X-Men + fatherly pride

Saw ‘X-Men First Class’ with the family tonight after a dinner of noodles. Movie was fine. James MacAvoy used the phrase “groovy mutation” TWICE in the movie, which is pretty boss. Not a Marvel kid growing up, more DC, but I could recognize most of the characters.

I cannot read your thoughts with mittens on.

But, ugh, two black characters and one of them turns to the bad guys (Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz’ daughter – her celeb pedigree very obvious) and the other dies in service to the other characters. Ugh.

Exiting the theater, we had driven in separate cars. Which kid would ride with whom? I mimicked the movie and said to the kids they could choose the side of cooperation, hope, and peace and follow me, Charles Xavier or their mom, militant and forging a new path like Magneto. Son chose me, daughter my spouse (the usual arrangement) but spouse said that if ANYONE was Magneto, it was me. Family agreed. In the movie lobby, I pulled my shirt over my head so only my face poked out from the neckhole I said: “Stop trying to READ my MIND!” Son came up next to me and did the same. The telepaths thus foiled, they headed to the car on the other side of the mall.

Strolling with my son through the mall, I looked down at his 11 year-old self and saw he was already acquiring an adolescent shuffle and slight slump, hands in pocket, a running stream of verbally summarizing everything. I realized I would not be looking down at him much longer. In the parking lot again, as he was talking about the Wilderness Survival-themed daycamp he was at today, he glanced up at me and I got a glimpse of the teenager to come, but also over that the man he would be someday. I beamed proudly at him. He smiled back and continued with his story. Got in the car, I let him sit in the front seat on the ride home (still a thrill for him).

Okay, January Jones. Betty Draper was a MARVELOUS character the first two seasons of ‘Mad Men’ and she has not had as much to chew on the last two seasons. But, she was a SEXPOT character in ‘X-Men’ with lots of skin and heaving bosom. Is there any actress so beautiful and yet so astonishingly unsexy? Not repellent, but the constant effect of looking at her is: admiration, then feeling I should feel stirred, and yet Eros sits on the floor eating a sandwich. A phenomenon bordering on the medical.