‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’: Mutant ’70s will delight fans, baffle most of humanity
Maybe I’m getting cantankerous in my old age, but a barrage of cool special FX does not make a movie, at least not in my book, and the ongoing glut of seamless, more-real digital renderings only exacerbates the problem. Take the “Iron Man” franchise: great character building and back story in chapter one, but by the third one Iron Man suits are flying everywhere and pre-“conscious uncoupling” Gwyneth Paltrow gets a vanity moment to flash her sculpted, post-40 abs – a lot of generic silliness to something that started so rooted and firm. That trend was realized again last week with the “Godzilla” reboot as the spectacle of the spiked Tokyo tosser all but stomped out a solid performance by Bryan Cranston. Here, in a psychedelic flashback to the ’70s, the “X-Men” franchise sacrifices soul for the computer-generated spectacular.
There are some clever, brilliant nuances to “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” such as the scene where Quicksilver (Evan Peters of “American Horror Story”) in a slo-mo microsecond aptly done to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle” rearranges the trajectory of bullets and plays puckish pranks on the guards holding the guns about to take out Professor X (James McAvoy), Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) or when Wolverine travels back to 1973 and wakes up next to a lava lamp and the shrill pitch of Minnie Riperton singing “Lovin’ You” (though I believe that was a ’74 or ’75 song). And so why 1973? Well there’s an impending apocalypse in the now that stems from the actions of a pint-sized McCarthy-minded White House adviser named Trask (Peter Dinklage) who wants to wipe out all the mutants, and to do so he has weaponized a solution by leveraging the DNA of Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). Zany history-rewriting threads involving Nixon and Kennedy ensue and there’s a neat Vietnam spin reminiscent of Zack Snyder’s “Watchmen,” and a follow-on in Paris that intrigues, but the developing action becomes a tedious waiting game pulling the whole construct down and the flashing to and fro begins to take its toll. Continue reading
Why a “name” thespian checks into such a project has to be twofold: a leading-role paycheck for cameo work and exposure – “You’ll become a household name,” you can almost hear an agent say. Think of Marlon Brando in “Superman,” a record payday for a few minutes of labor, though by that time he couldn’t much care about exposure because it invariably became fodder about his increasing corpulence. One too might think of Raymond Burr (“Perry Mason” and old “Ironside”) appearing in the 1956 American recut of the 1954 Japanese “Godzilla” (née “Gojira”). To garner a U.S. market, Burr was edited in as an American in Tokyo as the infamous dino-beast rose up from the ocean depths and merrily stomped the port of Japan.
The premise is quite simple: A man gets in his car and drives for nearly 90 minutes in crisis management mode. Hardy’s Ivan Locke is a high-performing construction foreman building the biggest modern-day skyscraper in the London area, but panicked calls from a woman in a hospital needing his reassurance keep pouring in over his BMW’s Bluetooth system. He also uses the system, a platform for his calm control over things out of his reach and the driving plot device for the film, to let his most loyal know he won’t be there at 5 a.m. when hundreds of cement trucks roll in to pour the building’s foundation. This sets off a management shit storm, but Locke, ever calm and confident, defuses each mini-tempest with reason, explanation and solution. What’s not so easy are the calls from his wife, who is confused as to why he is driving through the night and not home watching the big soccer game with the boys. 
Going back to “Stranger Than Paradise” and “
The film begins tranquilly enough in a sleepy little English shore town in the 1980s, where at a men’s club meeting over beers, the somewhat reluctant Eric (Colin Firth) wistfully recounts his affection for Patti (Nicole Kidman), a women he met recently on a train. Trains and railways happen to be an obsessive hobby for Eric (thus the title). He’s also a kind and engaging soul, and soon enough he and Patti are moving toward marriage in all the most maudlin and pat ways possible. It’s here the film begins to feel dangerously like a large, sugary gobstopper, all fluff and no fire, but then the closet door opens and the skeletons start to pour out. Eric erupts in night terrors, he’s fiscally a disaster and sometimes he mutters to people who aren’t there.
For What it's Worth 