Sketchbook/X-Men: First Class (Collaboraction) Compare/Contrast

A sketchbook picture of the X-Men

Last Saturday, I saw X-Men: First Class and Collaboraction’s SKETCHBOOK: Evolution -- both during opening weekend! Since I had caught the fifth installment in the X-Men series earlier in the day, it was weighing on my mind as I sat in the audience later that night in Chopin Theatre. The movie and festival seem ripe for comparison. After all, both focused loosely on the theme of evolution! Below you’ll find my running comparison of the elements in the sci-fi action blockbuster, X-Men: First Class, and the festival of avant garde short works, Sketchbook: Evolution.

Franchise History

If you are unfamiliar with these two franchises, and the Genus: Species format of the titles didn’t tip you off, allow me to clue you in: both X-Men: First Class and SKETCHBOOK: Evolution are part of successful, long-running series. I won’t bother getting into the whole Marvel-ous history behind the X-Men franchise. What’s important to know for the purposes of this comparison is that the first X-Men movie came out just one year before the first Sketchbook festival. Coincidence? Unlikely. But check this out: there have been 11 Sketchbook festivals, and only five X-Men movies! SKETCHBOOK clearly has the upper-hand in terms of output. (And let’s just be honest: X-Men 3 was barely serviceable, and X-Men: Origins? Absolute garbage.)

I haven’t seen any of the earlier SKETCHBOOK festivals, so that’s about all I can say on this subject.

X-Men: C+/SKETCHBOOK: A-

Acting

X-Men: First Class stars the guy from Inglourious Basterds (the one with the unconvincing German accent) as Magneto, and according the IMDB, the voice of Gnomeo plays Charles Xavier. It also features that hot girl from that movie about growing up with an extended family of meth dealers in the Ozarks, except they dolled her up in this one so she actually looks attractive, and so then she forgot how to act? On the other hand, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution stars your freshman roommate from DePaul Theater School, a barista from Intelligentsia who handed you a flyer while you were ordering a coffee and scone, and Steve Wilson’s high school acting class.

I’d say the performance quality in these two ventures was about equal: there were some great performances and there were some amateur performances. Pint-sized theater prodigy Ada Grey was in one of the sketches, and she absolutely stole the show. Ada is six years old, and I’m pretty sure that her theater blog has more followers than Iews You Can Use (but that’s okay, we’re not sweating it, RIGHT GUYS?). And it turns out she’s also a natural performer, too. Of course. WTF. She is six years old! I couldn’t even tie my own shoes when I was six. Honestly, Ada Grey was probably the most evolved thing in the whole festival.

X-Men: B/SKETCHBOOK: B+

Plot

It’s a little unfair to try to compare plots, because SKETCHBOOK: Evolution had like 16 plots, more or less (some of the pieces didn’t technically have “plots”), whereas X-Men: First Class, being borne of a single script, had one plot. But this is as good a place as any to mention “The Franchise,” a sketch that spoofed blockbuster franchises and had me wondering about the eight dollars I’d spent on X-Men: First Class. (For the record, I don’t regret it.) “The Franchise” poked fun at Hollywood’s tendency to recycle successful blockbusters into stale carbon copies, to the point where they fall into the absurd.

Generally, I’d have to say that the storylines present here were mostly uninspired (and I’m talking now about both X-Men: First Class and the majority of the pieces in SKETCHBOOK: Evolution). The stories were entertaining, yes, but the theme is supposed to be evolution here, right? Genetic mutation! Rapidly advancing technology changing the way humans function! Shit like that! There has to be something more original that this incredibly talented theater community can dredge up than a sketch about an iPhone intervention, or a story about a pair of two-dimensional scientists who discover the third dimension. The fifth X-Men installment also suffers from tired ideas that tend to weigh down the action, but that’s Hollywood, so what do you expect really?

Since I’ve been told that I have difficulty managing my expectations, I’m adjusting the grades for “plot” based on the fact that I had extremely low expectations for X-Men: First Class, and perhaps unreasonably high expectations for SKETCHBOOK: Evolution.

X-Men: B-/SKETCHBOOK: B

Special Effects

This is a no-brainer, right? X-Men: First Class obviously takes this one. X-Men’s budget was like a million times SKETCHBOOK’s. I don’t actually know the budget for either of these ventures, but it’s not even a fair fight. So I’ll give SKETCHBOOK: Evolution an A for effort. They had a freaking awesome puppet. And there were some interesting things they tried to do with overhead projectors.

(Could air-conditioning be considered a special effect? SKETCHBOOK gets an F for air-conditioning.)

X-Men: A/SKETCHBOOK: A

Final results

So which should YOU go see, X-Men: First Class, or SKETCHBOOK: Evolution? What do you think I’m going to say? This is a theater site, right? Look, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution closes in just a couple weeks. X-Men: First Class, however, will likely be available in one form or another for eternity. Based on the grade point average I’ve calculated for each of these two events, SKETCHBOOK: Evolution get the upper hand, ever so slightly. But that doesn’t even account for live theater’s limited shelf-life. Once SKETCHBOOK closes, you won’t be able to find it On Demand or on Blu-ray. Go see this show!

X-Men: B/SKETCHBOOK: B+/A-

-Joe Tansino

House On The Rock, Wisconsin (Guest Reviewer ADA GREY)

Once a last summer ago I went to House on the Rock in Wisconsin. You should go there because it is very weird and you might laugh your heads off. Or scare your heads off. It was the weirdest house in the whole entire worlds. Worlds with an s because there are planets, and some things live on there like aliens. It was weirder than aliens--it was sooo weird.

There was this thing that was called (well, I am going to add one line) The Scary Mikado. Scary is the part I put in. The Mikado was this Chinese man who was playing the drums, and all these people were playing the horns. Not real people--wood or plastic robots. And the man who was playing the drums kept looking seriouser and pointing his eyebrows. You put in a coin, and then they will do music, and then they will move. I hated the Mikado because of its scary music. And it reminded me of someone dying. It was so stupid; I hated the man with the mustache. I HATED IT SO MUCH. (All in capitals, please.) I hated it more than a giant whale eating me.

Speaking of whales, there was a giant whale that was bigger than real size. And it was wrestling with a Squid! The squid was in the water, and it was wrapping around the whale, and the whale was screaming in terror! (I am laughing at my own review. It is so hilarious.) There was a boat in the whale’s mouth, and it was sticking on his tongue. And it was so scary!

There was a doll carousel with lots of dolls riding on ponies! And standing all around the carousel! And it went to the ceiling! And there was one beautiful bride doll at the top riding on a rainbow pony, and it had beautiful diamonds on it. It was less weird than the other carousel. That had animals on it that were weird. There was a bulldog. The bulldog had a little thing on the back you could ride in and his face was frowning. There was a mermaid and a camel that had seats too. You can’t on ride on them, so don’t disappoint kids. I am not going to talk about everything because there is so many stuff it might take two weeks to finish my review and I want to have some surprises for people that go.

The thing I am going to talk about is like a tunnel that looked like it was going to go on forever and ever and ever. It wasn’t through something, but you could see out, but you were so high that it was scary to look out. There was this big window on the floor, and you couldn’t get past it because there was this rope around it and you couldn’t get past the rope. If you kept walking past the rope then the walls would be too squished together, and then you would try to get through, and then you would be stuck and try to call the police. But you couldn’t reach your cell phone because your hands would be too squished.

There was the room that looked like the city. There was a beer bar (not a sushi bar). They made it to look like the city, and there were carriages and there were like fake people. I pretended that one of the fake people was my boyfriend. I said, “do you want to go somewhere tonight.” And that is all I remember.

It felt like two days but it was only one day. We went both times in one day: in the day and the afternoon. I recommend people see it in one day because then they won’t have to go back if they are leaving the next day to finish it. The man that built the house was crazy. He wanted to be like Frank Lloyd Wright, but he couldn’t. I had more fun at House on the Rock than at the tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright school because House on the Rock was weirder, and i love being weird. I like both architects; Frank Lloyd Wright is fun but not like hilarious. So Frank Lloyd Wright is like “Wow! I like this. It is an awesome tour.” But House on the Rock was like, “Wow! This is hilarious, and it is weird too. I love it.”

A+