Wolverine: Why is he so popular?

Downloaded this and loved it, mostly, but had to skip over the wholesome farm family interlude. I was shocked by how long it goes on--the action comes to a complete stop for 15 minutes! Feel like Wolverine and X23 could have learned the This Is What A Loving Family Looks Like lesson in a fraction of that boring time.

The farm family thing was where the movie really hit the skids for me - up until that point I was really digging on the setup, this very unfamiliar situation for the characters, seeing stuff like Wolverine loading Professor X's wheelchair in the trunk - so many really good details and you don't have a really strong sense of where this is all going. As soon as the farm family shows up it locks into a much more predictable movie: these guys are obviously all doomed and from there on out we're going to be in a Waterworld remake. There are still great moments after that (the little doctor's office scene was really well done in a non-showy way, I thought) but it becomes a more generic movie, with a particularly dicey final action sequence - oddly evocative of X-Men 3, of all things, and the kids alternated between forgetting they had superpowers, and then using them in ways that really felt like the B-team came in to do the shots and the effects.

Seemed particularly shitty that Wolverine basically dooms the family by getting involved in the confrontation with the evil agro corporation - hard to watch that and not think "oh, what, so Logan's gonna skip town tomorrow and these thugs are gonna come back around and burn the house down, or what?" It's also in this stretch that we wind up Professor X's arc and it seemed a really perfunctory end to this character, after all these years. But then the same could be said for Logan also.... evil twin Wolverine just didn't work well for me as a main antagonist. I get what they were going for thematically, but it doesn't quite take off as anything really interesting even if the fights are great.

y'know I was just thinking the other day about how I wish you had continued that Claremont/X-Men blog

I think about that a lot! Always feels like something we MIGHT pick back up again someday, maybe with slightly different expectations for ourselves. I fell out of keeping up with current comics again right around the time we lost track of the blog, and that was a small but subtle angle of interest, being able to refer to much more recent developments. But I was always really itching to get to the point where we could alternate between X-Men and New Mutants, all the different artists coming and going, the recurring themes becoming clearer and clearer with time even as you can feel Claremont constantly itching to escape any kind of fixed setup or status quo for the book... ahhhh, I love that whole period. Maybe! Maybe!

I'm not even a big X-Men fan (altho the apex of Claremont's run did coincide w my peak superhero-comics-buying years ie, the mid-80s), I just dug the approach and perspective on something that's so canonical

like there's huge gaps in my reading - I was really only paying attention for a couple years - so it was interesting to get all the details filled in from a post-mortem critical perspective

Thanks! Yeah, not to toot my own horn but it felt like we were finding a good balance. In hindsight we probably still did a little too much summary or lingering on silly things, but it was the kind of blog I want to read and want to write, where you're generally analyzing things at whatever level and not just listing everything that happens. It was also really cool because David has a much deeper knowledge of, for example, artist credits and careers, and could draw connections to other titles and things going on in the period that were really off my radar. It was a good pairing. Every time we meet up we talk vaguely about reviving it, but it's a schedule thing since projects like that do require setting aside dedicated time for reading, for having the conversation, and for editing/posting.

The lesson of the Farm Family thing isn't that "this is what a loving family looks like", it's that Logan is the harbinger of death.

Okay, but it's still pretty interminable.

and I do think that a strong theme of the section (or at least the parts I saw, I fast-forwarded through most of it), was that Xavier wanted Big and (especially) Little wolverines to observe these good-hearted folks and learn that it's possible to live in a normal, peaceful manner with people you love without shoving a metal spike through their skull at the slightest provocation.

what with her being repeatedly shown to be institutionally feral and all

Well, yeah, that was all pretty explicitly rammed home. I think the thematic beat is fine, if unsubtle - just how it was worked into a narrative was pretty weak.

Sure, but I'm saying but a point of the sequence is that Xavier is dead wrong there.

I mean as noted it's not subtle about it - they watch Shane fercryingoutloud.

Ah, fair enough.

As soon as they were on the freeway inviting them back for dinner I was wishing I could skip the next X minutes. Hoped it would be a fake-out where no one ended up murdered. :)

I thought the farm sequence was well-done; I just didn't need to see an innocent teenage boy murdered onscreen. That went too far for me.

I liked this movie despite everything. I'm biased towards the story, because I certainly empathize with a scruffy-bearded, self-loathing dad to a miraculous daughter who seems just like him in all the best and worst ways, and I'll give the time of day to any character whose emotional comfort zone is being angry at everything all the time even though they know it's self-defeating.

The villains, though - I had no idea why we were supposed to be afraid of them, much less interested in anything they had to say. They just seemed like an army of jerks. The orcs in LOTR were more believably fearsome, and you knew they didn't stand a chance either.

Stephen Merchant was completely unexpected. Didn't give him nearly enough to do.

My favorite part was (paraphrasing) "bad things happen to people I care about!" "then I'll be fine."

This movie was recently re-released in B&W for a weekend (limited-run), which is an interesting thing for a big studio to do.

I'd pay to see the silent film cut, like the black & chrome version of the last Mad Max. I might even pay movie ticket prices.

The b&w Logan cut is with the digital release as a freebie.

watched logan last night and was super-impressed by jackman, stewart and dafne keen's performances - patrick stewart in particular was fantastic in a role that could easily have been mawkish but he was great at swinging between lucid tenderness and rage and confusion

i also really, really liked the effects they put together for professor x's seizures

i think ultimately it's better than the sum of its parts mainly due to the familiarity of jackman and stewart and how good their performances are. for all the talk of it being the first 'real' wolverine movie it shared a lot of the faults of mangold's first one - shitty villains and weirdly slack pacing being the main ones. and while i understand that having wolverine face and overcome a younger, more feral version of himself was thematically appropriate it ended up being just kinda ham-handed in practice. having him face off against sabretooth instead would still fit the themes of family and redemption and might offer a bit more of an interesting villain for a final face-off

the other thing which bugged me was the utterly implausible exposition video put together by the nurse who rescued laura - if they were going to do that, couldn't they have mocked up the shots as like stolen surveillance camera footage or something instead of implying that the was walking around highly secure areas with her phone out filming like a tourist?

also, while i remember: i'm sure it's hard to do a road movie about a grizzled burnout shuttling a precious human cargo across a dystopian landscape without invoking children of men or the road but mangold seemed to be leaning into it rather than offering points of differentiation most of the time

the other thing which bugged me was the utterly implausible exposition video put together by the nurse who rescued laura - if they were going to do that, couldn't they have mocked up the shots as like stolen surveillance camera footage or something instead of implying that the was walking around highly secure areas with her phone out filming like a tourist?

Yeah, I made the same gripe up above (...I point out in a "gr8 minds think alike" way, not an "I scooped you" way)

two great minds united by irritation at a minor detail in an action movie

I think that's what brought Adorno & Horkheimer together

captain and tennille too iirc

I wonder if there will be an X-23 movie; I'd love to see Laura's story continue (although not necessarily the same story told in the comics). I read a blurb saying it may happen, but of course who knows.

I'm assuming the New Mutants movie coming next year has nothing to do with the world of "Logan" or the group of kids at the end.

it's going to have Storm from Days of Future Past, so barring time-jump shenanigans I assume it'll be set in the early '90s

Grunge soundtrack!

Grunge soundtrack would be perfect for that Cable movie we were brainstorming a while back, that would just go all-in on 1991-era badassery, and have only solid colors as backgrounds for 3/4 of the scenes, five variant opening credits sequences, etc.... gah, what thread was that?

I reread some Cable stuff on Marvel Unlimited and it's not all bad? The badass gun dude cliche is horrible but any mid-/post-conflict era where dudes who are into guns and infiltrating our zeitgeist (and colonizing our police forces) makes a reasonable big gun man a viable alternative to "shoot everything" big gun man

plus pouches are back in

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