To get it out of the way

First and foremost, I must thank everyone who wished me luck on my GRE. I'm sorry I didn't respond to all of you. Would that your prayers had been better bestowed on a better candidate to achieve them.

I did not perform very well on the test. ( Cut for self-abuse and self-help. )

There's just not much I can do, which depresses me all the more than the worse-than-I'm-capable-of score. ( Ugh, cut for more emo. )

I did, however, get out to see X-Men: First Class, which? Not half so bad as I feared. Possibly, even good. I grind my teeth continually at January Jones as Emma fucking Frost, and I cannot believe for a second that the film, whatever its intentions, convinced anyone that Magneto wasn't, in just about all things, including his fundamental philosophy, entirely fucking correct. This is supposed to be a film about the birth of the X-Men, and it reads like a recruitment film for the Brotherhood of Mutants. It doesn't help that Michael Fassbender is given nothing but awesome things to do and a wonderfully complex character to work with besides and the best James McAvoy gets is...hair? The chance to both sanctimonious and utterly depraved?

Whatever, Magneto was totally the hero of the film. I enjoyed seeing a young Mystique start to come into her own, though. Up until the travesty that was X-Men: Fuck You, Bryan Singer, she was easily the most fabulously rendered character in the X-Men films. For all that I adore Sir Ian McKellen's gleeful portrayal of Magento in the Singer X-Men movies, Mystique was not only a great character design, she was one of the only characters whose powers, though not broken in how overpowered  they were, were used to the best effect. Every Mystique moment is a good one, even when it's kind of icky, like her hitting on Wolverine by asking him if he's hot for Stryker (WHILE LOOKING LIKE BRIAN COX WHHHYYY??). I loved her character moments, the makeup, the way she morphed between forms, and yes, I goddamned loved that she was nude. (I'm sure I wasn't the only one.) Makes more sense than her being able to change her clothes along with her body, which, regrettably, she was doing in X-Men: First Class.

You have her character and Fassbender's mutant Jewish James Bond, and, jeeze, of course I side with them. How could I not?

I feel better when I distract myself.

A link on linaerys 's journal has proved most interesting. I do not necessarily agree that X-Men: First Class plays up the X-Men as the Jewish other, but that's an experience-dictates-impression sort of deal, I suspect. This is the part that I liked the most:

Rather, what troubles me about the film is that it feels like yet another expression of an attitude that I've been noticing more and more often in Western, and particularly American, popular culture as it struggles with the topic of genocide and national trauma--a crucial failure of empathy, imagination, and, finally, perspective, that leads to a blanket condemnation of anger.  I saw this in Battlestar Galactica when human characters who refused to make peace with the Cylons--the people who had destroyed their civilization--were made into villains.  I noticed it a few weeks ago when I watched an old Star Trek: Voyager episode, "Jetrel," in which Neelix is urged, and eventually agrees, to forgive the person who designed the weapon that depopulated Neelix's home colony and killed his entire family.   And I see it in the increasing prevalence of vengeful victim characters, who are condemned not for the choices they make in pursuit of revenge, but simply for feeling anger.  There is in stories like this a small-mindedness that prioritizes the almighty psychiatric holy grail of "healing"--letting go of one's anger for the sake of inner peace--over justified, even necessary moral outrage.  First Class condemns Erik not for targeting innocents and embracing the same prejudiced mentality as his Nazi tormentors, but for wanting to kill Shaw.  It places two choices before him: either he takes the life of the person who killed his family and tortured him, in which case he's a villain, or he relinquishes not only his quest for revenge but the anger driving it

I love this. I absolutely agree. As we have started to rebound from stories where it is perfectly acceptable to have the successful prosecution of revenge be the climax of the story, we may have gone too far the other way. Anyone who has the desire to kill somebody, even in perfectly justifiable rage, is the bad guy. Obviously, this does not apply to the odd revenge-fantasy movie that still gets made. But if you want to have "nuance," people are not allowed to be angry, much less be allowed to kill, without becoming the bad guy.

And that is horse shit. It's a problem especially for heroes who never kill, like Batman. After a while, all sensible people would think, "Gee, it's nice that you see murder as the defining line that separates all good people from bad, but the Joker has just killed hundreds of thousands of people and I think it's time to stop playing nice." I don't advocate murder or summary execution of villains, but the self-righteousness of the psychology against ever killing is, well, self-righteous.

It's also not even close to what the X-Men are about. One of the things I love best about the team is that it routinely recruits thieves and murderers. And those people are recruited on purpose, not just to reform them but because they are, to paraphrase Wolverine, the best at doing things that aren't very nice. Storm once ripped the heart out of an enemy rather than let her destroy people with a bomb. STORM did this, Ms. Serenity Now Weather Goddess. One of the best X-Men stories I read in the past ten years was one in which a kid's power vaporized people around him. He ran off, after realizing what he had done, to hide in the mountains, when Wolverine caught up with him to calm him down. They share a beer, relate to each other, commiserate. The last panels show Wolverine emerging from the cave and walking off. He is very much alone. Do you think Wolverine took it upon himself to be that kid's mercy angel? No. He was sent. You better believe he was. It's kind of sad that that history is not embraced in cinema. The movie would be better for it.