Strangers With Candy / X-Men 3

I find it kind of amusing that there was some talk about the trailer for X-Men 3, but no talk of the movie itself. I didn’t see the first two, but I come across chunks of them on TV so often that it would now be annoying to try to watch the entire films now. I’d been told the second one was quite good and the third one bad, but at least I hadn’t seen 15 minute sections of the third one over and over, so I rented it for no good reason.

(spoilers for X-3)

I rather liked it. The laser-eye guy, Cyclops, was always annoying in the comic books (they were all annoying actually, but him more so) so I was glad to see disapatched with easily. Halle Berry does very little; well, most of the characters do very little. But at least there are lots of shots of her in tight clothes walking up and down staircases. I imagine this was the case with the other films too – Just too many characters to fit into a 90 minute film. So Patrick Stweart and Ian McKellan get the most lines, the juiciest bits, and they come out great because of it. Anna Paquin literally leaves in the first part of the film, and then comes back at the end, missing even the general vicinity of action. It really wasn’t very good – especially now that I’m trying to think about it. But it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. Killing off Professor X seemed kind of pointless though. Yeah, I wouldn’t have lined up to see X-Men 4, 5, and 6, but killing him wasn’t really necessary in the film. Still, it led to the very nice, quiet, final shot of Magneto, now powerless, sitting by himself with a chess board in a park; old and alone. Best scene in the movie.

Strangers With Candy barely got a theatrical release and I don’t think it got very good reviews. The plot is barely there, and it’s a better concept for a half-hour sit-com than a movie. But it was very funny, and we re-watched several scenes over again because we were laughing so hard. Steven Colbert didn’t seem to be entirely integrated here as well as he was on the TV show. And the Blank family set-up was different and weaker. (Dan Hedaya just lays there in a coma.) But Amy Sedaris as Jeri Blank was even more bizarre than I remember her on Comedy Central – fewer jokes about doing drugs, but more jokes about prison, more weird facial ticks and tons of 180 degree personality turns, sometimes 2 or 3 in a single scene. She’s remarkable.

The guest spots in the film were well done; Matthew Broderick and Sara Jessica Parker, Alisson Janney and others. There is a deleted scene with Sara Jessica Parker as a school counselor trying to get a teenager to seduce her that’s very funny. This one is well worth renting.