“Suri would always be in the trailer with me, trying to pull it off,” Tom Cruise said excitedly at the New York premiere of the film at Time Warner Center on Dec. 15, where he arrived without wife, Katie Holmes, on his arm. (It was rumored that the red carpet was held indoors in order to avoid Scientology protesters.)  “So the girls in the make-up trailer got this little teddy bear with an eye-patch so that she would play with it and get used to the patch on the bear and on me.”

In the film, Mr. Cruise plays Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who led the failed July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. But rumors about the film’s delayed release (it was originally scheduled for June 27, 2008) have referenced everything from German officials protesting the making of the film and problems with the budget to fatal injuries experienced on set.

“The only time I had a sense of all that stuff is when I’d go home to London and people would say, ‘What have you been up to?’ and I’d say ‘I’ve been in Berlin on set with Tom Cruise,’” said British actor Bill Nighy, who plays General Friedrich Olbricht. From there on the conversation would go something like this, according to Mr. Nighy:

“Oh my God, are you okay?”
“Well, yes. I’m fine,” Mr. Nye would reply.
“What about all that stuff?”
“What stuff?”
“What about the guy who died?
“What guy?”
“There was a guy, a guy who died!”
“No guy died. I assure you, no guy died.”
“And didn’t the government try to close it down?
“No, no. The government did not try to shut anything down.”

“The Germans were actually very supportive once they understood that that we weren’t trying to belittle this story into some Top Gun kind of movie,” clarified John Ottman, the editor, composer, and co-producer of the film.  

“It was just a complicated film to put together and 98 percent of stuff you read on the internet is not true,” he continued. “It was a film that got bigger from the original concept. A lot of the scenes that we originally wanted to shoot, we decided not to shoot at some point to save some money, but then we ultimately decided to shoot them. Everyone said, ‘Oh, they’re re-shooting all these scenes.’ But that was just not true.”

As for any injuries sustained during filming, there was one person—of the 11 injured—who required hospitalization after a side panel of a truck they were riding in broke. But there was plenty of room for other scares given Mr. Cruise’s typical on-set antics.

“After we were done shooting inside of an airplane, an old 70-year-old German junker--a sort of flying school bus--Tom took control of the plane and took it into a full wingover about 200 feet over the trees,” recalled director Bryan Singer (Superman films, The Usual Suspects). “It was wild. It was also our young actor Jamie Parker’s first day. I think he was shocked.”

Dutch actress Carice van Houten, who plays Mr. Cruise’s wife in the film, had only kind words to say about her co-star. “He’s a dream colleague,” she told Daily Transom. “He was very nice to me, very supportive, and very sweet. He spoiled me and made me feel wanted and safe, which is good for an actor I think.”

And despite German politicians’ initial hesitation about allowing the film to be made--due to Mr. Cruise’s involvement with Scientology and how their country’s history would be portrayed--things seemed to eventually work out.

“This is a special part of Germany’s history and it’s not a very glorious part,” said Thomas Kretschmann, one of the German actors in the film. “It was very good to see that Hollywood came along and wanted to do a film to show that not all Germans were the same and that there are in fact people who stood up and fought for their beliefs.”

During filming, which took place over the course of about six months, a few of the British and American actors even learned some German.

“I learned one word!” Mr. Ottman said. “It’s so terrible and American of me, but I learned ‘Tschuss,’ which means, like, bye or see you later.”

Mr. Nighy picked up the sort of German that could be more useful. “I can probably order an omelet,” he said. “That’s all I really need.”  

I can’t figure out why the very talented Mr. Singer preferred to return to a comparatively corny conception like Superman, whose four manifestations with Christopher Reeve (from 1978 to 1987) ran out of creative Kryptonite almost 20 years ago. Could it be that American audiences are now perceived, at least by Mr. Singer, to be yearning for a superhero without any debilitating complexes?

Certainly, the X-Men franchise is about nothing but complexes as they pertain to a tribe of mutants viewed by the rest of humankind with a mixture of wary suspicion and outright bigotry. In the beginning and, strangely, at the end, the prevailing subtext of the X-Men series is the beleaguered gay subculture. I say “strangely, at the end” because, in the current sequel, a “cure” has been found for what supposedly afflicts the mutants. This alleged “cure” is a serum derived from a new child character named Angel (Ben Foster), who inadvertently causes a civil war to erupt between two factions of the mutants.

Magneto (Ian McKellen) leads a mutant group pledged to all-out war against the human race and its attempts to “cure” the mutant minority. The more peaceful band of mutants is led by the wheelchair-bound Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who preaches a gospel of patience and accommodation with humans. On Magneto’s warlike side are his lieutenant, Mystique (Rebecca Romijn), and his other fanatical follower, Pyro (Aaron Stanford). On Professor Xavier’s presumably more enlightened side are fellow faculty members Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), Storm (Halle Berry) and the ill-fated Cyclops, a.k.a. Scott Summers (James Marsden).

Though none of the mutants are immortal like Superman, when one adds up their aggregate superhuman powers, one wonders why they don’t simply seize control from their comparatively puny human counterparts. Any one of the mutants on either side of the factional struggle would easily knock over a Spider-Man or Batman, but put them in a group and they inexplicably become a vulnerable, oppressed minority, like gays or illegal aliens. It’s no surprise, therefore, that there are few sequences in which we’re made aware of the non-mutant majority—and, similarly, no sense of a world composed of many nations on many continents.

An area in which the X-Men concept is unusually congenial to my tastes is its almost equal sharing of power between men and women. Indeed, the most pivotal characterization in the current X-Men is that of Dr. Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who, as Phoenix, rises from the dead after having nobly sacrificed her life in X2 for her lover, the aforementioned Scott Summers. This time around, however, Jean Grey is so completely controlled by destructive forces that she starts off by killing Scott, then joins forces with Magneto to terrorize humankind. Professor Xavier tries to turn her away from evil, but only manages to lose his own life in the process.

It is left to the survivors of Professor Xavier’s team, notably Wolverine, Storm and the fur-covered Beast (Kelsey Grammer)—who doubles as the Secretary of Mutant Affairs in the President’s cabinet—to battle the renegade mutants. There are plots and subplots galore in this fast-paced adventure yarn, though Mr. Ratner and his screenwriters have geared everything for action at any cost, so there are very few of the lyrical moments characteristic of Mr. Singer’s first two installments.

Even so, having now seen all three X-Men movies, I have to confess that I found the first two eminently forgettable. Hence, I didn’t expect much from this one—which is why I may have found myself strangely moved by the sense of relationships, friendly and unfriendly, coming to an end in a dull return to normality in the world of humans and mutants. I especially felt something in Jean Grey’s last defiantly windswept moments as the would-be nemesis of us all. And though I realized that I was being manipulated every inch of the way, I did feel a twinge of pathos at the forlorn sight of Mr. McKellen’s Magneto, now a powerless old man, sitting alone at a park chess table, playing both sides with a resigned air of anticlimax.

But not to worry: After the end credits, which seem to run on for hours, a nurse making her rounds in a hospital room is startled to hear a familiar voice from an unseen (to the audience) source. Could another dead mutant be planning to rise from the dead, Phoenix-like, in the fourth installment of X-Men some three years hence? Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Antoni-ennui!

The B.A.M. Rose Cinemas in the Peter Jay Sharp Building (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn) is launching a comprehensive retrospective of the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, beginning on June 7 with a one-week run of his 1966 masterpiece, Blow-Up. In that year, I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts, an institution in which most of the students carried the most expensive and sophisticated camera equipment I had ever seen in a student body. The scene in Blow-Up in which the protagonist, a fashion-model photographer played by David Hemmings, performed an ever more progressively intimate photo shoot over an inert model was like the national anthem to these students.

In the Village Voice of December 29, 1966, I hailed Blow-Up as the movie of the year, adding that I used the term “movie” advisedly for an evening’s entertainment that left me feeling no pain (or Antoniennui) whatsoever. Since I had been credited with coining the epithet “Antoniennui” to describe some of the master’s more arduous exercises, I was taking a jab at myself. Yet some of my esteemed colleagues found the film—particularly the imaginary tennis game at the end—unbearably pretentious, and you may too. But then again, you may not.

The excitement begins with the opening credits, which are stenciled across a field of green grass opening into a pop rhythm-and-blues background of dancing models seen partially through the lettering that, among other things, implicates Mr. Antonioni in the script and heralds Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings, Sarah Miles and a supporting cast of unknowns. The billing is misleading: Ms. Redgrave and Ms. Miles make only guest appearances in what amounts to a vehicle for Hemmings and Mr. Antonioni’s camera. Blow-Up is never dramatically effective in terms of any meaningful confrontations of character. The dialogue is self-consciously spare and elliptical in a sub-Pinteresque style.

Fortunately, the 24-hour duration of the plot makes it possible for Mr. Antonioni to disguise most of the film as a day in the life of a mod photographer in swinging London town. What conflict there is in Blow-Up is captured in the opening clash between vernal greens on one plane and venal blues, reds, yellows, pinks and purples on another. The natural world is arrayed against the artificial scene; conscience is deployed against convention. If you’ve never seen Blow-Up, see it now, if only to see what part of the world was like 40 years ago.

But. The fireworks were perhaps what we most enjoyed about last night's Fantastic Four washout on Liberty Island. They were of the Fantastic Four logo. In reverse. Which, in fact, happened just last week to the Fantastic Four skywriters in Los Angeles.

Struck by this dyslexic repetition, we called up the Hollywood expert Mark Lisanti, the editor of Defamer. (For the record, the Transom used to sort of be Mr. Lisanti's boss. And no: he wasn't particularly easy to supervise.) Mr. Lisanti: exactly how do the hyper-anal Ritalin-addicted promotions folk in Hollywood allow this to happen?

"When something like that goes wrong," said Mr. Lisanti, "it not only negates what they're trying to do, it makes them look very stupid. I'm sure every reporter at that thing was ridiculing it. But even if it showed up correctly, everyone would have groaned and rolled their eyes." That is indeed correct. But what desperation drives these tactics?

"This is the thing; you have a lot of people at the studios in the promotions and marketing departments, and they get paid big salaries. They have to justify them with things like this. A regular campaign isn't going to earn them promotions. When ABC promoted Lost, they littered the beaches with bottles with notes in them."

Our greatest fear: the escalation of promotional tactics. "We've had skywriting, we've had fireworks... Maybe they'll launch one of the stars into space. What's next? The next disaster movie, they'll stage an earthquake?"

"It really screams of waste," he said. "I've never seen a stunt that makes me think, 'oh, that's pretty cool, i wanna go see the movie.' The Fantastic Four skywriting makes me want to see the movie even a little less than I would have. They're trying to save it from Punisher territory. Look who they hired to direct it -- the guy who did Beauty Shop and Taxi?"

"If they really believed in this project, where's the Bryan Singer? The Taxi guy? That was one of the worst disasters in recent years. Instead, they've saved some money on the director's salary, and farted it up into the sky."
—Choire Sicha