July 14, 2000
Fangrrl Alert!
I broke my streak! Argh! ah well. I honestly did think about writing an entry yesterday, but faced with missing a day or putting up something that was either untrue or stupid, I decided it was better to miss a day. It's been quite a week. Old problems rearing their heads again, which I haven't been writing about here, as usual. I'm fairly certain my dosage of Zoloft needs to be increased, but of course, I have to wait for the doctor to agree with me on that one.
(Warning: You're about to learn of another potential/erstwhile geeky obsession of Lisa's. Comics. It hasn't happened yet, friends and neighbors -- except for the short-lived Aria, but it could.)
Now, lest I begin to sound like a raving fangrrl here, I saw X-Men today. I've never read the comic, but I did watch the TV series that Fox ran a few years back with fair regularity. And enough of my friends are into the comics that I know a good part of the backstory. But I still wasn't terribly psyched about the movie until I saw the preview back when I saw Titan AE. Then I was psyched about the movie.
To put it briefly, it more than lived up to my expectations. I went in expecting a decent summer action/adventure movie, and got that, plus a little extra. The casting, based on what little I know of the comic, was better than I expected. I missed Storm's melodramatic, cheesy incantations when she'd use her powers though. Halle Berry was just too... calm, too quiet. Patrick Stewart was absolutely perfect, of course. There's just nobody else that could have played Professor X. I remember back when news first got out that they were doing an X-Men movie, Hollingsworth and I debated casting. We both fell down on the job, except for Stewart. We both wanted someone like Glen Danzig for Wolverine, because he's short, bulky, and grumpy. Unfortunately, he's also not an actor.
See, Wolvie was always my favorite X-Man. I don't know why. He's grouchy, hairy, stinky (more than likely), violent and he's got more hangups than all of my RPG characters put together. But I liked him. He got the good lines, and it was neat to see him occasionally hint at the maybe-sensitive male hiding in there somewhere over Storm or Jean Grey or whoever.
In that sense, the movie did not let me down. Not only was Wolverine pretty much the focus character, but he was the same grumpy, growly, violent yet adorable Wolvie I'd come to know and love. And well, I was chatting with KT earlier, and she put it best when she said, "[Hugh Jackman] was almost too sexy to play Wolverine." Yours truly, my friends, was not complaining. Not in the least. Once in a great while, his native Australian accent crept out, but that's forgivable.
Overall, it was a blast of a movie. Maybe about fifteen or twenty minutes too short. And after the setup they gave themselves, I want the sequel out next summer, damn it!
Now. The previews... those were something else altogether. There were three: Bedazzled, The Nutty Professor 2, and Castaway.
Bedazzled looked potentially amusing, what with Brendan Frasier as a geek and Elizabeth Hurley as Satan, but the trick is going to be making me believe Brendan Frasier is a geek, especially after The Mummy. The boy's just too cute and a little too well-built to pull it off, I think. I almost didn't want to write anything at all about The Nutty Professor 2. Garbage. Absolute garbage. While the packed theatre rolled around laughing to the preview (which included jokes about penises, farts, toothless oral sex and naked old ladies in addition to the requisite fat jokes), I sat there feeling somewhat ill. Don't get me wrong, I can deal with gross-out humor to an extent, but if the preview makes me feel squirmy and icky? No thank you.
And then there's Castaway, a movie starring Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt and coming out in time for Christmas. Tommy Boy is apparently a Federal Express employee whose plane crashes, making him a (you guessed it!) castaway on a deserted island. How do we know he's a Fed Ex employee? Because the first minute of the preview has the Fed Ex logo displayed in as many places and ways as possible. I think the movie should be retitled: Fed Ex: When It Absolutely Positively Has to Get There Overnight, You Damn Well Better Hope It Isn't On Tom Hanks' Plane, or How to Make and Sell Your Own 90 Minute Commercial.
And that's my trip to the movies.
Posted by Lisa at July 14, 2000 11:52 PM
