Idi Amin Dada Photographs

A Failing Grade to X-Men: First Class

Let's say you want to take an early-summer break from the weekly onslaught of action pictures and want to trade up in quality to an art-house film. Which actors would attract you? Surely Michael Fassbender, a smoldering sensation in Hunger , Fish Tank , Inglourious Basterds and Jane Eyre and a true MENSA heartthrob. Perhaps James McAvoy, the winsome Scot who played the naïve doctor to Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and Keira Knightley's noble servant-class lover in Atonement . If these two aren't the Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud of modern movies, they personify better than any 30ish stars the yin-yang of Brit passion and sensitivity. Add Jennifer Lawrence, the Best Actress Oscar nominee for Winter's Bone , and Mad Men 's pretty, pouty January Jones, and you have an ideal cast for an uplifting transatlantic indie drama — or, since the director is Matthew Vaughn of Stardust and Kick-Ass luster, the makings of a smart fantasy parable.

Instead, McAvoy, Fassbender, Lawrence, Jones and several other actors with upmarket résumés (Oliver Platt, Rose Byrne, Kevin Bacon) are the stars of X-Men: First Class , a farfetched farrago meant to serve as the "origins story" to the 2000-2006 trilogy about the Marvel comics' crew of preternatural mutants. First Class alludes not just to the earliest group of strangely gifted students assembled by their genial mastermind Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart in the other movies, McAvoy here) but also to the new film's self-congratulatory air. It boldly solicits reviewers' blurbs proclaiming that the picture lives up to its title — that it is less a cash cow than a sacred one, equal to the éclat of its celebrated young stars. Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.

The X-Men films portrayed the battle of powerful minds: even-tempered, righteous Charles Xavier and the menacing Erik Lehnsherr, aka Magneto (Ian McKellen), representing all that is evil, cunning and cinematically seductive. First Class transports them to their respective pre-teens, when Charles was a privileged orphan in a Westchester castle and Erik a Jewish prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, where a prison doctor (Kevin Bacon) ordered the boy to "Bend this coin with your mind or I'll kill your mother right in front of you." Erik couldn't; the doctor did. By 1962, now in their 20s and played by McAvoy and Fassbender, Charles and Erik have joined forces to assemble other diff-abled young people, resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis and save the world — a mission that conveniently coincides with Erik's obsession to avenge his mother's death by killing the doctor, now a standard-issue sneering villain, named Sebastian Shaw, with some special powers and mutants of his own.

Jayalalithaa compares DMK regime to Hitler, Idi Amin

People in Tamil Nadu voted out the DMK because they felt they were living in Hitler's Germany or Idi Amin's Uganda, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa said Tuesday.

The DMK regime curbed media freedom and "people felt they were living in Hitler's Germany, under Mussolini or in Idi Amin's Uganda", she told a news conference here after meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh .

"There was no power, in most places no drinking water. The whole of Tamil Nadu had become one big garbage dump.

"The only thing everyone in power did was to amass money. People decided they had had enough."

She blamed the "all pervading corruption" on the DMK.

"(There was) total lack of governance, nepotism, domination of one family, not just in all areas of governance but in every business and every trade. Everything was monopolised by one family."

Jayalalithaa also blamed the DMK government for plunging Tamil Nadu into darkness.

"During our earlier tenure, from 2001 to 2006, Tamil Nadu was a power surplus state," she said, pointing out that electricity outages had become endemic when the DMK ruled Tamil Nadu.

This, she said, was due to corruption in the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board.

"The DMK is facing the heat today, the DMK supremo's family is facing the heat today.

"Many of the DMK leaders and leading lights of the party are facing a slew of corruption cases. Some are in jail, many more are likely to go to jail.

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