Iron Man 2.
I saw Iron Man 2 last on Tuesday, and I gotta say, it left me feeling kind of cold. It was messy, overly long, and honestly, if had been made by people who truly and naively believe - like the Starks - that technology is the solution to everything, I wasn't sure I was the right audience for this movie. By the time Tony delivers his most obnoxious and reductionist statement yet - "I have successfully privatised world peace!" - all the goodwill I carried over from the first movie was gone.
Andrew O'Hehir, who's the main film critic at Salon now that Stephanie Zacharek has moved on, puts it nicely:
I'm reasonably certain, based on what I know about Jon Favreau and Justin Theroux, that they want to wield a double-edged sword in "Iron Man 2," and make a vast fortune off a movie that both comments upon (or, ahem, "subverts") the superhero genre and embraces its most militaristic, fascistic, ultra-individualist ideology. They want to be too cool for school while still giving the masses what they want, in other words, but that's a little like looking for the missing quotation marks around those dancing girls' butts. ...
Rourke's villain doesn't get much screen time in "Iron Man 2," and that may be because every time he appears he threatens to root this movie's moderately entertaining, slam-bang spectacle in something resembling moral reality -- and God knows we can't have the audience opening that door. As Tony Stark's incompetent corporate rival Justin Hammer, Sam Rockwell is a comic-relief nerd without much to do. Although I will say that Rockwell's soft-shoe Michael Jackson dance routine, performed while wearing a Bluetooth headset and a truly heinous pale blue suit that looks as if it was left over after prom night in 1979, was probably my favorite moment -- for its delightful and total irrelevance -- in the entire movie. One can only wonder: How many times did Theroux write a "Please, Hammer, don't hurt 'em" joke, only to take it out?
I'm trying to remember all the films that Sam Rockwell has danced in: Charlies Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Piccadilly Jim...
Andrew O'Hehir, who's the main film critic at Salon now that Stephanie Zacharek has moved on, puts it nicely:
I'm reasonably certain, based on what I know about Jon Favreau and Justin Theroux, that they want to wield a double-edged sword in "Iron Man 2," and make a vast fortune off a movie that both comments upon (or, ahem, "subverts") the superhero genre and embraces its most militaristic, fascistic, ultra-individualist ideology. They want to be too cool for school while still giving the masses what they want, in other words, but that's a little like looking for the missing quotation marks around those dancing girls' butts. ...
Rourke's villain doesn't get much screen time in "Iron Man 2," and that may be because every time he appears he threatens to root this movie's moderately entertaining, slam-bang spectacle in something resembling moral reality -- and God knows we can't have the audience opening that door. As Tony Stark's incompetent corporate rival Justin Hammer, Sam Rockwell is a comic-relief nerd without much to do. Although I will say that Rockwell's soft-shoe Michael Jackson dance routine, performed while wearing a Bluetooth headset and a truly heinous pale blue suit that looks as if it was left over after prom night in 1979, was probably my favorite moment -- for its delightful and total irrelevance -- in the entire movie. One can only wonder: How many times did Theroux write a "Please, Hammer, don't hurt 'em" joke, only to take it out?
I'm trying to remember all the films that Sam Rockwell has danced in: Charlies Angels, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Piccadilly Jim...