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

"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

Sequels, Endings and Unendings.

As part of a recent income tax refund spending spree, I made an impulse purchase of the post-series Stargate SG-1 movie The Ark of Truth. I've followed Stargate SG-1 to a greater or lesser extent over the years, and although it's never been one of my favourites, for the most part I've been pleased with the show. 

However, I found The Ark of Truth less than impressive, especially when compared with similar offerings from other science fiction series over the years. 

As far as research reveals, science fiction originates the idea of the post-series movie. It's possible that Star Trek breaks ground on the concept, although my good friend Alan pointed out, the Peter Cushing Doctor Who movies from the 60's may have a better claim as the first TV-series-to-movie films. Regardless of which series gets the ball rolling, the genre has certainly taken to the idea, especially in cases where cancellation has prevented the completion of a major story arc, as in the cases of Farscape and Firefly. 

The Peacekeeper Wars - a marvellous title - is Farscape's entry into the post-cancellation sweepstakes, and as such sets the standard in terms of quality. Massive fleets meet in apocalyptic combat, a major character dies, the two lead characters marry in a hail of mortar shells and gunfire, the existence of the galaxy itself is threatened, and the post-climax dénouement provides a touching and appropriate conclusion to the series. (I have to confess to a certain degree of bias here, I feel that Claudia Black, who plays Aeryn Sun, may be the most beautiful woman on the planet.) 

Coincidentally, Serenity, the Firefly movie, has some of the same elements, including huge fleets of starships in battle and the death of a major character - or two - or three. However, Joss Whedon's unique style makes any sort of comparison irrelevant, and Serenity has the sort of ambiguous morality that he seems to build into all of his work. 

And so to The Ark of Truth - how does it miss the mark compared to Serenity or The Peacekeeper Wars? I think that I was expecting something more dramatic and with less deus ex machina. The parallel story lines of Ori and Replicators are both resolved almost casually - admittedly at the last moment, but there was no real sense of tension and climax to either resolution.  Yes, the characters are all in danger, yes, it comes down to the last moment, but in both cases the "last minute" solution comes and goes with no sense of drama, to the point where I found myself wondering thinking, "That was it? That's all?". 

I'll be fair and say that The Ark of Truth isn't terrible, but it's not great, either, it's basically an average episode of the TV series. The only bright spot was an unexpectedly monologue by Teal'c which for the first time in the series offered some insight into his guilt about his actions as First Prime to Apophis. 

The unfortunate thing is that in the Stargate SG-1 series finale, Unending, the writers came up with a brilliantly simple series send-off that really didn't require a followup, regardless of whether or not the menace of the Ori was ever dealt with. The idea of trapping the major characters in a bubble of time for sixty years sounds boring, but it offers an ideal opportunity for those characters to reveal their true natures when faced with a completely different kind of tension and pressure. 

Michael Shanks delivers what may be his best speech in the entire ten years of the series during a poignant, vulnerable scene between his character Daniel and Vala, played by Claudia Black. Interestingly, the scene was rewritten entirely after the two actors found that the original version "didn't feel like the characters". 

Apparently there's another Stargate SG-1 movie in the pipe, but I have to say that I'm going to be a bit leery about running right out and buying it at full price. After all, once bitten and all that, and unless it's substantially better than The Ark of Truth, it won't be difficult to find it in the 2 for $10 box at HMV.

- Sid