Azurite's Movie Reviews.... Index of reviewed movies:
Part of my self-indulgent pursuit of Russell Crowe movies.
This was based on recent history, the story of Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist in the American tobacco industry who revealed to 60 Minutes certain illegal and immoral practices in the industry. Wigand was fired by the tobacco company where he worked and made to sign a document pledging confidentiality. His own conscience could not allow him to keep silent, and when chance brought him in contact with a crusading journalist, Lowell Bergman (played by Al Pacino), he decided to talk to the whole nation.
But that isn't what the movie is about, exactly: it's about the usage of the information and the power of the tobacco industry to keep the information secret even when it has been taped for 60 Minutes. Bergman is unable to keep his promise to protect Wigand, even while Wigand and his now-estranged family receive death threats and are threatened with incarceration.
I found that the most appalling thing in the movie - that a major company can, for the sake of its self interest, have a man prosecuted for testifying to the truth in a court of law. Scary! I feel naive now that I hadn't realized this.
The most impressive thing about Russell Crowe’s performance is that he held his own in equal billing with AL Pacino. Pacino is a very strong actor - I love his work, but he tends to overpower the actors he works with. Crowe’s acting is retrained but powerful, and the kinds of fears and angers Wigand is undergoing are very clear even when Wigand isn’t talking about it.
This brought back memories of my days in journalism school where the moral imperative of the Freedom of the Press and the Right of the Public to Know were the kind of values we discussed. These issues seem even more important today, and much more compromised than they used to be.
I also greatly enjoyed the performances of two of my favourite Canadian actors - Colm Feore as the federal investigator trying to get the tobacco companies to court, and Christopher Plummer as Mike Wallace, the powerful anchorman of 60 Minutes who fears that this interview will compromise his career.
The only criticism I can think of is that the movie was somewhat longer than it needed to be - but I hardly noticed, as it kept my brain working.
Mirror Has Two Faces (2000)
Romantic comedy.... Barbara Streisand is Rose Morgan, an English professor at Columbia who has just been the bridesmaid at the wedding where the man she wanted married her sister. Jeff Bridges is Gregory Larkin, a nerdy math professor at Columbia keeps loving and losing gorgeous women. Rose’s sister tries to set them up, but Greg has this theory - that love and romance just mess up people's lives, what they should just do is be friends without sex coming into it. Fine, says Rose, and it works - it works so well that Greg persuades Rose to marry him on that basis. And Rose, who has already fallen in love with him, agrees, on the grounds that half a loaf is better than none.
Of course, she regrets it. When she tries to persuade Greg to sex and he refuses her (I told you he was nerdy) she leaves him. And then she gets mad because men ignore her because she isn't beautiful, so she loses weight, gets make-up, has her hair done and buys sexy clothes. Well! Suddenly the brother-in-law decides she’s the sister he prefers, and she decides he isn’t good enough for her. Hubby wants her back, but he isn’t sure he likes the new Rose. And her mother apologizes for putting her down for her looks.
There were some nice levels in this one, including the way Rose (and everyone else) realizes how much they really liked her the way she was. (And by the way... Greg comes through in the end.)
My Best Friend's Wedding. (Julia Roberts, Rupert Everett, and other people.) This is a romance, but the protagonist isn’t part of it.
Julia Roberts plays a horrible bitch who decides, as soon as she hears her ex-boyfriend is in love and is getting married, that she wants him for herself. So she agrees to be Maid of Honour and starts trying to break up their loving relationship with lies, sabotage and dirty tricks. But true love conquers all, and despite everything, the bride and groom actually get to the Church on Time and tie the knot, leaving Julia Roberts sadder but wiser.
I usually like Julia Roberts’ roles (I thought) but not this one. She was waay too dishonest and self-serving.
I did like her (other) best friend, her editor, played by Rupert Everett. He was a real charmer. I wanted her to end up with him instead of the pretty (and not so bright) fiancé, but no such luck.
Operation Dumbo Drop - Danny Glover, Ray Liotta.
Vietnam and elephants. A young boy has closely bonded with his elephant, who saved him from the enemy fire that killed his father. An American officer is assigned to take this elephant through enemy territory, regardless of the difficulties and regardless of the consequences, to a small mountaintop town, because the town is of strategic importance to the Americans. And besides, Danny Glover promised.
Predictably the boy, the elephant, the two officers and the handful of enlisted men helping them (mostly because they have no other option) go through innumerable dangers and difficulties before forming a bond, saving the elephant, saving the day, and surviving the war. Sadly, Danny Glover goes back to the States without the little boy he had befriend, which I didn’t like at all. Of course he couldn’t take an elephant to the States, but couldn’t he have stayed in Vietnam? He was all the boy had - except the elephant.
My favourite character was the boy. My second favourite character was Farley, one of the enlisted men, a young lanky fair-haired guy from Arkansas. I thought he could play Sam Guthrie in a hypothetical X-Men movie - Sam being one of my favourite characters in X-Men - and I was disappointed later, when reading up about this actor on the Net, to discover that the man is a Scientologist. Pity. My admiration for him went immediately downhill. His website (no doubt put up by the Scientologists) is a plea for ‘religious tolerance’. That didn’t endear me either.
As the movie ended, I realized that there was only one female character in the movie. At the very beginning there’s a toothless woman in a crowd scene, who smiles; and later on, a few women in a village scene; but the only female who is onscreen for more than a second or two is the elephant. It’s a world without women.
The best line: When the Vietcong colonel puts down his gun and refuses to shoot the elephant. "I am not here to shoot elephants," he says.
Prince of Egypt (Dreamworks Animation)
See, among the horrible memories of my past is the recollection of Sunday School when we studied the story of Exodus. That afternoon marks the end of any sympathy or interest I felt regarding the Christian church. I thought the story was dull and the teacher was an idiot, who wouldn’t or couldn’t answer any of my questions. A thought-provoking story was reduced to superstitious rubbish. I was opinionated at the age of twelve, but I might be just as irritated today. I don’t react well to excruciating boredom.
When I first saw an ad for this movie, I was excited, because of the Egyptian connection. When I heard it was about Moses, I was disappointed.
So I don’t have any particular fondness for the story of Exodus.
On the other hand, it was set in Egypt.
I enjoyed it. It wasn’t exactly thought-provoking, but it was entertaining and the art was good and the music was fun. I particularly liked the dream sequences where the drawings on the temple and palace walls started to move two-dimensionally and enacted their story.
I still don’t like the full story much. My heart is with the poor dead Egyptian first-borns and the innocent plague-and-famine-ridden Egyptians.
Besides, the voice of the Egyptian villain was provided by Patrick Stewart.
Rogue Trader (1999)No Russell Crowe here. This was a Ewan McGregor movie. Like The Insider, it was based on a news item - the career of Nick Leeson, the Singapore trader for Baring’s bank, who single-handedly caused a stock market crash and the bankruptcy of Baring’s. Now, I can’t imagine two personalities less alike than Wigand and Leeson. Wigand told the truth, at great danger to himself, for the sake of the greater good. Leeson discovered that he could disguise losses as gains and did so, for the sake of vanity and fear, until ultimately it all crashed around him - and the rest of the world, too.
If you believe the movie, Leeson started with good intentions. A young girl working on Leeson’s stock market team bought when she should have sold. He was told to ‘fire the bitch’. Feeling sorry for her, he covered the losses with his butt-covering account 8888 - known as "Client X". But there was no client X. Within months or years, Leeson was using the Client X money to take big gambles which brought in unprecedented gains for Baring’s. No one looked as closely as they should have. Leeson was scrambling to cover his butt, on a chasm of missing millions.
The movie starts with his career in Jakarta and then Singapore, where he married a co-worker, played by Anna Friel. One review said the subplot about their marriage was totally beside the point; I thought it was the only part that gave Leeson any personality. Anna Friel is gorgeous, but this wasn’t much of a role. Ewan McGregor can be gorgeous, but he’s a chameleon, and the combination of foolish character and ugly yellow-and-black striped jacket he designed for his stock trading team, make him seem pretty unattractive. The other traders wore red, which was supposed to be good luck. Such is the science of the stock market.
This isn’t an exciting or tense movie, and Leeson wasn’t
The best line is at almost the end, when Leeson’s face is on every newspaper and the police are in search of him. He and his wife get on the only plane they can - it turns out to be going to Abu Dhabi. "Oh, no!" groans Leeson. "They cut off your hands there."
"Nonsense," snaps his wife, her patience gone. "They’ll just stone you."
Then they both start laughing, because that’s about as far as it can go.
(Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow). Several people talked about this movie in the last Apaplexy, and I’m not sure I have much to add. It’s not possible to dislike this "has everything" movie, with its endearing protagonists, clever wit, eventful plot, star-crossed lovers and literary in-jokes; not to mention, violence and a dog. It’s also fun to become, as it were, intimate with the private life of that talented, charming rogue, Will Shakespeare. And some of the comedy is
actually brilliant, worthy of Shakespeare himself.
So I liked it. I did.
But I didn’t quite like it as much as I wanted to. For one thing, it’s sheer fantasy - the history isn’t much more authentic than in a Monty Python movie. Though I did love the bit where Shakespeare is drinking from a souvenir mug from Stratford-on-Avon.
I loved the preacher who inveighed against the playhouses ("A plague on both your houses!") and then saw Romeo and Juliet, and loved it. I liked the moneyman who got caught up in his role as Apothecary, and the stuttering tailor who was the Prologue.
The play ends with a shipwreck sequence, when Will, at Viola’s instigation and the Queen’s request, starts to write Twelfth Night. As the bodies float around in the water, I couldn’t help thinking of Titanic. At that point I had a sense of déjà vu: that this movie was a remake of Titanic. Same plot: in a detailed historical setting, a young, bright, talented, pauper falls in love with rich girl, who is about to marry a nasty and snobbish man in conformity with her duty to her family. They undergo various troubles, partly due to the machinations of the nasty fiancé, but they cope with each thing as it comes: mutual distrust, pretending to be people they aren’t, having fun with the common folk; and along the way they encounter a bunch of people whose names we recognize from history. They are parted in the end (with a shipwreck involved, and bodies floating around underwater, hair streaming) but their loves inspires one of them to a bright and promising life that would otherwise not have been possible.
I might add that everyone I have mentioned this theory of similarities to, has thought I was nuts.
That aside, I I had a bit of a problem with Joseph Fiennes. For one thing, I think his brother Ralph is talented, sexy and (most of all) charismatic. Though Joseph does a fine job with this comedy-Shakespeare, it still isn’t quite what I want. I’d like to have seen a little more depth to him, or to his romance with Viola. In other words, I’ve have liked a more serious movie.
And I’m not just griping because Will wasn’t portrayed as bisexual, even if I was indignant that his sonnet to the mysterious W.H. which begins "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" was re-addressed to Viola. They could at least have left the question open.
Starring Ioain Gryffydd (whose name I don’t think I can spell).
Patti and I went to see this because it starred an actor we like. It’s advertised as a kind of Romeo and Juliet story of tragic love.
Uh-huh. We’ve never seen anything so dismally depressing.
It’s set in a Welsh mining village in the mountains in the early 20th century. Solomon lives on one side of the mountain, where his Jewish father runs a fabric shop. Gaynor lives on the other side of the mountain with her father (a miner), her mother (a miner’s wife) and her big strapping brothers (all miners). He meets her when trying to sell her family cloth. Before long they’re meeting in the hayloft to make love in delirious happy passion with no thought to the consequences. On her insistence, he meets her family, sitting politely in the parlour making conversation about long passages in the Bible. He doesn't tell any of them (including Gaynor) that he’s a Jew. She thinks his name is Sam.
Predictably, she ends up pregnant. He won’t help. She is disgraced in Chapel, in the village, and has shamed her family. Meanwhile the miners are on strike, everyone’s starving, and he brothers keep beating up Solomon/Sam for his treatment of her.
Because of the hard times, the villages attack the Jews and destroy Solomon’s father’s store. Solomon has to go away to the city to earn some money. Gaynor goes to his family (finally understanding the situation) to beg them to accept her and/or her unborn baby, but they won’t. She finally goes far away to have the baby at someone’s farm.
This is when poor stupid Solomon decides he can’t live without her or the baby (or something) and he walks out of his nice job in Cardiff to find her. She isn’t in the village so he asks her big tough angry brother where she is. The brother beats him up. He asks again. The brother beats him up again. Finally, driven by admiration for such persistence or just incredulity at such masochism, the brother tells him where to find her.
Then Solomon walks, in the snow, without food, beaten to within an inch of his life several times over, over mountains and rivers and goodness knows what, finally to collapse in the snow only a few miles from the farm where she is patiently waiting for the baby to be born. But is he dead? No, he staggers to the threshold, and they but him to bed with hot soup. Alas, he is far too far gone for hot soup to do much good, so Gaynor climbs into bed with him to keep him warm with her body. He then dies. She starts to scream. Screaming starts her labour.
Next scene, she’s tearfully relinquishing her precious baby. In case we weren’t already sad enough.
Did I mention that it’s raining in just about every scene? At least, in the scenes where it isn’t snowing.
There were a few charming moments but I never did figure out the main characters. Did they really think they could go on meeting in the hayloft without pregnancy or being found out? Why didn’t he just tell her he was Jewish, so she didn’t have to believe, as she did for a long time, that he had just abandoned her for no reason? And she knew he was circumcised, why didn’t she wonder why? Or why didn’t he just run away to the big city with her, when they were both able-bodied and competent?
Youthful passion might account for a lot, but these characters consistently did the wrong thing at every turn, regardless of how obvious the right thing to do might be.
It made a lot of sense when I learned that this was based on an off-Broadway play, since it has the pacing and economy of a two-act play, and some of the story short-cuts that seem normal on stage but look odd in a movie. They couldn’t get American money to back this movie, so they transplanted everything to Australia and set it in Sydney.
Russell Crowe plays a young plumber named Jeff, the gentle, good-natured gay son of Harry Mitchell (Jack Thompson), a middle-aged widower. Jeff and Harry are not only father and son and housemate, they’re good friends and love each other very much. Both are lonely, and while Harry is (secretly) dating a widow, he encourages Jeff to find "Mr Right", but then his own enthusiasm over the date Jeff brings home (Greg, played by John Polson) scares Greg off. Well, actually, I though Harry as a father was enough to scare anyone off, discussing safe sex with Greg and sticking his head into the bedroom to offer them a cup of tea. Being gay has nothing to do with it: any date would run.
So Harry is worried that Jeff is lonely and bored, while he is seriously considering marriage to his widow. But when she discovers his son is gay, she is horrified. "It doesn’t matter," says Harry, bewildered by her reaction. "Yes, it does," she snaps. "You ought to be ashamed of him!" "I’ve always been proud of Jeff," says Harry, in proud papa. End of relationship with the widow - but as she leaves Harry has a stroke that leaves unable to speak and him totally paralysed - except for one finger, which can push a buzzer Jeff has attached to his wheelchair.
Then one day at a picnic in the part, Jeff and Harry meet up with Greg again, and Greg is still interested in Jeff, and Jeff is happy about it.
I wish I’d seen it off-Broadway. It was funny and movie (a several-hanky movie at least), and it’s both different and pleasant to see a movie where the central relationship is between a father and son. Now, the first three Russell Crowe movies I’d seen were L.A. Confidential, The Gladiator, and Proof of Life, in each of which he plays a tough and hard-fighting man of violence. It was odd but pleasant to see him as a young and gentle soul who prefers to sit on the backyard porch listening to the radio than to go out at night - much less hit anyone.
For all that, the movie lacked punch. It was amusing, but the overall mood was shallow. Harry’s over-involvement in Jeff’s life is unquestioned as a good thing. Greg in contrast has a terrible relationship with a nervous mother and homophobic father - but given the horrible tension his presence caused in the family, why was adult Greg living at home, anyway? Why did the widow let homophobia get in the way of a potentially happy relationship with Harry? (After all, she wasn’t marrying Jeff.) No one’s motives were particularly well explained.
American anime. The art was actually quite beautiful, but I was less than thrilled with the plot. Let’s see... aliens blow up earth, but not before a scientist has got his young son Cale son off the planet and left with the thing that will save mankind. The son grows up among aliens, feeling abandoned by his father. Some humans (with alien friends) find him because only he can help them find Titan, which is the thing his father created.
Why was I under-impressed? Well, the art was lovely, but the story was all plot-based and the motivation and characterisation was minimal. The alien Drej only really have one line, which is, "Destroy the humans", and they say it over and over, with variations - in subtitles.
It was pretty, but there was nothing real about it.
Titus - (1999) Starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and a bunch of other people.
This is the play by Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus. This is Shakespeare’s little foray into ultra-violence. The movie is a rather faithful rendition, despite its surrealism, that mixes images of every era from Rome to the present. The first scene has the boy, Lucius, in a modern kitchen, attacking a cake with his robot action figures.
Now, I knew what to expect. I once saw a wonderful version of Titus Andronicus at the Stratford Festival, where all the sets and costumes looked like Frazetta drawings. This version is more like Road Warrior crossed with Terminator 2, but more gruesome than either. But even knowing what to expect, this isn’t the kind of movie where you can really know what to expect, since it relies heavily on artistic surprise, shock value and surreal images. It turned out to be probably the most horribly violent thing I have ever seen.
Well, that’s faithful to the original. One of the key scenes has Chiron and Demetrius (otherwise known as Murder and Rape) raping Titus’ lovely young daughter Lavinia, and then cutting out her tongue so she can’t say they did it, and cutting off her hands so she can’t write it down. She is discovered by her uncle (played by Colm Feore, another favourite) standing in a white dress on a tree-stump in a swamp, and they’ve tied twigs around her wrists, so that instead of hands she has these circles of twigs at the ends of her arms. Very striking. For reasons I can’t entirely articulate, she reminded me of Neil Gaiman’s character Death. No ankh, though.
I found myself wondering how Titus could have so many relatives. They keep being killed off, in scene after scene, and yet scene after scene there are still Andronicuses turning up alive.
Saturninus was the evil Emperor, Jessica Lange his Gothic empress. Saturninus had me wishing at times for a nicer emperor, a saner emperor, someone like Commodus or Nero. In my opinion, not even Anthony Hopkins could bring out any recognizable humanity in Titus - and he’s the good guy. He has a nice scene talking to stones in the highway, though.
The problem with this movie isn’t so much the ultra-violence, which (as Harry pointed out) had a certain compelling quality to it, the beauty of the unthinkable and the visuality of the unimaginable. The problem is that the plot doesn’t make much sense. The only way to make sense of it is to say it’s a play about revenge, and leave out the details. Blame Shakespeare for that. They cut a few words, but not much, as far as I could tell.
Now, the strength of this one is that though it was made as a movie, it’s style and approach are entirely those of the stage, though translated to film, with the strengths of film - special effects, for example. I think this is why it is so horrific, so mesmerizingly shocking.
Another interesting point: one tends to associate violent entertainment with masculinity, or at least, I do. But this movie was produced by a woman, co-produced by a woman, and directed by a woman. I’m not sure what that proves, except maybe that I have a few sexist notions I should get rid of.
Harry showed me the interviews with the director and with Jessica Lange, which come with the DVD. They were saying how unpopular the play has been over the centuries, and that the movies couldn’t have been made at any other time. I’m not sure that’s correct. It may be. But I was wondering: why are you making this movie, now? The resources, the creativity, the sets, the quality of the actors, the calibre of the special effects - why make this particular play when they could have done any number of other works?
Or maybe just to prove that female movie-makers can do something other than Jane Austen?
My favourite line: as in the play, when Titus is playing the gracious host and says, "Rape and Murder are welcome in my house."
The Wedding Planner (2001)Romantic comedy. Jennifer Lopez plays Mary, the wedding planner, who has everything under control and runs her weddings like a military operation, with the smiling charm of a stewardess. For example, when the FOB (Father of the Bride) is MIA she tracks him down, finds him drunk and maudlin in a stairway, brushes him off, sprays him with mouthwash, and sorts him out to the front of the church. She wants to become a partner in the company - after all, she’s making more money for them than any other employee - and persuades the boss to take her on if she can land the Donnelly wedding.
And land it she does, but that’s where life gets complicated. At the very point her Italian-immigrant father is fixing her up with Massimo, a wide-eyed young man just off the boat, her life is dramatically saved by a handsome and charming pediatrician (played by Matthew McConaughey, whom you may remember as the theologian-boyfriend in Contact). He whisks her out of the path of a runaway dumpster. They go to a movie in the park together, and dance, and almost kiss. Almost. Mary is totally smitten.
Until she learns that her handsome doctor is the groom in the Donnelly wedding.
Professionalism rules - mostly. Her detemination to make this the best wedding ever gets her into ever deeper emotional hot water, as she consoles and encourages the bride, glares at and longs for the groom, and decides to marry the sweet inarticulate Massimo.
I loved this movie. Thoroughly. Laughed, cried, the whole bit.
The X-MenAsking me about this movie, my friends, knowing me too well, don’t ask me whether I liked it. They ask how many times I’ve seen it. The answer, to date, is three. I’d love to see it again. Any time.
The twelve-year-old within me is delirious with happiness at this movie. The 47-year-old adult was pretty darn thrilled, too. They took my favourite comic and not only made it into a movie, they made it into a good movie, a movie many of my non-comics-reading friends have been to and loved even though they never want to read a comic in their lives - but they’re (quite rightly) mad over Wolverine. Or Cyclops. Or whoever.
Twelve things about this movie:
(1) They got all the important things right. The nurturing qualities of Professor X (Patrick Stewart), the noble determination of his friend/adversary Magneto (Ian McKellen), Wolverine’s tough manner and warm heart, the paranoid atmosphere.
(2) The only character I didn’t think they got right was Rogue, played by Anna Paquin. Rogue is a superhero whose power is to absorb the power or life-essence of anyone she physically touches. The first time she kissed a boy, he went into a coma. This is the second scene in the movie. But the wrong note is stuck with her almost at once, since Rogue is called Marie. In all these years of comic book continuity, we have never learned Rogue’s real name. Even her closest friends and her lover have not learned her name. This Rogue not only has a name, and an ordinary sort of name like Marie, but she says it to anyone who asks.
Okay, okay, no big deal, it’s just a name. (Wolverine is rather too forthcoming in telling people his name is Logan, too.) But this Rogue is not the feisty, tough, brash, brave, beautiful and strong-willed girl of the comic. She is young, frightened, on the run, lonely... she spends most of the time looking frightened or sad. Our Rogue might be frightened or sad, but she wouldn’t let anyone see it. At a significant moment this Rogue is crying, "Logan, help me, please help me." The ‘real’ Rogue would not be crying at all, except maybe tears of fury, and she’d be shouting, "Logan, will you get your ass up here and save me?"
Good point, though: after her climactic experience, Rogue gets the shock of white hair in the middle of her head. Nicely done. Almost made up for the rest. About that time, she touched Wolverine. Wolverine later asks how she is, and Jean Grey says, "She absorbed some of your more charming personality traits for a while." I wish we’d seen that!
The thing is, that except for viewer-identification value, I could see no reason for making Rogue so tremulous. She could have been gutsy and stalwart as in the comic, and had exactly the same action. I think that would have made certain scenes even more moving than they already were - such as when she asks Wolverine to promise to protect her, or when she stares heartbroken at a mother and son in each other’s arms on a train. I would have found a Rogue like that very moving. As it was, I was fairly impatient with her. Really, she’s in a nightmare situation, a case where her mutant condition really is a handicap and a tragedy - and instead of being sympathetic for her, I found her a gutless whiner.
(3) Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, two of my favourite actors, together in a movie at last.
(4) There are lots of good things about Magneto. I never would have thought a living man could wear that silly helmet and look anything but absurd. Ian McKellen wears it, and looks scary. I never thought a man could levitate the way Magneto does, and look natural. Magneto does it with style and panache and, best of all, a sort of habitual nonchalance, as if he’s used to doing it.
There are some wonderful bits about his powers, too. He’s playing at once point with metal balls on his desk, the kind that swing on a pendulum. Except there is no pendulum, and when he walks away, they fall down.
In another scene, he creates a metal bridge over a chasm as he walks across it.
(5) Mystique has only a few lines, but they make her seem three-dimensional and even sympathetic. She’s an enemy of humans, but we see she has reason to be. Her acrobatic fighting is worthy of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Too bad she isn’t also Rogue’s foster-mother, as in the comic, but you can’t have anything, and I’m sure that would have made it all too complicated. She has dignity, and is scary and sympathetic at the same time. She's a martial artist who can fight Wolverine to a standstill (no mean feat!)
(6) At Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (i.e, Mutants) we see lots of familiar faces in passing. It wouldn’t mean a thing to a non-comics fan, it would be just a bit of background, but we see Sam (the one I mentioned a little earlier as a favourite), Kitty Pryde (the girl from Illinois who can walk through walls), Jubilee, Dani Moonstar, and others.
(7) In all these years of comic book continuity there have been many complex and unusual relationships. They actually left some of them in - the love triangle between Wolverine, Jean and Scott, for example. Or Scott’s devotion to Professor X. Or Xavier’s longstanding friendship with Magneto. They didn’t have to put these in, but I was delighted that they did. Touches like this made many devoted fans of the X-Men over the years.
(8) Sabretooth has almost no lines and he growls a lot. The only time he really speaks, it's Charles Xavier speaking to Magneto by moving into Sabretooth's brain. (Not a very cosy place, I imagine.) The result is that although Sabretooth is scary and bestial, you get the impression that he's got subhuman intelligence, while as I recall, the Sabretooth of the comic was quite intelligent and could even be sophisticated if he wanted to be - quite a contrast.
(9) I liked the school as a place. First of all, it was filmed at Casa Loma, beautifully. Second, it is made clear that most of the students were mutants on the run, runaway kids with have nowhere else to go, who found a haven here.
(10) Halle Berry as Storm is beautiful. She doesn’t do much or say much, but she looks great.
(11) To say too much about some details would be to give spoilers, but they do something with Rogue’s powers and Wolverine’s that I thought was absolutely brilliant. It’s set up carefully to reach a sort of momentum, so it all makes sense, dramatically and logically. And yet I don’t think it’s been done in the comic, ever, in all these years.
(12) Stan Lee, the original creator of the X-Men (with Jack Kirby) has a cameo in the beach scene.
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