X-Men: First Class: In the beginning...

Who knew? Sure, Kevin Bacon is all over the place. Hence, the whole six degrees of separation thing.
But now, thanks to this tongue-in-cheek summer, sci-fi thriller, headed for blockbuster status, we also know he was behind some of the most egregious holocaust horrors and the freakingly frightening Cuban Missile Crisis.
Those two events bracket this highly entertaining prequel, which takes us back to the beginnings of the X-Men story. It's one of those epic summer flicks that the Movie Slut saw at the old RKO or Loews theaters on rainy days in July and August and didn't know what the heck was going on. But the action was mesmerizing and the theater was air conditioned.
In those days, for some inexplicable reason, you went to the movies at your convenience. If the film was halfway through, you stayed till the end, watched the second feature, then took in the first part of the movie. It didn't much matter because you didn't know what was going on anyway.
The new X-Men is not that difficult to understand if you know a smidgen of 20th-century history, which will probably eliminate much of the audience. But they'll groove on all the action, special effects and pyrotechnical bells and whistles.
If you're a grownup, you'll find this a lively, and at times witty, summer diversion. Mutant Power!