IRON MAN 2

The opening episodes of Iron Man 2 are gripping, in holding us in anticipation, gripping especially during Tony Stark’s spectacular entrance (as Iron Man) where he is to deliver a speech at his grand expo on his outlook on world peace. Current world peace won’t last because there are cutaways to a number of questionable evil characters. Can the baddies serve up worthy action blockbuster havoc?

I kept waiting patiently – very patiently – for Mickey Rourke to do something terrific with his performance as Ivan Vanko, but it never happens. For all those who are fans of the cinema of agony, the ones who appreciated his extraordinary work in “The Wrestler,” it is a crushing letdown that his is the weakest drawn character in “Iron Man 2.” True Rourke followers were waiting for him to deliver something bold and genre-breaking, something diabolically twisted, something conjuring an astonishing level of evil never seen before. But his performance lacks juice probably because the character itself is a standard dry-bone villain. He has all the dimensions of Dolph Lundgren impersonating a Slavic robot.

That unfortunate news aside, it is still an ecstatic joy to see Robert Downey Jr. let it rip like a method actor on steroids as Tony Stark, the man inside Iron Man. The consummate actor must be enjoying the acme period of his career. “Tropic Thunder” and “Zodiac” were Oscar-worthy performances that earned him a nomination only for the former. And “Iron Man” and “Sherlock Holmes” are multi-million DVD sellers. But in film after film, he retains his indie edge with his cocky and flippant personality without flipping the finger, either. When he chews out a senator (played by wormy Garry Shandling) he does it with classic Downey SOB smart alec style, laid back but sharp with the tongue.

Running second in the joy department are those whooshing airborne scenes. You get the sense that Iron Man is travelling 100 mph with flying in the air, maybe it is 500 mph. Whatever the speed, Iron Man has the velocity of a missile. It is still far-fetched however that Stark can get from Malibu, California to Flushing, New York in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

There are the many secondary performances, and somehow, Gwenyth Paltrow lends the film the most heart as Pepper Potts, whom possesses the classiness of the 1950’s with a 2010 academic brain, becomes appointed to company CEO. Tony and Pepper have an unexpressed affection for each other. Pepper has to take upon herself all the stress of running a company while concurrently cleaning up Tony’s compromised public image. Their tension is obscure, at least to her, as Tony refuses to inform her about his dangerous blood toxicity levels (Where is Tony’s personal M.D.?).

And after it was told that Scarlett Johansson was not action blockbuster movie material, famously dissed by her own producers of the flop “The Island,” it must be sweet revenge for her to appear here. As Natasha, Stark’s sexy personal assistant, the more limber than ever Johansson is seen stunningly leather-clad – a martial arts vixen. Her showdown against a brigade of guards is among the film’s kick-ass highlights.

If you're not an avid comic book reader, you might not be sure as to why Samuel L. Jackson is in the picture, but if you cut out all the mumbo jumbo he’s basically Natasha’s supervisor. Don Cheadle (taking over from Terrence Howard) becomes Iron Man partner War Machine (the two of them are not drinking buddies), but the camaraderie is put on hold until Tony can cool his ego jets.

You may also question as to whether we are waiting for another sequel so Tony Stark can follow through on his dad’s legacy wishes (John Slattery as Howard Stark), which is never as resolved as it could have been. Dad speaks from beyond the grave via old company promo footage. It’s a subplot that could have been a way-y-y awesome major plot had it been followed through on – I kept thinking about the end to Alex Proya’s “Dark City” – but now we’re talking detours but that probably didn’t interest the producers behind “Iron Man 2.”

The Stark Expo, the arena for the final metallic showdown – is well, a blast and boost a second, but I was raising a logical question or two as to why Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell, as the second but more white collar villain), a snotty arms manufacturer who finances Ivan Vanko, had been given permission to deliver a presentation in the first place. Regardless, Jon Favreau (“Elf,” “Iron Man”) is a fantastic action director who expertly paces his actors through some plausible motions. Favreau, too, actually gives a damn or two about human vulnerability beneath all the explosive chaos.

It might be too harsh to call this a subpar sequel since the original set the bar so high, but… Really, it pains me as much to say that it is an inferior sequel as it is for you to hear it. But as you can probably gather there are many self-contained enjoyable moments to be had (perhaps one standing bravo and a half-dozen mild cheers) despite feeling that Iron Man has no worthy adversary and that the interpersonal conflicts are, um, a bit forced. And Downey makes anything better than it would have been had it starred without him.

Go to the official site at http://ironmanmovie.marvel.com/
 
Grade: B-

PLEASE GIVE

Chick flick has for some time now, maybe two decade’s worth, had a derogatory slant to it. Maybe it is because most of them, either starring the likes of Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey or maybe the two of them together, stink of moldy cheese. But if there exists one stable reliability to the genre it is writer-director Nicole Holofcener who has never made a bad feature. Her latest film is Please Give and once again Catherine Keener is her star subject.

During her career, Holofcener has made “Walking and Talking,” Lovely and Amazing” and “Friends with Money.” Her latest film opens with a graphic montage depicting the tragedy of mammograms. Not really a tragedy, that’s overstatement, but it takes a delicate beautiful thing and makes it, uh… makes you want to close your eyes at the indignity. These opening seconds are the least appealing element of the film. But maybe it was meant solely for the female audience to identify with (and not me). It used to be men that gave women a hard time in Holofcener movies, now you can add the doctor’s office.

Then there is the human consciousness. Kate (Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) are in the business of buying the vintage antiques of the recently deceased, sometimes buying apartments of the deceased. Kate and Alex live in a high-rise unit, next to a unit inhabited by the elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert). She is cared for by her granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), who share a range of good and bad opinion of Kate and Alex, whom in essence, are bargain-hunters.

The fizz in Kate and Alex’s marriage is deflating their sense of worth. Perhaps the problem is that they share every waking minute together (can marriage and occupation co-exist?). They have an overweight and generally insecure teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), whose self-esteem would boost if only somebody bought her a two-hundred dollar pair of jeans. But Kate doesn’t buy her jeans, or buy her skin care. Not when there are starving homeless people on the street. Alex could also step in and buy for his daughter, but he invests elsewhere too, in the lives of strangers.

This story is as much a marriage deconstruction as it is a portrait of the two granddaughters next door. Rebecca is an attractive and hard-working radiology technician who barely gets out to date (she prefers guys that are the cute type, like Thomas Ian Nicholas who plays Eugene), while Mary doesn’t date she does get around in various meaningless flings. But the story set-up is that Rebecca and Mary are neighbors to a married couple they don’t like because they look like they want to leech on their grandmother as soon as she passes.

Then the surprise is that Rebecca and Mary make friends with them, only it is made in a singularly paved way. Rebecca becomes closer to Kate, while Mary becomes closer to Alex and their daughter Abby. Defined by different avenues, each friendship becomes its own privatized confessional. Kate leaks out her guilt to Rebecca for what she does for a living. Alex pours out his frustrations on lack of excitement in his marriage to Mary. And Mary becomes Abby’s skin care specialist, and lousy advisor on beauty since to her beauty is skin deep and nothing else. Rebecca carries all the guilt between the two sisters. Seething is this unspoken rivalry between sensitivity and shallowness.

But all of this description fails to convey what a talented writer Holofcener is who cares too much about her characters to give them false objectives. Shall I reaffirm to you that the film ends in the humbling, realistic way it should end without being hammered with overblown dramatic ploys? What’s criterion is that Holofcener writes jokes worthy of Woody Allen in the 1970’s, but with a pro-feminist spark interpolated into it. She writes characters that are real and rounded, vulnerable and neurotic, smart and courageous – at least courageous for contemporary New Yorker types. And she finds varied and individual details in her characters. Holofcener puts the brains back in chick flicks and reinstalls the idea that at least a few chick flicks out there are made for the grown-up thinking person.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonyclassics.com/pleasegive/
Grade: B+

DEATH AT A FUNERAL

Some of you might be aware that the new Chris Rock movie Death at a Funeral is a remake of a British comedy – made in 2007. Talk about fast remakes. Dean Craig, the same writer, is credited both times. The entire situation template remains intact, some of the best lines salvaged from before, and retooled for this all-black cast – many of them including Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan and Danny Glover doing their funniest big-screen work.
Watching the same story again I was struck at how some of the big chunks of dialogue worked with just the same, and yet oddly, somewhat better. I liked the 2007 Frank Oz film mildly, this time however, my laughter was combustible. The Uncle Russell toilet fiasco, with the Norman character gets his hands stuck in Uncle’s drawers while he is relieving himself, had disgusted me the first time out. Yet somehow I found it really funny this time. Is it because the comic timing between Glover and Morgan is better than the original British actors? The speediness of the editing which doesn’t stop for a moment to think?

Perhaps Morgan, a supporting player, has a great horrified look for a comedy as the guy that is in over his head. Rock and Lawrence, as brothers Aaron and Ryan, are the top two guys in the cast but its Lawrence with all the great lines, and he gets to work with a running joke that he doesn’t have any movie to contribute to dad’s funeral. Other tension amounts because both of them are professional writers, but only Lawrence is published (are they soft-core porn novels, it sounds?). The reverend signed up for the service to hear Lawrence’s eulogy – everybody else wants his eulogy, too – and Rock is insulted, repeatedly, because his upcoming eulogy is not wanted.

Peter Dinklage (“The Station Agent”), as Frank, is the blackmailer who wants $30,000 from the brothers so he won’t show to their mom (Loretta Devine, “Waiting to Exhale”) revealing intimate homosexual photos with their dad. Dinklage, the only consistently working diminutive actor in the movies, reprises his role from the 2007 film. Dealing earnestly with the problem, Rock agrees to shell out the money by check but then changes his mind. Then there is a wrestling match between the three of them. Dinklage gets tied up, with perhaps the plan, to keep him occupied until the funeral is over.

The mixed races relationship between Zoe Saldana (“Avatar”) and James Marsden (“The Box”) stands out at the funeral, especially after Marsden takes Valium. Only it’s not Valium, it was mislabeled in the container by Columbus Short (“Cadillac Records”), a cousin. But there’s no prejudice really. Saldana’s father just wants her to be with the other white guy, played by Luke Wilson whom might as well be playing average Joe Bauers. Marsden, high on what might be acid, wrecks the initial funeral service and runs havoc in a nude screwball way.

That Valium container gets in the wrong hands again, and when the boys are trying to placate Dinklage, they feed him a bunch of pills and then after a nasty spill, they got a corpse on their hands. It almost makes sense for them to force the corpse in with their father, to nudge them in together for eternity. As long as the resumed service doesn’t require an open coffin, they might be able to get away with it. The predicament gets heavier when more and more members of the family find out about it, all implicating each other.

The film is directed by Neil LaBute who has never done this kind of comedy before. Previously he has made some nasty comedies (“In the Company of Men,” “Your Friends and Neighbors”), the kind that makes you wince at the selfishness of white collar man. Recently he directed Samuel L. Jackson in “Lakeview Terrace,” one of the most underrated thrillers in recent years. “Death at a Funeral” couldn’t be more different, but he lets his cast generously engage in their scenes while coherently shuffling back in forth between scenes that are at different interiors and exteriors in the house. This is a movie about a funeral service and two corpses, but LaBute keeps things rolling. 92 fast, surprisingly feel-good minutes.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/deathatafuneral/

Grade: B

KICK-ASS

How charmless is the superhero movie Kick-Ass? Nicolas Cage, in his first scene, is setting up to shoot his pre-teen daughter in the chest with a caliber pistol. This is, of course, not a lethal exercise, he’s merely trying to test the body armor. Chloe Grace Moretz, takes the bullet with pride. But I can’t help but wonder about her pigtails. Did dad, or the director, not consider he might shoot off her locks of hair?


Oh, the charmless part, in my opinion, was the entire scene seeped in such loudness that you’re supposed to hear, and feel, the ripples of that discharged bullet. But the movie gets more gratuitously brutal. I especially felt rotten after a turncoat mobster gets “microwaved” to death. But Moretz, as Mindy Macready a.k.a. Hit Girl gets battered viciously in the last act of the film, like she was just one of the guys. Her age is 11.

At this point in my review, I’ve made it sound like this father-daughter duo is the core of the movie but I have misled you. Aaron Johnson is the high school outcast who narrates the movie, who just wants to make a difference. Whether it’s a difference to the world or a difference to himself, does it really matter? He wonders why no ordinary people have ever tried to become a superhero. He wants to try, but with zero imagination, no helpful gadgets, it is no surprised he gets pummeled in his first two outings.

Charisma is everything to the movies, or at least used to be everything. It doesn’t help that Johnson has about one-tenth of the charisma of Jay Barouchel, and being compared to Barouchel is not flattering in the first place. He’s just an unhappy young man whom I guess is pounding out his frustrations by being a superhero named Kick-Ass. He’s no nice, charismatic kid like Peter Parker. Somehow, even with his superhero ineptness and ambiguous intentions, he gets a girlfriend in this movie.

The genre requires an evil genius, but you will have to settle for a stock character villain. The kingpin of the movie is Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) and he tries to keep his business from his son Chris, who will become Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the McLovin’ kid). Red Mist has the moxie to join Kick-Ass and Hit Girl, but with fidelity to his father’s business, only joins them to lure them to their capture. Let the slashing and gashing begin. Cage, who becomes the alias Big Daddy, gets brutalized in quite an awful way. His daughter Hit Girl is bummed, I guess, but somehow we think she will survive this ordeal with a next day brush-off.

This isn’t courage being mounted as message, it’s all displays of dehumanized behavior. This movie is for undiscerning viewers who enjoy overstylized ultraviolence for the sake of it being, uh, gnarly and way cool. Most moviegoers don’t know the names of the director responsible, but I take part in my duty to know so. Watching “Kick-Ass,” I at times thought I was watching “Natural Born Killers” as directed by the Wachowski Brothers, and repackaged with a smiley face for general young audiences. The name of the director is actually Matthew Vaughn, and he is now on my hate list. I am glad that I saw “Date Night” and “Death at a Funeral” recently, as an antidote, because after those two I can now add to my love list.

Go to the official site at http://www.kickass-themovie.com/

Grade: D+

THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

A writer works out his beginning of a novel which pop up in vibrant imaginary dream sequences. Two of them are beautiful and ecstatic visions that celebrate the love a man has for a woman or the heart-ripping of letting go of a woman, and the third plunges into the terrible vicious attack of an innocent woman wronged. This is the opening of The Secret in their Eyes, the Argentina import that is the recent Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film.

What the writer is grappling with is softening the blow before he gets to the really nasty but inevitable scene in his book which is based on a tragedy he witnessed 25 years earlier. These opening minutes, nonetheless, grabbed me and wound me up in its multiple threads and layers. For the rest of the film I cared about what will happen to Benjamin (Ricardo Darin), a retired criminal court investigator who is now this aging writer.

Jumping back and forth into the present, we wonder why he never professed his love for Irene (Soledad Villamil), a judge and former colleague who just so happens to be so tied into everything that she too is part of his new novel. Darin and Villamil are so good, and appealing as would-be lover, that we are entranced by the very reflections in their eyes.

The case that changed their lives forever deals with the rape and murder of a beautiful 23-year old woman whose husband devotes the rest of his life for her, which proves undying. The police are baffled by the case, obviously baffled when they carelessly arrest an individual based on absolute non-circumstantial evidence. Months later after the case has been closed as unsolved, Benjamin petitions the judge to re-open it because he thinks he can pin it on one suspect. If only that suspect can be found, as this being a crime of remorse the suspect has fled.

The director of the film, Juan Jose Campanella with his sixth credit, is gifted visually in his ability to set a mood whether it’s a sense of brooding or exalting. There is a tracking shot that starts as an aerial over the soccer stadium and goes into the stands and then through the interior walls of a stadium. It should be hailed as one of the most astonishing tracking shots of all-time right up there with “GoodFellas” or “Touch of Evil” but because it’s not an English-language film, it could go forgotten.

Without the fancy camerawork, the film could easily fall back on dialogue no problem. The film contains a classic interrogation scenes that is so unorthodox in its approach that you wonder if the miracles of reverse psychology tactics are really true. But this also becomes a story of justice versus injustice, so in a way, the movie wants to rip your heart out twice. But indeed it keeps you involved every step of the way.

Tactlessly, I want to bring up a few subtractions that work against the film: I never felt that I really ever breathed in Argentina as a setting (the movie is a tad hermetic with its settings inside the courthouse, and scenes inside the criminal’s home), and for a Best Foreign Film winner you always let’s admit want to come away feeling that you got a sense of an entire country’s canvass.

Secondly, we don’t know the dead girl beyond her pictures (we’re asked to sympathize with her on the singular note that she’s pretty and because it is inherently tragic. We do get a beautiful haunted performance by Pablo Rago who keeps following his duties as a husband long after his wife had already been murdered.

Benjamin is chronicling 25 years of story into his book, but this is just a case of compellingly weaved fiction. The twist ending is good enough for a Korean film (I happen to think Korean cinema is the most creative and richest in the world currently). But I nearly forget that this is Argentina.

Go to the official site at http://www.sonyclassics.com/thesecretintheireyes/

Grade: B+

DATE NIGHT

Date Night is far from great but in terms of being a feel-good entertainment it gives you probably what you would want out of a Steve Carell and Tina Fey aging-dorks pairing. Feel-good is a relative term these days against a sour onslaught of releases, it’s also a sign that this fairly light comedy doesn’t do anything that you would label as abrasive. It’s a rare comedy that didn’t make me want to puke once.

What a compliment, I know. Actually, I found myself giggling at Carell’s repeated failed attempts at masculinity and Fey’s inhibited nerd who is a tad too simple for the Big City. Carell, in a regular “Dan in Real Life” type of role, is well-suited for that “too-nice” guy. Fey is just as funny here as she was in “Baby Mama” but this is a role with more insecure frailty. They play the Fosters, a New Jersey couple, whom decide to go out on a much needed date night in New York City in order to reboot their romance for each other.

They hit a very swank but uppity restaurant-club named Claw, and since they don’t have a reservation, they steal one when the hostess calls out for the Triplehorns who are nowhere to be seen. Complications demand that the Fosters are now mistaken for somebody important, and two thugs take them to the back alley to shake some information out of them. They escape from under their wing and spend the rest of the movie running, and searching for answers, too.

Due to predictable elements, the movie’s outline is drawn for you before you’re halfway through it, and the two thugs – a scruffy white guy and a bald black guy – are nincompoops that can’t shoot straight. These are unrecognizable character actors playing one-note characters. But other actors on board include Ray Liotta as a big crook, William Fichtner as a white collar crook, Taraji P. Hensen as a detective, James Franco and Mila Kunis as a nutty couple in hideout, Mark Ruffalo and Kristen Wiig as a couple on the fritz, and Mark Wahlberg as a Bruce Wayne-type stud. The supporting cast hit their marks breezily and satisfyingly.

What is startling, in the best sense possible, is that Wahlberg is able to do almost nothing and yet is very funny. His character’s persona is macho conceit, and when our date couple duo enter his sexy pad, Carell becomes instantly jealous of Fey’s leeriness for Whalberg’s pecs (biggest laughs of the movie). When they leave Wahlberg’s condo and go on route to their next destination, the two take a timeout to evaluate their marriage. The interplay dialogue brings up this issue: With two kids, two parallel careers and a mortgage how will they ever have time to spike excitement into their boring marriage?

The rest of their after hours adventure is nothing but exciting, if at least once, preposterous. Carell, after commandeering a sports car, locks horns with a taxi cab – their vehicles, that is – which becomes a two-car wrecking derby through the streets of New York while good cops and trigger happy cops pursue them. The idea of the bumpers of two cars sticking together as the way portrayed in the movie is, well, a crock, but for the time-being it gives the producers of the film something to put in the marketing trailer. I worked up enough good spirits to at least chuckle at the preposterousness.

Most of the other adventures are sane, and yet exciting, but the best trick of the movie throws Carell and Fey into an adult club which prompts them to perform the most deliberately bad pole-dancing that you ever saw. You wonder for a few minutes afterwards if Carell and Fey attempted to be good and if that was it, if that was really their best. But that’s the appeal of them anyway, two dorky actors tackling naughtiness and turning it into something charmingly naive. Their sweetness shines through in the final shot of the film, the coda, of a couple who have been chased through the night and yet survived ’til sunrise. And the end credits cookies reveals that these two really enjoyed each other’s company in the making of their movie.

Go to the official site at http://www.datenight-movie.com/#/home
 
Grade: B

CLASH OF THE TITANS

Get ready for a battle between kings and gods, mortals and immortals in an action spectacle that impacts you with a thunderbolt. Clash of the Titans is Greek mythology updated, with a sense of verve and excitement (and a tad too many rattling edits and shaking cameras), for 21st century action-hungry audiences, but it keeps its criteria mission and objective in order: to tell a grand centuries-old story.
Gloriously, the filmmakers put the camera in the sky in many of its rousing scenes, but because we know we live in an age of CGI special effects, we know it is not really the sky. But it feels like we are really floating up there along with our hero Perseus (Sam Worthington), who was born of a god but raised in the man, and thus here is a fantasy film that does the exceptional job of suspending our disbelief.

With only a few scenes of actors standing around and waxing rhetorically, this new remake of the 1981 film (this is a forward leap improvement narrative-wise than the original), moves with brisk pacing while exceedingly following through on its foreshadowing. When the film promises well in advance a difficult battle to the death encounter with Medusa, whose hair is writing with snakes, the actual battle is a fantastic showdown that hurls with acrobatic ferocity.

Also included in the adventure is Perseus’ capture of the flying horse Pegasus, duels with gigantic scorpions, encounters with Stygian witches with eyeballs in their palms, various winged demons and gargoyles, and Kraken the sea monster that is so colossal in size that he can prompt tidal waves capable of ravaging ancient Greek cities. Two things missing from the original is the mechanical owl (good omission, also a good self-aware laugh) and the two-headed wolf battle (a sorely missing omission). Perseus does not begin as the principle leader of the band of warriors, that authority belongs to Mads Mikkelson (“Casino Royale”) as Draco in command, but surely enough he ascends to leadership.

This is also another successful vehicle for Worthington who has become a major star within the wingspan of a year. He brought much-needed gravitas to ill-conceived “Terminator: Salvation” and was the star of the worldwide box office behemoth “Avatar.” Worthington is hardly the tallest man on screen, visibly shorter to Mikkelson, but he is as hard as a rock. And he brings integrity to the screen – in various times he appears he would die for a goddess simply because it is the right thing to do, the right thing for the better of mankind. He loves goddesses for what they represent to the foundation of the world, and Worthington’s Perseus makes himself feel less than who they are. Worthington turns martyrdom into a masculine art.

Initially, Worthington begins humble (too humble and grounded to be honest), having survived at childhood being washed at sea within a closed coffin. He nonetheless becomes a warrior, defying if not practically rejecting his god genetics, and places the “common” people at higher importance than the gods. He is unmoved, if full of refutation, when Zeus (Liam Neeson, succeeding and exceeding Laurence Oliver in the original role) arrives and announces himself as his father. If they happen to share the same ideals, they both in a way have different definitions of the same objectives.

What Zeus and Perseus, father and son, will have in common is the desire and need to wipe out Hades (Ralph Fiennes), the vengeful god with the intent to wreck and destroy humanity as well as to seize all of Zeus’ power and rule the underworld. The climax of the film is a little bit too “sensational” for its own good – with debris crashing, splashing here and there and everywhere – but as the camera swoops through the carnage and wreckage it inspires thrilling giddiness.

The film is playing in 3D in select theaters, but it is important to note that the film was not filmed in Real 3D but instead converted in 3D after studio test runs. The 3D glasses tint the film and the picture’s colors become diffused in a dissatisfying way. This is opposite to “Avatar” which was filmed in Real 3D with the planned conception to view it in 3D IMAX. What Warner Bros. proves with “Clash of the Titans” is that converted 3D is not a good idea, it adds nothing. See this in the original proper 2D projection. I unfortunately reviewed this in 3D, preferring the film when I took the glasses off.

Go to the official site at http://clash-of-the-titans.warnerbros.com/
 
Grade: B