Those of you who are in or near Muncie ought to plan to head down to Villiage Green Records in the villiage next Friday, June 9th at 6PM. Everthus the Deadbeats will be playing a CD realease show with The Belle Ends. All-ages, so tall people won't have any trouble seeing over the crowd.

I thought about reviewing The Da Vinci Code and X-Men here, but I wasn't particularly blown away by either. Da Vinci Code follows a pretty standard formula for the sake of having a plot, which often gets in the way of the more interesting parts about architecture and symbolism. I would rather see a re-edit with most of the plot crap removed, save for Sir Ian McKellen's scenes. Most expository dialogue is accompanied by short vignettes of historic events. Someone mentions the crusades, and suddenly a huge, lavish depiction of the crusades comes up to remind the audience what it probably looked like. While I normally love big fx shots, I thought these scenes were tedious and tacked on to keep the average person's attention until the next time someone pointed a gun at someone else. Yes, academics pack heat in this movie. Are Ivy league tenured faculty normally strapped when travelling abroad? I mean, aside from Indiana Jones, whose movies are easily comparable and superior to this movie, as they can take an absurd premise and actually have fun with it. No such fun is found in this movie, not even in the foundation of the Louvre, a building that has been dug up and remodeled so many times in the last thousand years or so one wonders how there could be any mystery left in it.

X-Men wasn't really great, or terrible, which is probably the worst way to tackle the Dark Phoenix story, perhaps the most signifigant story in the Marvel U. I really don't have much to say about it, except that too many characters and no real plot was the reason I stopped reading X-Men when I was 15. The film effectively sinks the franchise, despite the box office gross, which is just as well. I'm ready for Superman Returns.