ebonlock | My name is Kurt Wagner, but in Munich I was known as...

Busy, busy weekend. Haven't seen "The Vikings" in years so it was delightful to get to watch it with a bunch of folks who'd never seen it before. And who wears short-shorts? Tony Curtis wears short-shorts!

Saturday Aelf and I earned some positive karma points helping

mallen clean up the old apartment. I did give us both some serious ideas about cleaning our own place. Wow, who knew how much filth could accumulate underneath a fridge...

Afterwards we met up with

tersa for X2, I'll ramble about that a bit below, but for now I can just say it easily blew away the first one in terms of plot, characterization, dialogue, etc. Go see this movie! And then go see it again. I'm planning one more viewing this week if I can squeeze it in somewhere.

Zoomed home afterwards to do a small ceremony (wasn't entirely content with the one I did for Beltane), and then I spent about an hour dancing on my solo piece. I quite literally danced better than I think I ever have in my life that night so I just couldn't bring myself to stop. Finally my body said, "Ok, time to stop now." Still, I was well pleased with the work and workout.

Sunday we met with the troupe, had a bit of brunch, and then mapped out our plans for the next month or so. Listened to some music for possible future choreographies, then went up to RWC to meet Laini, the veil lady. Oh my did she have gorgeous veils to show us. Too many. I went in with the intention of buying a set of lame veils for troupe use and walked away with two sets. Well one and a half, she's making me a black one as well. But they were so gorgeous! I couldn't help myself, I really couldn't. I think all of us ended up with fantastic colors and conveniently enough, the ability to mix and match them among one another. Now to learn how to handle lame...

Then went over to

elo_sf's place where we chatted for a bit, then hit Home Depot. I got him started on the fine art of herb growing while picking up a gorgeous honeysuckle vine for myself. Oh it smells heavenly! I'm going to take some time to replant that sucker this week. I need to get a trellis of some sort to train it up. Then we swung by Houlihan's for some very tasty soup and mini-desserts. Yum! We also discovered that one of E's cats has a thing for verbena...go figure.

Headed home with the intention of working on our duet choreography and ended up crashing instead. I think the weekend just caught up with both of us last night, and we swore to one another to try to do better this week.

I think the only thing that could've improved X2 for me would've ben a bit more screentime for Nightcrawler, but then again I'm a looney fangirl when it comes to him so I'm biased. Wow what a film, and I don't know about the rest of you but the first 10 minutes of it was worth the price of admission to me. Kurt kicked serious ass, even if he was being mind controlled at the time. I've always had a secret desire to see him just totally cut loose and use his powers to their deadliest effect, boy did he ever! My only quibble was that they had shoes on him for at least part of the sequence. He a) wouldn't really have been able to wear shoes given the way his feet are designed and b) wouldn't have been able to run up and along the walls with them on.

A couple of plot holes also left me scratching my head. The first was why Kurt would've had such a cute little set up in the church he was hiding out in. I mean wasn't he at Stryker's secret base as a prisoner for the past few months? In the graphic novel backstory it's made clear that he gets captured in Germany, shipped over, and is held prisoner his entire time in the States. But even assuming he was on the run for a few weeks (more like a day or two in the film) how would he have acquired all the posters of himself to hang in his room? And btw, I want those posters a lot!

Second plot hole, why in the name of god did Jean have to get out of the XJet to do what she did at the end? What, her powers don't work inside the jet? I think the whole sacrifice scene would've played a bit better for me if there'd been a real reason for her to go outside and face her end the way she did. I just didn't get it except that, well, according to canon if we want to do the Dark Phoenix saga we gotta' put Jean at the bottom of a lake. Maybe there's some more info in the novelization to explain this scene, I hope so.

Loved the Phoenix stuff we did get to see, and what we saw starting to come up out of the lake looked very promising! But will we get the Hellfire Club? Madeleine Pryor? Will Wolvie go off to Japan to fall for Mariko? And will we get Amanda Sefton introduced for Kurt? And oh do you suppose we'll actually get to see Hank McCoy as the Beast? It was very cute seeing him without the blue fur in this one, even briefly. And is Mystique Kurt's mom in this series too?

And Colossus really should've had a Russian accent, don't you think?

Favorite quotes:
Professor X: Logan, my tolerance of you smoking within the mansion notwithstanding; continue smoking that in here, and you will spend the rest of your life believing you are a six-year-old girl.
Wolverine: You would do that?
Professor X: I would have Jean braid your hair.

Storm talks to Kurt about his scarification, he comments that they're angelic script and that he has one for each of his sins, "So as you might imagine, I have quite a few."

And Aelf, the Artie I thought the kid might be was from the pair Artie and Leech, apparently now with Gen X: http://www.vitrex.net/~psy35/xmen/artie.html, a couple of young Morlocks. Ooh, hey that'd be an interesting plotline to do too now that I think about it...

Mutants I'd really like to see in the future:
Gambit (and not just his name on a list of mutants either)
Caliban
Quicksilver (seeing him and dear old dad teaming up would just be incredibly cool!)
Legion (good guy, bad guy, I don't care how they bring him into this just so long as they do. I just love the character!)