Mel Gibson vs. Nightcrawler

Last night I dreamed the following, more or less: I was in a theater watching the newly released X-Men 4. The movie was turning out to be really terrible, although I was glad to see they brought Nightcrawler back from his completely unexplained vacation from X3. Then Mel Gibson showed up, both in the movie—as Nightcrawler’s brother, which seemed as outrageous to my dream self as it does to me as I type this now—and in the theater, sitting one row in front of me. At that point the movie began to reach new depths of suck, mostly because of Mel’s crappy acting. Meanwhile, the Mel in the theater started making an ass of himself, talking and generally being obnoxious. So I stood up, knocked his baseball hat off his head, and basically picked a fight. At this point it became clear that he’d had a few (what can I say, apparently my subconscious reads more supermarket tabloids than I do) and the cops quickly showed up. We were ordered to empty our pockets, and Mel spent about twenty minutes pulling fistfuls of cash and empty Heineken bottles out of various places on his person.

At this point things get kind of sketchy in terms of story line. I know that at one point I told Mel to “shut the fuck up already,” and then one of the cops started to accuse me of being emotionally unstable. Fortunately for all involved, the real-life alarm clock went off and I woke up.

Study questions: (1) Do you think Mel really drinks Heineken? Why or why not? (2) Discuss the pros and cons of Nightcrawler turning out to have a crazy cop for a brother who paints half his face blue (aha!) and goes around pouring glasses of water on extraterrestrials. (3) Essay: Imagine a world in which Mel Gibson would actually be cast in an X-Men movie. Extra credit if you bring up the fact that David Hasselhoff has actually played Marvel character Nick Fury in a cheesy TV movie of his own.