January Jones was nominated for an Emmy for her work on Mad Men, Sarah.
First of all, let me say that First Class is what X-Men 2000 should've been. It's very telling that the movie begins exactly where the first film began, with Erik watching his parents being taken away by the SS officers at a concentration camp(Auschwitz?) when his mutant magnetic ability suddenly manifests itself, causing the gate to bend. But instead of jumping decades ahead to where Magneto has become a geriatric, sophomoric, textbook villain, First Class shows how Erik was turned into a weapon by Hellfire Club leader Sebastian Shaw, who was working with the NAZIs at the time, but only to further his own agenda, and then jumping years ahead to when Erik is hunting down all the NAZIs responsible for the murder of his parents, including Shaw himself. It's almost as if the screenwriter is saying,
this is how the story should've been told.
Meanwhile, the relationship between Charles Xavier and Raven Darkholme also begins in a far more benign atmosphere in the home of Charles' parents, which I assume is the Xavier mansion in Westchester, New York. It all unfolds with such unforced logic and seamlessness it makes me wonder how Zak Penn, the screenwriter for the first X-Men movie, can even look at himself in the mirror and call himself a screenwriter. If only the first X-Men movie had been structured this way, only with Scott Summers, Jean Grey, Hank McCoy, Warren Worthington, and Bobby Drake as the First Class. Wolverine is actually unnecessary to the story. He'd be better served in his own origin story involving Stryker and the Weapon X program, leading to his joining the X-Men in a sequel. I'll post more later.
