Iron Man 2: And now for something similar...

So we just saw Iron Man 2, and I have to say it was fairly entertaining.

The movie makers had the sense to tell Samuel L Jackson, "You're like an FBI guy, sort of, but otherwise, please just play badass motherf***** Sameul L Jackson." This is a big improvement over George Lucas casting him as a boring monk for three terrible movies.

Anyway, Robert Downey Jr does a good job as expected. The movie benefits from the Avengers ramp-up and you do get the sense that this is a small story couched in a larger one.

Here's my beef: The ending is pretty weak. You've watched trailers of Iron Man and War Machine fighting the robot drones for months now. You see racks of hibernating drones for an hour. We all know what's coming. And at the end, the good guys predictably just shoot a bunch of drones with lasers. Meh.

But they KNEW this wouldn't be interesting enough, so... they quickly encased another bad guy in (shocker) a bigger more evil Iron Man suit. I can't remember where I saw this before... oh, yeah, Iron Man 1.

This does not bode well for Iron Man's future. Here's what I mean:

Tony Stark/Iron Man is not the first movie hero to get bogged down in an endless swamp of fighting a "bigger badder mirror of himself" in the end of each movie. It also happened to Superman... and look where it got him:

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Superman 1: Superman mostly matches WITS with regular human Lex Luthor.

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Superman 2: Superman fights 2 evil Supermen and 1 evil Superwoman. It begins.

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Superman 3: Superman fights Evil Superman in a computer (with Richard Pryor?!)

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Superman 4: Superman fights... an Evil Teutonic Superman

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Superman Returns: The largest/least successful superhero movie in recent history.

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Superman was a great movie, and part 2 was great too, but it took a steep dive from then on. Not a good trend... Now...

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Iron Man 1: Fights evil business partner in a big silver evil Iron suit.

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Iron Man 2: Fights evil business enemy in a big silver evil Iron suit.

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What makes it even weirder is that given a year of development time, the bad guy (Vanko) opted to pass on armor and just built weapons. Why, in his rushed attack at the end, is he in a form-fitting clean Iron suit that looks as perfectly modeled and planned as genius Stark's most current model suit?

Oh well. Like I said, I liked the movie, but the end felt like a missed opportunity.

An Epic Post for an Epic Fail

I couldn't help myself; I knew it was wrong but I had to go there.

My plan was to take three rowdy friends to 2012 and heckle the movie to pieces (as the movie shattered the earth to pieces). My reality was three sleepy friends unconscious throughout most of the nearly 3-hour schlockfest.

Where do I begin with a movie like this? If you stick with me through this longer than average post you will save 2 horus and 38 minutes of your life.

SELECTIVE INTEREST:
In this movie, something like ninety-five percent of humanity dies. Ninety-five percent of people. That's the biggest tragedy in a movie, ever--unless you count the 100% destruction of Princess Leia's homeworld in Star Wars. (And who knows how few or many people lived on her planet anyway? It looked mostly blue from where I was standing.)

Amidst the worst carnage in any movie, ever, this movie wants you to chuckle at cheesy summer-blockbuster jokes and cheer when the cute dog lives. The surviving fraction of humanity gives up a monstrous 'hooray' when John Cusack--who plays a failed author, of even less consequence than the real John Cusack--survives. Sheesh.

I mean, what do you say when Southern California falls into the sea (Lex Luthor's real estate plan, finally come to fruition?) and the President (still badass Danny Glover) dies from being hit in the face with an aircraft carrier riding tsunami ... and then no fewer than four main characters get visibly upset because a nameless Chinese national laborer's leg is bleeding from a machine accident? Seriously?!

I looked to my compatriots to ask them, "Almost everyone died in the last hour... who gives a rip about this guy's scrapes?" The answer was unanimous and swift: "zzzzzzzzzzzzz."

Don't worry, the dog is okay

A NEW KIND OF HERO:
The main protagonist in this movie is basically a global-warming scientist. Right. The only interesting scientist-protagonists onscreen are ones who squeeze more power out of the warp drive or blast Alien Queens out of airlocks. This one has the unfortunate habit of making Obama-light speeches throughout the movie, and it just doesn't work.

Especially when he basically quotes Christian Bale's speech from the most recent Terminator, about how "if we are willing to sacrifice any human lives in our struggle, we've already forsaken our humanity." It wasn't a great speech the first time. It should have been better the second time, especially since the actor is at home in disasters (2006's Tsunami: The Aftermath).

DESCENT TO DOOM:
Roland Emmerich's last few movies have followed the same arc as Stephen Sommers' entries (snap!): After starting with some fun popcorn-fare (Independence Day/The Mummy) he tried something similar but different (Godzilla/Van Helsing) that came up high on the FX budget and low on satisfaction. Finally he returned and supernaturally drained the joy from a genre that's hard to screw up too badly (2012/GI Joe). I hear that both directors are working on comedies about dead babies now.

MAIN EVENT: CRACKS VERSUS POPES
This movie is so ridiculous that the first hour consists entirely of people running from "cracks" splitting the earth. They run from a crack, drive just a few feet ahead of an assailing crack (that one of the characters observes in Puck-like fashion seems to be "following" them around), and take off from three separate runways that are "cracking" just behind their planes. They also escape the largest volcano eruption ever by driving two inches ahead of the shockwave in Woody Harrelson's RV.

That's why it rings so poorly when the movie takes a thirty-minute time-out in the middle to mercilessly mock all of the world's faiths. You just can't do that in a movie this crappy. You didn't see Bill Pullman in Independence Day cracking wise about how Moses never saw this one coming.

Yet 2012 has the President ominously cut off just as he tries to comfort the nation reminding them of Psalm 23 (The Lord is my shepherd...). It has the Pope and all the praying masses of the Vatican steamrolled like Wile E. Coyote by tumbling buildings. It has another one of those ironically self-aware cracks shoot between God's finger and Adam's in the Sistine Chapel. It has the Chist the Redeemer skydiving off a mountain in Rio de Janeiro. The entire disaster becomes a Darwinian mechanism for wiping out every world faith in 90 minutes (check your scorecard--only atheists survive despite a large collection of religious characters).

This too much in too cheesy a movie. Emmerich doesn't have the skill (and with his shoddy track record, dare I say the right?) to attempt to make statements like this onscreen. It's hard to explain the way this comes across in such poor taste... It reminds me of how I'd feel if a character started spouting abortion-commentary in Pirates of the Caribbean Part 5. Wrong movie, dude.

EVER HEAR THE ONE ABOUT THE POLISH SUBMARINE...
...with the screen door? This movie trumps that. The earth's brightest scientists build gigantic survival ships ("Arks"--see, we want to market to Nihilists, Jews, Christians, and ...people in comas with ten bucks?). The Arks have a few flaws. Namely: A huge draw-bridge style door on the back of the boat. This door goes from the top deck down to the lowest part of the hull. Unsurprisingly the door jams and hundreds of thousands of people almost die because, um... There is a door the size of a city block on the side of the boat that is open. This door is the size of an aircraft carrier but it james when a power cord falls into the gears.

It seems that shipwrights since the Stone Age have grasped the "no doors underwater" concept in boat-design, but for some reason we decided to go experimenting in this, our darkest hour. Second: When a leak is detected, the ship automatically seals individual compartments with airtight doors to prevent the leak from spreading. This would have been a great idea, except the compartments sealed with airtight doors have ceilings of open grating, so everyone sealed in a protective compartment turns out to be sealed in a... well, 'automatic watery grave.'

Third: The engines can't run when the door is slightly ajar. Why? I don't know. This 'technical difficulty' was left unexplained because (let's be honest) everyone knew it was just another reason to remain in "suspense." It was pretty cool though... I'm working with GM to get my car to shut down any time I roll the windows down. I told them I want this for "suspense" reasons.

10+1 Reasons to Love 'True Lies'

• It is the best Arnold movie behind Terminator (1 & 2) and Predator. He is funny, self-aware, and still built like a mountain.
  
• Its humor made me laugh the first time I saw it (and still does).
  
• TOM ARNOLD: In the best role that I've seen him in, as a chubby sarcastic secret agent. Bill Paxton comes in second place as a comic relief co-star.
  
• Some just plain cool action scenes, including: The coolest scene in any movie featuring a Harrier VTOL fighter jet....

• ... A chase involving a horse and a motorcycle...
  
• ...A great brawl/shootout in public restroom, and...
  
• ...A great infiltration (and escape from) a snowy chateau.
  
• Did you know it was Eliza Dushku's breakout?
  
• The bad guy (pre-9/11) is a carbon copy of Osama bin Laden. Good thing this was made when it was, because it would have been trickier in a post-9/11 world to make a movie with a US Govennor beating the hell out of Osama bin Laden (and yes, eventully thwarting a terrorist plan involving a nuke and exploding pseudo-Osama into a billion tiny pieces of flesh).
  
• I like Brad Feidel (Terminator)'s soundtrack. You might not remember it, but it was exciting and fitting.
  
• Speaking of, this movie was a re-teaming of Arnold, Feidel, Bill Paxton and James Cameron from Termintor. How many bad movies has James Cameron made? I can't think of any (though I don't watch Titanic too often, personally).

What's not to like about this movie? What can I say, it makes me laugh each time see it, and the action is the perfectly balance between semi-realism and Hollywood ridiculousness. Casablanca, it ain't, but sue me.... I love this movie.

Worth Seeing: District 9 / PS: NO, Joe!

District 9 is produced by Peter Jackson and directed by Neill Blomkamp. It's a movie about an alien (the extraterrestrial kind) refugee camp in Johannesburg, South Africa. District 9 if the kind of movie that's more fun the less you know about it.


So I'll just say this: I think it's worth seeing. It won't spoil anything to tell you that the production design and effects are great, and that this movie can be enjoyed on any level from shallow (explosions!) to deep (Apartheid metaphor, barely veiled).


If you are simply in too much of a hurry to see the movie (or you hate aliens, or Peter Jackson, or ... um, Africa?), you can ruin it by watching the short movie that this big movie is based on: Alive in Joburg.


In other news, it seems that against everyone's wishes and plain common sense, GI Joe 2 is already in the works. While contemplating this tragedy, I figured out another reason I hated that movie: The fights remind me of Star Wars Episode I's battles (snap!!). A lot. Check it out:


The ninja's (analogous to Jedi) are really cool, and they flip around and sword fight like crazy. But you just don't care about these strutting personality-vaccuums, so when they're not fighting (90% of their screen time) you're bored with them.


Everyone who's NOT a ninja is fighting a big, cheesy CG battle that just feels... without consequence. When the Joes were battling, I think for a second I imagined Gungans (lots of Jar-Jar's) fighting battle droids, and it just made me want to... to... to pay my bills, or wash my wife's car, or watch SportsCenter, or balance my checkbook or something. The whole thing JUST DOESN'T MATTER.


I will leave you with this riddle: Which is less important, the subjugation of Jar-Jar's people, or the survival of a big CG Eiffel tower?


Just in case you were worried, even the little CG people visibly evacuated the tower first. There is nothing to worry about. Or care about. Or be excited about. Or prevent you from yawning.




Okay, I can't help it--I have to answer my own riddle. They are both infinitely unimportant. This is not a good thing to be thinking when you just paid $9 to be entertained.

Yo Joe!

I had to see it because I grew up in the 80's--so back off, okay?!

Here are the things you need to know about GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

It's cardinal sin (here's looking at you, Star Wars prequels) is that it just plain isn't fun. There was no point during this movie when the characters, the action, or anything else made me happy. It was just a chore, through and through. In a day and age when you can find eight billion fun or funny things on Youtube within seconds, a movie can't afford to be funless from start to final frame.

The actors are wooden. Channing Tatum seems born to play high school football players--there just isn't a lot going on in this guy's noggin. He falls blandly in a dull netherworld between the original Rocky (who you pity because he's dumb as a brick) and some sort of trendy 'Fast 'n' Furious' type rogue (the kind of character that is lost on me). But I liked what one reviewer said about Dennis Quaid's 'General Hawk': He barks out orders "like your drunken uncle at Thanksgiving dinner."

America is mostly safe. The Joes operate out of Egypt (maybe because real estate is cheaper there?). We spend most of the movie watching French Moroccan and British 'Joes' rescuing Paris and Moscow. Maybe it's the poor direction and pace of the movie, or maybe it's our current geopolitical state, but I looked around the theater during the "save the Eiffel tower" scene and nobody seemed all that concerned.

WOULDA COULDA: I would have set this movie in another timeframe. Maybe during, or just post-WWII, or maybe the Sixties (interesting setting for a patriotic fighting force) or even the Eighties. And we should have had older heroes. How could Channing Tatum have earned the 3,437 tour of duty ribbons he's wearing when he looks like he's 23 years old?

Bring on Michael Biehn! Protagonist of Terminator, and supercool military squad leader in Aliens, The Rock, Navy SEALS (movie: bad; Biehn: good) and The Abyss. Come to think of it, how was Biehn NOT in a movie about a supercool American military team? If there is one guy who can walk around with a gun in a movie that springs from 1980's nostalgia and make it work instantly (with the exception of maybe der Gubernator), it's Michael Biehn.

DEATH BLOW: I'm not trying to be mean when I say this--really. But you know your military movie is bad when the audience is wishing it was more like a Michael Bay movie. I was missing the guns (with bullets, not lasers) and standoffs between Michael Biehn and Ed Harris I remember from The 90's blue-camo-cheesy Rock.

Seriously, Stephen Sommers? You forced me write that you something to learn from Michael Bay? Yowtch.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL: The movie ends with all villains surviving and vowing to get revenge in GI Joe 2: An Insult to Your Brain. This goes to show the one character attribute these filmmakers possess that I sorely lack: Unabashed, I-don't-care-what-people-or-numbers-say, hopeful-to-the-point-of-idiocy optimism.

Name that movie!

Tell me if you can identify this fantasy story (some of you know where this is headed already...):

Our tale begins a quaint village of little people (I mean, like, 'midgets'). They are enjoying food, drink, and the simple life... that is, until something very important comes into the possession of one such little person.

This item is of little significance on the surface, but a wizard identifies it as (foreboding drums...) the one key to toppling the Dark Lord who is coldly intent on ruling all free people. Let's call this item "The One Little Key to Intensely Evil Nature" (TOLKIEN, for short).

The little guy takes his closest companions and TOLKIEN on a quest far from his simple home. His plan is the get TOLKIEN out of his hands as soon as possible, because he's pretty sure he is not the guy destined to end evil.

On the way, one other little person's phileo (brotherly love) leads him to bind himself to the main heroic little person when other companions fall away for various reasons.

Also on the way, the little guys encounter a mysterious swordsman. Befriending this dangerous but skilled stranger may just plop TOLKIEN into evil's lap... or perhaps this rogue is more trustworthy than he seems at first glance.

As their company slowly deteriorates, they stumble into the woods and are befriended and encouraged by ancient, almost magical beings there.

From there, the remaining party members find themselves stalwartly defending a ancient white-walled good-guy fortress against an impossible onslaught of black-clad, inhuman, evil attackers. Things are looking pretty grim for our heroes, until...

... Norse-looking, red/blond-haired cavalry reinforcements ride in at the darkest hour to save our desperate heroes!

But it's not over yet. The rogue-swordsman-with-the-heart-of-gold has defended the good guys' castle, but now the little ones have an appointment at the Dark Lord's doorstep with TOLKIEN. While the swordsman leads a distraction-battle outside Evil's gate, the heroic little one enters the scary HQ of evil and puts TOLKIEN permanently out of the Dark Lord's reach.

Hooray!

The swordsman takes his place as king of the white castle (not the burger place) and the little hero returns home... having seen and done more than his entire village had in their collective experience, he's now the town hero.

You guessed it, the epic cinematic experience I'm referring to is...
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WILLOW!

Kind of makes you wonder how many original thoughts are actually floating around in George Lucas' noggin, doesn't it? See this link for someone another agreeing perspective.

This reaffirms my belief that George is not a 'visionary storyteller'... he is a mechanical recycler of old, great stories... and sometimes, he just gets lucky (or gets good help!) and his remanufactured pieces are better than the sum of their parts.

Contrary to what Obi-Wan Kenobi thinks however... there IS such thing as luck. That much is evidenced by the heartless, unoriginal, downright boring Indy #4 and Star Wars Prequels--which pale in the light of the old Star Wars movies and earlier Indiana Jones movies. Willow is a bit more lively than IJ4 and SW1-3, but as we see here, it's anything but original.

Ah, Sweet Incongruity

I was flipping through channels when I saw that Spike was airing the original Star Wars trilogy in HD. I stopped to watch a few minutes and noticed some things about 'old' (1970's, baby!) Obi-Wan Kenobi versus 'new' (prequel) Obi-Wan Kenobi. Let's check them out in a brief study in contrast.

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I recieved the Best Actor Oscar when you were 13, George Lucas... do not anger me.

New Kenobi (henceforth 'NK'): Try not to think about girls, the Council doesn’t like that. And whatever you do, don't make a rash decision!
Old Kenobi ('OK'): Leave your family--and planet--to attack the Death Star. Just you and me. We don't even have a ride there yet, but it will work out. Trust me.

NK: At six years old, you're too world-weary and corrupted to train as a Jedi. We only accept gelatinous, undeveloped brain-wash candidates.
OK: Nice to meet you. I recognize that as a backwater farmer, you are probably lacking the Sci-Fi equivalent of a GED but... you know what would look nice with that dusty tunic? A lightsaber--here you go!

NK: I hang out at Starbucks with the Evil Emperor every week, but he seems alright to me. I don't suspect him of anything worse than shoddy tax legislation.
OK: My sensitivity to evil is so well-attuned that I can sense fear in people I hardly know, and perceive the death of people light years from my location.

NK: I am so stupid I think that Stormtroopers are my friends.
OK: Stormtroopers are so stupid I can fold their feeble minds into taco-shell-shapes by waving my fingers.

NK: I sport various types of mullets and pony tails.
OK: I kill people who do that.

NK: I drink alone; the fate of all middle-aged single British librarians.
OK: I drink (and smoke) with the Most Interesting Man Alive from Dos Equis commercials. And Gandalf.

You can scramble the letters of my name to spell "Genuine Class." Bam!

Isn't the difference obvious? This comforts me, because it reminds me that these trilogies can't possibly coexist. Even the same characters are... different characters as far as these movies are concerned, which makes it that much easier for me to excise the new ones from my personal Star Wars canon.

See "Comment" link below to barrage me with nerd-related insults... but at least you hopefully agree that the 1970's version made for better cinema.