Saw X-Men: First Class. Thoughts:

1) X-Factor (That was the British team on Muir Island, right?) meets Mad Men wouldn’t sound like a promising concept, guess I’d’ve been wrong. Let me know when they do one with Mojo and Spiral and Arcade and the Brood. That sentence started as a joke, but seriously let me know.

2) The campiest fucking Nazi sequences in a decade where Tarantino made a Nazsploitation movie.

3) I always wanted Magneto to use some metal type to imprint something on someone’s forehead. If I ever write an X-Men story, “Magneto fight in the print shop” is a given. Or maybe Rogue vs. Magneto or some way to give someone else the power, the dude’s just so goddamn dour.

4) The moments? Good. The connecting tissue between? Awkward. The expository dialogue? Terrible. Below actual 1962 X-Men comics level.

5) wow January Jones cannot put words together into speech the way humans put words together into speech

6) gay male gaze much? Maybe that’s a residue of the weird Britishness. Or maybe that’s how Emma Frost turned from a 14 year old’s idea of sexy to a 9 year old’s idea of sexy.

7) a world in which Nazi research discovers genetic particularities that yield mystic powers is obviously a world in which Germany wins WWII

7.5) oh yeah but I guess Captain America was also punching Hitler in the face

8) as I understand it, the sorting at inprocessing was actually the least forceful, most polite and manipulative part of concentration camp life

9) all in all, a decent job of doing something new and interesting while simultaneously maintaining canon and throwing in a bunch of fanservice touches. Best movie at this since Resident Evil: Apocalypse. (which not only made sense, but it made the existing canonical Resident Evil game plots make sense, which is an amazing accomplishment.) Basically ran subtext as text, with mixed results. Worth it.

10) it must be fun to be Kevin Bacon