Back to the Future (Past), or You Can't Keep a Good X-Man Down

I enjoyed X-Men: Days of Future Past, Bryan Singer's return after a decade-long absence to the surprisingly resilient superhero franchise he originated. This movie is based on a 1981 story from The Uncanny X-Men comic book that I first read when it was reprinted in probably 1989 or 1990.

The movie alters the tale as necessary to unite the cast of 2011's 60s-set X-Men: First Class with the players from the earlier X-pictures, set in the present day -- or rather, as a title card at the top of 2000's X-Men tells us, "the not-too-distant future." I'd feared this timeline-straddling -- Days of Future Past is set in some unspecified year in the 2020s, -ish, and in 1973 -- might make the movie as dull and incoherent as the Star Wars prequels, but it's funny and light on its feet.

This time-travel movie triggered some sympathetic time-travel on my part. I bought my first issue of X-Men in the summer of 1988, and I stuck with the title for about four years after that. Since then, I've looked in on the X-Men infrequently, whenever I've heard that Grant Morrison or Joss Whedon or Matt Fraction was up to something interesting with them. 

Anyway. For NPR, some ruminations on how time-travel helps to keep long-running movie franchises fresh.

SEE ALSO: Another thing I wrote for NPR, about a quite different time-travel flick last year.

Just Like Starting Over: The Love Punch, reviewed.

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Timothy Spall, Celia Imrie, Emma Thompson, & Pierce Brosnan walk in slow motion in The Love Punch. (Etienne George)

My review of The Love Punch, a disappointing romantic caper featuring the appealing pairing of Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan, is up now at The Dissolve. Somebody give these two a better movie to costar in, stat.

Air-Conditioned Fun in the Summertime: 10 Movies I Want to See in the Next Three Months

Ellar Coltrane in Richard Linklater's Boyhood.

Rob Brydon & Steve Coogan reunite with Michael Winterbottom in The Trip to Italy.

Chris Evans leads an international cast in Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer.

Tom Cruise in Doug Liman's Edge of Tomorrow.

Rachel McAdams & the late Phillip Seymore Hoffman in Anton Corbijn's A Most Wanted Man.

Time was, the summer movie season -- when blocks got busted and Oscar contenders got out of the way -- began Memorial Day weekend and had shot its wad by mid-July. Once in a while you’d get a great late-summer picture, like The Fugitive, released Aug. 6, 1993 (and nominated for Best Picture, come to that.) But generally the big action pictures, which gradually gave way to the superhero flicks, needed six or seven weeks before kids got marched back into school so studios could benefit from repeat business.

In the 21st century, the summer movie season advanced to the first weekend in May, a date that in recent years has belonged to Marvel Comics adaptations, whether they’re made by Marvel Studios, like The Avengers, or by other studios, like the Spider-Man pictures (both the Raimis and the Webbs) from Sony, or the X-Men series, from Fox.

Nowadays, of course, the cinema calendar is a lawless Thunderdome: Liam Neeson starts kicking ass in January, and Bond flicks and Hunger Games adaptations come out in November.

Anyway. I filed my rundown of the 10 summer movies I was most anticipating to my editor at The Village Voice before I'd seen any of them. I saw X-Men: Days of Future Past last night, and I've no regrets about including it on the list. I left Life Itself, Steve James's documentary about Roger Ebert, off just because it's a documentary. I'm very curious about Ari Folman's The Congress and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes or whatever that one's called, too.

The Career of Tom Cruise, X-Men, Han Solo, and the Wrath of Cannes. I'm on the Voice Film Club podcast this week.

I had a great time sitting in on this week's Voice Film Club podcast with my Village Voice editor Alan Scherstuhl and L.A. Weekly film critic Amy Nicholson. Alan invited me on to talk about my essay demanding the death of Han Solo, but before we get to that we have a long chat about the perplexing career of Tom Cruise (working off of Amy's marvelous cover story about him) and Amy's review of X-Men: Days of Future Past, which I won't get to see until tonight. You can hear the podcast above or here.

Robert Duvall-ing the Cradle: A Night in Old Mexico, reviewed.

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Robert Duvall, living legend.

Wherein I review the late period Robert Duvall vehicle A Night in Old Mexico for The Dissolve.

So Long, H.R. Giger, and Thanks for All the Sleepless Nights

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H.R. Giger, 1940-2014

A brief remembrance, written this morning not quite as quickly as I can type, of the great Swiss artist H.R. Giger and his most iconic creation, for NPR Monkey See.

Show Me No Money: Trust Me, reviewed.

Saxon Sharbino and Clark Gregg in Trust Me, which Gregg wrote and directed.

Trust Me, the second feature film written and directed by Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD. star Clark Gregg, confounds pretty much any expectation you're likely to bring to it. I reviewed it for The Dissolve.

Bring Me the Head of Han Solo

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Not like this. Not like this. But somehow. Han Solo-as-conversation-piece, from 1983's Return of the Jedi.

It was actually my pal Village Voice Film Editor Alan Scherstuhl who pitched me on this piece. When Disney announced the other week that Harrison Ford would be returning for at least one more Star Wars movie, Alan figured -- and I immediately concurred -- that it's high time for Han Solo to receive the heroic demise that Ford wanted to give him in Return of the Jedi, 31 years ago. With apologies to Mike Ryan, whose work I admire, here's why Solo gotta go-lo.