X3 - Review, etc.

I watched X3 yesterday and totally loved it. I had heard how the movie was high on SFX but lacked the emotional depth of the first two movies, so I went expecting a spectacle but with other expectations considerably scaled down. And I was rewarded for not expecting too much from the film because it delivered in awesome style.
Strangely, however, the scene that everyone is holding up as the one best illustrating the brilliant use of SFX in the movie - the one where Magneto lifts a bridge clean off its foundations and uses it to connect Alcatraz to the city - is not the one I found most impressive. The scene that stood out for sheer power and intensity was when Jean Grey aka Phoenix has a violent confrontation with Professor X, the most powerful telepathic and telekinetic mutant breaching Professor X's mental defences with ease with Magneto reduced to being a helpless witness.

If Jean Grey radiates power, Magneto is shown, to great effect, vulnerable in many instances. The all-powerful Magneto, the leader of mutants against X-Men, the scourge of humanity and my favourite mutant, is a mere Class-4, indefensible against a Class-5+ Jean Grey. I might have said this before, and I might get the opportunity to say it again since a Magneto spin-off is apparently being planned for a 2007 release, the X-Men movies are amazingly well-cast. Patrick Stewart has made his role his own, as has Hugh Jackman and to a lesser extent others like Halle Berry and Famke Jannsen, but the only man who could have played Magneto is Sir Ian McKellan (apologies for mis-spellings, if any).
The combination of ethical ambivalence, misplaced convictions and the knowledge of his own power make Magneto a very difficult character to play. It's pretty much impossible to visualise any actor other than Stewart playing Professor X either, but his character's morals and beliefs are never in doubt making him a character with fewer complexities and thus easier to play.
I've often thought Sir Ian would be the perfect actor to play Dumbledore, especially in movies four and beyond, because Dumbledore is a character who plays the benign grandfather most of the time (and especially with Harry who had become irritatingly idiotic in the fifth book, while Hermione had become irritatingly wise) but who can transform into the ruthless and frighteningly powerful wizard even Voldemort fears. For almost the same reasons, he made the perfect choice to play Gandalf.

Coming back to X3 and present times, what especially gladdened me today was the Box Office comparison of the Da Vinci Code and X3 on Rotten Tomatoes. X3 has made in one week almost as much as the supremely hyped DVC made from two. I haven't seen DVC so I won't comment on the movie but if a big-budget studio could not convince me to watch it in this era of super-slick trailers and teasers that make me make the mistake of investing into such Yashrajland turkeys as Bluffmaster, then they must look into what went wrong with their movie.
(Please note that 'Yashrajland' is a term that I have adopted from the Great Bong to describe the genre of movies characterised by wonderful visuals, occassionally good music, moist-eyed women and men, precocious kids and the requirement of a suspension of disbelief that I'm inacapable of.)
The reason I don't want to watch DVC is, however, not limited to its lacklustre trailers alone. I figured yesterday as I was thinking of which movie to watch standing in the queue for movie tickets at night, that DVC has no sex, very little violence, uncharismatic leads with no chemistry (there's no sex anyway and I think, one kiss in the book), an anti-climactic story, locations that everyone has seen on TV or in print, and finally a story that no one in the English-speaking world who has read more than one book in his life is unaware of. In short, DVC has absolutely nothing new to offer, and I have no intention of watching the movie just to see a translation of what was at best a gripping story with a disappointing end translated on to film.

I also watched the theatrical trailer of Superman Returns and it was every bit as good as you can expect from a Bryan Singer movie. This guy made The Usual Suspects and then the best movie series based on a comic book ever, and Superman promises to be just as great a movie-watching experience as the X Men movies have been. If he pulls it off, Bryan Singer joins Peter Jackson in the class of present day directors who make the best movies, the best movies being, as we must never lose sight of, movies which provoke and educate and stimuate our minds and everything, but also that entertain.
This is a great time to be alive!

Watch X3 now, and on the biggest screen you can find.