Finally got 'round to seeing
X-Men: First Class. Not bad at all, really. I'd put it as the second best X film, after X2, and slightly above the first one. I like when my comic book movies make an effort to humanize the source material, and this one did that. I also like how they didn't try to make the preposterous elements more realistic, but did make the characters' reactions to them believable (for the most part). And the This Is My Superhero Name trope was handled better than usual, I thought. I pretty much hated the way they made Professor X drop superhero names like clangy cymbals onto oildrums in the first film.
The boyservice scenes were excessive, however. I like seeing hot women in lingerie as much as the next hetero pig, but no less than three scenes were shoehorned in as an excuse to show them, and that's not even counting the sorta-nekkid Mystique stuff. Really, gais? That's pretty fucking insulting, frankly -- both to the female actresses and to the target demographic that's being so hamhandedly pandered to. I'm pretty sure this would be obvious and annoying even if you FFuckers
hadn't ruined me vis-a-vis gender issue awareness. (There's another element in this film, wherein even the major theme that allows it to pass the Bechdel test gets male-gaze crap thrust awkwardly into it, that it IS all your fault that I found it so obvious and distracting.
)
So yeah. Stuff gets blowed up and shit real good, and the story is fairly solid. Some of the acting was dodgy, but only a little. Oh, and while Kevin Bacon makes for a good villain, I couldn't buy for a minute that he ever spoke German as a first language.