Mutants, Slightly Less New

Finally got around to seeing “New Mutants” after it finally got released after years of delays. Finally.

And it delivered. Even other people liked it! Obviously, I was going to enjoy it.

But I think the part that brought the most warmth to my heart was seeing how they made room for a dance montage after “X-Men: Apocalypse”, which is still my favourite of the franchise, relegated that to the deleted scenes.

Cheers!

Bonus Question!

Best New Mutant!

Magik! For weirdness. Also mixing mutanthood and magic. I feel that.

Comics, Cartoons, Comedy

Man, that final weekend in August. The August of not a lot of movies!

And this one weekend had three big ones I had to see. Who knew a day would come when an X-Men movie would not be prioritized of all else for me after a lifetime of my affinity for the franchise? And it’s not because I’m not excited. I’d be here for it even if no one else thought it looked good. And public opinion is not seeming to be largely against its quality.

Nah. I’m holding off on that, which is a film that looks somewhat appropriate for the Halloween season in its horror overtones, and the new Bill-Ted movie because of Phineas and Ferb. It hasn’t done much in years, but I still love the soundtrack, which includes some cuts from their first movie, like the song Slash played on. And was called out in for the guitar solo.

Now they have another movie, and since the whole franchise is predicated on endless summer, it felt right to fit it within the season. So yeah. In the words of Phineas, “Alright, Slash, let’s go.”

All of you are called Slash for the purposes of that quotation.

Bonus Question!

Worst Phineas?

Phineas Mason, the Tinkerer, was a bit of a jerk. Especially to Spider-Man.

X-Song Rights

I just had this dream where some producer I was thinking about working with maliciously acquired the rights to my songs, and I didn't know how they could have been sold to him by someone else in the first place. Then I did some investigating and discovered that the rights were somehow held my Charles Xavier, and I didn't know why I would have given them to him. Like . . . I like the guy, and I trust him to a point, but I'm holding the rights to my songs till I die.

Maybe that was it. Since this is a world with Charles Xavier, death is less permanent. I probably died with a will that transferred the song rights to him and then got resurrected but forgot to go through the legal processes that would revert the rights to me.

Anyway, when I woke up I briefly dislocated my shoulder, but I'm fine now.

Bonus Question!

Trustworthiest X-Man?

On the whole, I'm inclined to go with Sam Guthrie, the Cannonball. He's a good kid. And nigh invulnerable when he's blasting.

ImpulSilver

I’ve been reading Peter David’s old Young Justice series from the 90s, and one of the things that sticks out is Impulse’s resemblance to the X-Men movie version of Quicksilver, who bears little resemblance to the comics version. Although he was also written to great effect by David in the 90s. Did someone in the production room for “Days of Future Past” just finish reading David’s X-Men stuff and say “You know who we need in this movie? That speedy dude Peter David made so awesome two decades ago!”? And the writers just assumed he was talking about Impulse instead of Quicksilver and wrote the script accordingly. Which actually worked out pretty well.

Bonus Question!

Worst Quicksilver?

If Quickstrike and Silverbolt from “Beast Wars” ever became a celebrity couple.

Gifted and Giving

I was watching "The Gifted" and musing about the decision to use the Strucker name for the main family. In the Marvel comics that serve as loose basis for the show, the name is owned by an old Nazi ally and his children, Andreas and Andrea. Like the show's Strucker kids, they're mutants. But the show's quite free of Nazis. These televised Struckers are just basic, affluent suburbanites. But then they turn out to be suburbanites whose genetic makeup exposes them to a world outside their sheltered existence. And this is a world against which their father's profession places him in direct opposition.

Unlike previous antagonists to Marvel's mutants, like the similarly named Stryker, the Strucker patriarch seems to hold little in the way of ideological hatred for the mutant race. He's just doing his job. A job that happens to involve persecution of  an underprivileged minority.
Incidentally, the Strucker siblings of the comics did eventually realise that wallowing in their socioeconomic superiority to the detriment of the rest of the world wasn't really the way to go, and they made some attempt to get out and do some good. The show's kids seem to be on a similar path.

So. This show. It's like "X-Men" without X-Men. It also features Nazi descendants without any actual hint of Nazism. But as the themes the X-Men characters bring don't require a team by that name to be present, the show does a fairly elegant job of displaying the deleterious effect of a chauvinist worldview in the absence of any organisation that explicitly espouses it.
Basically, we get to see the X-Men fight Hydra on television without a whole mess of rights issues.

Bonus Question!

Is "Nightmare Before Christmas" a Halloween film or a Christmas one?
Since its plot revolves around the protagonist's journey to understand the meaning of Christmas, I've always taken the latter position. But in its country of origin, I could see a compromise. It starts at Halloween and goes towards Christmas. Maybe that makes it an ideal Thanksgiving movie. That's a pretty underserved market.

Dancing on the Tables of My Childhood

When I first realised that the premier pilot of "The Force Awakens" was portraying Apocalypse, there was a part of me that basically just wanted to see Poe Dameron with vague omnipotence and blue lips. Instead, the interpretation was closer to full Palpatine, and it worked deliciously.

I think that this film might have been the weakest showing for Scott's glasses, but I suppose that Oakley hadn't quite achieved market dominance in the Eighties. However, I think that this visor might be the best of the series. It evens out.

But Nightcrawler got to be himself! Really, it's a role that looks on paper like a fitting role for Alan Cumming's brand of witty panache, but the direction of the movie in which he appeared suppressed that aspect of the character. Not the case here. This Nightcrawler was the one I loved in most other incarnations. Man, it was the one who danced on the table in the opening credits of every episode of "X-Men: Evolution". Who cares if Angel got turned into Billy Idol? For one thing, that was glorious in its own right. For another, we got classic Kurt Wagner. That's a win, babe.

For all the haranguing about the division of intellectual property between Marvel Studios and other production houses, one would assume that Pizza Dog's rights would be tied to Hawkeye. Yet this Fox film explicitly features a dog mainly identifiable by his attachment to pizza. Way to slide one beneath the lawyers, Fox! Living up to that name!

Speaking of things that fall under the vast umbrella of Disney! That moment with Quicksilver and his mother? "I'm not afraid." "You should be." Totally reminiscent of "The Empire Strikes Back"? And Peter was totally staring off with Skywalker face as the scene ended. And then the next one began with some of the students in a discussion about the showing of "Return of the Jedi" they'd just viewed. And the activation of Cerebro looks like hyperspace. But that last one's a bit of a stretch.

Anyway, I'll never get tired of hearing Xavier's refrain of "old friend" with Magneto. Keep on feeling, Chuck. Your love is beautiful.

Bonus Question!

What are you calling right now?

Next film opens with an X-Mansion baseball game. Calling it right now.