Blue Man Sings the Whites

Further evidence of my increasingly obvious arrested deveolpment - I didn’t bother going to the flicks for There Will Be Blood, but I did hand over £7.50 (plus a frankly outrageous 10% online booking fee) to see Iron Man.

In my defence, I’ve always had a nagging fondness for old Soup Can Head, dating back to his brief appearance as a backup strip in the old Marvel UK Transformers comic. The attraction was almost entirely shallow and physical - face facts, the classic red-and-gold Mark V armour was the fucking bomb. In fact, it may only ever have been topped in the comic-book-battlesuit way-coolness stakes by his Silver Centurion threads.

Beyond the “Kick Your Ass And Look Great Doing It” thing, though, there was also the practical matter that Iron Man hadn’t been bitten by a radioactive anything, he wasn’t a member in good standing of an honest-to-goodness pantheon or the last survivor of an advanced but selectively idiotic alien race.

He was just a bloke in a tin suit.

A tin suit that fitted in a briefcase, no less, and so therefore would have obviously also fitted into, picking an example at random, a school bag. Man, I wanted to own a flying robot suit more than I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library. And I wanted to talk to the girl behind the counter at the North Watford Library a LOT.

I’m not sure how much crime there would have been to fight in suburban Hertfordshire, but I was up for making the effort to find some. And anyway, I could always use the suit for my journey to school - I’d picked out the little wooded area behind the tennis courts near the underground station as a possible landing area. See, I was even boringly practical in my escapist fantasies.

Ahem. Anyway. Iron Man.

The plot goes something like this. Tony Stark is a multi-multi-squillionaire. He makes weapons for the US military. Whilst visiting Afghanistan to demonstrate his latest and greatest boomstick, he’s kidnapped by a gaggle of swarthy men with teatowels on their heads who lock him in a cell with a load of high-tech equipment and order him to make them one of said boomsticks.

If any of these guerillas had ever seen an episode of The A-Team, this film would have been about 20 minutes long.

So, Stark promptly escapes from a maximum security stockade to the Los Angeles underground, where he survives as… oh no, wait. He promptly escapes by making himself a big armoured metal suit - an iron man, if you will - and shooting the bejesus out of a bunch of people who have the utter gall to look suprised by this turn of events.

The whole incident has made him ponder that the weapons he might be being misused - ie, that they might be being used to kill people. He responds to this realisation the way any of us would if we could, by building a robot battlesuit and flying around blowing shit the fuck up.

There’s an awful lot to like about Iron Man. The dialogue is by and large witty and sharp, the plot hammers along at a million billion miles an hour and while there’s a tiny spoonful of clever somewhere in the mix it never loses sight of the fact that it’s meant to be a big, dumb, massively entertaining blockbuster.

Blocks are duly busted.

Robert Downey Jr. is really, really good in a part that must have been quite a stretch for him - a rich, glamerous substance abuser in the middle of a media circus. This version of Tony Stark appears quite heavily influenced by the Ultimate iteration of the character (an influence made more explicit in a fanservice cameo after the credits), making him considerably more sleazy and reprehensible than he was in the original comics. It’s to the credit of both script and actor that despite being a fairly massive prick Stark remains sympathetic and somewhat likable.

The supporting cast is a bit more of a mixed bag. Terrence Howard is given very, very little to do and does it pretty badly. He primarily appears to be in the film because the scriptwriter is aware you can’t possibly consider doing an Iron Man movie without having Rhodey in it even though he has no fucking idea whatsoever what to do with the character. Howard’s demeanour doesn’t so much project “Highly-Trained Air Force Colonel” as “I May Or May Not Be Awake”.

Jim Rhodes’ usual role in the comics - Tony Stark’s confidant and conscience - is largely filled here by Gwyneth Paltrow as Stark’s executive assistant. Saddled with playing the one of Marvel’s standard-issue Superhero’s Wet Blanket Love Interest, she manages the deceptively tricky balancing act of dancing along the tightrope of concern and underlying sexual tension without tumbling off into the, errrr, big net of being so simpering and annoying that you spend the last hour of the film praying that the villain drops a cement mixer on her (a condition known formally as “Going Full Dunst”). Incidentally, Paltrow also does a nice job of toughing out Stan Lee’s apparent belief that “Pepper Potts” is a perfectly acceptable name for a supporting character.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch Jeff Bridges is clearly having the time of his life giving an agreeably scenery-chomping performance as Obidiah Stane. He comes off as a slightly creepy but avuncular old uncle, with his magnificently bald head, his enormous beard and his lapel badge reading “I Will Die Or Turn Evil”.

There are issues. While the script generally crackles with energy and humour there’s just the odd exchange, the odd scene that falls flat on its face. And the final battle just doesn’t really work. I can’t tell you if its a failure of scripting or direction or CGI, but there’s little or no tension and it’s just a bit… well, boring.

That’s somewhat compensated for by a bloody brilliant ending, mind you.

So, any good? Yes, it really is. It’s not quite in the top tier of comic adaptations - it’s no Batman Begins, no The Crow, no Incredibles - but it’s a brillant romp and is quite comfortable jostling for position with the best of the rest - the first two X-Men, Spiderman, the Tim Burton Batman, Mystery Men. After last summer’s thoroughly limp crop (The Bourne Ultimatum very firmly excepted), this year’s popcorn season is off to a cracking start.

OK. I’m suitably warmed up. Now bring on Indy and The Dark Knight.

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Dishonourable mention – 300
After an hour of trying to work out if this film was supposed to be a pro-Iraqi Freedom metaphor or an anti-Iraqi Freedom metaphor, I suddenly realised that I was giving the filmmakers entirely too much credit. What it is is visually spectacular but totally fucking stupid. 300 shares a lot with Sin City, Frank Miller’s last big-screen adaptation. Regrettably, one of the things it shares is a degree of casual misogyny. It’s not as all-pervading as it is in Sin City, largely because 300’s only got one female character and doesn’t spend any time with her that it could be spending watching half-naked oiled men shouting and chopping bits off each other, but that character gets treated very badly and combined with the inclusion of gratuitous concubines and a gyrating, net-curtain-wearing seeress getting molested it all left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Still, it’s a subject that really deserves a post of its own, so I’ll curtail the gathering rant and move on.

My other big problem with 300 is that I couldn’t get fully onboard with the whole gung-ho, no-compromise, last-one-dead-buys-the-first-round-in-the-Elysium-Fields, dulce-et-decorum-est-pro-patria-mori attitude. I had a fair amount of sympathy for the view that on the whole it probably wasn’t a great idea to piss off the most militarily powerful empire on the planet for no obviously good reason, and found it really annoying that the film made out that anybody who didn’t want to bleed out their last in a doomed last stand on some Godforsaken battlefield was obviously completely morally bankrupt. I realise that I’ve missed the point of the movie fairly spectacularly, but there you go. It’s pretty, it’s relentlessly idiotic, and it’s moderately offensive. And you can stick that on the poster.

5 - Casino Royale
The opening chase sequence is jaw-droppingly awesome, but it never quite hits those heights again, and it could definitely stand to lose about 15 minutes from the end.

Signs You Might Have Played Too Much Poker, Number 23 In An Occasional Series: When you get far, FAR more pissed-off at the criminal mastermind showing his cards one at a time in a Hold ‘Em showdown, thus giving his opponent a split-second of thinking he’s won the pot before the killer second card is revealed, than you do for said Big Bad committing terrorism, torture and murder. Genital beatings? Mass killing? Perfectly understandable behaviour for a generic supervillain. But slow-rolling? Now THAT’S the act of a REAL wanker.

4 - Hot Fuzz
Not as good as Shaun Of The Dead, which wasn’t as good as Spaced. Which still makes it comfortably the best comedy of the year.

3 - 28 Weeks Later
There were no visuals that quite grabbed me like the spine-tingling opening 10 minutes of 28 Days Later, but it makes up for that in spades with relentless edge-of-the-seat tension. Coming off the dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks 300, it was great to see a mainstream gore-fest with the ambition to be about something. If you don’t get a chill in the sequence in which the American soldiers occupying London are forced to open fire on a crowd of panicked civilians and Infected, you’re not paying attention. Great ending too, which being an idiot I didn’t see coming at all.

2 - The Bourne Ultimatum
I can’t remember the last time I left the cinema thinking about the symbolism of water in a Hollywood blockbuster.

1 - Pan’s Labyrinth
Fantastic. Brutal, affecting, magical and visually stunning. “No! Don’t go into the metaphor!”

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Yes, I know that the posts about things I don’t like are always more entertaining than posts about the things I do like. So let me try and get the nice out of my system all at once, eh? Then we can get back to the stuff you’re reading this for, the incoherent bellowing about things that nobody in their right mind cares about but that infuriate me to the point of physical nausea.

You know. Like that fucking advert for Eon.

The one about them opening a wind farm?

That illustrates its tremendous power by showing a bunch of people getting blown around a seaside town?

Thus strongly implying that there’s an energy company out there who’re under the impression that wind turbines create wind?

Presumably, Eon think that’s why Holland’s so flat. All those windmills have blown the hills over.

Tossers.

Anyway. Where were we? Oh yes. Spreading the love.

• The Wire
  I don’t want to eulogise this too much, since better minds than mine have already covered the ground more than adequately. So I’ll just say that Christ, it’s good. I’m reaching the end of the third series now, and if there’s a better-scripted, better-acted, more authentic-feeling, funnier, bleaker TV programme out there, then I’ve never come across it.

• Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
  All the way through I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that this spoof eighties horror series isn’t quite as funny as it should be. There are a few gems, though - “it’s not my fault! Bastard monkey hands!” might just replace “Excuse me, but are you the one they call the Cincinnati Kid?” as the go-to pisstake every time somebody fucks up a deal at our semi-regular poker game.
  
  (How far do you think we are from a remake of The Odd Couple starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn or Don Cheadle and Adam “Fucking” Sandler, by the way? A year? Two? I think that might mark the point when I give up on human society altogether, to be honest.)

• The Peter Serafinowicz Show
  God knows I like Peter “Hi! It’s Duane Benzie / Well fuck-a-doodle-doo!” Serafinowicz. And I tried to like this series, I really really did. But for every great sketch (read: every sketch with Brian Butterfield in it. Especially the detective agency) there were four or five more that left me completely cold. Boo.

• Have I Got News For You?
  A shadow what it was ten years ago. Still the best British comedy on TV at the moment by a street.

• Mission Impossible
  Grabbed a cheap box set of the three films a few weeks ago, because I really liked the first one, have a certain affection for the utterly preposterous sequel that I don’t like to talk about in polite company, and haven’t seen the third but it’s got Philip Seymour Hoffman in it so how bad can it be?
  
  There’s an ad doing the rounds at the moment for a film whose name temporarily eludes me.
  
  ”Three of the greatest actors of their generation…” it starts.
  
  Oh? I think. My, I wonder? Whoever they could mean?
  
  “Robert Redford…”
  
  Well, yeah, I suppose he’s there or thereabouts. The Sting is one of the top ten best films ever made, after all.
  
  “Meryl Streep…”
  
  Fair enough.
  
  “And Tom Cruise!”
  
  You WHAT?
  
  One of the greatest actors of his generation. Tom “Angry Garden Gnome” Cruise. Fuck OFF! The richest actor of his generation, fine. The most famous actor of his generation, certainly. But greatest? In Cruise’s seventy squillion film-long CV, exactly how many quote-unquote great performances has he given? Like, ever?
  
  Magnolia, obviously. So there’s one.
  If you can find another film in which he’s better than “OK, Considering It’s Tom Fucking Cruise” though, then you’re a better person than me. Born On The Fourth Of July, Rain Main, that one where he’s the hitman riding around in Jamie Foxx’s cab – all decent performances but not one whit more. I really liked his character in Interview With The Vampire, but I’d be the first to admit that it wasn’t so much a terrific acting job as an exercise in eye-rolling, scenery-chewing, Cassanova Frankenstein-esque pantomime villainy.
  
  One of the greatest actors of his generation my substantial pasty ARSE.
  
  Anyway, I bring that ad up here for this reason – re-watching the first Mission Impossible last night, I realised with a sudden jolt that Tom Cruise is conspicuously, no-fooling fucking TERRIBLE in it.
  
  Honestly. Nobody was more surprised than me.
  
  Ethan Hunt, AKA the Most Over-Trained Man In The Universe is meant to be a hyper-competent super-secret agent, but Cruise turns him into a twitching, gurning basket-case. There’s no depth, no subtlety, no… anything. Look at the scene where he finds a big clue that suggests the Emmanuelle Béart character might have betrayed him. As soon as she speaks, he might as well have a big flashing neon sign bolted to his weird, almost-entirely-rectangular, Lego-block head saying “I Have Found A Big Clue That Suggests You Might Have Betrayed Me.” It’s feeble.
  
  Compare and contrast Matt Damon in the Bourne films. Nobody’s likely to mistake Matt Damon for one of the greatest actors of his generation any time soon, and yet – especially in the later two films - Jason Bourne is orders of magnitude more convincing as a super-spy than Ethan Hunt.
  
  Anyway. Mission Impossible. For all the things wrong with it, it’s not another dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks Hollywood actioner, and is still decent fun despite the Cruisebot’s best efforts.
  
  

More of the fleeting distractions from my inevitable shuffle toward the grave to follow. Betcha can’t hardly wait.

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