Magnets and the Superhero Flavored Candy!

Two stores, two amazing discoveries in the past few days.

First at a dollar store in Allen Park, I discovered a bunch of Superhero candies.  Some were gummies (my personal favorite variety of candy) others were these crunchy tart candies that are shaped like heroes. There were also candy sticks, or what used to be called candy cigarettes and then there were the taffy pieces. Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, The Incredible Hulk and Wolverine each adorned different flavors of taffy.  The best part of these taffies though, is that normally I would pay a quarter a piece for them, but these come in packages of 10 for $1. There was also some Spider-Man candy rope type things, I haven't tried them yet, but they look good.

Other candies discovered, were gummies and crunchies based on Super Mario Bros. characters, and also more candy sticks based on some Hanna Barbara characters.

At anther store, not all that far from the office that has recently opened, I found some other cool things, namely some Superhero themed magnets that will be used to decorate my space at work.  I'll have magnets all over my desk, and some lawn gnomes on top of my desk from here on out.  I'll save the gnome discussion for another day though, for now it's all about the Superhero magnets.

My mother was with me as we stopped at Five Below, that's where I bought a few cool things a couple of weeks ago, and also where I found the gnomes and magnets, and some other stuff.

The magnets are the coolest thing so far though, I got two cool bigger Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ones, as well as the 'normal' ones with Captain America (three variations), Spider-Man (2 variations), Thor (2 variations), The Punisher, The X-Men (2 variations), Iron Man, Superman, and another Ninja Turtles one. There is also one there about gnomes, which was funny to me that I was able to get that the same day I got the gnomes.

As the name suggests, everything in the store is $5 or less, and they have a lot of cool stuff, I will be back again.

X-Men: No Class

   OK, the film doesn't really have no class, but it's far from "first class" entertainment when it comes to tying into the other movies in the series.  It obviously was trying to tie into those movies based on cameos and other small things, but way to many things don't add up when it comes to series continuity.  That aside, the film was still enjoyable. I mean who doesn't want to watch X-Men fight Nazi's? OK sure, that doesn't technically happen, but it could have.

   Plot Synopsis: Before Charles Xavier (McAvoy) and Erik Lensherr (Fassbender) took the names Professor X and Magneto, they were two young men discovering their powers for the first time, working together to stop the greatest threat the world has ever known.  The film  features a star-studded supporting cast, including Academy Award-nominee Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone), January Jones (“Mad Men”), Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Zoë Kravitz (“Californication”), Nicholas Hoult (A Single Man), Lucas Till (Walk the Line), and Emmy Award-nominee Oliver Platt (“The West Wing”).

   I'll start with the visuals like I did in my last review the transfer to the disc is great, very few flaws, and watching it HD rather than on the grainy theater screen was a true treat. (Jennifer Lawrence half naked most of the time didn't hurt either...) The effects were all pretty believable in this world, but nothing to write home about.

   The audio here was pretty standard, again nothing to write home about.  The only thing stood out as excellent to me was Magneto's daunting theme music, but nothing was blatantly bad so it's slightly above average at best. The sound mix worked well together, but it just felt like it was lacking something to me.

Now for the extras, this disc isn't packed full geeky goodness like some, but what it has is fantastic.  First off it starts with 10 free digital comics that help to tell the back story of the actual "first class" and they are all great, though I'm still adapting to the digital comic phenomena. Also included is a 7 part making of documentary, that while annoying to be broken into segments that run about 10 minutes a piece, is still a very fine documentary in the long run.  Several deleted/extended scenes are included (sorry I didn't count them and don't have the disc sitting next to me as I write this), as is some behind the scenes info on scenes, and a really cool feature that lets the viewer 'control' cerebro in a feature that when you find and click on the various mutants you get scenes from all of the films that mutant has been in within the live-action franchise.  The glaring  omission is the lack of a director's commentary.

Final grade is a 3 out of 5 on this one. There just isn't enough stuff to put this edition over the top.