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Movie Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)

The narrative purpose of any post-Avengers Marvel movie is not to majorly shake-up any of the characters at the core of the franchise—regardless of what Iron Man 3’s closing narration has to say about Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his place in the world, everything you know about him going in remains the same at the end—but to slowly push each individual piece away from alien-wasted Manhattan, towards the next apocalypse. With that in mind, director Shane Black does fine work within the paint-by-numbers structure of a solo Avengers outing. Tony Stark is charming, crass, egotistical, and the possessor of enviable wealth, fame, and success. He deals with the fallout of Manhattan—he freaks out at the mention of wormholes—and with the wreckage of an impetuous youth. In the end, he is Iron Man, and Black and Downey do their best to mash that triumphant, wailing note as long and as loud as humanly possible.

This is the beginning of Marvel Studio’s much-hyped “Phase Two” of Avengers movies, and, while they’ve got the formula figured out, holes in the fabric are beginning to show. However fine or fleshed-out the assembled Avengers seem, the love-interests, friends, and rivals propping up the individual pillars of the eventual tent of proportions beyond belief are frustratingly one-note. This is the third Iron Man film where Stark’s opponent is a disenfranchised corporate raider, where Stark’s claim that he’s not going to play ball with the United States government clashes with the need for him to protect the American status quo, and where Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) serves as Iron Man’s damsel in distress. Marvel Studios will probably never run out of oily businessmen, things that go boom, or plots against America, but considering that the best parts of Iron Man 3 occur just beyond that storytelling triumvirate is enough to make thoughts of such comic book movies pleasurable. Read more

Movie Review: Room 237 (2013)

The theories held by the crackpots who are given time to talk about their obsession with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining during Room 237‘s investigation of the film’s many supposed secret meanings are all crazy, but, in a way, they aren’t. More than any Kubrick film beyond 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining has inspired so much writing, diagramming, alternate screening methodologies, and impassioned conspiracy theories that to print them all out and assemble them into a cohesive narrative of cinematic obsession would be impossible. That director Rodney Ascher has made anything from this geyser of misinformation is a respectable achievement in itself, a remarkable feat of picking, choosing, and whittling down, working an unwieldy tangle of trees into a serviceable canoe. That Room 237 is so compulsively watchable is a tribute to Kubrick’s filmmaking, which is captivating even when taken out of context, toyed with, projected back on itself, and advanced frame-by-frame through moments that, without the benefit of ghost hunting, simply wouldn’t be compelling on their own. Read more

The Balcony Is Closed

I met Roger Ebert in 2010, but, like most people who’ve written something about him in the days following his death, I’ve known of him for much longer. He and Gene Siskel, along with Mr. Rogers and the Sesame Street gang, were part of my afternoon television childhood. Unlike Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch, and the amiable folks who lived in Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, the portly, bespectacled Ebert and his tall, balding companion were my antagonists, using their opposable thumbs to strike down or damn with faint praise whatever theatrical entertainment happened to pass my fancy from one week to the next.

I’ve always been a moviegoer. With the exception of its first three years, when I lived in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, my childhood was lived within the shadow of the local multiplex, which was so close to home that I was eventually trusted to walk myself to it. Within driving distance are relics of America’s film-obsessed past: a dollar theater, a repertory house with a theater organ, and a drive-in that still plays that cutesy “Lets Go to the Movies” jingle between every movie. My mother introduced me to At the Movies as an exercise in critical thinking. This was important, because while children are more intelligent than most filmmakers would assume, the sheer largeness of a theater screen and the images projected onto it often win out over quality. Even if I went to a movie like Street Fighter with my mom and enjoyed it, the level of conversation I was able to have about that movie and those that followed improved, from “I liked it!” to “I liked it because,” which, really, was what At the Movies asked of its audience. Read more

Movie Review: Dredd (2012)

Let’s clear the air: Dredd 3D is so unlike Sylvester Stallone’s execrable Judge Dredd that, were it not for the title character and the iconic helmet worn by both Stallone and Karl Urban, the two wouldn’t appear to share the same source material. Dredd, though not half as smart as the 2000 A.D. comics that inspired it, has a bleak, is an uncommonly inspired shoot-em-up. Its first shot, with the towering buildings of Mega City One casting grim shadows over the ruined earth the city is build upon, evoke a daytime Blade Runner. Its last borrows liberally from The Dark Knight. The plot, which sees Dredd and a rookie judge navigate their way through a locked-down apartment complex filled with men willing to die in protecting the leader of their drug cartel, happens to resemble that of The Raid: Redemption. But merely comparing Dredd to other action movies won’t do. It’s a smarter, nastier film than many of its contemporaries, and, at its best, gives rise to moments of raw terror and startling beauty, the two often going hand-in-hand. Read more

Movie Review: Gangster Squad (2013)

There’s nothing new to Gangster Squad, Ruben Fleisher’s amalgamation of and fetishized love letter to the Hollywood mafia movies of the 1990s. Outwardly, there’s little wrong with Fleisher’s approach—the film looks and feels like a theme park noir, approximating the style, tropes, accents, and dames in red dresses of the pulpy, lurid dramas that continue to pump their dark blood through the heart of American culture. The problem here is that, like a theme park attraction, the performers appear to be dead tired, sleepwalking their way through an old-as-dirt story that’s been repeated to the point of boredom. To compensate, Fleisher paints his sets red with the blood of countless goons and has his stars grit their teeth while pulling the trigger. This solves remarkably little. Read more