Film Freak Central

Iron Man 2 (2010)

*/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson
screenplay by Justin Theroux
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw A multi-million-dollar machine carefully engineered to generate the ridiculous amount of money it's about to, Iron Man 2 is kept from total, instant obsolescence by its "too good for this shit" cast, which cleverly manages to distract from the fact that this flick is a tone-deaf, laborious mess. Front and centre is Mickey Rourke as wronged Russian physicist Ivan Vanko, an amalgam of two Iron Man villains and so enigmatic a presence that although the dumbass screenplay (by actor Justin Theroux) takes pains to make Vanko's angst father-based, it's hard not to be distracted by the more mysterious depths of Rourke's performance. Similarly good are Gwyneth Paltrow, whose Girl Friday Pepper Potts is given the keys to her boss's Stark Industries and burdened instantly by expectation and cable-news notoriety; Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, again playing himself as a tech billionaire; and Sam Rockwell as an unctuous, fake-baked rival defense contractor. Not so great are the bland set-pieces, the misguided attempt to parallel Vanko's avenge-daddy motivation with Tony's make-dead-daddy-proud motivation into one legacy-based leitmotif, and a series of convoluted plot mechanisms (Tony's dying! Tony loves Pepper! No, he loves dead-eyed, one-note-but-hot Natasha (Scarlett Johansson)! Tony's company is in trouble! Tony's in trouble with the government! Tony likes to get drunk!) that grind the whole enterprise to a standstill at short intervals. If you can maintain your interest during an extended sequence in which our Tony plays with a bunch of virtual computer screens while building a long tube, you either drank the Kool-Aid that makes you care whether Tony lives or dies, or you've slipped blissfully into a coma.

Iron Man (2008)

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow
screenplay by Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway
directed by Jon Favreau

by Walter Chaw Iron Man is garden-variety pop heroism/wish-fulfillment that, marinated in Robert Downey Jr.'s effortless insouciant sauce, speaks volumes about the psychology of our nation at this disgusted, exhausted moment in our history. The plot's only casualties save its grand fiend are nameless Afghanis: terrorists on the one side, collateral damage on the other--few of them receiving the nobility of an individual death. Even the chief Al-Qaeda baddie is blown-up discreetly in the wings after a white guy first dazzles him with technology, then paralyzes him with the same. (Call it awe and shock.) The film's politics are easy and its racism similarly cavalier: Better dead than red (er, brown); when historians look back at this era in popular culture, it won't be terribly difficult to pick out that which forms the backbone of contemporary "Why We Fight" propaganda. What recommends the picture are sterling performances by Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow as Iron Man's Girl Friday, Jeff Bridges as the mentor-cum-baddie, and wonderful, reserved, dignified Shaun Toub in a too-brief cameo as the sole voice of moral "otherness." What's unfortunate about the flick is that it takes an awful long time to get to the good stuff, and that good stuff--almost entirely CGI-rendered--falls curiously flat. Not quite boring, Iron Man just seems sprung. There's no forward momentum, no impetus, no real gravity. With all that firepower at its fingertips, it has no idea where to point itself.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man Three
*½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley
screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron Man 3--an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's films, which I have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) makes to Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld. The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis--the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well--maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.

Son of the Mask (2005)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jamie Kennedy, Alan Cumming, Traylor Howard, Steven Wright
screenplay by Lance Khazei
directed by Lawrence Guterman

by Walter Chaw Towards the end of the uniquely awful Son of the Mask, star Jamie Kennedy gets two fistfuls of his screen-wife Traylor Howard's bosom (this after pummelling her head against the ground in a scary depiction of domestic violence) and declares, in so many words, "Eureka--so it is you, honey." It's a charming vignette that follows about an hour of fart, snot, golden shower, and Exorcist jokes, each trumping the last in level of inappropriateness until finally the deadened synapses begin to register that with sets like "Edge City" and "Fringe City", the brain trust behind this abortion might actually have had something subversive in mind. A shame, then, that they've confused "edge" and "fringe" elements with puerile scatology and institutional dehumanization, intercut with baby and animal reaction shots and a marginal and failed television comedian (playing a marginal and failed television animator) mugging in an astoundingly lifeless approximation of "manic." For a film that might want to be taken as "edgy," in other words, Son of the Mask caters to the absolute lowest and commonest of the lowest common denominators.

Spider-Man: The Animated Series (2003) - DVD

Image A Sound A+ Extras A Cheese A
"Heroes and Villains," "Royal Scam," "Law of the Jungle," "Sword of Shikata," "Keeping Secrets," "Tight Squeeze," "Head Over Heals," "The Party," "Flash Memory," "Spider-Man Dis-Abled," "When Sparks Fly," "Mind Games: Part One," "Mind Games: Part Two"

by Walter Chaw Taking place right where the Sam Raimi feature film leaves off, with Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Harry Osborn off to college (Peter perplexed, MJ clueless, Harry seething), MTV's "Spider-Man: The Animated Series" is a completely CGI creation that has a pretty tough time finding a pulse in among all the whiz-bang. In truth, it took me a long time to thaw to the look of the series, so much like a nifty video game that I caught my thumbs twitching in unconscious sympathy with the gyrations of the coloured .gifs. And even when it stopped actively bugging me, I never completely bought into the piece as any kind of drama--the suspension of disbelief impossible when thoughts of the size of the mainframe, the insane processor rates, and how neat a video game all this was going to make one day keep running through the brain like a stock ticker. Worse, even if the look of the thing were not super-distracting, the voice acting by lead Neil Patrick Harris is more smug than the intended wry, sounding an awful lot like not only Doogie Howser (natch), but also Screech from "Saved by the Bell". Popstress Lisa Loeb is pretty much non-descript as Mary Jane, her absence from all the collection's voluminous special features conspicuous but probably due either to her being busy with a cooking show on the Food Network with boyfriend Dweezil Zappa or not feeling very confident about the series.

The Rocketeer (1991) [20th Anniversary Edition] - Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B Sound B
starring Bill Campbell, Alan Arkin, Jennifer Connelly, Timothy Dalton
screenplay by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo, based on the graphic novel by Dave Stevens
directed by Joe Johnston

by Walter Chaw Joe Johnston's rousing Art Deco audition for Captain America, The Rocketeer is, twenty years on, as crisp and clean as laundry-line linen. It has a beautiful hero, his beautiful girl, and Alan Arkin as the crotchety old Q/Whistler/Lucius Fox to guarantee that no matter what our hero does to his gadgets, there'll always be more and better ones to take their place. The villain is modelled on Errol Flynn and works for the Nazis, and you don't have to squint very hard to figure out that a good portion of the picture's stickiness and cult accretion has to do with the idea that its 1938 setting allows for a measure of movie-history geekery. A sequence on a film set as bad guy Neville Sinclair (Timothy Dalton, chewing scenery like a champ) shoots a period swashbuckler is subversive not only for the way that it reflects the vehicle in which it finds itself, but also for suggesting that the Golden Age of Hollywood was, as we suspected all along, rife with miscreants and foreign agents. It allows for a greater connection to our working-class heroes, as well as the comparison the movie makes now again of The Rocketeer to Chuck Yeager. And at its best, it allows The Rocketeer to feel exactly like the best kind of aw-shucks patriotism: spic-and-span and "you got a stick of Beeman's?" and based on a love of our ideals instead of a hatred of an Other.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

***½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras A-
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Anne Hathaway
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

click any image to enlarge

by Walter Chaw For all its overreaching (and what's perilously close to a training montage), Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises is fascinating, engaging, and aggressively present. It's a wonderfully-performed melodrama about the sad, intractable state of our sorry state, painted in broad strokes in a muted palette. It's what many would think impossible despite the evidence of its predecessor: a comic book for grown-ups. And it accomplishes what it sets out to do without much in the way of action sequences or hero moments--the irony being, of course, that The Dark Knight Rises is fated to become the best-reviewed and most-lucrative release of 2012 for having the very same qualities for which the deeply-underappreciated Superman Returns was lambasted. I would argue that a wide swath of the people who will adore it will have difficulty articulating exactly why.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 (2012) - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Bob Goodman, based upon the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Klaus Janson
directed by Jay Oliva

by Jefferson Robbins There's nothing left. Batman: Year One is so last year, The Killing Joke basically got turned into The Dark Knight, and "Watchmen" has become both a big-movie flopola and a prequel comics series. With Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Part 1 on shelves now and its concluding Part 2 due on direct-to-video disc this winter, the DC Universe has basically wrung itself dry of compelling product from the '80s comics revolution that it can repurpose into features and animated editions. The bones remain for new stories, but the cost-benefit on original work vs. revivified fan favourites ever tilts towards the latter. Those of us who discovered or returned to superhero comics as a result of Frank Miller's and Alan Moore's mature deconstructions are seeing their final fruits. The only burning question is how many shmoes bought this package from Amazon thinking they were getting The Dark Knight Rises in half of a special two-disc edition.

The Dark Knight (2008) - Blu-ray Disc

****/**** Image B+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Heath Ledger, Morgan Freeman
screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's the best American film of the year so far and likely to remain that way. Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight is revelatory, visceral, grim stuff--a vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy, another masterpiece after last year's No Country for Old Men that as much as says that the only morality in the midst of chaos is chance. No coincidence that both films feature villains who let a coin-flip act as judge and jury. But what's adjudicated? What shape does the court take? The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day--and the inability to properly frame questions, much less ken answers, feeds this feeling of hopelessness. That widening gyre, it turns out, is a labyrinth, or an Escher print, illuminating a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit. Nolan's Gotham City is a beatification of Chicago: the city's glass and metal elevated into holy relic and presented in such grand, panoramic vistas that the little things done in spite of it or on its behalf seem like so many futile pittances--the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world.

Batman Begins (2005)

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes
screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer
directed by Christopher Nolan

by Walter Chaw It's perhaps only right that in a year that has seen Robert Rodriguez present a scary-faithful adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, Christopher Nolan should re-envision (and revitalize) the Batman film franchise with a picture, Batman Begins, that at last captures the pitch blackness of Miller's seminal graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (itself a re-envisioning and revitalization of Batman for its time). Batman Begins is to Tim Burton's Batman films as Burton's films are to Adam West's camp-classic television series, so drastically have Nolan and co-scriptor David S. Goyer de-fabulized the mythology. Compare, for starters, a sequence in the 1989 film where Batman shines a little penlight in the eyes of an over-curious lady-fair while chauffeuring her in the Batmobile to the modern iteration in which Batman trashes the Gotham police force en route to getting a young lady an antidote to a concentrated militarized hallucinogen that, unchecked, could inspire her to rip her own face off.