Category Archives: A Strange Review

There’s a moment in this film when Kansas farmer Jonathan Kent, caught in the path of a tornado, shoots a look at his adopted son, Clark, who could easily save him from certain doom. Just as Clark is about to do what only a super man can do, and thus expose his otherworldly origins to a terrified crowd unaware that a creature from another planet is standing in their midst, the elder Kent raises his hand—not so much to say “Stop,” but rather, “Not now. Later.”

That was lump-in-the-throat time. For Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) has spent Clark’s entire life teaching him to wait, not to exploit his strange and confounding powers, not to fight back when taunted, to turn the other cheek, because the damage he is capable of inflicting is incalculable and would betray too much too soon to a people unprepared to be in the presence of real power. (“You fear me because you cannot control me,” Superman tells an Army general. “And you never will.”) Jonathan is convinced that Clark was brought to Earth for a larger purpose: not to strike back at bullies, or even to play supercop. What that purpose is would reveal itself in time. But Clark is growing impatient.

I was strangely moved by Man of Steel, this science-fiction re-imagining of the Superman origin story. Of course, our tale begins on Krypton, which is as doomed as old media. “Artificial reproduction control” and the exhaustion of natural resources has left Krypton vulnerable to the forces of decay, and Jor-El (Russell Crowe), a scientist, and his wife (Ayelet Zurer), having defied convention by reproducing naturally, decide that the only hope for Krypton is their newborn son. Just as General Zod (Michael Shannon) launches a military coup, determined to bring all “parliamentary” debate about public policy to an end and make the hard (read lethal) decisions necessary to save Krypton, Jor-El launches Kal-El into space. To earth the Kryptonian baby goes, bearing the hope of both his parents and his people, as well as a mysterious “codex” that Zod believes is the key to Krypton’s survival.

Zod’s rebellion is put down, and he and his cohorts are launched into a phantom zone to serve out a sentence for treason. But Krypton is not long for the universe, and soon vaporizes like the conscience of the New York Times. Read the rest of this entry »

So they call it “stadium seating,” but on what planet was this particular stadium built? Flatland? I had to change seats four times before I wound up positioned so absurdly I was obstructing my own view. I had to watch the film as reflected in the 70s-era aviator glasses of the guy sitting behind me, who had fallen asleep. HEY, REGAL CINEMAS—YEAH, YOU—STOP PUTTING THE 2D BLOCKBUSTERS IN THE BROOM CLOSETS.

Oh–and pizza? Hamburgers and french fries? This is what they’re serving at the concession stands now? What, no chicken bolognese? No mutter paneer?

Speaking of authentic Indian stuff—

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT DO NOT TRESPASS BEYOND THIS POINT IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN MOVIE AND WISH TO SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!

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I don’t care what anyone says: the suit is an alloy.

We create our own demons, says Tony Stark right off the bat, quoting someone, he knew not who. It seems we create our own messiahs, too. But that’s for later.

Iron Man 3 is really Iron Man 4, because if you didn’t see The Avengers, you’re going to find the references to “New York,” “the aliens,” “a guy with a hammer” strangely alienating. But alienation is one of several themes for the day. But that’s for later.

We start in 1999, when Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) was still a “wham bam thank you ma’am” kinda guy and Happy (Jon Favreau) was his mullet-wearing bodyguard. He’s at a science conference with a beautiful young researcher named Maya (Rebecca Hall) when he’s confronted by a shabby geek named Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce). Killian is desperate for Tony to invest in AIM, a new project that builds on some original science stuff that Maya, in fact, has been cooking. It has something to do with reprogramming the brain such that it can revivify—reboot—the entire human system. Lose a limb? It’ll grow back. Need some fire in your belly—you’ll literally breath it. Left for dead? Not for long.

But the only thing Tony’s interested in is bedding young Maya, which he promptly does—only to leave her and Killian in a lurch.

It’s now 2012. Tony is in a “committed relationship” with Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) but not without his issues. This technology that Stark Industries has birthed has evolved from weapons of mass destruction to that magnet in Tony’s chest that keeps him alive. From being a Destroyer of Worlds he now lives day to day, moment to moment, a prisoner of his own success—a success that may have brought him prosperity but certainly has provided no peace. He’s beginning to suffer—gasp!—anxiety attacks!

Iron Man with the willies?

It all has to do with “New York.” It seems The Avengers movie was so successful, he’s afraid he’ll be called on again to battle space aliens and Norse Gods and Midtown Manhattan traffic. In short, just when you think you’ve got everything under control, from your secure little techno-Utopia, angry Norwegians start busting up the place.

Moreover, Stark’s many alter-egos, his various Iron Man suits, are seriously getting in the way of his relationship with Pepper: it’s hard to build intimacy through diamond-hard steel. Latex is one thing, but come on…

The tech that was supposed to mediate his experience with the outside world, with his own heart, is alienating him from his one true love, and his own self.

(I will wait until you finish choking back a tear or two.)

Now who should walk into Pepper and Stark’s world again but, you guessed it, Aldrich Killian, all gussied up, lean and mean—the yellow-toothed hobo look gone for good. He’s an entrepreneur, a mogul, a winner, and it appears he’s come back to let Tony & Co. kick themselves for what they missed out on, a ground-floor investment in magic gone forever.

Happy, now Pepper’s bodyguard (playing security to a guy who’s already a walking freight train was getting to be embarrassing), is wary of Killian’s true motives from the get-go. Soon it becomes apparent that Killian is not just a genius but an evil one at that, with a killer army of AIM-armed supermen and women who run around terrorizing folks by melting their frames and, in some cases, exploding from within. They’re literally walking time bombs, as Killian’s DNA elixir is terribly unstable, and he and his wired weirdos are desperate for a fix. It seems only Tony Stark, whose nickname is now “The Mechanic,” can repair what’s broken.

As if this were not bad enough, some nut called The Mandarin appears on TV screens threatening doom and gloom and many innocents deaths, all in the name of avenging the massacre of Native Americans. Why The Mandarin (Ben Kingsley) sounds more like Walter Conkrite reading the evening news than anyone from mainland China becomes obvious after a while.

You see, Killian and The Mandarin are in cahoots. I’ll say no more.

So Tony has to save America from some uber-terrorist armed by a corporation that for all intents and purposes creates iron men—only from the inside out, not the outside in, as in having to don one of those stupid suits.

The rest is played out as you would expect. Tony and Pepper and Col. James Rhodes (Don Cheadle) take on Killian, The Mandarin, and an army of fiery nuclear-powered and barely human robots. (Daniel Dennett call your office.)

So, let’s review: we have our Fall story: man wishes to wrest immortality from God, and so eats from the Tree of Life and—life proves incredible unstable henceforth, with death raining from the sky. Hubris, thy name is modern Western techonology!

We have several false messiahs. At least three times in two hours men hang cruciform—icons, however, of failed attempts at salvation. In fact, the final showdown takes place on Christmas Day—when the real messiah was born. Get it?

Uhhh….not quite.

As it turns out, The Mandarin’s rationale for mass slaughter—Native American grievance—is as phony as his, well, I’ll leave it to you to find out. And when Killian manages to hijack Air Force One and kidnap the president, only to hang him arms-akmbo over an oil rig (a Viking funeral, it’s called), the explanation given is that this is “punishment” for the prez’s letting some fat-cat oil barons go free after a massive oil spill.

But he admits that’s only for mass consumption—a message that the likes of MSNBC, CNN, and David Sirota will run with as unwitting accomplices.

What Killian really wants is to control the war on terror: arming, presumably both the killers and the terrified threatened.

So we have all our icons in place: massacred minorities, spoiled nature, and even the Son of God (both Tony and Killian will also appear cruciform at key moments in the plot, but these images, too, are meant only to distract).

Who will finally save the day? Tony’s been having a helluva time getting his act together, and the latest iteration of the Iron Suit is proving wonky. And what has science wrought in the hands of an Aldrich Killian? Technology has not only failed to save the day, it’s the villain, no?

And all of America’s might—it’s massive army and now Patriot super-suited soldiers—has proved mighty fragile, what with traitors within the very White House itself and a president dangling over the soon-to-be world’s largest bonfire.

Even Stark is proving tired and feckless. He has to rely on the aid of a 10-year-old kid from Tennessee to literally put all the pieces of this mess together.

Iron Man 3 is a noisome movie, with a lot on its mind, more than it can really process intelligently. It wants to be a fun and funny good guys vs. bad guys summer action flick, with just a hint of none-too-jingoistic patriotism running through it (if you can stomach the “war on terror is really a war within stuff”). What it really is, however, is a paeon to Western Man. Whatever terror the new, the loud, the naive let loose, never fear: the entrepreneur will always be near.

The Idea, the one thing no one can take from Tony Stark, is what Iron Man is about. Not the suit, not the bang-bang or boom-boom—the Idea—the fuel of Western progress. So Western Man is the Messiah we’ve been waiting for (even as he is sometimes the demon we must also conquer). And Christmas? That’s the day when we reward the people in our lives with the fruits of our success.

(And don’t let Stark’s crossing himself fool you: a clumsier and more half-hearted gesture there never was. When Tony says, “Let’s go to church,” he’s reveling in his own ingenuity.)

Robert Downey Jr. is admittedly a pleasure to watch, because all that swagger masks just a hint of Downey’s own I-am-so-in-over-my-headness. It’s easy to empathize with him, and he’s funny as all hell without having to rely on mugging or inflated gestures. The back-and-forth between him and Harley, the kid from Tennessee, is priceless. The boy stumbles on Stark in the midst of trying to repair his Iron Suit in the kid’s garage. Harley immediately recognizes him, then tries to get in on the game, playing on Stark’s sympathies with “my dad left us six years ago.” Stark basically tells him that life sucks then you die, go get me some tools and a tuna fish sandwich. (Watch out for Ty Simpkins: he is going to enjoy one heckuva career. Mark my words.)

I was about to turn off this clumsily plotted and at times barely intelligible fireworks display—in my mind, at least. Until Ben Kingsley showed up. And by that I don’t mean made his first appearance on the screen as The Mandarin. I will say no more, only to say (and you knew I was going to say something) that it’s one of those quirky Supporting Actor performances that the Academy loves and you will giggle yourself silly over. Plus the message The Mandarin is really meant to send is one Hollywood will eat up.

Pearce is suitably maniacal as Killian and Paltrow gets to kick some ass. All told the movie proves a reasonably entertaining exploding bag of gas for young American idolators everywhere, despite of, or because of, its mixed messages and narcissism.

Ayn Rand would have loved this film. Jacques Ellul, not so much.

Or Oblivious, which is what I was through most of this thing. Where to begin? At the beginning? Which one? (Please note: there are intentional spoilers, because I don’t want you, my dear readers, to waste your hard-earned money on a film so frustratingly maudlin, derivative, dull, and pointless that I almost choked on my Sno-Caps and snorted a Milk Dud.)

So Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) is an astro-nought attending a space station high above a decimated Earth. If I’ve got the story straight, there were these Martians who either repossessed the moon for failure to make timely payments or blew up the moon because it was ruining their view of Chicago or some such. Anyway, then the rains came and the seas boiled over and football was no more. Phooey.

But the Martians didn’t stop there. No, they tried to take Earth too, the greedy bastards, but Earth men (namely you and me types) fought them off with nukes (smart), which pretty much devastated what was left of a moonless planet.

The only thing left for the remaining human population to do was leave Earth altogether and head for Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons, also known for its lovely English breakfasts.

But Jack and his lover/colleague Victoria (Andrea Riseborough) were tasked with what amounted to a mopping-up expedition—fighting off the last of the space aliens, processing dreck into potable water for Titan’s Earth exiles, and collecting the mail to make sure it looked like someone was still home.

Jack and Victoria are due to finish their mission and head to Titan in a mere two weeks, but you know that whenever they give a deadline, something bad’s gonna happen to mess things up good. Nevertheless, Victoria hates the mission, refuses to join Jack on any of his sojourns to Earth’s surface, and can’t wait to get the hell out of Denver. Jack, however, has this nagging feeling that Earth is still his home and doesn’t want to leave. He also has these strange dreams and barely retrievable memories of New York City and the Empire State Building and a rendezvous and Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr.

What’s more, Jack has a favorite hideout on Earth, a patch of green by a lake that has managed to retain its pristine condition, despite enough radiation and natural disaster to singe the last bacterium off of Chernobyl.

Then one day, a Big Thing falls out of the sky, which is why I always wear a hat. What is this? Jack asks. Why it’s the remnants of a NASA spaceship, and inside is Julia (Olga Kurylenko), who it turns out is Jack’s wife before Jack became a robot who gets into a fight with himself, the original Jack, who also falls out of the sky. But that’s for later.

Meanwhile, Victoria is not happy about Jack’s bringing a resucitated wife who has been in Delta Sleep for 60 years back to the space station. I mean, call first before you bring a guest home for dinner (“Gonna have to stretch the two pork chops, but whatever…”). OK, maybe Vickie’s a little jealous. But why are her pupils dilated like she’s just been to an opthamalogist? There’s a tension that bespeaks an unspoken something. To make matters worse, the only contact with home base, back on Titan, is Melissa Leo. And that can’t be good.

First of all, she’s always asking Vickie “Are you two still an effective team?” which is code for something, although who knows what. And whenever you have astro-noughts stranded somewhere for long periods of time and the only contact they have with “mission control” is a robotic voice or a virtual presence or Melissa Leo, well, you know someone’s lying about something.

Anyway, once Julia wipes 60 years’ worth of sand out of his eyeballs, she demands to be taken back to Earth’s surface to retrieve the data recorder from her wrecked ship. Only then will she be able to piece together where she is, why she is, and who she is.

Everybody got that?

So Jack, against Victoria’s wishes (you know how she gets), drives Julia into town—only they’re accosted by rejects from Road Warrior crossed with the Sand People from the original Star Wars. Jack suffers a terrible gash in the bridge of his nose—which proves to be important, because it’s the only way we’ll be able to tell “our” Jack from the other Jack whom “our” Jack beats up and hog ties. But that’s for later.

Turns out that what’s left of Earth is run by Morgan Freeman. Fine by me. Since he’s played God and Nelson Mandela, why not? Beech (Morgan Freeman, who I mentioned in the previous sentence) needs Jack to repair a damaged drone so he can send it into the sky and blow up the space station. Jack thinks Beech and his rejects have turned on the human race and gone over to the Martians (that part isn’t really clear, unlike the rest of this masterpiece), but Beech let’s Jack and Julia go with the understanding that once our astronaut hero learns the “truth” of the space station and the Martians and Titan and what the drones he’s been repairing really are for, he’ll come back and help this hapless gang of irradiated hobos.

At this point I wished I was in oblivion. I couldn’t figure out who was who and what was real and if there were Martians to begin with or people were robots or I was a robot or the guy in front of me was Vin Diesel or what.

Turns out that someone was telling a big fat lie about the whole “war” story. Whether it was some evil corporation who built the space station that blocked out the moon or blew up the moon or mooned Morgan Freeman or the space station is the alien being with a really bad case of the droopy Mondays, I don’t have a clue. All I know is that we were supposed to get all teary-eyed by the Armageddon-like ending and the reuniting of other Jack (the one without the gash on his nose) and original Julia in their house by the lake, where they presumably get letters from Kevin Costner in the past, which is where his career currently resides.

The trailer for The Man of Steel looked cool, though. Did you know Russell Crowe plays Jor-El?

That Oblivion video I posted a few days ago showed the extraordinary amount of work that went into this mess. But honestly, the whole things looks like a commercial for upscale bathroom makeovers. Stylistically, it borrows heavily from the aforementioned Star Wars (there’s a chase scene between Jack and some drones that looks like it was traced over the storyboards for the “Luke and Han blow up the Death Star” finale, only in this case, I couldn’t figure out who I was supposed to be rooting for or why). There’s a heavy Matrix homage, with Beech as Morpheus’s less spiritual and hip cousin. I mentioned Road Warrior, right? How about a little 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe I Married an Ax Murderer, but don’t hold me to that.

What was missing besides a script? How about that claustrophobic sense of increasing menace from Alien? How about a central character who isn’t his own twin? How about some original composition or camera work, like found in, oh, Road Warrior and 2001. How about a sense that you were in a world haunting and alien yet strangely familiar, like in Blade Runner? How about a mystery that, when finally revealed, reveals something that isn’t boring and stupid? How about characters whose fates you cared about, and a love affair you wanted to see consummated, like Trinity and Neo’s?

Was Victoria a robot? Is original Victoria still a frozen fetus in the giant black Triangle that talks and has frickin’ laser beams attached to its head?

AND I drank too much water with my $90 worth of concessions, so you know what that means, and like for the whole last hour of the film—but could I get up and go? Of course not, because somebody might sneeze a plot point that pulled all this claptrap into a vaguely recognizable narrative that wasn’t all middle (as in beginning, MIDDLE, and end).

Let’s hope this film does not consign Tom Cruise’s career to oblivion.

And will whoever stepped on my nachos/Whopper combo on his way to take a cellphone call please meet me outside? I have a knuckle sandwich I’d like to deliver.

Reading Jonathan Fisk’s Broken: 7 “Christian” Rules That Every Christian Ought to Break as Often as Possible is not unlike watching one of his webcasts. The energy, the humor, the pop-culture references, the easy glide into theological language, it’s all there. The only thing missing is that Gorgon-looking creature who groans “Eeeeee-mail.”

Yesterday, I reviewed a review of Broken by David Snyder, a Reformed Baptist. I was taken aback by how he ended his assessment: “Broken does a great job of exposing false gospels, but also tends to underestimate the power of the true one.” I then used that as the basis for a very long post on what I thought was missing, not necessarily from Broken, as I admitted I had not read it, but from too many Lutheran pulpits, especially in relation to reaching young people.

Now I have read it. Read the rest of this entry »

So it’s at a measly 37% at Rotten Tomatoes, but note that audience approval is significantly higher, at 63%. Yes, critics have been harsh to this film, which probably explains the empty theater I was sitting in. (The last time I was in a room that full of empty seats, I was 17 and on stage at the Comic Strip on First Avenue in New York.)

“The Incredible Burt Wonderstone makes the classic mistake of thinking a comedy about magicians will be magical,” wrote someone from the Times UK. No, I expect a comedy about magicians to be funny. I expect a live magic act to be magical.

And I’m here to tell you to ignore the critics, because The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is funny. Not in Anchorman‘s league, perhaps, but close enough to make it worth your time and geetus.

So Burt Wonderstone and Anton Marvelton (not their real names, by the way) were scrawny, picked-on kids in 1982 who discovered that the way to compensate for their general uncoolness was to beguile their classmates with magic. The duo’s hero was none other than Rance Holloway (Alan Arkin), whose home magic kits taught you the basic handkerchief from nowhere, three unbreakable rings, and quarter from behind the ear tricks. The videotape that accompanied the instructions and props made the prospect of being a magician seem almost too good to be true for this all too too solid world.

But Burt and Anton persevered, becoming a team, only to grow up to become Steve Carell and Steve Buscemi, who, dressed a little too much like Siegfried and Roy, sell out their own theater in Las Vegas night after night, dazzling audiences with their amazing friendship as much as their disappearing tricks.

But all is not as it seems: Burt is an insufferably arrogant, clueless ladies man who is so caught up in his own little world of hotel suites, glitter, and make believe that he barely knows what the Internet is. His crude, sexist, and abusive ways result in the team’s having to find a new lovely female assistant every two weeks. Fortunately for him, Jane comes along (Olivia Wilde), a backstage assistant and inspiring magician herself. She quickly learns all the gags even while thwarting Burt’s come-ons. She’s not quite Michelle Pfeiffer to an illusionist version of Jeff and Beau Bridges, but that’s the vibe.

One day Burt and Anton happen upon a street performer: Steve Gray (Jim Carrey). Imagine a cross between Criss Angel and David Blaine and you’ve got the picture. Dubbed “the Mind Rapist,” Gray’s act consists of self-mutilation, torture, and gross-out grotesquerie. “What you do is not magic,” Wonderstone tells Gray late in the film. “It’s monkey porn.” Read the rest of this entry »