X-Men: First Class + Midnight in Paris

These are umm terribly late. Oopsie? Still felt the need to post, so here you go!

Woody Allen is back (does this man ever take a break?) with a charming little love letter to Paris, and to the giddy intellectual fury of the 1920s, in Midnight to Paris. With Owen Wilson playing the typical Allen role in Gil, a neurotic writer trying to finish his big novel, the film centers on a couple taking a vacation in Paris; Gil's frustrated fiancee (the miscast Rachel McAdams with a lot of shirt-dresses in her wardrobe) doesn't appreciate his Parisian musings, but Gil finds a magical transportation to the past while wandering the streets of the City of Light at, well, midnight. Allen has a blast throwing figureheads of the 1920s art scene into Gil's wanderings - Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter; the list goes on. Sure, some of these references become a little too obscure or possibly little too pretentious, and the film itself might be a tad slight, but it's hard not to fall under Allen's spell. This is bouncy, cheerful filmmaking that's still grounded in a life-affirming moral - the past always looks better in hindsight, always shimmers with the haze of nostalgia; there's a necessity in appreciating the glory of the present without losing the magic of what's gone. Allen's been dolling out duds since Vicky Christina Barcelona, and it's lovely to see his signature style paint a story that will make you feel weightless. B

The X-Men franchise is technically the monster the began the whole superhero obsession, hitting a year before Spider-Man. And with Brett Ratner derailing the original trilogy, it was smart to turn back to an origin story. The greatest feat in this film, swathed by funky 60s vibes and a filming aesthetic by Matthew Vaugh to match (many film critics referenced a harkening back to early Bond), is the casting. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, young incarnations of Professor X and Magneto, are wonderfully matched, giving their sparring the necessary emotional weight and thrill. If you didn't know Fassbender before, you'll know him now; he gives a truly star-making turn in his first big blockbuster lead, dripping with intensity and passion; honestly, the only weak link in the ensemble is January Jones, using her villain Emma Frost's chilly demeanor less as a character choice and more like an inability to move her face (at least she has great cleavage!). The film is soaked a little too deeply in its campy tones, but it raises the franchise back to the heights of the original. My biggest personal problem come from the fact that the characters have 20 years from the end of First Class till the beginning of the original trilogy, but aren't given much space to grow. Sure, I may be nitpicking the mythology, but as a fan, everything is in the details. B+