Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Watched Stranger by the Lake at Ty and Di's house last weekend. Good movie directed by Alain Guiraudie. Also enjoyed Argo , directed by Ben Affleck, though I couldn't see why it should win the Oscar, as so many wanted it to. It's just a well-made movie, not that special. Last night, after dinner with Tim, I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past.  Bryan Singer directed. Sexy scene with Hugh Jackman buck naked but he seemed strangely beside the point in a plot that really revolved around Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and her paramours Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (a very hot Michael Fassbender). Even minor characters such as Beast (Nicholas Hoult) and Major Bill Stryker (Josh Helman) were more interesting. from Panama the first hummingbirds schoolchildren at a waterfall

Two Chicago cops tell the story of their suspension for being derelict of duty, a story of vice, alcoholism, drugs, cannibalism, marital infidelity, violent shootings, dead or dying children . . . and soon you begin to wonder how much more can the story take before descending into melodramatic TV cop drama, and then you realize not very much. Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman try hard to make the script work, but in vain. You wonder what their agents were thinking when they got their stars the gig. Jackman over-acts as the tough, trigger-happy, family man. Craig is more natural, easier to watch. His love for Jackman's wife is the most believable part of the Keith Huff script. The production at Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is directed by John Crowley.

For a movie that purports to explain the origins of the X-Men, the explanation of the origins of Wolverine remains murky to me. Why was the child Logan living with a man he thought was his father, but was not? Why was he sick, with a sickness which the child Victor Creed had when he was younger? Why did Creed keep so malignant a vigil beside Logan's sickbed? Did he know that Logan was his brother then? The answers may be obvious to the comic book fan, but for this quarter-fan, the movie, directed by Gavin Hood, was more obfuscating than not. The sequence showing the two men fighting in all the major American wars--from the Civil War to Vietnam--nicely made the point that the brothers were the two faces of American military power. While Victor Creed hired out his bloodlust, Logan was the troublesome conscience. The rest of the movie did not try for too philosophical a message but plumbed for adrenalin-pumping entertainment in the form of aestheticized violence. The movie was obsesse...