On the movie-going experience: I still love sitting in a darkened theater, munching incredibly fattening popcorn and washing it down with at least 56 ounces of sugary soda (my favorite theater chain in Buffalo has switched from Pepsi products to Coke, which means I have to drink regular Coke because I think Diet Coke is gross, while Diet Pepsi is my favorite carbonated beverage of all time). I love seeing movies an that huge screen, which is the way they’re intended to be seen, after all.

But theaters seem to be actively trying to encourage people to wait for the video.

First of all, theaters are never warm enough anymore. I know, it’s expensive to heat a bunch of cavernous rooms, especially on a Monday when there just aren’t enough bodies present to help bring the temperature up, but sheesh. When I step out into 55-degree air after the show, I should not feel like I’m warming up.

Second: this crap before the movie has got to go. Previews used to be fun, but now there are too damned many of them. Four is about my limit before I start getting impatient; the other day when I saw X2 I counted twice that many. And previews are all the same now: a shot or two of “normal life”, followed by a shot or two of what happens to disrupt “normal life”, than a lot of frenetic crap with the volume rising through it all. Then, just as the trailer becomes deafening, the sound cuts out long enough to show the advertised film’s lead actor uttering some kind of clever line, and then there’s one final burst of deafening stuff before the tagline, title and release date are flashed on the screen. If you’re going to make me sit through eight previews, at least make them somewhat different.

And ads before movies are getting annoying. I can deal with the one for Fandango.com, because that’s actually a movie-related service that’s relevant to the product at hand. But as much as I find smoking a disgusting habit, and as supportive I am of the efforts to make smoking illegal everywhere except Kalispell, Montana, I really don’t want to endure an anti-smoking propaganda ad before a movie in a cold-ass theater.

Oh, to return to previews for just a minute: just show the previews for movies that are coming out in the next year or so, thank you very much. Don’t show me previews for what’s actually playing just down the hall at the same multiplex. Believe me, I know what’s out now. And for the love of GOD, don’t show me previews for movies that were out six months ago, and are now coming out on DVD. BlockBuster can handle that. I can get through the movie-going experience just fine without being told when Die Another Day is coming to DVD.

All this pre-movie stuff has the effect of requiring me to set aside at least three hours to see a two-hour movie, and that’s not including drive time. The other day I left the house at noon to do the following: Stop at Office-Max to make one hundred copies of a sales letter; Stop at the post office to mail out three short stories; See X2. All three stops, and my home, are within five miles of one another. I got back to the house just before 5:00, and I didn’t stand on line more than five minutes at the post office or at Office Max.

The other effect of all this extra crap before the movie is even worse: it means that invariably, my bladder is reaching capacity just as the film is moving into its third act. I don’t think I need to say anything more than that.

As for the theaters themselves: I love Regal Cinemas, with the huge seats and the stadium seating. That rules. And it’s nice that the door to the auditorium is located down this little hall and around a corner, so when someone enters or leaves during the show the light from the hallway doesn’t spill into the theater. But the presence of knobs and tension-bars, and the requisite loud clanking noise that goes along with them whenever the door is opened or closed, has got to go. And for God’s sake, drop that white-shirt, black bow tie and burgundy vest outfit for the employees. Yeah, a perky high-school or college-aged girl looks cute as hell in that uniform, but nobody else does. Especially the guys. You could put Brad Pitt in one of those uniforms, and he’s going to look vaguely like Ralph Wiggum.

But hey, the floors aren’t quite as sticky and nasty as they used to be.

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X2. Wow.

(For a spoiler-free review, go check out this one, by the Saruman to my Gandalf. I have no compunctions about discussing spoilers when I do reviews here. You all know the drill.)

In a lot of ways I’m still a comic-book geek at heart, despite the fact that I am no longer a regular reader of the medium. Even though I have no idea what’s going on with Marvel Comics these days (How many Spiderman titles are there, anyway? What’s with all these “Ultimate” lines of classic Marvel characters? ), I remember with fondness the years I spent following all the events in the Marvel Universe. I never tried much to get into the DC Universe, even when they decided to blow it all up and start over in the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths series. Marvel was my thing, and while Spiderman was my favorite, I also faithfully followed the adventures of the team of mutants created by Professor Charles Xavier.

So, I’m pretty much the intended audience of the X-Men movies.

I liked the first one, but I found it too short when it came out three years ago. Entire bits of plot exposition were omitted, and the characters were drawn in something like shorthand. The film started with a lot of the X-Men mythology already in place, which disappointed me a bit; one of the charms of my favorite comic-book movies has been the visualization of the character origins. Yeah, the last forty-five minutes or so of Superman is kind of pedestrian, but all the stuff leading up to that is so good that I’m OK with coasting the last act of the film. Ditto Spiderman, with its wonderful first two-thirds and nearly disastrous conclusion. This may be why I’ve never totally warmed to the Batman movies; the one that comes closest to really addressing the formative experiences of Bruce Wayne happens to be my favorite of the series, Batman Forever (the third one, when Val Kilmer played the Caped Crusader). But still, X-Men was still very good, even if I believed at the time (and still do) that if only they’d fleshed out their story a bit more with an addition half-hour or so, it could very well have been the best comic-book movie ever made.

Well, I guess the powers-that-be liked what they saw in that first movie, because in the sequel, X2 (lame title, that), the budget appears to have been expanded and the reins loosened. The result is, for me, the second-best comic-book movie I’ve ever seen. This movie is just pure, comic-book fun from the first scene to the last. I felt like I was actually reading one of those old Chris Claremont issues of The Uncanny X-Men.

In fact, if there’s a problem with this movie, that might be it. I suspect that someone who doesn’t know the X-Men from the Power Pack (look them up yourself, I’m not explaining them!) might have some problems following what goes on here. But then, maybe not. I really can’t say, but the movie does assume familiarity with the first movie, and when the characters made passing references to those events, I fondly recalled the helpful little corner-boxes in the pages of the comic when someone would refer to a past happening, like if the current issue was #231, the box would read “That happened in #217. -Ed.” The X-Men comics told stand-alone stories with less frequency than just about any other series that I could recall; instead, every story would usually end up playing some role in continuity somewhere, even if you couldn’t initially tell how. Some reviews of this film that I’ve seen complain that the film spends too much time setting up the inevitable X3, and while I can see the complaint, I also think this is one of those “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature” moments. Anyone familiar with the comics knows that setting up future events is always a big part of what’s going on, what with the always-shadowy origin of Wolverine (which I’m not sure was ever revealed in its entirety), the constant arrival of new and young mutants on the scene, the constant escape of some villains and the deaths of others, and the film’s very last shot.

(You can tell who read the comic and who didn’t just by observing their reaction to this shot. The ones who read the comic are the ones going, “Oh, WOW! How soon ’til the next movie! Holy crap!!”, while the ones who didn’t read the comic are going, “Gee, what’s that thing? Huh? What’s going on?”)

So, while I can see that people unfamiliar to the X-Men mythos might have trouble grokking what’s going on, well…I also have to note that I’m not one of them, and I write reviews based on my experience in a movie, not in terms of someone else. (Which is probably why I can get so very long-winded.)

I won’t go into separate praisings of all the actors, because the afore-mentioned, above-linked Demon From DC pretty much nails all that. I will note that Hugh Jackman can have the Wolverine part until he no longer wants it; Famke Jannsen is wondrous as Jean Grey; and that I actually liked Nightcrawler, for once. (He was never my favorite X-Man, but this film pushed me quite a ways toward his corner.) I found Storm a bit lame in the first movie, but here, she was awesome. She was probably the X-Man most short-changed by the first film’s lack of running-time. And I’m not sure which great actor I am more jealous of: Christopher Lee (who gets to play the villains in the LOTR and Star Wars movies), or Ian McKellen (who is Gandalf in LOTR and Magneto here).

A few final, random musings on X2:

:: When I stopped reading the comics (when I went off to college, and money for things like comics became a memory as distant as the dinosaurs), Magneto had actually “rehabilitated” and taken Professor X’s place as the head of the Xavier School. So, I’m having a little trouble recalibrating for “evil” Magneto.

:: But then, I love how this film brought up an old plot-device that Chris Claremont often used in the comics: forcing the X-Men to team up with one of their usual enemies to combat a far worse one. The blurring of the lines between the good guys and the bad guys was a staple of the comics.

:: OK, time to admit a little ignorance…I never read anything featuring Lady Deathstrike. I get that she’s a “follow-up” project to Wolverine, so she has the same adamantium skeleton and claws like his, but where did she get the same healing ability? That’s Wolverine’s actual mutant-power; everything else of his is “man-made”. Does the fact that she has the same power mean that mutant powers can be replicated?

:: Magneto’s escape may be the best bad-guy-escaping-the-inescapable-prison scene ever.

:: Bring on Dark Phoenix and the Hellfire Club for the third movie.

:: Cyclops could use something to do next time.

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Novel Editing Update:

As of this morning, I am a little more than one-fourth of the way through the book. I have excised just under 3,300 words. That seems a little low, considering my goal is to get rid of a total of around 19,000; but I haven’t hit the longest chapters yet.

Editing, thus far, seems to be a combination of ruthlessness (“Must….cut….more….words!”) and annoyance (“My God, did I really write that?! Why would I ever write that?! It’s incomprehensible crap!”). Of course, it always seems this way when I’m editing my own short fiction, but the effect is startlingly magnified on a project of this scope.

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The definition of foul play: While Cat Number One is doing its business in the litter box (we have the covered litter box, which is much better for odor-control), Cat Number Two lurks inches away from the opening, waiting to pounce at the first sign that Cat Number One is finished.

I doubt very much that any cat lover ever forgets, in the back of their minds, that cats really are evil. But we love ’em anyway. ‘Tis a cross to bear.

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There will be another day for the citizens of Stuckeyville.

NBC has renewed Ed, one of my favorite shows despite some recent hiccups with the writing. (Remember: It’s always the writing.) Interestingly, they are returning the show to its 8:00 pm Wednesday time slot, despite the fact that it actually performed better, ratings-wise, on Fridays at 9:00. But I’ll take it.

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It occurred to me this morning that Democrats don’t do particularly well when using metaphor to express their points. At least, they’re not as successful at it as conservatives are. Everyone can cite Ronald Reagan’s mythical welfare-queen, drawing multiple checks to defraud the system, even though it was never substantiated; ditto the Viet Nam veterans who were spit upon and kicked and treated like scum upon their return from that war. But when Democrats try this, their efforts are generally pooh-poohed and investigated, with the results of said investigation somehow hanging around their necks like an albatross to a far greater degree than ever for a Republican. So it is that Al Gore, for example, takes on a reputation as a guy constantly “lying” to “reinvent himself” — even if the “lies” are, in some cases, actually true and in other cases simple instances that could be attributed to a faulty memory, but nobody remembers, say, Phil Gramm and Dickie Flatt, or Dick Armey and the guy who lost his job because the government-run institution where he worked couldn’t afford the minimum wage. It’s weird.

Anyway, I’m wondering if Democrats shouldn’t work harder to get their points across in more concrete terms, using metaphors if they can. For example, the “Top One Percent” Tax Cut. Now that we’ve established that the tax cut will mostly benefit the top one percent, and now that we’ve established just who the top one percent are (i.e., how much you have to make to get into that club), maybe we can illustrate it even better. Here are a couple of examples:

:: If you are elected to the United States Senate, and if you then become the Senate’s Majority Leader, and you have no other sources of income other than your salary as Senator, in order to break into the top one percent you would need to double your income. (Senator Bill Frist’s salary: $161,200 per year.)

:: If you become President of the United States, the news is good: you’ll be in the top one percent, at $400,000 per year. Of course, you won’t be in the Privileged Percentile by much, and if that percentile continues to move upward as wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority, you might well fall out of the Privileged Percentile over the course of an eight-year service as President.

:: But, proving the old adage that the job ins’t worth a bucket of warm spit, as Vice President of the United States you’ll only be slightly closer to breaking into the Privileged Percentile than the Senate Majority Leader ($186,300 per year). Maybe Dick Cheney can get an old crate and set up a Halliburton Stock Stand on the sidewalk in front of his secured location.

:: Maybe you were just selected by the Carolina Panthers in the sixth round of the recent NFL Draft. Sixth-rounders don’t tend to command a whole lot in the way of signing bonuses and large, up-front contracts, so there’s a good chance you’ll end up playing for the league minimum for a player with less than one credited season of NFL service (assuming you make the team). The bad news: you won’t crack the Privileged Percentile ($225,000 per season). But if you work hard, play the game well, and manage to hang on until your third season, you’ll just make it ($375,000 per season). Of course, if you’re around that long you can hold out and get the big bucks. For pointers on this, write to Emmit Smith’s agent, or Bruce Smith’s agent.

:: But then, maybe you don’t like playing in the cold and the snow. Warm weather’s your thing, and the green grass at Wrigley sets your heart a-flutter. It’s baseball for you, then. Will you enter the Privileged Percentile making Major League Baseball’s minimum salary for a rookie? It could be….this might be….oooooh, foul ball! No, you won’t be in the Top One Percent. But you’ll be closer than that poor slob in his rookie NFL season, at $300,000 per season.

:: OK, screw those two sports. You like ice. Lots and lots of ice. Hockey it is. Minimum salary for a rookie in the NHL: $150,000 a year. Keep looking. Senator Frist’s job is looking pretty good, eh? (But if you wait a year, and enter the NHL in 2004, you’ll make $185,000 a season. You’ll be breathing down Dick Cheney’s neck.)

:: Oh, wait a minute! Basketball! That’s everybody’s favorite. Everybody wants to be like Mike, right? And with all that merchandising, surely an NBA rookie making the minimum would earn the favor of President Bush’s tax cut! We’re in like Flynn! Well, not quite. But you’re getting closer; closer, even, than the baseball guy. ($349,458 per year.)

:: OK, so you’re in the NBA as a rookie, and you’re this close to making enough to get that tax cut. Unfortunately, your equally-gifted-at-basketball twin sister, who just signed a rookie contract with a WNBA team, might be better off coaching a college team than trying to play professionally. And entering the Privileged Percentile? Fuhgeddaboudit ($30,000 per season).

:: Well, fine. I didn’t want to do any of those things, anyway. I just take my chances with being a freelance writer. That’s gotta be worth something….

[At this point, the writer of this post expired as a result of his head exploding. Al Qaeda involvement is not suspected in the explosion of the head, but Attorney General Ashcroft has promised a full investigation.]

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I’m not following this flap at the New York Times much, except to note that I find stories like this really pretty funny when they come up. I’m reminded of something Roger Ebert wrote when he reviewed the film Catch Me If You Can:

It is probably true that most people will take you at face value until they have reason to do otherwise. I had a friend who had risen to a high level in her organization and was terrified her secret would be discovered: She never attended college. My guess, and it proved accurate, was that nobody would ever think to ask her. It is probably an even better guess that no patient in a hospital would ask to see a doctor’s medical school diploma.

This Blair guy, it turns out, was pretty much of a bullshit-artist. A lot of commentators want to read something big and momentous into this whole business — something about hypocrisy and affirmative action — but it’s pretty clear, from what I’ve seen, that what’s at work here is little more than that wonderful part of human nature that makes us all susceptible to bullshit. Hell, one could probably make a case that bullshit is even necessary for human interactions to proceed the way we generally want them to, so that when things like this NYT bit happen, we would almost be better off chalking it up as an example of “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Ah well….

(BTW, it occurs to me that conservatives don’t like the NYT because it’s a liberal paper. And liberals don’t like the NYT because it’s not a liberal paper. Who does like it, then?)

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The weather here in Buffalo has been uniformly lousy the last few days — cold, windy, rainy. Since most of our weather patterns start as unsettled systems coming in from the west, I am putting the blame for this on the good people of Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and the state of Michigan. Cut it out, people.

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Kirk to Enterprise….

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Department of Bizarre Convergences, Report #47563:

On Saturday afternoon, one of Buffalo’s TV stations aired the film JFK. On Saturday night, another of Buffalo’s TV stations aired Bull Durham.

Thus, in the course of six hours I got to hear Kevin Costner argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy for a vast conspiracy to kill President Kennedy (JFK), and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone (Bull Durham).

(The fact that I am actually observing things like this indicates one of two things: [a] I am in tune with and grokking the myriad possibilities of life, or [b] I desperately need to get some gainful employment so as to better apply my mental energy. I report, you decide….)

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