So often reviews of films like Iron Man, even positive ones, give you the sense that the critics are a bit embarrassed that they’re required to go through the motions of critiquing a Hollywood product for which financial success and pop cultural domination is a foregone conclusion. I’m the first to sympathize with the critical crisis of futility, but it baffles me that so many critics so blatantly suggest that it’s barely worth their time to decode and deconstruct the films that are going to be seen by the largest number of people. Check the qualifiers that get thrown around: “As big-budget comic book adaptations go…”; “works well enough as your standard comic-book blockbuster.” Read: “Giving this film the full strength of my critical acumen would be beneath me.”
So it’s no surprise that the strongest and most considered review of Iron Man that I’ve read comes from a blog. Though io9’s Charlie Jane Anders admits that Iron Man “is not exactly a perfect movie,” she carefully deconstructs its political slipperyness and “Cronenbergian body horror” before branding the film “the first comic-book movie that’s actually better than its source material.” Traditional critics bitch and moan that their reviews of “sure” blockbusters don’t matter, but when millions of consumers invest in a shared entertainment experience, film reviews transcend arts reporting and become anthropology. It’s always exciting to see someone take the responsibility of that anthropological study seriously.
An excerpt from Anders’ review after the jump; you can read the full thing here.
Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:
This appears to be the Pass movie of the early summer for critics. Is it because of Downey or the middle-aged hero or talk about a huge opening or the use of the Middle East and the half-ass political arguments of the film that play out hypocritically but pay active lip service to liberals… I don’t know.
All I do know is that when film critics are the ones identifying with your superhero, you may be being successful with the wrong demo for mega-bucks… which is all the film producers wanted in the first place.
[Downey's] romance with mood-altering chemicals didn’t end after he got out of prison. By 2003 he was an uninsurable serial relapser famous for being pulled out of hotels or other people’s homes in an addled, disheveled state. As a movie star with a lot of pals, he lived a life beyond consequence until he finally wore out the endless mercies of the entertainment business. After he was fired from his spot on Ally McBeal, the bottom finally came, at a Burger King of all places.
On or around Independence Day in 2003, he stopped at a Burger King on the Pacific Coast Highway and threw all his drugs in the ocean. And while he was sitting there chewing on a burger, he decided he was done. This being America, five years later you can walk into that Burger King, and if you order a Kids Meal you can get your own Robert Downey Jr. action figure, wrapped up in gadget ware. (And what does Tony Stark want when he escapes his kidnappers? A good old American cheeseburger — from Burger King, natch.)
Isn’t it funny how it all comes together? Downey’s recovery, his personal victory over almost-certain death. His character’s victory over almost-certain death within his big Hollywood comeback movie. The marketing of said big Hollywood comeback movie. It all revolves around Burger King, and specifically, the Burger King cheeseburger as touchstone of both near-death experience and synergistic lunch. “Is this a great country or what?” Carr asks––smirkingly, maybe, but not totally disingenuously. Surely, nowhere else in the world could an actor’s biography be modified to better showcase a studio’s corporate sponsor.
When a laugh is more powerful than a tear. The Care Bears Big Wish Movie, Where in the World is Osama bin Laden? and, possibly, Iron Man share a common theme. A quiet–almost subliminal appeal–to an audience seeking a straight shot of entertainment asking them to drop apathy and get involved in a troubled world. A new subversive cinema (that I wrote about earlier this week), which isn’t a filmmaker sneaking a message past Hollywood executives, but past a message-weary audience.
After interviewing George Romero at Sundance 2008, Joe Swanberg and Ronald Bronstein (the interviewers) began to debate whether or not there’s even a place today for subversive directors (i.e. those who defy an institution–Hollywood–while pretending to support it). Romero’s Night of the Living Dead served as a blood and guts zombie vehicle carrying everything troubling him about the turbulent 60’s. The argument today is that subversion is unnecessary. No filmmaker is limited to studio controlled dollars, equipment or theaters to get their ideas out. Although you don’t have to take subversive tactics to get a film made anymore, I think there’s a new institution to game, that of a jaded movie watching audience.
For a generation who doesn’t know a world without premium cable channels and DVD shops on every corner, a trailer is shorthand (largely due to uncreative marketing) telling an audience to drop a film full of challenging ideas into the skip it bin. A lot of films buzzing through the festival circuit offer more of the same life-crashing drama Robert Downey Jr.’s characters are synonymous with. So, in a statement about his decision to play Tony Stark in Iron Man, a remark that there’s more room to build a character with a comic book hero than in most parts that come across his desk rings true. However, I think what he’s referring to is more than just the opportunity to enjoy his craft, it’s an opportunity to implant something in an audience that rolls their eyes at the “broccoli” dramas he’s expected to play in.
The new subversion is to get in front of a jaded audience that switches off interest the moment they hear of hot topics like Darfur or Iraq. By pretending to play to their sensationalist needs, directors like Jon Favreau engage a disaffected audience that has a thousand titillating stories to distract them from anything of substance. At least, that’s what I’m hoping he does (I haven’t seen Iron Man). Maybe comic book heroes are the perfect vehicles to reopen thoughts about Iraq and other box-office poison. To that end, I hope I’m right about Iron Man and I hope it succeeds.
I don’t know what is more upsetting, that I’m actually excited about a movie starring Ben Stiller and Jack Black (remember Envy?) or that it’s actually Robert Downey Jr. in blackface that’s provoking all this excitement. Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — I’m not the only one that’s going ga ga over Downey’s racial transformation for Tropic Thunder. It began a couple weeks ago when this still, featuring Stiller, Black and a colorized Downey, made the rounds through the blogosphere. It turned out the actor’s appearance is part of a brilliant joke on method actors. Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, a multiple Oscar-winner who goes through a special skin-darkening procedure in order to play an African American sergeant during the Vietnam War. It’s mostly funny because you could almost imagine someone like Sean Penn doing this for real.
But is there danger of the joke becoming a bit too much during the whole movie? After all, it began as a mere sight gag with the still photo, then continued with the website, where Downey actually looks eerily identical to Blaxploitation star Fred Williamson. However, now it’s also an audio gag, complete with what must be referred to as blackvoice. Yay, racism is funny! Not that I’m knocking it; I do actually think Downey is absolutely hilarious here. And having Brandon T. Jackson there as an actual African American actor, acknowledging how ridiculously racist Lazarus is, makes it the potentially the best use of racism as comedy since Blazing Saddles (sorry Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay).
I wonder, though, if the joke, the blackface and Downey’s performance will all completely overshadow the rest of the actors. I guess, considering my lack of favor for either Stiller or Black, I should be more hopeful of that being the case than worried.
Tropic Thunder, written by actor Justin Theroux (Inland Empire) and Etan Cohen (Idiocracy) and directed by Stiller, arrives in theaters August 15.
Chris Thilk passes along word that Paramount’s Iron Man website saw its traffic spike by 800 percent after a new ad for the film was unveiled during the Super Bowl. This is interesting for two reasons. First, it would give the indication that there’s still a sizable segment of the audience that learns about movies first via TV advertising.
Second: I’m so not the target audience for this movie, and I never get hardons for trailers, but the Iron Man trailer almost makes me understand what it feels like to be a 16 year-old boy (almost). It seems so clear to me that the full Iron Man trailer, which I believe had been online for a couple of weeks before the game, is far superior than the Super Bowl ad in terms of selling the movie as a narrative experience, but it was the TV ad that apparently got the job done, and it did it by getting down to basics. He builds a suit, he puts it on, he makes out with Gwyneth Paltrow, and he wins. This is what the people want. I can’t begrudge them that.
Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:
