Otherwise known as: DreamWorks Animated Features On Netflix That I’d Missed As A Kid

As it turns out, The Road To El Dorado is hilarious. I don’t know if I’d just set a low bar for wit, being a kids movie, or if it was the Campari granita I was crunching on, but I had a super great time. That the horse stuck around as character! That the music was by Elton John and Tim Rice feat. Hans Zimmer! Stage darlings Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Kline as these adorable optimist/pessimist partners conning their way out of & into adventures and each other’s hearts! A gift, this movie.

Also, a surprisingly sophisticated attitude toward religion? The gods are real, but also they’re fake, but also people already know that, but also there is magic, but also the most powerful sort is rooted within the community itself and the love they show each other — this is pretty impressive stuff for PG! It’s contradictory and so human, and that’s the sort of truth I know.

A more straightforward approach with the spiritual, The Prince of Egypt has a sacred text sincerity note before we even hit the title card. I’m going to trust them that it reflects the story of Moses as told in several religions, and gosh, it’s certainly beautiful enough to feel like a special sort of art. Wonderful songs and absolutely gorgeous animation, painting-like frames that you nearly want to pause and gaze at for a moment to soak in all the richness.

And once again, a fully ridiculous cast: Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover, Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren, Steve Martin, Martin Short. “What on earth!” – me looking at the IMDb page after I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Queen was voicing The Queen. But if we’re going to give out an award for Most Distinctive in this line-up, it’s going to Jeff Goldblum, who either imbues animated characters with his physical presence just with his voice, or the animation happened after the fact and the artists just couldn’t resist.

Stranger Things is really wonderful. The chatter is all about how charmingly nostalgic it is, but I’m actually going to tell you not to pay any heed to that. The word “nostalgia” is only headlining due to the coincidence of timing and population that means the people who still dominate American cultural criticism right now (mostly guys, mid- to late-30s), are the exact group who grew up loving the ’80s movies that were the first of Stranger Thing’s kind — gently scary suburbia sci-fi, where kids on bikes tangle with aliens and shady officials among the trees and cul-de-sacs. But I think for this subset of viewers, memories of their own childhoods have swamped a very cool fact: this 2016 TV show has lifted a whole genre out of the confines of a past decade. And unlike nostalgia, genres are for everybody.

Or to put it another way: I wanted to hug this show to my heart for 100% of the runtime, and my heart had no pre-existing rooms built for any of the things Stranger Things is so affectionately referencing. E.T. spooked me the heck out as a little kid — I remember bits and pieces of the one time I saw it, but my strongest memory is of noping on out of there. I have never seen Stand By Me. I have only seen about half of The Goonies, and that wasn’t until I was in college. I haven’t even seen that other recent retro Spielberg, Super 8. But it’s fine, it’s so fine. Because Stranger Things is a member of a film family, not an advanced course with pre-reqs. If the series were making a commentary on those older entries, subverting that framework or those themes in some way, that would be a different situation, but it’s not doing that at all. It just purely is this. Stranger Things can be the first of its type you see, and it would be so happy to be that for you.

A couple inspirations for this show that I have seen though, and which I suspect Stranger Things owes as much to as any, are The X-Files and Twin Peaks. The X-Files for the creepy conspiracies, obviously, and Twin Peaks for the good investigator. Good as in good at figuring things out, but also good as in good-hearted, good as in good gut-instincts. Because for all that Chief Hopper first shambles onscreen like Orange Is the New Black’s Luschek run through a Bitter Cop filter, we soon find out that he’s built from the same character DNA that gave us the Bookhouse Boys. Hopper may not share much of Agent Cooper’s bright-eyed joy or Sheriff Truman’s dyed-in-the-wool moral fiber, but what he has in spades is that same openness to weird possibilities, and an urge not just to protect, but to believe.

That’s actually something of a trend in Stranger Things — characters who seem like a certain archetype when you first meet them, but reveal themselves to be someone more interesting. The children are their goofy, brave selves right off the bat, and they work beautifully in tandem, because watching the older characters individualize over the season feels sort of like growing up, and beginning to understand that adults were curious kids once, too. The best of the character arcs almost function like their own gentle plot twists, and it’s a delight. This whole show is a delight. There are so many fun and well-crafted details about it that I could talk about, but I’ll resist, because I want everyone to experience them in their full glow, lighting up along the series with the sure, impossible magic of Joyce’s colored lights.

Stoker is, in certain broad strokes, a macabre family drama, but the Stoker of the title is without question India Stoker, and that is why I own this movie. It’s gorgeous, rich with stunning and lightly strange production values, but the movie is not just an exercise in formalism. This is India’s story. The visuals are telling her narrative. She is the heart of the picture and the plot, the supporting characters deliberately kept just that: supporting. And a movie that stays with a girl the whole way through, and not an easily palatable girl at that, is honestly still a refreshing product from today’s film industry.

India is so central to Stoker that her heightened, layered perception of the world is what crafts the texture of the movie itself. The editing flickers like thoughts in places, bleeding across time and space, like when India tips a hanging lamp in the basement to swing across her path, and the beam of light is thrown on the faces of her mother and uncle above in the kitchen just moments before. We see and hear the way India does, and India, bless her, is morbid as hell. She seems to turn the surreal circumstances of her life into her own weird violent fairytale, and so the movie is that too. When we are suddenly given a date partway into the run time, it’s almost bewildering, loose as we were in the stylishly timeless storybook reality of the Stoker property. Following India to high school in the next scene feels almost like the dull, workaday cruelties of the world are intruding on us — how India feels, of course.

Because India, cool as she is toward others, performing emotion for them when necessary but hardly ever voluntarily, feels things profoundly. Sensation is one of the offerings of the world, and she takes it. And this blooms into another refreshingly unusual feature of this murdery Bildungsroman: India’s very individualistic sort of erotic awakening, unabashedly about her own self-discovery, where a partner is rather incidental, even indirect. Again, the story is about her. Though not without influences — India is as hyper-aware of how she is shaped against her fascinating, fucked up family as she is the delicate spider crawling up the inside of her leg.

“Just as the skirt needs the wind to billow,” she tells us in the opening scene, “I’m not formed by things that are of myself alone.” But still: “This is me.” At the end we are returned to that moment, and now know just what she means.

***

Some interesting things about the production of Stoker:

A sound mixer friend of mine happened to see the raw footage coming in from Tennessee, and was amazed at how vivid the colors were in-film, before the color correctors ever got their hands on it. Chung-Hoon Chung  and Chan-Wook Park truly make an incredible pair.

The score is by Clint Mansell, loved for his soundtracks for Moon and Black Swan, but the piano pieces played by the characters were composed by, get this: Philip Glass.

Curiously, the screenplay was written by actor Wentworth Miller (yep, that guy from Prison Break), who had originally passed the script under a pen name and didn’t even play any of the parts himself. I now deeply want him to collaborate with Bryan Fuller and/or Don Mancini on something, as they seem to share an “aesthetically inclined gay guy really interested in sensitive yet shocking horror stories” sensibility.

Speaking of Bryan Fuller, there must have been something in the water a few years ago, because the India Stoker/Abigail Hobbs parallels run the absolute gamut. I won’t list them all (there are so many!) due to spoilers, but if you’ve seen both, WOW right?

I hadn’t realized this at first, but I think a lot of the movies I’ve been watching since starting this blog-journal could be grouped in pairs. So maybe we’re in a Book Adaptations section here, following Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby with Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. I really like The Talented Mr. Ripley, the movie and the novel both, and though I think that they are more different from each other than the Gatsby’s are, I’m glad about it. The Ripley movie managed to rescue itself from something that would not have “needed” fixing in 1955, and what Minghella did with his adaptation was actually pretty dang progressive for 1999.

To talk about this though, I’m going to have to reveal some central plot points at the end of the movie, so unlike the rest of my write-ups this one is NOT spoiler-free, sorry sorry!

Ok, so for those of you still here, let’s talk about the Patricia Highsmith novel a bit. What is so captivating about The Talented Mr. Ripley The Book, is probably how coolly straightforward it is in tone. The book trades on the disparity between that tone and its subject matter: a protagonist who is the human embodiment of the @wolfpupy Tweet: “have to stop saying ‘how am i going to kill my way out of this one’ every time there is trouble going on, or at least not out loud.” Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is deeply chilling, but he’s also sensitive and vulnerable enough to illicit a weird sympathy. Actually, maybe the trait that most aligns us with him is that Ripley is talented. We like watching cleverness, so when we catch ourselves rooting for him, appalled at ourselves, maybe what we’re actually hoping for is just that the plan works. We shouldn’t hope that though, because the plan is horrific. It’s a complicated complicity. Anyone who has watched Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal will recognize this feeling, and also get why this story (set in Italy, no less) was one of Fuller’s touchstones for the third season of that show.

Now, the movie still wraps you up in that uneasy investment Tom Ripley’s deadly deceits, but without the cool, removed narration of the novel, this Ripley becomes a different sort of monster. His yearning is painfully visible in film-form, and it is most directed, as it is in the book too, at Dickie Greenleaf. Highsmith, a queer woman who wrote the recently adapted Carol under a pen name, is neither explicit nor exactly subtle about Tom’s desire, but there’s a reason why she got away with that: Tom Ripley is bad. Tom Ripley is a textbook Gay Villain, his love for men tied up in his amorality. There is something wrong with Tom, and his queerness is part of it, and it will lead to nowhere good.

But what flew for a mass audience in the 1950s is, of course, very uncomfortable for audiences today! And for the first half of the movie, it honestly looks pretty bad. Until, taking a left turn from the novel, the movie introduces Peter, and the story changes beautifully.

Peter Smith-Kingsley exists in the book, but briefly, and not like he does here. Because in the movie, Peter is gay, and Peter is good. He is kind and caring, well-adjusted, happy. And most importantly, it is Peter who offers Tom a way out. Directly, with none of that midcentury ambiguity, we are shown that Tom Ripley could be rescued through the love of a good man. Loving men is no longer monstrous, but what can save him. “Tom has nightmares. That’s not a good thing,” Peter tells him gently, “Tom has someone to love him. That is a good thing.” And so the movie’s new thesis statement reveals itself — but it’s too late. Tom has gone from being a representation of something, to being one specific, terribly broken individual, and thinking he has no choice, he destroys this chance at love and happiness. It’s heartbreaking, one of the most devastating scenes I’ve ever watched, and in true Ripley fashion, still chilling.

Apropos of nothing, I recently woke up with the idea that Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby might just be a dead set masterpiece. So I picked up a copy of the book, which has been the easiest thing to do ever since, for reasons only fully understood by themselves, the Council On Books In Wartime decided it would be the novel they’d send overseas by the hundred thousand to soldiers in WWII, ensuring that, improbably, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s little known The Great Gatsby would become The Great American Novel. And wouldn’t you know it, it just might be! Because what it actually is is the great American daydream: fabulously indulgent, ironic, biting, somehow gaudy and gauzy at once, hilarious, inadvertent, morbid, and hiding at its core an embarrassing sentimentality, which it will try to drown in champagne and pools as soon as you’ve seen it. God bless Gatsby. God bless America.

And god bless the 2013 film, because they GOT IT.

The first time I’d watched it I wasn’t clear, because I was fairly drunk, which frankly should have been a sign in itself that something was going right. In fact, I’d snuck two Nalgene bottles of mimosas in to the summer matinee showing for myself, a friend, and our old high school English teacher. We had a tremendous time. Rewatching this, it wasn’t until I hit the scene where Nick gets smashed in the apartment Tom keeps for Myrtle in the city that I recalled I originally saw it in 3D. The mere fact that you were able to watch The Great Gatsby in 3D is probably enough to get F. Scott Fitzgerald bought a drink every day in author heaven.

What delights me about this adaptation is that it appears to understand its source material to be the brightly ridiculous thing that it is. I pray that this was purposeful, because it’s such a good embodiment of theme if it is, but the movie has that particular look of cheapness that nonetheless someone spent a lot of money on. That too bright, too glossy fake quality, brought doubly to life with zipping, loopy editing. It’s a fun that seems self-aware, as we watch greedy gin-soaked butterflies dance around a Disneyland magic mansion with nearly negative regard for either realities of physical space or blocking consistency, while verbatim dialogue from the novel trips off everyone’s silver-spoon tongues, lines sometimes almost layered on top of each other like you’re flipping through the pages of the book in your English class.

The flawless anachronistic picks for music (tracks from co-producer Jay Z, ironic masterstroke “A Little Party Don’t Kill Nobody,” Lana Del Rey — who has been serving fucked-up fantasy American Dream realness at such a high grade that you can’t even blame them for mixing in her singing “Young and Beautiful” twice) are about as perfect as the picks for casting. Carey Mulligan appears to be the murmuring child of a shower of gold coins and a dappled fawn. Tobey Maguire is one of our best bemused Everymans, because he never makes the mistake of playing them as if Everymans aren’t deluded nightmares of their own. And truly talented comedic actor Leonardo diCaprio as Jay Gatsby, looking confusingly thinner and younger than he did before or after, is some time-travelly psychological genius for the character trying to beat back into his soft-focused daydream of the past.

Much like the book, there are still a handful of sadly sincere moments, like the more subtly pretty staging and genuinely pretty phrasing of Gatsby realizing “his count of enchanted objects had diminished by one,” but it’s not long before we’re treated to a wind-lashed yacht rescue flashback sequence, complete with such Arrested Development-sounding descriptors as “its captain, alcoholic millionaire Dan Cody.” Even the properly jaw-dropping car accident scene, broken glass glittering the roadway like diamonds, is followed by Gatsby hilariously lurking in the bushes outside Daisy’s house like a creepy house cat in a pale pink suit.

Honestly, I hit a point where I began to wonder if this thing isn’t brilliantly dumb in a similar way to Wet Hot American Summer, and then I heard that title in my head, and couldn’t stop laughing. Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby: actually pretty Great.

Everyone in the audience loved Plautus, Septimus’ little tortoise, in our student theater production of Arcadia. They loved Plautus, our director told me one night, because the actor playing Septimus loved Plautus. He bestowed small moments of love on him throughout the play — pretending to feed him little slivers of apple, sharing looks, acknowledge him before he left the table — and we fell in love with both of them.

There are few movies I love as much as Only Lovers Left Alive. I mean really love, love in this unconditional bone-deep way, blood-deep, forever and ever. And I’m pretty sure it’s because of that wonderful Plautus property: we love watching people love. Eve and Adam love each other, unconditional bone-deep blood-deep forever and ever, and so I love them that way.

And I do believe what lets their love sing through so clear and strong is the same thing that built Septimus’ love for his paperweight pet. Our deathless couple show their love not so much through grand gestures, although Eve does fly halfway across the world to get to Adam at one point, but in a beautiful accumulation of casual, honest affection. They lie around and listen to music, they play chess and eat blood popsicles, they drive through night-drawn Detroit and idly chat about sleeping cities and Jack White and a diamond planet up in space that emits the sound of a gigantic gong. They dance together in the living room. They just try to sleep in a bit, please. Their love is actually shown, not just stated. More than any movie I’ve seen, their relationship is allowed to breathe, which is rather ironic as they’re vampires. Maybe their eternalness is what gives them this privilege of getting time in their own story to love each other.

Perhaps it’s a little odd that one of my dearest comfort films is a Jim Jarmusch vampire flick where not much even happens, but perhaps not. For something that stars two cool-skinned creatures of the night, it’s such a warmly humanist (in a sense) movie. And it’s funny — pitch black, droll, arch yet affectionately so. A typical scene: Eve reclines on Adam’s ornate shabby sofa, her head in his lap, surrounded by his ramshackle collection of instruments and speakers and dishevel-tude. “I love what you’ve done with the place,” she remarks, and he places his whole hand over her face. They both laugh.

Describing this movie to a friend recently, I didn’t mention the plot once, and instead found myself just offering a list of charming facts about it — like how they fondly call plants and animals by their Latinate scientific names, or that one of the vampires is Kit Marlowe and wrote the complete works of Shakespeare. It was as if I hoped to find one detail that would manage to communicate the whole thing, one treasure that tells the shape of the chest. But I’ve come to the idea that perhaps the appreciation of the assembly is the point of Only Lovers Left Alive, and the point the movie is making about life itself. The Small Good Thing Theory of the Universe. That should probably be Eve’s philosophical epithet, to match Adam’s romantic Spooky Action At a Distance. Eve is the one most purely lit by wonder for the world, and I feel it’s telling that she’s also the one who is most fluent in survival. What it means to survive, what to survive for.

I don’t want to get too grand here, but honestly if there were only one movie left at the end of everything? Well we could do a lot worse than the message of living and love in this one.

Plus it’s got a killer soundtrack.

I never intended to rewatch A Single Man. A friend and I went to see it at the tiny independent theater in our college town, and we had exactly the sort of curious, stylish time we expected and wanted, and that was that. But recently, I discovered there’s a certain mood in which all you want to do is watch the sort of movie where the opening credits play over footage of a beautiful naked man slowly dance-drowning in dark blue water. Actually, perhaps the better verbing is “put on.” You want to “put on” a movie where that happens, because A Single Man is somehow meditative and background even when you’re intently watching it. It’s kinda remarkable in that respect.

I’m really glad that enough people perked up at the idea of noted fashion designer Tom Ford directing an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel that he managed to get Colin Firth and Julianne Moore, because he gave them roles very suited to them. Which makes sense after all — things being well fit is rather Tom Ford’s whole purpose. They look so lovely. Everyone looks so lovely. The 1960s, lovely; Los Angeles, lovely. So lovely even though they are all so, so broken, time, place, and people all together.

If I recall, critical talk on this movie was overwhelmingly concerned with style and aesthetics, given who helmed it, and some were willing to say that was “all” it is. But I suspect Ford knew exactly what his strengths would be, because A Single Man is constructed to be purposefully concerned with the look of things. It treats the beauty of the world as something to be sincerely, purely appreciated, even more so for a man who has decided to leave the world today. The very colors on screen bloom forward into high saturation whenever our heartbroken professor notices a particularly pleasing detail — a woman’s eyeliner, a young man’s mouth, the smell of a dog’s fur, a smile, a California sunset. Everything is a little more precious, because it will be the last.

Perhaps the most beautiful and befuddling thing in Professor Falconer’s life is his student Kenny, played by Nicholas Hoult at his most preposterously anime. He looks angelic to the point of sinfulness, which is a feat that took more than simply draping him in pale pink angora, although they did that too. For my money, the role he plays in this movie might be the most interesting part, as a boy who seems every inch a symbol at first and yet keeps flaring up with his own weird spark. There’s a fascinating dualism to Kenny, pushing and protecting in equal measure. He’s something more of a true angel than he first seems, might be the way to put it.

Anyhow, if you’re going to watch A Single Man you either already have, or were sold in the first paragraph. Or perhaps you were waiting for this: Julianne Moore has what looks to be a small citrus grove inside her house, and at one point grooves to “Green Onions” in her perfect black & white mod frock.

Gosford Park might be the preeminent Manor House Murder Movie in my heart. I’m a little uncertain about giving it this title because I dearly, deeply love Clue and the recent BBC miniseries of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, but Gosford Park manages to combine several elements of both of them, plus only the best bits of Downton Abbey. It’s a standout in the field.

Julian Fellowes deservedly won the 2001 Academy Award Winner for Best Original Screenplay for this script, and I’m not sure what I’m more surprised by: that it was fully original, or that he didn’t have the good sense to quit while he was ahead. Honestly, I’m pretty sure he used up 70% of his ideas about interwar period English class relations in a big old house just in this one script. It’s like a highly concentrated version of however many seasons Downton has lagged on for, and much like how I prefer Thomas Hardy’s bleakness distilled into poem form, I definitely prefer this Fellowes.

And, you still get Dame Maggie Smith! Along with every other actor in Britain. Seriously, all of them, and all in top form. The majority of the characters in this movie are hilariously savage, impeccable burns right and left, and yet somehow you still get blindsided with real aching human drama in the midst of it all. It’s wonderful entertainment. I’ve watched this movie three times now, and every time I’ve laughed from beginning to end, only broken up by freshly shocked gasps. And as much as Gosford Park is trafficking in the sort of fun that’s built on the inherently fucked up British class system, said fucked up-ness is examined with a bite as sharp as Dame Maggie’s. No one gets off in the movie. Even your faves are problematic, and their problematicism will be commented on, and I really appreciate that. It’s remarkably rich in nuance, for something that could have simply been a landed gentry murder mystery and still been a treat.

This is not my idea, and for the life of me I can’t find where I’d read it or who said it, but it has been proposed somewhere that it might have taken an American director (Robert Altman) to portray a certain sort English society the way Gosford Park does, similarly to how it took an English director (Sam Mendes) to do what was done with American Beauty. I feel like there might be something to this. If nothing else, it’s interesting to think about with the through-plot of an American director researching his next Hollywood movie.

Anyhow, come for the amazing 1930s frocks and plentiful possibilities for femslash, if nothing else. Or simply Bob Balaban, the token American, bleating “Hello” out of a car in the rain, which my sister and I have been mimicking for weeks now.

I feel like movies should be judged on how well they achieve what they set out to be. A dramatic biopic is not trying to be good in the same ways an indie comedy is, you know? This gets tricky in the case of X-Men: First Class, because I don’t know if they intended it to be the homoromantic superhero movie of our times. But that they achieved this, harder than anything that has come before or since, is honestly an accomplishment that nearly stands independent of whatever the intentions may have been.

The prequel/origin story First Class was actually the first X-Men movie I ever watched, over five years ago. Through some remarkable cultural blindspot, at that time I had zero idea that Magneto is the franchise’s villain, and was under the perfect impression that I was watching the story of two people finally finding their soulmate and deciding to raise their adopted children together. If anything, I think that the blast radius of my devastation over their break-up might have obscured even what led to it, because on rewatch, my god if Charles and Erik aren’t even hotter for each other than I remembered. Else, maybe this movie just gays with age.

Now, the X-Men franchise has always been interested in making mutation a metaphor, broadly for all who are not white, straight, able-bodied, and male. Our heroes and villains both are basically engaged in a superpowered fight against discrimination. This is great and I’m all about it. What is frustrating though, is that the movies don’t actually commit to representing the sort of people who are discriminated against in our own world. The female and non-white mutants are sidelined (or flat killed) more often than not, leaving more room for the two white guys in the lead, with their relationship always readable on the bro side of -mance. They shouldn’t do any of this. Put your mutant money where your metaphor mouth is. Give us more characters of other colors than white and blue. Let your shapeshifting woman shift into other shapes. Go further than just having sweet nerdy Hank explain why he hid his mutation from his boss with: “You didn’t ask, so I didn’t say.”

While we continue to wait for more diverse casting, at least we can say that they don’t backpedal from the level of love story First Class established, as the follow-up feature, Days of Future Past, does absolutely nothing to disavow anyone of the belief that we’re watching the Rope of superhero franchises. The honest-to-goodness plot hinges on Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen’s older versions of Charles and Erik (from X1 and X2) coming together to send Wolverine into the past to bring their younger James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender versions together as well, so they can try to save the world like they couldn’t save their relationship. How romantic is this shit? I’ll tell you: this shit is maximally romantic.

In said past, both Magneto and Xavier seem to have dealt with this break-up exceedingly poorly, though occasionally it’s hard to tell what is the result of emotional trauma and what is just the universally bad, brown stylings of the 1970s. What was even going on in that decade. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, in the X-Men world we may never actually know! There is a whole lot of time travel and slate wiping, but honestly it hardly matters. You could stack up a list of things that are important in an X-Men movie and “consistent world ramifications of actions that unfold” is going to lag way behind things like “two exes play a loaded game of chess.”

And the thing is, I get the feeling this franchise knows this. The X-Men are weirder than the Avengers. The characters are less heroes with the weight of the world on their shoulders, and more a bundle of misfit children who can control metals but not their feelings. There’s an inherent silly soap opera quality to the X-Men that the films embrace, which lends a refreshing looseness to the whole splashy escapade. Costumes are bolder, plots more unpredictable. These movies will literally slow down for an extended comedy sequence of über-fast Quicksilver whizzing around a room setting up slo-motion slapstick, because they know that we love that character, and they know that the reason why we love Peter Maximoff is because Peter represents this fundamental truth: that the point of a superhero movie is to have a grand old time. And I have faith that if we keep talking about it, someday the studios will make room for everyone at this party.

I had somehow missed the first three X-Men movies, and have still missed The Last Stand, technically. But when I asked a comics friend if I should watch that one too, he responded, “Not if you’re sober,” so we’re just gonna pass that one (until I’m not).

Part of me feels like I should try to compare and contrast X1 and X2, to figure out what makes the first one good and the second one great, but what even is the answer there? Is X2 just better plotted? X1 more bogged down with character introduction? Maybe. But then again, I like character introduction. I also love scene setting, and X1 is fabulous at that. It starts in Poland, perfectly. Michael Chabon knew exactly what he was doing when he began The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay* with a boy in 1930s Czechoslovakia, because to tell your story of new American gods, it is good to start in the Old World. Comic book characters sprung like primary-colored Athena’s from the minds of scrappy young Jewish men in Brooklyn, New York, trying to literally live on imagination, and so yeah: Erik Lehnsherr.

Let’s talk about Erik Lehnsherr.

Charles Xavier is important too but we’ll get to him in a minute — we start with Erik, because Erik demands you start with him, because Erik is angry. And his anger is important. Sure, it’s the most blatant bit of on-the-nose storytelling since maybe the Mutation As Queerness Metaphor that we’ll also be getting to (there is a lot to be got to in the X-Men franchise) (I love the X-Men franchise), but when Erik shows you the concentration camp numbers stained into his wrist and swears he will not be rounded up again, well you’d be forgiven for whispering some awed curse words.

In the world of the X-Men movies, the whole structure of how people react to superpowers is different than in its Marvel sister-universe, the Avengers franchise, because here our heroes are “mutants.” Instantly set apart, not normal, Other, with all the fear and lack of safety and hot resentment that comes with that. Which is why it means everything for the mutants to find community with each other — for Logan to normalize the hell out of Rogue’s impossible existence with a simple “Fair enough” as they rumble through Canada in his truck, to support Bobby when he reveals that he hasn’t “come out” to his family yet, to always assure each other that “mutation is not a disease” and they do not need to be fixed. The mutants are persecuted for being different, violently so, and as extreme and just flat bad as his aims and methods may be, we fully get why Erik is not going to stand for it. I genuinely forget he’s the villain at times, in a way I never do even with other sympathetic super-enemies like, say, Loki.

But then again, X2 contains this actual bit of dialogue:

Pyro: “So, they say you’re the bad guy.”
Magneto: “Is that what they say?”

“They” both is and is not Charles, because damn if Charles doesn’t wish every minute that Erik weren’t the bad guy. But he is Charles’ perfect foil, that is sure. Because where Erik is a pessimist who believes humankind has had chances to not be awful and blown them repeatedly, Charles Xavier is an optimist who believes in everyone’s capacity for goodness. He has a sense of faith in both individuals and the universe, at a strength rarely seen outside of maybe Agent Dale Cooper. And just as we need Erik’s anger, Professor X’s unconquerable hope is also so important. Even if it weren’t for the future of the world, and were simply the trust that someday he and Erik might be on the same side again. Erik, whom Charles loves almost like a threat — “I will always be there, old friend,” he assures him in his plastic prison, always.

I haven’t even mentioned anyone’s powers. Their powers are SO COOL. Magneto controls metals, which is spectacularly useful and/or dangerous in 99.9% of situations. Magneto is formidable. And Professor X has telepathy, feels people’s thoughts and can slip into their minds, and I adore that I’m still not exactly sure about the scope of what he can do, because that feels right. Charles, your power is spooky. It’s a good thing you mean so well.

But that’s just Magneto and the Professor. We could be here all day if I went through all the mutants we meet in just the first two X-Men movies. There are just so many of them, and their abilities so varied, that the cast of characters basically becomes a murderers’ row of deus ex machinas, and I love it. It’s high fun the way a heist movie is: assembling a mod podge team of people with different skills but one common goal.

Now, don’t get me wrong — the X-Men movies are not exactly nuanced masterpieces of cinema. Like all superhero movies, they are grand in a way that’s always hovering on the line between glorious and ridiculous. They have the myth’s hand-wave toward plot holes and rationality, because that’s not why they exist. They exist because we want to see a woman who can create storms come spinning into a frozen forest in a whirlwind, crackling lighting out of her fingertips, and rescue two new members of her found-family of beautiful, melodramatic weirdos. That is why we go see X-Men movies.

Anyway, to answer my initial question: X2 is better because it contains Nightcrawler.

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* If anyone with even a passing interest in comic books or their history has not read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, wow do I ever encourage you to do that. It won the Pulitzer for fiction for good reason. Read it in October — it feels like it’s always October in that book.