gotta fight for your --
which i'd read about before seeing -- see this LAT blog post -- but still found almost devastatingly intense. it wasn't just that DJ AM (aka adam goldstein) was in the scene, playing himself, spinning and bantering with RDJ -- i went to one party he dj'd, had a mutual friend but never met him, had no connection beyond LA's usual 6th degree of separation.
from that blog:
Everyone asked agreed that DJ A.M. should have one more chance to energize a crowd -- his biggest ever, in fact -- so Favreau kept the sequence in the film.
Also, Kevin Scott, one of Goldstein's close friends, advised on a mash-up that plays over the sequence and pulls together the music of Queen, Rob Bass and Daft Punk with a flair that the filmmaker hopes falls in line with DJ A.M.'s work. It was a bit of a challenge securing use of the music in that form, but Favreau said it was worth it to make the scene a special one.
so there was that layer, of course. but the harder part for me was watching robert downey jr, a man whom i have admired for so so very long, and whom we all watched perform the most painful, public self-destruction over and over and over again to the point that his sheer survival, let alone happiness and massive career comeback, still seem almost ridiculously improbable. he's always been an actor who had this depth of darkness in his performances, whether they were about drugs and alcohol or redemption or not -- which is part of why, i think, his performance as a man who wants redemption for a past life he is now horrified by worked so well as a meta-meta-commentary in the first iron man movie.
everything about tony stark's drunken, destructive meltdown in that party scene is superhero-sized, but that never made it any funnier, really. he's not shown in this film as an alcoholic, even at his most slutty party-hearty. (likeadeuce is schooling me right now about how his drinking in the comics in the 70s/80s was definitely more "lost weekend" and even an intervention/detox followed basically by sobriety.) there's that comic book sleight of hand where we never really see anyone die as a result of his behavior, though it's hard to imagine in that set-up they wouldn't have.
i don't have some neat point to make here. there are a lot of characters (on tv particular) who are tough guys or girls self-medicating to various degrees of dysfunction. so many it's almost a bit of a cliche at this point to find out that overachieving doctor/lawyer/judge/mom is actually an addict. i don't know what kind of superhero movie that would make, though i'm more intrigued by the question as i learn more about what's in the iron man canon. and because i think RDJ would be totally capable of it -- his sherlock holmes was more plainly an addict than i ever expected to see in such a mainstream interpretation, no matter how blunt his drug use is handled in the books.
anyone?