Culture Crash: X-Men vs. Buck

This is a match made in hell. Cowboy vs. Mutants, and the cowboy comes out the winner.

X-Men: First Class might have been a good film, except the scriptwriters forgot the first rule of comic book adaptations: comic book worlds are not the real world. They should have dropped the stupid Cuban missile crisis plot line and invented a fictional mad scientist who holds the world hostage, ala James Bond. Instead, we get mutants in rubberized, bullet-proof, superhero suits clustered around a black-and-white TV watching old JFK speeches. Yech.

I’ll stick to the boy-on-boy wrestling between Professor X and Magneto. If you’re like me, you’ll be going to this movie to see James McAvoy in the aforementioned rubberized suit, but you’ll soon be asking yourself where did that glorious Michael Fassbender come from? This is his coming out party: other than a bit part in Inglourious Basterds, most people haven’t seen him before. Except maybe in Centurion before it went to DVD. (Note: must log into my Netflix account…)

That’s as close as you’ll get to seeing anything sexy in this film, however, because January Jones and Rose Byrne pull out all the stops in their battle for the Cardboard Cut-out crown. Jones is the winner by a lacquered blonde hair. Byrne, on the other hand, gets the award for Female Stick Figure.  Somebody buy that girl a pizza.

You don’t go to see comic book films for the message, but usually there’s one struggling to dig itself out from beneath all the rubble left from the action scenes. X-Men pretends to have something to say about humanity and acceptance of people’s differences. Instead, it sends the message that living in the closet is the best, safest, and most humane thing to do. Yuck.

Buck, on the other hand, provides more than just a man in his chaps. It’s a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the cowboy who trains (not “breaks”) horses. Brannaman, who was rescued from an abusive family situation when he was a young boy, uses his past experiences with people to inform his relationships with animals. His message: if you want a big animal to respect you, you have to respect it…and violence has no place in that relationship.

The filmmakers follow Brannaman as he drives around the country teaching clinics to horse owners. They interview Brannaman, his wife and daughters, his step-mother, several of his friends and clients, the former town sheriff, and Robert Redford, who starred in The Horse Whisperer. And if they could have, they would have interviewed the horses, too, I’m sure.

Brannaman, it turns out, is a very entertaining guy. But he shares the stage with dozens of horses. And, even if they can’t speak, their body language communicates volumes about the kind of respect a person can win by being polite, firm, and nonviolent.

I recommend that you go see Buck; but take a pass on X-Men: First Class, unless you’re dying to see Magneto lift a nuclear submarine ass-first out of the ocean. (Damn, I wish I could do that!)