Weekend Assignment #215: At the Movies

The Weekend Assignment is posted each Friday at Outpost Mâvarin; a roundup of responses goes up the following Thursday, so if you’d like to join in, you’ve still got some time. Karen says: Don’t worry if you don’t get your entry in by the end of the weekend. It’s called the Weekend Assignment because John Scalzi originally designed it to give folks something to write on weekends, but times have changed since then. Now the meme is launched on Thursday nights / Friday mornings, just a little later than Scalzi used to post it, and you have a whole week to respond. Still, I for one am grateful if you don’t all wait until the last minute!

Weekend Assignment #215: Review a film. Any film. Got something interesting to say about Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)? I’d love to read it. Metropolis (1927)? Why not? A Night in Casablanca (1946)? Fine. The Seventh Seal (1957)? Er, okay! Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)? You’ll get away with it. Speed Racer (2008)? Go for it. From Hollywood to Bollywood to Hong Kong, from Kubrick to Kurasawa, it’s all on the W.A. marquee. But there’s one catch: the film should not be on your personal list of favorites; nor should it be a film you despise.

As it happens, I’ve done movie reviews on this blog every now and then. Let me show you (in chronological order by post date):

Ratatouille

Live Free or Die Hard (saw it on the Fourth of July last year)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (saw it during the weekend that we were reading …Deathly Hallows)

The Simpsons Movie

The Bourne Ultimatum

Hairspray

Michael Clayton

Juno (keep reading – this one’s in a combined post with a book review)

Atonement

Both my movie-going and my reviewing dropped off after last summer, and I saw a few movies during the winter that I didn’t get around to posting about (3:10 to Yuma, Walk Hard, Charlie Wilson’s War, and possibly something else I’m not recalling). The last movie I saw was Leatherheads, but I didn’t write it up, and I honestly can’t remember whether I saw anything between that and Atonement.

But when I saw the post for this Weekend Assignment, I immediately told my husband, “Now we have to see Iron Man this weekend. I need to write a review!” (His response: “I’m seeing Iron Man this weekend. I guess you can come, if you want.”)

Iron Man

Action/Adventure, 2008

126 minutes

I married a fanboy, and since we’ve been together, my comic-book-superhero literacy has really grown. If it weren’t for Tall Paul, my familiarity with Iron Man would have been limited to the Black Sabbath song, and it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to see the movie based on this particular comic-book icon. However, if you like a fast-moving adventure flick that has an involving storyline that pulls all the special effects together, with some decent acting accompanying it, you don’t have to know the backstory to enjoy Iron Man.

Tony Stark is the brilliant, arrogant billionaire heir to Stark Industries, one of the country’s leading defense contractors. While in Afghanistan to demonstrate a new weapons system, he is wounded and taken prisoner by terrorist warlords, who demand that he build the weapon for them in exchange for his freedom. Tony discovers that the terrorists have somehow acquired a large store of his company’s weapons, and doubts that they’ll let him go free even if he does comply with their demands, so instead he engineers a weapon-equipped metal suit in which he escapes. Once he is found by the Air Force and returns home, Tony wants out of the weapons business; and now that he knows his weapons have landed in the wrong hands, he wants to prevent their use against the people the were supposed to protect. His means of doing so is an advanced version of his metal “ecape suit.” His company really isn’t on board with his new direction, to say the least – and in order to avoid spoilers, I won’t say much more about the plot.

Iron Man is a thrill ride, as comic-book-based summer blockbusters are meant to be – but it also has layers to its storytelling and good acting, particularly in the title role. Like Batman, Iron Man is a superhero with no superpowers who depends on his intelligence (and his special equipment), which makes Robert Downey Jr. an excellent choice for the role. He’s convincing as a shallow rich playboy, a genius engineer and inventor, and as a man changed by experience whose awakened conscience wants to correct wrongs. Tony Stark isn’t a conventional white-hat good guy, but I couldn’t help liking and rooting for him, and I credit that to Downey’s performance. I also liked Gwyneth Paltrow as his assistant Pepper Potts (as an aside, I usually end up liking Paltrow in her roles, even though I don’t always want to) – she’s an old-style “plucky Girl Friday” type of character, but she understands her boss very well and doesn’t let him get away with much. The action scenes are riveting, the humor sprinkled through the film is character-based, and the characters’ motivations are generally made clear to the viewer.

Even though the climactic battle of the film takes place between two people operating inside metal suits, this movie actually has a lot of more realistic violence, particularly in the scenes in Afghanistan, which include torture and executions – because of that, we’ve decided that The Boy, age 8, won’t be allowed to see it. I wouldn’t suggest the movie for any kids under the age of 12, actually, depending on how sensitive and/or easily scared they are.

However, for teens and adults – even those who aren’t comic-book fanboys (or -girls) – Iron Man is well worth the price of admission, and places pretty high in the ranks of Marvel Comics’ movie catalog.

Extra Credit: Is there a film due out this summer that you plan to go see? If so, what is it?

You may have noticed that most of those movie-review links above go back to the summer of 2007. Both my husband and I love going to the movies, and summer’s a big time for us to do that. There are at least half-a-dozen films coming out this summer that we plan to see, and chronologically, Iron Man was first on that list.

There are two summer movies I’m particularly looking forward to seeing, but I’m a little nervous about how they’ll turn out. However, after seeing its newest trailer, I’m finally starting to get pretty excited about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – and that means I’m even more anxious that the filmmakers don’t screw it up! I’m also anticipating the return of the world’s greatest secret agent, #86, in Get Smart. I think Steve Carell was a great casting choice for Maxwell Smart, and I hope the movie will be just as silly and fun as the old TV show was.

I don’t even have to check with him first before I tell you which movie is #1 on Tall Paul’s list for summer: The Dark Knight. His favorite superhero with no superpowers is, without a doubt, Batman.

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10 comments

  1. I saw Iron Man this weekend and really enjoyed it! Those gadgets and gizmos were fabulous and the story very good as well. I wondered how he got that round light on his chest and there it was. Thanks for doing this review! I love a fun movie!

  2. I thought I posted a comment to this all ready. It must not have gone through. Anyway, it looks like a decent movie, and your comments make me think I should see it. I will probably rent it though. I don’t think I could get my wife to go. 🙂
    I am a little worried about the Indy movie, but I’ll probably go anyway.

  3. Mike – Can you and your wife make a deal – she sees Iron Man with you, and she picks the next movie? I think most CGI-heavy movies look better on a theater screen myself.

    Yeah, I’m still a little worried about the Indy movie myself, but unless the reviews are truly awful, we’ll be seeing it opening weekend. I’ll weigh in here after we do.

  4. I have such a hard time reviewing movies. I never know what to say beyond whether I liked it or not. I do love reading other people’s reviews though.

    There was no question that hubby and I would end up seeing Iron Man either. He’s the fanboy, but I admit that I have a thing for super hero movies.

  5. Literary Feline – It always surprises me how different it is to write a movie review as opposed to a book review. It may be partly that I know book/literary conventions and vocabulary better than I know those of film; it may because movies are less of a tangible experience. I keep trying to do it anyway, though :-).

    I think my favorite superhero movies are still the Spider-Man ones – mostly because Peter Parker is such a nerd :-).

  6. After reading your review and having a review by a couple of little kids (I’d say they were about 8 or 9), I’m just going to have to watch for it when it comes out on pay-per-view or DVD. I got a kick out of one of the little guys who jumped on the train where I was a car attendant and said, “I just saw Ironman and it was awesome. Now mom is letting me ride the Iron Horse, wow!”

  7. Kiva – Clever kid! I’d definitely recommend seeing the movie when you get a chance (if I didn’t already mention that :-)).