Skip to main content
Tag

x-men first class

Review: X-Men: First Class, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

By Cinema, Reviews

We’re at that time of year when the big stu­di­os role out block­buster after block­buster so that Americans look­ing to escape the stifling heat will choose to find com­fort in cinema air-conditioning and we in New Zealand hope that the cinemas are warm­er than our lounge rooms.

Apart from the Spielberg/Abrams col­lab­or­a­tion Super 8 (next week, folks) all of the big­gies this sea­son are either sequels or com­ic book adapt­a­tions, demon­strat­ing that des­pite all indic­a­tions the bot­tom of the bar­rel hasn’t quite been scraped yet.

X-Men: Furst Class posterAfter three X‑Men films and a hor­rendous Wolverine spin-off Marvel/Fox have gone back to the begin­ning in the now tra­di­tion­al fran­chise re-boot strategy per­fec­ted by Batman and stuffed up com­pletely by Bryan Singer with Superman Returns.

It’s 1962 and the Cold War is heat­ing up. In Oxford a smarmy super-intelligent booze-hound (James McAvoy) is scor­ing with girls thanks to his abil­ity to read minds. The CIA asks him for some help unrav­el­ling the mys­tery of some unex­plained phe­nom­ena in Las Vegas and is per­turbed to dis­cov­er they get his freaky mind con­trol powers as well as his ana­lys­is – and his “sis­ter” Raven (Jennifer Lawrence from Winter’s Bone) who has the abil­ity to change shape at will.

Read More

Review: Thor, Fast 5, The City of Your Final Destination and Mozart’s Sister

By Cinema, Reviews

There are two main­stream com­ic book pub­lish­ing houses, DC and Marvel, and choos­ing between them as a kid was a bit like choos­ing between The Beatles and the Stones. They had dif­fer­ent styles and sens­ib­il­it­ies (and philo­sophies) and after a little bit of exper­i­ment­a­tion you could find a fit with one or the other.

DC had Superman and Batman – big, bold and (dare I say it) one-dimensional char­ac­ters with lim­ited or opaque inner lives. When Stan Lee cre­ated Spider-Man, a teen­age pho­to­graph­er with powers he neither asked for nor appre­ci­ated, he cre­ated a soap opera – a soap opera with aspir­a­tions to high art. As you might be able to tell, I was a Marvel kid.

Read More