X-Men: Days of Future Past (Bryan Singer 2014)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014), the sequel to 2011’s queer classic X-Men: First Class aka Brokeback Mutant, is not its inability to work out what to do with female superheroes who aren’t blue and naked – Storm has two whole lines of dialogue, which might be more than Blink does, and one brief meteorological dabble; Rogue, for all that Anna Paquin comes seventh in the credits, gets a two-second wordless cameo; and Kitty Pryde has the clunkiest, most thankless line of exposition in a film full of clunky, thankless and repetitive exposition because if it’s too hard I won’t understand it, and then gets to spend the next two hours kneeling down trying not to stroke Wolverine’s sideburns – nor is it Professor Xavier’s claim that the ‘greatest of powers’ is ‘hope’, when clearly he means ‘cliché’, nor is it that given the opportunity to transport Wolverinator, the huge jackass, back in time to change one thing that will in turn change everything they send him to strut around 1970s New York like some kind of white Shaft rather than to the script conference that set this humdrummery rolling (where he could have killed everyone with impunity because we would never have known this universe containing this dreary mess of a film ever existed – would you like me to exposition that for you a couple of times, or are you keeping up all by yourself?), but the fact that the film is so leaden and uninvolving that nothing, nothing at all, can distract you from coming up with an amusing alternative title for it … although, in a truly damning indictment of just how exhausting work has been the last couple of weeks, the best I, the actual (god’s honest truth) coiner of Brokeback Mutant, could come up with was the half-assed X-Men: Days of Farty Pasta … and in an equally devastating indictment of Fox’s apparent collusion in undermining the one genuinely lucrative Marvel property to which Disney does not own the film rights, it turns out that getting to call this tiresome piece of crap Days of Farty Pasta is actually the very best thing about it…