I hate going to the movies. Now, you probably know me well enough to guess that I don't actively choose to see crappy movies. So it generally isn't the content that I despise, it's the company. People always manage to ruin the experience for me. Like my gaming, in my movie-going I like to fall deeply and completely into the film. I want to let myself become fully involved and totally concentrated on the movie, so the constant distractions of people eating and walking and talking and laughing at the wrong parts and being fat and kicking over cups and getting paged just drive me nuts. To get me in a movie theater these days, it has to be a movie that I abso-fucking-lutely just have to see.

Or have a free coupon.

X2 was honestly the best movie experience I've had in a long time. And it was all in the timing. The Moron Populace has already seen the movie, so there were only six people in the theater. Six quiet people. We went to the 10pm showing on a Tuesday night, so there was no crowd anywhere. We walked in during the previews and got to sit wherever we wanted. And the movie was pretty damn great!

Comics fans are used to being shit on. Most of us remember a time when any non-comics adaptation of comics material unequivocally sucked, whether it was a tv show, a movie, a game, or a cartoon. But in the last decade, we finally got some comics fans tucked in behind the scenes to start quality-controlling the flow. X2 is a giant French kiss to all the comics readers in the audience. So many character cameos and quick references... and the very last shot is an image that only a fan would get: the shape of the Phoenix.

I mean, you show me a guy with a ruby-quartz visor over his eyes and I instantly know him. I know his childhood nickname. I know his family. I know his history of costumes. I know his legacy. I know how he and the other original members of the team gawked out of the second story window when a teenaged Jean Grey walked up the path to the mansion's doors for the first time. You show that same guy to Rhonda and she thinks of him as one of the last-ditch cast additions in the final years of Ally McBeal, but in this movie he shoots lasers out of his eyes.

It is downright weird how they got all of these actors to agree to X2, though. Anybody who isn't Wolverine has about two pages of dialogue. This movie probably has the smallest Oscar winner-to-screen time ratio ever. And although Sir Ian McKellen seems to be adoring his role as Magneto, I can't imagine Halle Berry keeping this up for another movie. Hopefully they already shot some X3 scenes with her, or else she's going to become the mutant equivalent to Chuck from Happy Days.

Some of my favorite bits: Wolverine smoking his cigar. Colossus armoring up. The opening Evil Nightcrawler scene with all the acrobatics and teleporting. Dr. Hank McCoy on television. Magneto's jailbreak. The brief, bloody Logan-as-Weapon X shots. Shadowcat and Siren among the younger students.

Least favorite bits: Professor X's ability to freeze people. (Come again?) Nightcrawler's scar-tattoos and tacked-on "faith." (Yes, I know it was a counterpoint to the movie's heavy evolution asthetic, and to illustrate that even hideous mutants can be human.) Stryker building a second Cerebro. (Wouldn't it have been simpler to just appropriate the original?) Wolverine taking a bullet in the forehead and surviving.

And some hoped-for bits that didn't happen (yet): Wolverine calling Nightcrawler "Fuzzy" or "Blue Elf." Iceman in full body ice form. The Wolverine-Colossus Fastball Special.

And some stuff I hope they never cover: Empress Lilandra, the Shi'Ar Empire and Prof. X with healed legs and that stupid jumpsuit. Mystique revealed as Nightcrawler's mother. Cyclops's perennial loser brother Havok. Cyclops's dopey loser father Corsair.

And the Blob. Keep him out.