Here's a cool stocking stuffer for this Christmas...

I'm not a huge fan of the Richard Lester version, so it couldn't be any worse. Plus, this was before Donner had the creativity drained out of him by Mel Gibson and the Lethal Weapon sequels.

My mutant power is to forget that I have a mutant power. Damn!

Last night I was checking out X-Men: The Last Stand on DVD and I noticed an interesting phenomena. The special effects that I thought were more or less passable in the movie theater were seventy-three times worse (I did the math) on my television screen.

Maybe I’ve got the contrast up too high or the color values set too low, but something is wrong. In the past, going from the big screen to the living room has helped smooth over lackluster effects in movies, but not this time. The Angel’s wings look like they were pasted on in Photoshop. The chrome on Colossus was impossible to look at without laughing. And the effect of smoothing twenty years of wrinkles off Xavier and Magneto in the beginning of the film looked so downright creepy and slimy I needed to wash my eyes after watching it. They looked like they’d fallen into a vat of Botox and then Bob Layton had inked them. Blech.

Maybe I was just in a more forgiving mood six months ago in the theater when I still had my hopes up. But again, blech.