Archive for April, 2012|Monthly archive page
Iron Man 2 (2010)
Iron Man 2
★★★★☆
Directed by: Jon Favreau
Written by: Justin Theroux
Based on the Comic Book Created by: Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby
I think it would be fair to say that I was as surprised by Iron Man 2 as I was by the original Iron Man. I always liked Iron Man comics as a kid. In the 90s when everyone was rabid about Jim Lee’s run on X-Men and hyperventilating over Spawn and Youngblood and the new Image comics, I—well, I was right there with them. Look, the 90s weren’t great for comics. But I also spent an awful lot of my money on dirt cheap back issues of Iron Man, because as much as I liked the other, more popular heroes like Spider-Man and Batman, something about a guy who strapped on an awesome suit of techno-armor appealed to the burgeoning gadget nerd inside of me.
I never thought I’d see a big-budget Iron Man movie get made, and even when it did I didn’t think it would be very good. So I was pretty stunned when Robert Downey, Jr. turned in a magnificent Tony Stark performance and they pretty much nailed the character, the story and the production. Good for them, I thought at the time, they got lucky. It was this sense of fortuitous accident that I got from the first that led me to believe the sequel could never be as good and thus I pretty much ignored it until recently, seeing an ad for The Avengers, I got kind of amped to see more super hero flicks, even terrible ones.
So I found myself watching Iron Man 2. And it turns out, it was no accident that the first Iron Man was good.
Iron Man 2 picks up basically where the first left off (it’s a few months later), with Tony Stark as the rock star CEO/super protector of world peace, admired by all, so long as you except congress and the military who want Stark to turn over his Iron Man tech as a patriotic duty. Stark ignores their cries and clings tightly to the suit, which, along with his palladium replacement heart, is slowly killing him. The revelation of his impending death sends Stark on a sort of death mission, handing over CEO duties to Pepper Potts (still played with prim affection by Gwyneth Paltrow) and taking heavy risks like driving the car he sponsors in the Monaco Grand Prix himself.
Enter Ivan Vanko (apparently also called Whiplash, thought it doesn’t seem to come up in the movie, played with punk rock flamboyance by Mickey Rourke), son of Stark’s dad’s ex-partner who helped develop the tech that drives Tony’s suit and Iron Man. Bent for revenge for perceived crimes against his father, Vanko confronts Stark/Iron Man with a semi-suit of his own. This kicks off a firestorm as Stark’s assurances that Iron Man tech was so far ahead of the curve it would never be eclipsed are proven false and Stark continues his downward slide as pressure increases.
The plot gets pretty convoluted from there: not so much that you can’t keep up, just so that it kind of spirals into a disjointed series of events that you kind of have to hang on through because they do all tie together in the end. Lt. Col. James Rhodes (“Rhodey,” played to clipped perfection by Don Cheadle, stepping in for Terrence Howard from the first) confiscates a backup suit from Stark’s lab; Stark’s new assistant, Natalie Rushman (Black Widow, played with curiously un-alluring hot/cool sexuality by Scarlett Johanssen) loops Nick Fury (played by professional scenery chewer, Samuel L. Jackson) into the deal, where he provides the macguffin necessary for Stark to recover and to propel some nice character development; Stark business rival Justin Hammer (played with effectively whiny villainous arrogance by Sam Rockwell) breaks Vanko out of prison and hires him to perfect his own version of the Iron Man suit and the stage is (mostly) set for the epic finale.
Let me just say that director Jon Favreau’s sense of pacing is precise in this movie. So many other super hero sequels stumble by trying to cram too much into a movie just because they already have the backstory covered, but despite the complexity hinted at by the paragraph above, it actually flows very nicely together with minor set pieces and some smart, funny dialogue propelling even the non-SFX portions. And kudos to the screenwriters for avoiding the temptation to cram extraneous villains into the screenplay; Justin Hammer is an ideal foil to Stark on the personal/professional side and while Vanko/Whiplash isn’t exactly a humdinger of a foe for Iron Man, the finale is as explosive and exciting as you could really want from a summer blockbuster. A massive hat tip for including War Machine, too, which is every bit as cool as its name implies.
Are there problems in Iron Man 2? Sure. Some of the rapid-fire dialogue isn’t quite as smart or as funny as its supposed to be (though a lot of it actually is), there are a few too many shots of Rhodey and Stark’s faces with blinking Iron Man lights flashing on their faces and the Pepper Potts storyline wrap-up feels like a rehash from the first. But any movie that has super-powered future tech like the Iron Man suit in it and still manages to make Black Widow’s infiltration of Hammer Industries look badass (and provide one of the movie’s funniest scenes/lines to boot) has something really good going on.
I thoroughly enjoyed Iron Man 2 and while I’m not sure that lightning can strike three times (Iron Man 3 is supposedly coming out in 2013, though without Favreau at the helm), I’m not going to be so quick to dismiss next time.
Hatchet (Hatchet, #1)
author: Gary Paulsen
name: Paul
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1987
rating: 1
read at: 2012/04/02
date added: 2012/04/03
shelves: childrens, novel
review:
It is my opinion that if you, as a writer, are going to take on well-tread territory such as, let’s just say, a lone survivor tale, you had better bring something new or at least interesting to the table. Take a book I read recently, The Island Of The Blue Dolphins. In that book, Scott O’Dell made his protagonist a native of the island she was stranded on, which meant that the survival element was more about loneliness, the societal compartmentalization from her gender and mental survival than about her ability to figure out how to make fire.
I guess the “twist” on Hatchet is that the survivor is a pampered, modern, TV-watching 13 year-old, but to me that was hardly enough to make this story feel unique. The other possible hook that Gary Paulsen might have had to work with was The Secret, which is the overdramatic flourish given to the fact that the hero here, Brian Robeson, knows more about why his parents were recently divorced than half his family. There might have been some dramatic, psychological territory to mine here or perhaps even a tie-in with the life-or-death struggle he’s thrust into, but Paulsen wastes it and then cheapens it by not even resolving the issue in the Epilogue.
If it isn’t really clear already, I kind of hated this book. The prose is stilted and repetitive, and while it starts of interestingly enough, the triumphs of Brian’s struggle to survive are constantly undercut by the fact that this feels incredibly familiar and the fact that, in terms of places you might find yourself having to survive on your wits alone, the Canadian wilderness in summertime is hardly the worst. He has plenty of food sources, clean water, finds an ideal shelter and he has a very useful tool in the titular hatchet. I guess it has to be somewhat believable that a 13 year-old might survive in this environment, but the problem is that believability quickly becomes a serious issue for Hatchet.
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Paulsen has to over-explain the presence of the hatchet in the first place. Near the climax of the book, there are two events that happen in short order that strain credibility to the point where I practically stopped reading. If I hadn’t been 170+ pages into a 200 page book, I probably would have. The author’s insistence on having Brian’s running commentary be variations on the refrain, this is insane doesn’t make up for the fact that in this case “insane” is code for “improbable and suspension of disbelief breaking.”
And after earning the dubious honor to be the first book since Michael Chricton‘s The Lost World to make me say, “Yeah, right!” out loud, Hatchet then races to a terrible climax and finale that are unsatisfying, before hand-waving the whole thing away in the rage-inducing Epilogue.
Here’s the thing about young adult fiction or children’s literature: I enjoy it, even today in my mid-thirties, and I don’t make excuses about it. Good stories are good stories, that’s how I look at it. But good writing and good storytelling should be the common thread among “adult” and young reader books, and if I’m going to accept fiction aimed at a younger audience for its successes I have to hold it accountable for its failures on those same terms. And any way I look at it, I can’t see anything in Hatchet worth recommending it, unless I start to use the qualifier, “…for a children’s book.” If you want a children’s book about survival with actual emotion and themes beyond “you’re more capable than you think,” try The Cay. As for Hatchet, give it a pass.
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