Cynical Cinema

Iron Man is amazing. Not only is it one of the biggest, best summer blockbusters, it’s actually one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. Robert Downey Jr., although a seemingly strange choice, is perfectly cast as the titular superhero. Tony Stark is a billionaire weapons manufacturer who sleeps with hundreds of hot women, lives the life of Hugh Hefner, and uses his genius brain to create some of the most devastating weapons in the world. He is kidnaped by terrorists, who attempt to force him to build a replica of his powerful Jericho missile. While appearing to build that missile for them, Stark is in fact building a robotic suit of armor that will allow him to make his escape and, eventually, turn him into Iron Man. With shrapnel near his heart, he must build a device to keep his heart running while he fights the forces of evil. This device ends up, of course, being Iron Man’s Achilles heel. Or, his kryptonite, if you will.

And of course Iron Man is a lot like a lot of the super hero movies out there. One thing I have always thought is that the first movies in these series is always the best. The movie where we learn about the origins of the super hero, and he undergoes a character transformation that leads him to become Batman, or Spiderman, or the Incredible Hulk, or what have you. In subsequent installments of these series, the hero is already fully formulated, so there is no more room for character growth. It all comes down to action, explosions and whether or not the bad guys are any good. Iron Man is true to that form, in that Stark undergoes a character transformation as well as a physical one. He decides that his company will no longer build weapons to kill other people, but rather will begin focusing on doing good in the world. The one problem I have here is that just like every other movie like this one, his transformation changes his outlook on everything. Here is a guy who used to get every woman he wanted. Now that he has become “good”, he begins to think about settling down with just one woman. Is that what “good” people do? Couldn’t he still live the life of George Clooney, and still be a good guy? Or are all good people monogamous?

Well, it is Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Stark’s long-time assistant, the cheesily-named Pepper Potts. I am not normally a fan of Paltrow’s, but she is very well cast in this role, as the meek yet competent and smart assistant to a lascivious playboy billionaire genius…or who knows? Maybe anyone could play that role. Not anyone, however, could have played Obadiah Stane, Stark’s partner in the weapons company. Jeff Bridges is magnificent, with a shaved head and a certain amount of comforting sensibility that masks his darker intentions. I hate to call a role in a comic book movie a “tour de force”, but Bridges and Downey both come close. Terence Howard is in here as well, but he is badly underused as a military advisor and sometime babysitter of Stark’s, but it appears as though he is being saved for something much bigger in the second Iron Man movie.

Jon Favreau directed this adaptation of the comic book, and he shows an absolute command of the entire movie, as well as a love for comic books. The scenes where Downey is trying out his suit for the first time are quite funny, and seem to be taken (I can only assume) straight from the silly middle pages of the comic book upon which this is based. And the actual fighting done between Iron Man and the terrorists, or Iron Man and the bad super hero at the end of the film, are exceptionally well done. This movie is absolutely pulse-pounding, beginning to end, and for me it ranks with Batman, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Blade and Superman as the finest comic book movie adaptations of all time. Watch it! Iron Man comes out September 30th on DVD and Blu-Ray (get the Blu-Ray if you have it!) From Paramount Home Entertainment.

Iron Man is amazing. Not only is it one of the best summer blockbusters, it’s actually one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. Robert Downey Jr., although a seemingly strange choice, is perfectly cast as the titular superhero. Tony Stark is a billionaire weapons manufacturer who sleeps with hundreds of hot women, lives the life of Hugh Hefner, and uses his genius brain to create some of the most devastating weapons in the world. He is kidnaped by terrorists, who attempt to force him to build a replica of his powerful Jericho missile. While appearing to build that missile for them, Stark is in fact building a robotic suit of armor that will allow him to make his escape and, eventually, turn him into Iron Man. With shrapnel near his heart, he must build a device to keep his heart running while he fights the forces of evil. This device ends up, of course, being Iron Man’s Achilles heel. Or, his kryptonite, if you will.

And of course Iron Man is a lot like a lot of the super hero movies out there. One thing I have always thought is that the first movies in these series is always the best. The movie where we learn about the origins of the super hero, and he undergoes a character transformation that leads him to become Batman, or Spiderman, or the Incredible Hulk, or what have you. In subsequent installments of these series, the hero is already fully formulated, so there is no more room for character growth. It all comes down to action, explosions and whether or not the bad guys are any good. Iron Man is true to that form, in that Stark undergoes a character transformation as well as a physical one. He decides that his company will no longer build weapons to kill other people, but rather will begin focusing on doing good in the world. The one problem I have here is that just like every other movie like this one, his transformation changes his outlook on everything. Here is a guy who used to get every woman he wanted. Now that he has become “good”, he begins to think about settling down with just one woman. Is that what “good” people do? Couldn’t he still live the life of George Clooney, and still be a good guy? Or are all good people monogamous?

Well, it is Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays Stark’s long-time assistant, the cheesily-named Pepper Potts. I am not normally a fan of Paltrow’s, but she is very well cast in this role, as the meek yet competent and smart assistant to a lascivious playboy billionaire genius…or who knows? Maybe anyone could play that role. Not anyone, however, could have played Obadiah Stane, Stark’s partner in the weapons company. Jeff Bridges is magnificent, with a shaved head and a certain amount of comforting sensibility that masks his darker intentions. I hate to call a role in a comic book movie a “tour de force”, but Bridges and Downey both come close. Terence Howard is in here as well, but he is badly underused as a military advisor and sometime babysitter of Stark’s, but it appears as though he is being saved for something much bigger in the second Iron Man movie.

Jon Favreau directed this adaptation of the comic book, and he shows an absolute command of the entire movie, as well as a love for comic books. The scenes where Downey is trying out his suit for the first time are quite funny, and seem to be taken (I can only assume) straight from the silly middle pages of the comic book upon which this is based. And the actual fighting done between Iron Man and the terrorists, or Iron Man and the bad super hero at the end of the film, are exceptionally well done. This movie is absolutely pulse-pounding, beginning to end, and for me it ranks with Batman, Batman Begins, Blade and Superman as the finest comic book movie adaptations of all time. Watch it!

I hate to call something a must-watch, because people send me emails, angry that I said Hot Fuzz is a must-watch, and they hate British people. Or that A History of Violence is a must-watch, but they hate violence! (I really did get both of these emails. I liked the violence one best.) But this is one. The Hunting Party is a movie that asks the question - how hard are the agencies of the world really looking for the Osama Bin Ladens of the world? Specifically, this movie deals with the CIA and their “efforts” to track down the war criminals of the conflict in Bosnia and Serbia. As it stands right now, most of the war criminals - murderers, genocidaires, rapists and worse - from the former Yugoslavia are still on the loose, (many believe some are sheltered in Russia) despite agencies like the CIA having vowed to track them down and find them half a decade ago.

The Hunting Party stars Richard Gere and Terrence Howard as a reporter and a cameraman who have been through many wars together. The film is inspired by the true story of a disgraced reporter, played by Gere, and his cameraman (Howard) and a wet-behind-the-ears young journalist who has to prove his merit because he is the big boss’s son. The three of them take off into the former Yugoslavia, searching for the region’s most notorious and dangerous war criminal, the butcher known as “The Fox”. How much of what transpires after that is true and how much is fiction, I don’t know. But I do know that the movie is enthralling. Three things make The Hunting Party tremendous. First, the social conscience and the real-world political questions raised by the film. Secondly, it’s pacing. The first time you see Richard Gere’s live, on-air meltdown on national TV, it’s almost comical, in a way. Later, you learn the circumstances behind that meltdown, and when you look back on it, you can no longer remember why you found anything funny in it at all, it just looks tragic. There is enough subtle humour throughout the film, at just the right places, to break up what would otherwise be overwhelmingly tragic and bleak subject matter. And third, the realism. These characters behave the way three real people, in the real world, would behave. Yes, they are foolhardy, yes, they are reckless, and yes, they are probably very lucky to be alive at certain points in the movie, but they never seem anything less than human at any point.

The Hunting Party is both a fascinating character study of a man who does not know how to stop being a reporter, and an eye-opening look at the way the CIA, the UN and other world agencies pay lip service to war criminals and the architects of genocide without ever really doing anything about them. It is, indeed, a must-watch. So watch it!

When I was a kid, I was convinced that the most dangerous person on Earth was Angela Lansbury. Not because I had seen her crazy-scary performance in The Machurian Candidate, but because everywhere she went, a murder was committed. Usually someone close to her. Don’t go on that cruise, Jessica Fletcher! People will DIE. That role has now been taken up by Jodie Foster in The Brave One. This movie almost definitely has the worst movie title of all time. The Brave One? Who would ever watch something called that? Unless it’s a bunch of kids, and The Brave One is the title of a Nickelodeon after-school special where a young man finally learns to stand up to bullies. But the title here is meant to be slightly ironic, which would be fine if it wasn’t so lousy. Jodie Foster plays a radio DJ who has gone her entire life never finding any trouble, about to get married to her boyfriend, until the couple is mugged and her boyfriend is killed. Then, all of a sudden, she becomes an absolute magnet for trouble. Murders are committed in front of her, tough guys harass and attack her. I guess violence is much like breaking the seal when you drink. Once it happens once, it will happen every six minutes for the rest of your life until you stop.

Of course, with all this fear, she purchases a gun. And when violence finds her now, she is ready to respond with more violence of her own. Which escalates into vigilante justice, Charles Bronson with a pretty face and an awful haircut. She kills muggers, murderers, you name it. Terrence Howard plays a cop who is on the trail of the vigilante killer and who is also sort-of involved with Foster. He is one of those amazing movie cops who can make enormous leaps in logic to come to the exact right conclusion with no help from the other officers or from actual reasoning. He is also one of those amazing movie cops who are completely oblivious of the most obvious things that are right under his nose. Example: He spends the whole movie hanging out with the killer he is pursuing. She says weird things, knows too much about some stuff, seems jumpy at the mention of other stuff. But only when he hears an elevator door bing while he’s talking to her on the phone, and then hours later finds a dead body that’s merely a few thousand yards from some elevators, does he maybe start to clue in. EVERY dead body will be within a few thousand yards of some elevators. It’s a CITY.

The end makes no sense. I know real police work is not like CSI, but I know enough about powder burns and gunshot residue and the analysis of ballistics to know that the scenario that plays out would never work in a million years. Nor should it. The ethical dilemma faced by Howard at the end is akin to the one at the end of the Charles Bronson classic Death Wish. And, basically this is the same movie. But it tries so hard to be something more, and sadly this ruins Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster is one of the top five actresses in the world in terms of talent, and yet, shockingly, she is the worst part of this movie! She looks so sketchy and freaky that anyone would immediately think “killer” when looking at her, the emotions she is called upon to produce never once ring true, and her connection with Howard feels so forced and unnatural that we really don’t care about either of them in the end. This movie really wants to have a message, and deliver that message they have. Here it is: “Don’t rent me”.

The basic premise of Awake is a good one. A man is going in for open heart surgery, and the anaesthesia does not work 100% properly. You see, he is awake during the entire surgical procedure. He can’t move a muscle, he can’t speak, but he is aware of his surroundings and he can smell and feel and hear everything that is going on. Which leads to a very intense scene when he first realizes that he can hear everything that’s happening in the operating room, and he can feel the incisions. The scene is fairly graphic, in a surgery-channel sort of way, and my girlfriend couldn’t watch. Which means she missed the best seven minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie is maudlin, phony, and fairly irritating. And I blame two people in particular. The Star Wars Guy and the Bikini-Chick. Those two people are the stiff-as-a-board Hayden Christensen, and the sweet-as-pie-with-giant-eyes Jessica Alba.

The DVD cover for Awake has a quote from Frank Scheck, movie reviewer for the Hollywood Reporter. He says “Awake does for surgery what Jaws did for the beach”. If he means it will make people afraid to go under the knife, he is wrong. If he means it will send people screaming in droves from it, perhaps he is right. In fact, based on that logic, Awake does for Hayden Christensen movies what Jaws did for the beach. Maybe, just maybe, people won’t go back into the theatre for these things for a long time. Hayden Christensen is just painful. At best, he is a third-rate Christian Bale, which works fine for the acting-is-not-required Star Wars roles, but rarely is effective elsewhere in the movies. And Jessica Alba has the appearance, the charizma and the acting talent of a ridiculously attractive cabbage patch doll. Which makes these two the least believable screen couple this side of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley. Oh, they do the standard movie scene where he pulls her into the tub with her clothes on - get it? They are in love, and that’s what people in love do…

At any rate, while he is aware of his surroundings but unable to respond, Christensen hears a plot to kill him! An evil scheme that involves his murder while he is having a heart transplant! But how is he to stop it? Well, it turns out, he isn’t. He must hope that his loved ones piece things together before he comes out of his coma. And in the meantime, we watch him wander around the hospital in a completely ineffective out-of-body experience. Meanwhile, characters become their own narrators so that we know exactly what is happening. Dialogue like “OK, now you do exactly what we discussed. Take this syringe that I have prepared for you, put it into the heart he is about to receive, press down on the plunger, and then when the heart is placed in his chest, he will die, and we will collect the money. And remember, the reason we did this is…” If I was planning to kill someone for any reason at all, and I was conspiring with someone else, I don’t think I would have to explain the entire plan to that person more than once. But, it sure helps us (and Christensen) know what is going on!

Awake has seven minutes which are intense, exciting, and terrific. They occur when Hayden Christensen is in a coma and can’t act, and Jessica Alba is fretting in another room and isn’t a part of the scene. The other 77 minutes of this movie are either poor or awful. I suggest avoiding all the minutes in this film.