Movies and stuff

Trying to put together a group to go see X-Men: First Class (I hear it's good but it could have been a terrible movie, tbh, I was sold on the concept - which just demonstrates why the filmgoing audience can't have nice things). It looks like it might be a go tonight! Am currently typing this at the kitchen table while having a baffling conversation with my mother, in which I am gradually discovering that she remembers a lot about the X-Men. I mean, for her. My mom couldn't get through two of the four great classical Chinese novels because they were "too unrealistic", that gives you a sense of her taste in media. But she remembers the X-Men are not the X-Files, and Wolverine and Storm and Professor Xavier and what they look like, and the associated film actors, and that there were at least three movies. "They have great marketing," she says. "You have to make the characters' appearances memorable." She doesn't remember Magneto or associates because "Why bother to remember the villains". XD;;

The Hurt Locker: a really tough movie to watch when you don't know what's going to happen. Probably the only way I could have gotten through it was piecemeal, on multiple long plane rides, one of which aircraft was running out of fuel. Though, having now seen it once, I'd have no problem watching it again; but the first time demands a stiff drink. At the same time, I suspect an inured first-person-shooter fan who came in expecting a thrilling action movie would be bored by the string-of-vignettes structure and the general novella-ish feel (at moments I could hear The Voice Of Coles Notes, yanno: "Do you think James was mistaken about the boy's identity? What does this represent for his attempt at emotional connection?"). It misses out on masterpiece status: the characters could have been better developed, but they are genuinely that bad at aforementioned emotional connection (even unspoken), so they never get anywhere with each other and the viewer never gets anywhere with them. Which is as much to say, Kathryn Bigelow is not Minekura Kazuya. XD; But they operate within the same general framework.

( And then I expand on this thought ad infinitum )

In conclusion: if there was ever any doubt, it's a better movie than Avatar. But I would probably do myself a Kathryn Bigelow DVD retrospective before making any other sweeping pronouncements. BTW on the basis of her Oscar cred I hear she's going to make her next film about the storming of Osama Bin Laden's compound, ROTFL AMAZING

Next up: Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Which feels oddly, depressingly/hilariously contemporary - culture warz of mis/dis/information on the intergalactic Internets! - or maybe we haven't changed that much since the 1980s, and the world is not in fact ending, as Delany's characters themselves fear. I haven't read Dhalgren, and that's the one everyone else read, so I can never really have a conversation about Delany. Except with dubdobdee. And sub_divided, who can be assured this is a way better book than the earlier ones, even if Marq Dyeth meanders as all gets out.