this looks like the Avengers and The Hulk are actually challenging the red baron, and I’m glad they’re doing so (except for Iron Man, who appears to be reaching for mozzarella sticks. The 11-13 count is uncertain because Iron Man may have taken some before they got to the box). I suspect regardless of the outcome the pizza’s quality won’t be noticeably affected for the worse.

I don’t enjoy seeing scores of government and military employees get emotionlessly killed and forgotten in movies and video games. Avengers was a nice contrast to the last Marvel-branded film I saw, X-Men: First Beet, in actually making an effort to appreciate special agents and whatnot, even if they’re mostly probably jerks. In the Xmen movie, some incredibly cheap devil guy teleports around killing, in seconds, multitudes of devoted operatives who likely trained for years to get their positions. He does it by teleporting next to people, grabbing them, teleporting again to some place high up, dropping the person, and then teleporting again before he has time to fall. He does this to about fifty people in a few seconds, with no apparent physical drain from constantly carrying fully grown men through invisible voids nor disorientation from appearing in 30 different places in under a minute. I just know if I got to play as that guy in a video game I’d be allowed to teleport maybe three times before resting or it would cause mortal personal injury for some reason and it would be more of a nuisance than a benefit because the entire planet would be designed by someone fully aware that I have this skill and who resents me for having it because that’s the kind of scumbag you have to be to work at a software company that has enough money to license movie characters. I would still have to kill thousands of citizens but I’d have to do it entirely by punching to not get penalized, apart from the boredom penalty of punching all the time. Gosh now I’m mad and none of that even happened.

But this isn’t an imaginary video game, it’s real movie, and all those people are dead now, and the dumb kids who are supposed to become x-men don’t seem bothered and are minimally sidetracked from their regularly scheduled poor me I’m white, well off, have magic powers and absolutely no social anxiety routine. There is a black guy but he gets killed also, almost immediately after 20 million dollars is spent showing how great his mutation is. Again, the white kids quickly get over it. And there’s a blue person but it’s clearly played by a white woman and in any event nobody bothers trying to kill her because her secret power is that she is naked. I would gladly have offered forth a dope for the role if the alleged writer agreed to change the script so the dope got killed instead but negotiations broke down on the highway and nobody is stopping to help, you creeps.

I mention this movie now because it was watched in my presence two months ago at the place where I spent a week getting sunburnt, on a television machine in the near distance, while I tried to draw pictures with a mouse with a sunburn. In this way I missed the beginning of the film and didn’t give it my full attention until half way through, so I acknowledge that my assessment may be only partially absolutely right.

All these mutant outcasts in this xmen movie -immediately- get along with each other, drinking beer, listening to crummy music, embracing the latest fashion and language trends. THEY complain that society doesn’t accept them. The vampire show that also got watched in my presence is the same. Drink drink sex gender relationships. All these pouty aliens get along better with the “humans” that supposedly oppress them despite not having magic powers than I do, and thus a real person inherits their fictional poutiness. However is that fair? Look I’d go out and prove it if I wasn’t busy putting things on the internet.

Unlike the xmen, the vampires seem to have powers from the start. The one character who was the focus of the episode could read minds, evidently without wishing to. How is she not under attack from stray thoughts at all times? As a child she would have to be making moral decisions constantly. How much knowledge, that she came across inadvertently or unfairly, just from wanting to know it, but not necessarily wanting to steal it, was fair to use to her advantage? Would she have to deliberately handicap herself to offset it? Would she take full advantage of it? Either situation seems absolutely unfeasible to end somebody up at a low status food-service job, yet there she is, miserable at a diner, with coworkers who resent the mind-reading. You would either get yourself a rich and comfortable, thoroughly dishonest life or seek some situation where you could be free of having to make those decisions. And is it really dishonest to use the ability that you were born with? how does this person have remotely normal interests? How does she not feel totally alone and isolated from every person? I understand she is interested in the scummy vampire because his mind cannot be read, but clearly the guy is a creep and not a satisfying end. Does the show explain all these things? (a simple “yes” or silence will suffice if it does; if I had no problem with it I would have forgotten it immediately because all that stuck in my mind was the problem.)

I am absolutely not overthinking it because scrutiny is a consequence of trying to make fantasy gritty and plausible. I am thought grit. I wish people would not watch these things in my presence because I neither have time to watch them nor to ponder them later. I don’t have time because I spend so much of it writing these things. Also, looking for pictures to insert in them and then doing that.

I don’t have any good vampire pictures.

Hey Xmen! OKAY! it’s the last 15 minutes, everybody put on the costumes that the ads imply we’re wearing the whole movie and then have one mission together where we actually do the stuff people paid to see us do. Okay now let’s REBOOT so we don’t risk having to make a sequel where there’s time for stuff to happen. Did nobody learn anything from Star Wars 6: Episode 3? every ad for pepsi, doritos, cheezits and craftmatic adjustable beds had the real Darth Vader in full darth garb whoring it out to sea and then he’s only in the actual movie long enough to inspire a lame meme and then one power-point scene transition later he’s done.
X-Men: First Blood 2: Rambo: The Treasure of Sierra Madrock also seemed to waste a lot of time showing off effects for characters that don’t matter. As I said, the guy who could transform based on his surroundings was killed almost immediately. I suppose I didn’t expect him to get killed but apart from swerving me that was pointless. The Beast is a regular human for most of the movie and gets transformed into a megabeast toward the end, and then pilots an airplane so his beastness is irrelevant. What’s really dumb is that prior to then, when he’s mostly human, he’s trying to scientifically transform himself into a total normal human, which would deprive him of his magical beast powers which are only visually evident from his funny looking feet. What a fickle scumbag. He devotes all this energy to fitting in with other fickle scumbags. I know I wouldn’t drink a potion that made me not have a problem with this. It’s annoying but it’s my only interesting attribute. Maybe that’s the moral of the story and I’m supposed to dislike it, but I more want to dislike the writer for making Beast do something dumb that makes me dislike him. If you want to do that, maybe you can cast Kelsey Grammer in the role next time. What’s that? Oh I didn’t hear anything because I am static words on a computer screen.
Surely, surely, having funny looking feet makes it difficult to be naked in pursuit of life’s sexes, but even that isn’t a factor because Dr. Beast’s mutual affectionery is the Naked blue dope Lady, who also looks weird. And then Dr. Beast tries to get them BOTH to drink the normal potion, and then there’s a really uncomfortable scene about that, which makes ME uncomfortable and additionally wastes time. I hate that guy.

There are too many of these “superhero movies” that are more about the secret identities than the heroes. They’re REGULAR FOLKS JUST LIKE YOU who just HAPPEN to have SUPER POWERS sometimes.
Xmen: Playin’ for Keeps kept the “establish decade by constantly blasting contemporary top 10 hits that none of the characters are allowed to be indifferent toward the first 15 seconds of every scene” to a minimum. Nonetheless the mutants and normal humans are indistinguishable in appearance and behavior. Although apart from the stock President Kennedy footage and James Bond submarine sets there is no distinctive sensory hint that this is the 1950s.

I don’t want to go to the pictures to see a man, I want to see a Spider Man. I do have a special fondness for heroes doing heroic acts out of costume (as opposed to someone like Superman who will let the world go to hell to keep Clark Kent employed even though he doesn’t require money to sustain himself), but these are just heroes being normal boring oafs who have problems so that they seem realistic. No! We spent the whole last decade being plausible, making snarky references to stuff from fake comic books or cartoons that real movie people don’t do, and we haven’t stopped.

The Avengers! I liked their movie despite a solid 20 minute discomfort block in the middle where the main characters stand around in a room and bicker, though they showed little regard for civilians by not bothering to evacuate New York City when they knew alien turtles were coming. Those civilians then showed little self-preservation by continuing to labor in their office buildings and create TWO WAY TRAFFIC on the bridges around Manhattan. What idiots are going INTO the city when they see stuff blowing up? (my brother the Alex Jones fan will insist it’s the crews assigned to remove the evidence of controlled demolition from the rubble of the World Trade Center)

Loki doesn’t cut it as a villain, especially when there are four to six people who can beat him up at any one time. That useless tornado guy from the Xmen movie should have been here. Somebody who watches more movies than I do insists that Loki is deliberately pathetic so that the film’s focus is on the heroes working together. Great, but now the next movie is Iron Man 3, not Avengers 2. I didn’t even get much of an impression that Iron Man needed help here.

What if I don’t get a sequel? I was let down that this movie didn’t take the chance to show off Captain America’s pantomime skills. This is very helpful to people like me, who’ve never read the comic books, as it gives us important background information. We learn not only that Captain America knows where his watch is, but also that the Avengers apparently do not own a clock. Additionally, we learn that this is worthy of devoting precious level transition space to. The movie was too busy showing me what could very well have been the exact same footage of Green Goblin apprentices getting blown up over and over the final twenty minutes.

I was also disappointed that Iron Man never called Hulk a brainless gargoyle.

Oh gasp! I ought to have known! Spiderman, Xmen, Avengers, all united beneath the bow tie banner! I never had a chance!

UNLESS Roseanne has secretly gone undercover as Storm in an effort to sabotage the patriarchal dress scheme from within! But whose side is she really on? Find out if I mention it again!

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I will clarify that I found the X-Man film entertaining on the whole, but the small things that stuck in my mind refused to leave until I deposited them here.