Three Reviews

Yesterdady was movie day. First I went to the theatre to see two comic book movies, GREEN LANTERN, based on the DC Comics character, and then X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, based on the Marvel Comics series.  I grew up on comic books, but only vaguely remember Green Lantern; clearly he wasn’t one of my favorites, and wasn’t one of the more popular comic heroes.  Having that in mind, the film makers spend the first third of the movie filling in the back story of how Green Lantern became Green Lantern.  Actually, he’s only one of many Green Lanterns throughout the universe, each of whom has a ring with the power to do all sorts of amazing stuff.  The ring is powered by a green lantern, and it’s the ring which selects the defender,each of whom has to protect his/her portion of the universe from the evil Parallax – a smoggy cloud with an evil face.  The plot is too convoluted to try to summarize, and it is confusing and hard to follow, but who cares, this is a movie about special effects, which are great.  It does have a very scary villain, a wimpy scientist taken over by the Parallax,who is really, really, scary and creepy.  Nonetheless, Hal Jordan, a great if  irreverent test pilot, is selected by the ring to be earth’s Green Lantern, and in addition to fighting crime, he has to try to save his universe from Parallax.  The movie runs about two hours and is mild fun.  It is pretentious, the dialogue silly, the acting fairly mundane, and the special effects fantastic.  Blake Lively (Is that really her name?) plays Hal’s girlfriend in a truly worthless role, and Tim Robbins give a wooden performance as Hal’s father.  It gets a 5.5 and is not as bad as some other reviewers have said; it’s much better than THE GREEN HORNET, and see it in 3D if you can.

I then stepped into X-MEN: FRST CLASS, just as it began.  This is a much better movie than GREEN LANTERN, and the special effects are almost as good.  It pretty much fillls in the back story of the X-Men who have already appeared in several movies as adults. In this movie they’re teen agers just learning to deal with their special “talents” and being recruited by a young Prof X (and we learn how he came to be confined to a wheel chair)  As the movie develops the viewer is introduced to each of the X-People as they take on their various guises – half for good and half for evil, with some switching back and forth.  This prequel has some contradictions from the earlier movies, but they’re not distracting.  The film is set in 1962, and the Cuban Missile Crisis is an important part of the plot.  The young actors are all pretty good, and January Jones, who plays Emma Frost, who can change herself into a diamond body, is gorgeous!  Kevin Bacon makes for a good James Bond type villain, and Michael Fassbander is excellent as Erik, who beocmes Magneto.  It’s all great fun and gets a socks up 7.9.

Since it was book club night, I picked up a honey mustard chicken sub and went home to see what was on Movies on Demand.  I saw that THE TOWN was still available, and since I’ve read several reviews saying how good it is, decided to watch that.  The Town is a suburb of Boston (I think – everyone has a Boston accent), and it’s essentially a police procedural.  The movie begins with a very long bank robbery that introduces a gang of four, led by Ben Affleck, who take a hostage (Rebecca Hall), later turning her loose  (Come to think of it,  there was no reason for taking a hostage other than to set up the plot).  Affleck has no qualms about being a bank/armored truck robber, but he wants out of the business – which is cohorts don’t want to happen.  Meantime, he tracks down their hostage to make sure she can’t do the gang any harm.  So he picks her up in a laundromat, and very shortly they fall in love (of course).  The rest of the movie follows their growing relationship as the FBI works at tracking down the gang as they continue to rob banks and armored cars.  There is a lot of foul language, some fairly graphic sex, and the story is fairly original and not too predictable.  The actors do a lot of mumbling which is hard to understand.  Blake Lively was also in this film as a former lover of Affleck’s character, and Affleck directed the film.  It was fairly engrossing, so I give it a socks up 6.7.