Sorry Women, Summer Films Are for Boys

The silliest of seasons is almost upon us. It's the season of the boys, or rather boy movies.

Boy movies share some common things, guns, explosions, cool gadgets, bad guys, pretty ladies, aliens, and fisticuffs. The Nazis also have a bad habit of showing up. Other commonly featured things include: fighting robots, tight green pants, Harrison Ford in a 10-gallon job, Thor, more tight pants (this time in red, white and blue), monsters in the night, Barbarians, and, of course, the man babies of Hangover 2.

If you're a woman this summer, there isn't much on offer for you, madam, except a number of repeat screenings of Bridesmaids, or perhaps a retreat to the cooler climes of art house and documentary. But if you're in possession of a pair of testicles then the theatre is your oyster(s).

Guys in love

X-Men: First Class is among the first of the boy films out of the gate this summer. It has almost all of the classic tropes, with a modish twist. Despite the presence of breast-laden babes, mammary offerings cantilevered up and out, man love is the most evident emotion on display here. The love is between two super guys who weep together, tussle, struggle and crawl into each other's minds. Can their pants really be far behind? I think not.

Before they were the X-Men, Magneto and Professor X (as played by Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart), they were X-lads. The action kicks off in a Nazi concentration camp, when a young boy separated from his mother demonstrates remarkable force of will, strong enough to bend solid steel. That's some serious mother love. Little Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender) is a mutant, possessed of the ability to manipulate metal. But he is not alone. In fact, the world abounds with mutant humans, hiding their abilities and their difference, acting normal, as best they can.

Meanwhile, in England's green and pleasant land, Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is using his god-given talents to pick up chicks. These two were meant for each other, and when they meet cute, in an underwater embrace, you know it’s only a matter of time before they're sharing more fluids.

Unfortunately for them, it's salty tears. I shouldn't spoil the moment. It is oddly sweet. But when men are doing mind melds to each other you know that other melding is really what they have in mind.

Camp Bacon

As the action shapes shifts around the globe, from groovy '60s England to Soviet Russia and Las Vegas, the story staggers along behind trying to keep up. The requisite cast of characters are introduced: Raven/Mystique, Emma Frost, Beast, etc., but the scariest villain of them all is Kevin Bacon's nose. That damn thing scares the hell out of me, whenever I see it. As Sebastian Shaw, a swinging Vegas Nazi scientist would-be world dictator mutant dude, Bacon takes camp into curious new places. He's not all that convincing in any of his incarnations, but he seems to be having a swell old time, romping around in a velvet smoking jacket plus submarine.

To cram a great deal of plot-type stuff into a sentence or two, the X-Men must come together, (and not the way you're thinking,) to stop World War 3. Will they do it? Or will the missiles fly and pave the way for a new world order of mutant Nazi thugs presided over by Bacon's nose?

X-Men doesn't really know what it wants to be: a camp-fest, a super gay love story, a celebration of '60s comic book style, or a semi-solemn treatise on learning how to accept and celebrate diversity. It lurches uneasily between all of these things, careening around like a drunken bear. Fashion occasionally threatens to topple the film into the territory of the completely ridiculous -- towering Russian hats, slivers of mini-skirts and garter belts accessorized with capes. It's all there, with January Jones's crystalline titillation to boot.

There has always been a great deal of subliminal or not so subliminal sex in comic books. Who didn't spend time imagining what happened in the bedroom of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, or the orgy scenes that might take place in the Justice League headquarters? All those super powers, skintight suits, pneumatic breasts and massive codpieces. In X-Men: First Class, director Matthew Vaughn tries to keep a lid on the id, but the damn thing keeps leaping out, like some pop-up penis in a box.

Violent to the core

I always thought that comic books and soap operas had a great deal in common. And what X-Men most resembles a good old-fashioned soap story, wadded full with plot, outsized characters, twists and double crosses. But whereas romance takes centre stage in soaps for women, for the boy-men, violence marks the epicenter of the action. Something just has to explode, be it an orgasmic eruption, or a cloud of missiles launched into the air. X-Men ends exactly thus, with the fate of the world resting upon the love that dares not speak its name.

If you suspend all desire for rationality and simply let the silliness take you over, the film is not that bad. This may sound like damning with faint praise, but how can you not have some warm feelings for a movie where the heroes wear turtlenecks?

But, it is also not terribly good either. More precisely it is almost exactly what you expect. The film leaves your head like a soap bubble, bursting gently in the summer air the moment you exit the theatre doors. Is there any harm to it? Operating in isolation, no, but there are just so many films of the same ilk, crowding out all else.

Art is so girlie elitist

In the same way that every McDonalds hamburger tastes pretty much like every other McDonalds hamburger, watching these type of films is like eating one burger after another, after another. Not such a healthy thing to do to yourself. I like junk as much as the next fella, but I don't like it when junk is all there is, and it's increasingly harder to see something in the theatre, the choices are not all that diverse anymore. The Pacific Cinémathèque and Vancity Theatre continue to fight the good fight, programming all manner of films for audiences other than man boys and boy men. But as a friend said not so long ago, the better the film, the fewer the people. When the only way that a film can sell big (here and in the much more lucrative overseas market) is to be entirely predictable, why pretend it is anything other than another piece of junk product -- homogenous, generic, mildly palatable, ultimately disposable.

It's the insistence on juvenilia that I find most troubling. There was a time, not even very long ago, that when you became a man you put away childish things. That doesn't happen in movies anymore. You can be a child forever if you'd like, you never have to give up your comic book heroes or move on to more adult fare.

And this insistence on the juvenile has moved into other arenas as well. For example, an interview that took place recently between Canadian dance icon Margie Gillis and Sun News Network interviewer Krista Erickson has been making the rounds of the creative community lately (click to view it here).

It is almost appalling to watch, but really you should, since the ill-informed notions spewed forth from the Sun's spray-tanned mouthpiece make the case that art is not for the common folk, ergo it deserves no public funding. This type of attack is not new, but lately it is part of a global campaign, with arts funding and library funding slashed in the U.K., and in the U.S., the venerable PBS and NPR under serious attack.

The idea that art is elitist has been promoted in mainstream film for quite some time now, where any instance of complexity, complication, or cultural aspiration is synonymous with evil. Mainstream film is as fully a corporate product as McDonalds hamburgers, very carefully and consistently espousing the same ideology over and over again.

This is evident even in something as goofy as X-Men, when the boys part company over the idea of humanity's essential nature, Erik/Magneto arguing that humans are jerks who will gladly set out to exterminate anything that is different, and Charles/Xavier trying to make a case for assimilation.

Personally, I side with Magneto, but then, he's supposed to be the evil one.