Remember the old days, when Memorial Day Weekend marked the start of the summer blockbuster season? Well, those days are gone, Grandpa! Summer starts in, like, February now.
Still, Memorial Day Weekend is big, so it’s odd that no one even tried to challenge “X-Men: The Last Stand” today. Surely there’s enough potential audience for TWO movies. “Mission: Impossible III,” “Poseidon” and “The Da Vinci Code” all had “counter-programming” (i.e., new movies you can watch if you don’t feel like fighting the huge crowds), yet “X-Men” goes out there unopposed. Which means even if it’s not exactly the best movie ever (and it’s not), it will still do gigantic business over the holiday weekend.
The highlight of Monday’s screening of the film was that we saw two amusing trailers beforehand: “The Devil Wears Prada” (with Meryl Streep as an ice-cold fashion-magazine editor) and the remake of “The Omen.” I was sitting next to my pal Lady Dawn, and as she has already observed in her blog, we giggled like schoolgirls, at the former because it looked funny, and at the latter because it looked awful. After the trailers, when the movie should have started, the screen went dark and the lights came up. We thought we were in trouble for not taking the previews seriously — “We will turn this movie around and go right back home if you critics can’t behave yourselves!” — but it turns out it was just a problem with the projector. Whew.
“X-Men: The Last Stand” is reviewed in this week’s “In the Dark,” as are two indie films: “Moonlight” and “The Proposition.” Subscribe to “In the Dark” at get reviews and other film-related merriment sent to your e-mail box automatically every Friday. It’s fun!
(By the way, “X-Men: The Last Stand” is another example of liberal Hollywood trying to impose the mutant agenda upon us. I’m getting pretty sick of it.)
