Lies my teacher told me

The way I learned it, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the most dramatic confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union of the Cold War, brought about by the Soviet's attempt to place nuclear missiles in Cuban bases, and only resolved by heroic, mostly secret negotiation between President John F. Kennedy, the U.N. Attorney General, and Nikita Khruschchev.

I had no idea that it was all engineered by Kevin Bacon from his swinging submarine, and that it was actually averted by the combined forces of Charles Xavier and Magneto.

I just saw X-Men: First Class tonight, four days after it opened, because I am a bad comic book fan. Here are just a few quick thoughts.

—I kinda liked it okay. It didn't have any performances to match the best of those in the first three films (particularly Ian McKellen's Magneto), and virtually no action scenes or powerful visuals to compare to some of the best in those three films, but the actors were all pleasant looking, charismatic and I liked the costuming and set-design for the most part. Plenty of plot holes and odd leaps in logic, but, in terms of plot, there was nothing incredibly stupid about it, akin to the first film's mutant making ray-gun thing.

—The movie only really came to life for me in the short sequence in which Xavier uses the proto-Cerebro to seek out other mutants, and he and Magneto go through a recruiting drive montage. That scene, and maybe the one where we see Chuck trying to pick up girls with his mind-reading ability to genetics-based lines in a bar. The rest of the film was surprisingly lifeless.

—I don't see why Emma Frost couldn't have had an English accent though, or Moira a Scottish one, or Banshee an outrageous Irish one.

—While considering some of the choices they made in this film, I couldn't help but notice how many completely hilarious characters from the awesomely terrible mid-nineties X-Men cartoon were in this, and how they were rendered non-terribly hilarious.

Like, Sebastian Shaw just wears a pretty nice period suit, instead of knickerbockers and tights. Beast doesn't have that goofy smart guy accent and the habit of not only constantly quoting scientists and philosophers but then citing them like an asshole, and Banshee doesn't make that dumb flying scream he made in that cartoon ("EEEEEE!").

—I liked Emma Frost's hat in the Russian scene, and her costuming in general. Which kinda surprised me, as all the promotional shots the studio released previously kinda made me cringe. I think she looked pretty dumb in her diamond form though.

—The black mutant dies first. Of course.

—Was it weird that they never even named Shaw's tornado guy assistant? I didn't recognize him at all. I wouldn't have even known that Azazel mutant was anything other than an evil version of Nightcrawler if I hadn't seen him mentioned on a couple of blogs in recent days.

—I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel to this movie, set...I don't know when, the ' 70s? The '80s?...when teenage versions of the heroes from the first trilogy like Cyclops, Jean Grey and Storm and some of the ones from the end of this film are being X-Men and doing X-Men stuff. I don't really know how all of the five X-Men film fit together at this point though; weren't a teenage Cyclops and a teenage Emma Frost in X-Men Origins: Wolverine...?

Of course, since Chuck and Magneto broke up at the end of this movie, and the former can no longer run around being a psychic man of action, I wonder if there's much point in a direct sequel to X-Men: First Class.