A Tale Of Two Movies

I was hoping to get out to see some of the new summer movies this weekend so I could provide a review to all of my fans (Hi, Mom!), but I ended up with too much to do. Then I thought, "Hey, I'm a Friedmanian "Flat Worlder" -- I can outsource my movie-watching". I assembled a crack team of three movie experts to review the top two movies out this weekend: "The Da Vinci Code" and "X-Men: The Last Stand". The team consisted of the following members:

Reviewer #1: An 18 year old college sophomore at home for the long weekend. The baggage she brought home consisted mostly of dirty clothes that she wanted someone to wash. She doesn't want a bunch of submariners poking around her MySpace site, so she won't tell her dad how to get to it.
Reviewer #2: A 15 year old high school freshman who was recently elected Sophomore Class President for next year at Idaho's biggest high school. His chest is hairier at 15 than his dad's was at 30.
Reviewer #3: A 14 year old 8th grader who recently won his school's chess championship. Despite his demonstrated intellect, he still can't remember his username or password to update his blog. He just grew an inch in the last few months, and is now about 1/4" taller than Reviewer #2 (and almost 2" taller than his dad).

On Friday night, they saw The Da Vinci Code. I was eager to hear about the reactions of those who hadn't read the book vs. the one who had. Reviewer #1 likes almost all movies -- she hated this one. She said it made her list of the 5 worst movies of all time; Reviewer #3 thought it might have been #1 on his list of bad movies. Both made statements to the effect of "We didn't want to leave the theater to go to the bathroom because we expected that at any time there'd be a scene that would explain what was going on. That scene never came." Reviewer #2, who had read the book, said the movie not only didn't add anything to the book, it took a lot away from the experience. Bottom line: two of the three reviewers got in trouble from their mom for giving the movie "the finger"; the third would have given it the same, but she's a proper young lady.

On Saturday, they saw "X-Men III". Reviewers #1 and #3 hadn't seen the previous two movies in the series, and both said that wasn't a problem with understanding this film. All three liked the movie a lot -- the action kept moving along, and most of the characters were interesting. Reviewer #3 did question why all of the non-standard colored mutants were blue. Although their reviews may have been skewed because they, especially Reviewers #2 and #3, were right in the middle of the target demographic, they all gave the movie between 4 and 5 out of five.

Literary note: I was going to really mess with WillyShake's head and sub-title this post "A tale told by teenagers", mixing Dickens with Shakespeare quotes and thereby perpetuating the stereotype that submariners don't know anything about literature, but decided not to.