clutter.

There’s something about my grandparents house that will always seem familiar, despite design changes, furniture or otherwise.

This is my time capsule, I don’t want it to go away. I’ll have no where to hide.

1. Re-enroll in Delta; talk to a counselor and get a set class schedule for the next two semesters.
2. See about teaching credentials.
3. Ready transfer credits for SFSU.
4. Pay off $2,300 in credit card debt.
5. Sell my car.
6. Move to the Mission.
7. Finish college in San Francisco.
8. Pay $2,000 a month for motherfucking rent.
9. Eat Indian food on cool evenings, and drink cheap beer in the park on warm afternoons.
10. Fall in love in the city.

I miss having a male best friend.

It’s not to say I don’t love my female friends, I do, or that they’re not as dear to me as any male friend could be. There’s just a sort of bond that exists between two guys, two dudes you could say, that can’t really be emulated by the female of the species.

Throughout my life I’ve always had one particular best male friend at any given time, and now I don’t. In grade school it was Kevin, or Jared, or DJ. In high school it was Eric. Late and post high school it was Nic, and after we sort of drifted apart I haven’t really had anyone to fill the gap.

It’s hard to explain, I suppose all the bromance flicks that have popped up lately (I Love You, Man, or any Judd Apatow flick really) have made it more apparent that the chauvinistic appeal of hanging with a ‘bro’ is something that I probably won’t come into again for a good while. I have guy friends, but none that are that close. With Nic it wasn’t so much that we were close, physically or emotionally, we both just had very obvious roles in the friendship that worked out.

Nic was a follower of sorts, and if given that sort of personality to control I will do as such. If I got into something, so did he.  I started collecting comics again, he bought some trades. I started playing MMO’s, so did he. I bought an XBox 360 and an HD tv, Nic did too. It wasn’t a ploy to emulate me, moreso that he wasn’t the type to make decisions on his own without prodding, and he used my example to do things he may not have had the gumption to before.

I was the more headstrong of the two of us, but never mean (when it wasn’t funny). I will talk about personal bits to my female friends, sex and more intimate things, but just not in the same way I would have with a guy best friend. It’s not the same when you high-five a girl over a sexual escapade.

Or a SEXUAL ESACLADE. Zing.

Bleh. Just…bleh.

(Also, this post will contain SPOILERS, so don’t bitch me out if the plot is ruined for you)

I didn’t expect to see the midnight showing of Wolverine, as I hadn’t pre-purchased a ticket and didn’t imagine most anyone would be able to suffer through a morning-rollaround nerd flick. However a surprise from my mother via fangando set me on the path to not only seeing the flick at midnight with Jim and company for free, but in such a way that I didn’t even need to use my movie money, so now I have $25 for later. Nice.

I didn’t really know what to expect from the film, if anything I was riding high on the possibility of bad-ass action and mutant-ry. I arrive at the downtown Lodi theatre around 11 and met up with the comic brigade, where Jim gave me his wife’s ticket as she couldn’t make it. We trekked over, talked some geek, handed out free comics from his shop to other movie-goers, and started in on a night of mediocrity.

First off, unrelated to the film itself, the previews accompanying were SHIT. Really, with such a high profile flick like Wolverine, you’re going to show me a cheesy sci-fi horror film that looks like the bastard child of Aliens and Dead Space? I couldn’t even tell what the flick was even about, it used every tagline cliche imaginable in it’s two minute running time.

The second preview was a little better, Peter Jackson’s District 9, a sort of “aliens are here and we discriminate them” mockumentary that could be good.

Just those two. No Star Trek, no Transformers, no triple A summer titles on display. I was very let down.

So the film starts, and immediately I’m feeling somewhat apprehensive. The movie is supposed to shed some light on the character of Wolverine, whose past had been shrouded in mystery up until Marvel released Wolverine: Origin a few years back as the definitive “this is how it is” history of the character. I had imagined the film to take a lot from the series, but was let down as the connection between the two was pretty much cut after the first 10 minutes.

We’re given Logan’s entire history up until say…the 70’s or so in a span of 10 minutes, plus some montage footage to accompany the credits. Nothing more, no development growing up, no dealing with his powers, no realization that he and his brother Victor don’t age normally or sustain injuries. I wanted to see some of those bits, and was given nothing.

So we’re thrown into some machismo male bonding as Victory and Logan sign up for some secret government op with other mutants, which, after a single mission of standing around doing nothing, Wolverine bails on to live in Canada for six years with a hot school teacher (SilverFox), and will occasionally rage in his sleep and tear the sheets with his bone claws. Eventually the plot wakes up and we find that Victor killed an old member of their group, the leader, Stryker, propositions Wolverine to help in finding who’s killing old members, and then the love interest bites it and Wolvie is given reason to undergo the Adamantium experiment.

Long story short, he gets metal on his bones, meets up with other mutants in order to find Victor and Stryker (who was playing him all along, big surprise), and discovers that they’ve taken the powers from 10 mutants and put them into Wade Wilson (Deadpool). We’re then given an effect heavy fight scene where, at one point, Wolverine yells to Victor “back to back!” while they slash at a teleporting Deadpool on top of a nuclear reactor on 3-mile island.

Then Wolverine gets shot in the head with an adamantium bullet and forgets everything.

So, aside from the utter shite way that the plot was drawn out, there are all sorts of little bits that I, as a comic geek, find offensive and retarded. Offensive AND retarded. But most of my issues lie with the fact that everyone seems to forget that this movie exists as a prequel of sorts, and the continuity between Origins and the original three films is pretty much ignored.

I’m just going to bullet point these suckers out:

• One, I may have just missed it, but at no point in the film are we given a reason as to why Wolverine (whose real name is James Howlett) calls himself Logan. At a point half the cast just starts calling him it, aside from Victor who constantly calls him Jimmy.
• Wolverine is a pussy. Seriously, we got enough of this shit in the X-Men movies, and I was hoping that in his years before being mind wiped we’d get to see the berserker rage, but unfortunately he’s just mopey and sedated. He doesn’t do ANYTHING on his special op mission, he just stands around while everyone else kicks ass.
• The effects range from awesome to ridiculously shitty. In the farm house bathroom where Wolverine checks his newly adamantium coated claws I’d swear the effect team used cel shading to render the claws, they look THAT bad. Also, the whole “walking away from the explosion” bit was utterly ridiculous, and Deadpool looked awful.
• Speaking of Deadpool, you’ve ruined the character. Wade Wilson, played by Ryan Reynolds, was decent to start with. Although more of a smart ass than a downright psychopathic nutcase (which Deadpool is), I could have seen him continuing on with the character past the film (which Marvel wants to do). Unfortunately, he’s made the monster, and at the end of the film he can shoot optic blasts, make swords retract from his arms, teleport, regenerate, and whatever else they decide to throw in for later. Deadpool’s powers in the comic are regenerative properties, strength, and weapon usage. Now he’s a super mutant, and still alive at the end despite being DECAPITATED.
• Oh, and those optic blasts? Scott Summers is in the film as sort of a jerk off little kid in high school wearing his tinted specs, which doesn’t make sense as he wasn’t given the ruby-quartz lenses until Professor Xavier found him when he was a boy. How the hell did he get ruby quartz sunglasses at the age of 14?
• Other mutants make appearences. Gambit was bearable, but the actor wasn’t cool enough (and Gambit is supposed to be cool). Emma Frost was unnecessary; Blob wasn’t even really Blob; Agent Zero was annoying, Will.i.Am can’t act; Beak didn’t need to BE Beak, he could have been any other mutant; oh, and Xavier is in it, and he looks creepy beyond belief as they’ve CG’d or makeup’d him up to look younger. In the end he just looks like a pedophile taking young mutant children into his helicopter. Oh, and he was walking, which would have made more sense if they threw Magneto in the scene too as a then-friend.
• From what I can tell the Weapon X operation wasn’t done at Alkali Lake. It didn’t look like Alkali Lake, and when Wolverine wakes up from the process he gets shot a few times and jumps off of a water fall naked. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t most of X2 take place in that damned facility? From what I remember there was a massive battle supposed to have taken place, with scratch marks everywhere and blood and whatnot. It’s like the writers were so scared to make Wolverine into a killer, which is WHAT HE IS. He’s an anti hero at times, he murders lots and lots of people, he’s good still, but he doesn’t pussy foot around gutting someone.
• Also, the dialogue was terrible, and can we all agree that the cheesy “scream at the sky” shot from above is awful? Can we stop using that please?

In the end they’ve neutered Wolverine, and this movie was about as intense as the original Hulk film. The action scenes were decent, but there were far too few. The relationship between Victor and Logan is never looked at very long, we don’t see Wolverine kick much ass, ever, and inconsistent displays of his power between the X-Men films stopped me from every truly enjoying the experience. I’d just wait for the video release, to be honest.