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.

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.

As it turns out, however, the novel was as much a trap for Mr. Schepisi as it was an opportunity. Though the book runs only about 300 pages, it is so densely packed with gracefully written insights into its characters, and their social and historical backgrounds, that even an ambitious adaptation and elaborate production like Mr. Schepisi's seems skimpy and unclear. Indeed, the movie provides an object lesson in what novels do best and what movies do best. Mr. Schepisi can be credited with remaining focused on the central configuration of the book: the serio-comic odyssey of four South London pub habitués charged with carrying out a fifth's last wishes–or as the title would have it, his last orders.

On a drive to Margate to spread their friend's ashes, there are memory flashbacks connected to the four friends, the deceased, and all the women and children in their lives. Here the iconic edge of movies over novels is realized with the felicitous casting of Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone as the four pilgrims, Michael Caine as their late friend, and Helen Mirren as his unfaithful widow (though under the most movingly extenuating circumstances).

The male characters are not salaried workers or wage slaves, but lower-middle-class entrepreneurs whose wives seldom think of careers. Mr. Caine's Jack Dodd was a butcher because Dodd and Son had to stay in the family. Mr. Winstone's Vince, Jack's adopted son, rebelled against that tradition and opened a car dealership. Mr. Hoskins' Ray gave up the insurance business to become a successful bookie. Mr. Hemmings' Lenny was quickly disabused of his middleweight-championship aspirations and opened a fruit-and-vegetable stand as part of being a lifelong loser. Only Tom Courtenay's Vic keeps a level head throughout, with a stable marriage, two sons to carry on his undertaking business, and a professional calm all the way to the disposal of Jack's ashes at the seaside.

On the printed page, the characters do not immediately jump out at you as they do on the screen. In movies, actors collaborate with their characters to create an opaque barrier between the audience and the filmmaker; in novels, the characters are prose transparencies that never fail to reveal the author to the reader.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schepisi quickly loses his iconic advantage by having to resort to a second line of young actors to play the aged leads in flashbacks that go back almost half a century. We are distracted time and again by having to contemplate how little or how much they resemble the more familiar faces in the here and now. And particularly for American audiences, the rapid cockney dialect with which the actors sacrifice communication for realism is another problem. In his novel, Mr. Swift's dialogue is no less authentic, but readers can contemplate the context of his masterly adjoined sentences at their leisure. In the movie, there is too little time on the screen for Mr. Schepisi to plant his visual signposts en passant , as it were.

Mind you, I am not endorsing the current Harry Potter-Lord of the Rings mania for literal adaptations of books into movies for fanatical adolescent readers. Hence, I do not fault Mr. Schepisi for a certain degree of compression, even though it meant sacrificing one of my favorite characters, Mandy, Vince's wife, a surrogate daughter to Jack and Amy.

What Mr. Swift and Mr. Schepisi are ultimately saying is that every life, however ordinary it may seem on the surface, is important enough to be explored for its full complement of happiness and heartbreak, comedy and tragedy, luck and misfortune, all ending the same way–either in a grave or an urn. Strangely, Last Orders is the third movie I've seen recently– The Shipping News and Maelstrom are the others–in which an urn containing the ashes of the departed is hauled around from place to place. Is cremation the new order of the day, and does it signify a decline in traditional religious faith and the ascendancy of a universal environmentalism? Certainly, Mr. Swift goes much deeper into the metaphysical implications of his strange story than does Mr. Schepisi with his instinctively

humanistic bias, but that again reflects the aesthetic tendencies of two art forms and two media in collision with each other.

Kidman's Comic Flop

Jez (Jeremy) Butterworth's Birthday Girl , from a screenplay by Tom Butterworth and Jez Butterworth, falls flat despite its very talented cast and its satiric acuity with the minor characters.

Nicole Kidman is on hand with one of those strenuously athletic sensual performances to which we've become accustomed ever since she burst upon our consciousness in 1989 in Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm . Here she plays Nadia, a Russian Internet bride summoned by hapless bank clerk John (Ben Chaplin) to his home in the London suburbs of Aldenston. After John discovers, to his horror, that Nadia does not speak a word of English, they are compelled to communicate solely through a variety of kinky sexual acts for which both have a startling affinity.

When Nadia's two Russian "cousins" burst in upon the happy suburban sexfest, John gradually realizes that he's been targeted and victimized by a dangerous gang of touristy Russian extortionists with Nadia as their bait–and, of course, that Nadia actually can speak fairly fluent accented English. Another surprise is that she had previously been impregnated by her Russian lover Alexei (Matthieu Kassovitz), much to John's dismay and Alexei's as well.

Alexei's more practical sidekick, Yuri (Vincent Cassel), tries to keep a lid on all the complications while tricking John into robbing his own bank to save Nadia from an imaginary dire fate.

As I watched the film struggle with all its switches and turnabouts, I wondered why it wasn't funnier, more charming or more exciting. Much of the problem lies in the nebbishy passivity of John in the face of one deception and disaster after another. I began to suspect that the filmmakers were in over their heads and had a hell of a time figuring out how to spring John and Nadia for the mandatory happy ending prescribed for a giddy comedy caper movie.

Unfortunately, the film manages to dissipate its suspense without convincing us that the ending makes any sense. Ms. Kidman displays a very resourceful personality in Birthday Girl . Her range of expressions is impressive, and her very suggestive physical dexterity keeps one watching even when her motivation is clouded over by endlessly shifting moods. But, as the late, great clown Bobby Clark complained in a stage revival of Victor Herbert's Sweethearts , "Never was a thin plot so complicated."