Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Goddamn it!

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have.
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

I missed Towel Day...but, credit where credit is due, thanks to my niece Jody for sending me a Facebook message about it.
- Sid

Sunday, May 4, 2008

Have you heard the one about...


"Sorry I'm late, I was doing a Vanity Fair piece."
-Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark, Iron Man.
Every now and then when someone accuses me of telling jokes all the time, I defend myself by defining a joke as "a structured anecdote with a punch line" - everything else is just conversation. According to that definition, the movie adaptation of Iron Man is a joke: it's a structured anecdote with a pretty good punch line.

I don't mean to suggest that the movie is either an intentional or unintentional comedy, although it does have the usual number of in-jokes (Stan Lee does his usual walk-on, this time as Hugh Hefner, and a shot of a youthful Tony Stark and his first circuit board shows Tony posing with Bill Gates) and a surprising amount of physical humour. Impressively, the humour in no way detracts from the flow of story and never has any feeling of television-Batman-and-Robin parody.

I think that a lot of the credit for the movie's success has to go to Robert Downey Jr. There's been a lot of media discussion about how the choice of Downey was a risk, based on his well-known issues with substance abuse and subsequent imprisonment, but it makes him an oddly apt choice to play a playboy millionaire character whose alcoholism represented a major story arc in the comic book version. In fact, there's even a reference in the movie to Downey's Burger King epiphany. His portrayal of Tony Stark is by turns flippant and earnest, but has an underlying air of determination that comes across perfectly. The script is loaded with tossed-away one liners from Stark that Downey delivers so casually that I suspect an unattentive audience (such as the one I sat in this evening) won't even notice them.

Similarly, Jeff Bridges does a brilliant job as Obadiah Stane, Stark's mentor and business partner, giving the character a chillingly plausible air of corporate evil. I have to say that the shaved head and full beard help considerably, in that he's almost not recognizable in the role.

And the armour itself? Well, really, it IS the main element of the story, and the three versions all perform admirably. (There's an alarming similarity between the armour-assembly process in the movie and the one from the Blizzard Starcraft II trailer, but that's a separate issue.) The "final" model - final in quotes because it's in pieces by the end of the movie, and apparently sequels are planned - is convincingly detailed, articulated and transformable. Full credit to everyone for trying to figure out a plausible system that would allow someone to actually fly in a suit of armour.

All that being said, Glyneth Paltrow doesn't work as Pepper Potts so completely that I tried to ignore her. Terence Howard as James Rhodes felt all wrong too, I would have preferred someone like Gary Dourdan from CSI, someone with some physical presence. There's a clumsy attempt to establish Tony's post-trauma personality as having an element of fanaticism to it, but it only pops up for a single scene and then falls by the wayside.

Regarding the original comic book character, if you'd asked me last week where Iron Man's origin lay, I would have unhesitatingly said, "Korean War, but they updated it to Vietnam sometime in the 70's - probably Iraq in the movie version." Sadly, the weight of online commentary suggests that it was always Vietnam - sadly because it would have been a better comment on American interventionism for them to have updated the story from Korea to Vietnam to, as it turns out, Afghanistan. The joke is that as Obadiah Stane points out during the climax of the movie, the Tony Stark who announces that his company will no longer manufacture weapons then turns around and makes "the greatest weapon of all". Let's face it, when Iron Man fires a missile into a tank and it blows up, nobody inside the tank is walking away from that. I have to wonder if they're going to address that dichotomy in sequels.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the movie version, especially since it takes things back to the basics. I stopped buying comics a few years back, mostly out of boredom, but from what I gather some of the attempts by writers to alleviate the boredom issue have been more creative than intelligent, unfortunately. (Come on, Teen Iron Man?)

Oh, and the punchline? Sorry, I'd hate to spoil the joke for anyone - and it's a pretty good joke.
- Sid

Thursday, May 1, 2008

"On the dark side of the moon"

"Dark Side of the Moon is THE signature album of the twentieth century."
Chris Sumner, a Friday night several months ago.
(Disavowed when sober)
Having just been awakened, as usual, by the somehow concerned meowing of the infamous Nigel, the fleeting memories of a dream begin to fade in the daylight, as dreams tend to do. Sadly, due to workload, many of my recent dreams have dealt with paper stocks and printing issues (no, really), and very often I have no memory of my dreams at all, but in this case, the fragments of my dream were of a science fiction drama on the moon - on the dark side of the moon, to be specific.

I have to give full credit to my subconscious mind for the large portion of my dream involving my relationship with one of the other members of the moon base - a somewhat hawk-faced, kinky haired blonde woman who might have been an Israeli. Thanks, subconscious, now if you can have this woman cross my path in the real world... That aside, the dream was surprisingly retro, with a military contingent on the base in case of difficulty with the opposing Russian mission, concealed data disks and people assembling vacuum-capable weaponry that probably wouldn't work like they did in the dream. There were even references to the Apollo missions. As one of the soldiers was putting together some kind of tripod-mounted light artillery, he mutters something about "getting his golf club ready", in acknowledgement of Alan Shepard's 1971 golf shot during Apollo 14.

However, in the clear light of day, it occurred to me that at no point did I notice the lower gravity. How sad that imagination failed me at that point! Sigh...I blame innumerable TV programs that have come up with workarounds to keeps the budget down, but it's unfortunate that my sleeping mind was unable to make the leap (no pun intended) to quarter-gravity. Perhaps another time...
-Sid