I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 20 sign-ups; 13 cancellations; Total= 7
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
EARLY X3 REVIEWS are rolling in. Here's an extremely positive one (mild spoilers), though I have no familiarity with the reviewer and thus how reliable or unreliable her taste is.
I was appalled when Brett Ratner wound up directing, but want to like the film, and really hope it doesn't suck.
EW is thumbs down, though a principal objection is this idiocy:
For one thing, at the end of "X2," Jean was supposedly quite dead. But it spills no secrets to note that she's insistently alive in "X3" in the form of her alter ego, the voraciously destructive Phoenix, a woman even more dangerous in her out-of-control telekinetic (and, as the good doctor Freud would point out, sexual) powers than Jean was before.
Well, jeepers, no one saw that coming. Also, Eowyn stabbed the Witch-king, and was a woman: who knew?) (It's no spoiler because I have absolutely no knowledge whatever, but I have dark suspicions about Professor X's short-term fate, too.)
Manohla Dargis here is basically neutral, slightly negative:
Mr. Ratner, whose previous films include "Rush Hour" and its sequel, isn't as competent behind the camera as Mr. Singer, but such niceties can be irrelevant when it comes to industrial products like these. [...] As might be expected, "The Last Stand" pretty much looks and plays like the first films, though perhaps with more noise and babe action and a little less glum.
The original X-Men still look great, and "The Last Stand" is larded, like the others, with subtle whiffs of adolescent anxiety regarding physical strength and sexuality. But director Brett Ratner has none of the finesse or judgment of Bryan Singer, who made the first two "X-Men" films. Ratner makes a hash of the story and characters his predecessor brought to such complex, sympathetic life, delivering a pumped-up exercise in mayhem, carnage and blunt-force trauma.
We can only hope that, as "The Last Stand's" final scene suggests, this isn't a last stand at all and that Storm, Wolverine, Rogue and the rest will live to fight another day, with a more worthy directorial aide-de-camp.
Surprise, surprise. "X-Men: The Last Stand," the third big-screen convocation of mutant shape shifters, weather changers, ice makers, energy suckers, healers and telepaths from Marvel Comics, has shifted the shape of the franchise from pretty good, if uninspired, to terrifically entertaining.
Against the odds, this third X-Men movie (inevitably referred to as the last in the "trilogy", to torture completist-geeks into buying the DVD) turns out to be a lively and likeable picture - a fun summer blockbuster, which is capable of being scary and even rather affecting.
Of course, he hated the second one, which makes this questionable:
The second X-Men was a chaotic, cranked-up mess that failed to ask or answer the pertinent question about the X-Men: if, collectively, they can do almost anything, then how can you have a story? How can it work without, as it were, dramatic gravity, especially if they are pitted against each other?
Though it has some satisfying extravaganzas, the latest film in the X-Men franchise is a disappointingly scrappy affair, finds Tim Robey. [...] X-Men: The Last Stand isn't terrible, but it has a scrappy, uncertain feel. It smacks of star wrangles and rewrites and worry. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) and Halle Berry (Storm) sit perched above the title as the two biggest names, but the movie labours to convince us that they're worth their billing, principally by neglecting their less famous co-stars and, with them, all the most interesting characters. [...] The Last Stand is neither serious nor - despite such conversations - silly enough, but it does intermittently satisfy as a dumbed-down CGI extravaganza.
Billed as the climax of a trilogy, the third and weakest chapter in the X-Men series is a blatant attempt to prove there is still life in the franchise. And there is: just enough to pull a Star Trek and spawn a Next Generation saga. Hollywood won't kill this golden goose until it stops laying fourteen-carat eggs at the box office. [...] The "fastball special" is an apt metaphor for the movie. Director Brett Ratner, who came in last minute when X vet Bryan Singer dropped out to helm Superman Returns, throws everything at the screen in the hope that something will stick. What results feels rushed, chaotic and stuffed with more characters than the script takes time to develop. The Ratner touch, exemplified by the wham of Rush Hour, lacks the resonant feeling Singer brought to the mutant heroes of the first two X-Men films. When Ratner tries for feeling, as he did disastrously in The Family Man and After the Sunset, you only feel numb. Coherence is not Ratner's strength; pow is. And when he turns on the juice, notably in a mutant battle to the death staged at Alcatraz, the true X factor kicks in.
Sensing a pattern yet? He does conclude with "...that nearly saves the movie from its own too-muchness. I said nearly."
X-Men: The Last Stand, the third episode in the popular movie franchise, is more of a party girl than its brooding big sisters.
X-Men and X2: X-Men United were preoccupied with stuff like identity politics and creeping totalitarianism; The Last Stand just wants to have fun.
Logic isn't this film's strong suit, especially during its haywire final reel. But the good-looking, quick-moving Last Stand has a manic, explosive final battle that's more spectacular and inventive than anything in the first two films.
If there isn't at least one jaw-dropping wow in a popcorn movie, it's a stinker. Fortunately, "X-Men: The Last Stand" is punctuated with wows, the most awesome coming in its mutant smackdown finale. [...] All of this will be a relief to die-hard fans of the popular series. They can forget the chat-room anxiety generated when their hero, Bryan Singer, director of the two previous "X-Men" movies, handed over the reins of the popular franchise to the more paint-by-numbers Brett Ratner ("Rush Hour"). (Singer moved on to just one lone guy in tights, directing "Superman Returns.")
True, Ratner is no Singer, but in "The Last Stand" he delivers the goods with gusto.
So do the actors and characters -- some familiar and others new to a cast that's as densely populated as a Dickens novel. All are lucky to be provided with such plum roles, which require them not only to act but also to look incredibly sexy in tank tops or leather.
The sleek, no-nonsense script by Simon Kinberg and Zak Penn satisfactorily wraps up this lively trilogy, cranking out a number of surprises in a plot revolving around superpower mutants debating, and feuding over, a new cure that could make them "normal."
As in most trilogies, not all of the beloved characters make it to the end credits, and which ones get jettisoned into the great mutant beyond may startle you.
As I said, I wouldn't put any bets on the Prof's short-term survival (jeebus, it helps to have a clue about the source material -- and the last time I bought an X-comic was in the Sixties, and the last one I read was much more than a decade ago so I'm not precisely an expert, to put it mildly). (Hint: Professor X also comes back from the dead in the comics.)
John Hartl at MSNBC (whom I read for years when he was at the Seattle Times, back in the late Seventies and early Eighties) says Ratner ruined it.
Unfortunately, Brett Ratner’s “X-Men: The Last Stand” is more like “Godfather III.” Singer’s replacement director has made the characters so cartoonish that they’re barely recognizable. He’s more interested in cheesy plotting and over-the-top action sequences than he is in generating empathy for the people who drive the story. The grace and intelligence Singer brought to the project are missing.
And, finally, Ebert gives it three stars and likes it:
All the same, I enjoyed "X-Men: The Last Stand." I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects. Magneto would say this is a test of survival of the fittest. Xavier would hope they could learn to live together.
Here's an insanely dumb point, though:
It seems to me that Magneto in this case is -- well, a terrorist. So fanatic is his devotion to mutants that he will destroy the bridge in the service of his belief.
Genius. Also, Sauron was evil. So glad Roger could pick up this subtle detail. Who knew that Magneto is a f*cking terrorist? Also, it turns out that SPECTRE and Blofeld weren't actually running a charity.
Despite my usual scrabbling for pennies (before even thinking about paying a dentist), I've carefully saved my pennies for a $6.50 matinee (along with for Superman Returns, which I also hope doesn't suck, but fear it will), since I only get out to about a movie a year on average (and have had several gaps of none at all for three or five years in a row), and that, along with Netflix, is pretty much my entire entertainment budget in recent decades. (Oh, poor poor pitiful you; quitcher blubbering, you embarrass me.) (Oh, yeah: not as much as evidence of a split personality does.) (Shut up!) (You shut up!)
Read The Rest Scale insofar as you give a damn. Myself, summer is here, and I'm pondering if my mutant power might be sweating. Or turning into the Blob.
ADDENDUM, 5/26/06, 9:30 a.m.: RottenTomatoes currently gives 58% Fresh, which seems to be consistent with my quotes. I'm trying to persuade myself I feel well enough to walk the four blocks or so this morning/afternoon to where it's playing, but I'm really not sure I'm up to it; might wait until at least tomorrow.
5/25/2006 10:26:00 PM |permanent link | Main Page | Tweet |
4 comments
4 Comments:
It sucks. Be warned. In an Aliens 3 kind of way.
Sure, {character name} could come back from the dead/regrow their powers, borrowing any of the ways done in the comics and documented in wikipedia, but there's nothing on the horizon and me, I'm not going to wait. This isn't television. It looks like the franchise is over.
I was horribly disappointed with it, but then I didn't know there was another director (/writer?) going in, either. Nor did I remain for the end of the credits, which I'm told has something significant in it but I doubt whatever it was could make up for the rest of the movie.
The characters were pretty much never provided with any motivation to do the things they did. Some of the scenes which should have been the most shocking were done the most obliquely, so that you couldn't tell whether or not certain people were dead until well after the moment had passed, and then you still couldn't tell why. The big battle scene at the end was written by someone very lazy: Wired News is just wrong: given the range of powers that the characters had established already, anybody with a little imagination could have been more "spectacular and inventive." And I, who never catch continuity problems until well after the movie (and usually only if someone else points them out), was thrown by two really big and glaring ones.
But mainly the characters made me crazy. If your brain is operational at all while you're watching the movie, you're going to find yourself thinking things like, "What?" and "Why is she doing that?" and "Why isn't anybody trying to save the other mutants or humans or anybody?" and "Where's he been all this time?" and "When did it suddenly become night?" and "Where did everybody else go?" and "What happened to Rogue?" and "Why didn't they have her do that earlier?" and so on endlessly.
1 was so-so, 2 was lovely, 3 was a mess. And I thought 3 actually had the most potential to be cool, so it was doubly disappointing. If you want a special-effects extravaganza, try Serenity. It's out on DVD now, and it has characters who aren't brainless.
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