James McAvoy is Professor X and and Michael Fassbender is Magneto. They are best friends! Mutant best friends. I remember my first best friend. He convinced me to ride my tricycle on the street in traffic. Later we tried to pop people’s tires with rocks. He was definitely the Magneto of the friendship, putting his friend in harm’s way and trying to destroy humanity at a young age. Later I named my stuffed tiger after him. Then the tiger lost an eye at sleep-away camp and my great-grandmother sewed an eyepatch for him. If Professor X has any stuffed animals he should name at least one of them after his good friend Magneto.
If a disco ball and the lady silhouette from a trucker’s mud flap had a baby, and that baby grew up to marry Don Draper, then it would be Emma Frost. She wears fuzzy white hats and lingerie all the time like a centerfold in a 1960′s Christmas issue of Playboy. Yeah, seasonal nudity! Innuendo about eggnogg? Sometimes she can read thoughts and sometimes she can turn into a lady-shaped pile of diamonds. So she’s like a guy who’s afraid of getting engaged’s worst nightmare. Emma Frost spends most of her time fetching ice and reading minds for Kevin Bacon’s character Sebastian Shaw. If Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw ever form a band they could call it “Six Degrees and Kevin Bacon”.
X-Men: First Class was set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Billy Joel should rewrite “We Didn’t Start The Fire” to include lines about 1960′s mutants. “Telepaths! Blue Furred Beasts! Devil guy, to say the least!” And then some lines about Cola Wars, Reagan, Wolverine, cigars and adamantium claws. What rhymes with adamantium claws? I bet steampunk poet Wolverine asks himself that every day. “We didn’t start the X-Men!” Nothing cooler than a comic book themed song parody.
I love that when the Beast makes his first appearance in X-Men: First Class, he makes the same face as that kid from Jumanji after he grows a monkey’s tail. I guess the facial expression for being turned into an animal is pretty universal. At least he can take solace from the fact that one day he will speak in the dulcet tones of Kelsey Grammar.
Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique reminds me of this hipster girl I worked with who would get bored and crawl around on the office furniture. She would drape herself over a computer chair and kick one leg up, like “Oh don’t mind my sexy curvaceous body- I’ll just go ahead and talk to you about bands or whatever while I pose like a Maxim photographer is about to spritz my face with water so it looks like I’m sweaty from being so turned on by Maxim readers.” Speaking of Maxim, I like that the stripper mutant Angel’s power is having insect wings that revert into tattoos when she’s not flying around the room. Is it possible for a genetic mutation to be trashy and hot? Yes, it is. Good thing she didn’t go with the Tasmanian Devil waving a rebel flag tattoo, because I’d hate to see that come to life. If I was a stripper and I got a tattoo, it would definitely be butterfly wings or a really hot fairy saying, “Don’t mess with this bitch” or “Daytona Beach 2004″ or something like that.
I once dated a girl briefly in college who was into butterflies. After she unceremoniously dumped me following a week of Spring Break booty dancing (thanks a lot, 69 Boyz!) I wrote a 130 page novel about the drunken college house I was living in and spent a whole heartbroken chapter talking about her. Then I saw her at a John Mayer concert years later and realized I had completely forgotten she existed. That’s intense attraction for you, I suppose. One minute you’re hunched over a Brother word processor, a cigarette in your mouth and your heart aching for some girl, the next you’re making small talk with her and wondering what you were getting so worked up about to the warbly strains of ”Your Body Is A Wonderland” and wishing you’d brought a flask because beer is $6.
X-Men: First Class is the best of all the X-Men movies. It’s a story of friendship and revenge wrapped in a stylish and breezy package, like a fried chicken taco with jalapeno mayonnaise, if fried chicken was friendship and jalapeno mayonnaise was revenge and the soft tortilla was made of witty dialogue and exciting fight scenes. That’s a lot to ask of a tortilla, but here we are- eating fried chicken tacos and drinking Sprite. Turnip greens, too. That’s it, I’m hungry now. The end!
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