first half of the movie without Bruce Wayne not in the suit. I first saw it years ago when it came out, over at University Square.
Either movie is better as a movie — better acted, better script, better directed, etc. — than “X-Men 3,” which I watch and like only because 1) Bryan Singer made the first two and they were great, and 2) I like the whole “X-Men” mythos enough to eat up almost anything made in that system.
Though were I a Superman fan, I might have thought something similar until the 3rd movie, perhaps the 4th (the truly awful one); were I a Batman fanatic I might a have felt the same after the first two Tim Burton films but before the latter two … the travesties of movie making.
Hans sent some bibliographic material I should look up, but Sunday is fiction-writing day, not research day.
Last night I listened to The Verve. I now have The White Stripes and The Who ahead … then the end of “The.”
