Iron Man
Rating – PG-13
Review – 10/10
Reviewed By – Luke Lyons
Marvel Studios first production send them into the market with the biggest bang since the first Spider-Man film hit theaters. I will get right to the review of the film but a small cap of what goes on in the film first…
It starts with Tony Stark being taken captive and being forced to construct a
This part of the film is rather lengthy but it doesn’t seem like it. It’s actually entertaining and you won’t mind it one bit.
Stark then escapes with the help of a friend and makes it home where he vows to protect those he put in harms way with the weapons he created. He then begins to build another suit of armor.
This is by far one of my favorite parts of the film. It’s got a lot of stuff to laugh at. Watching Stark build his suit is at times so funny you might find yourself laughing yourself sick. But this also gives time for the characters to really shine. The film goes on as he finishes it and takes it out for a rather incredible flight test that has some amazing CG work and will leave you wanting more.
After he gets the suit perfected he gets it painted and heads out to destroy the enemy group that took him captive.
This is the point where the action really kicks in. from here on out all I will say is he gets his revenge which leads to a final conflict with The Iron Monger, even though he is not called that in the film, and a very incredible action sequence.
The acting from Robert Downy Jr. is simply fantastic! He IS Tony Stark. He is witty, smart, sarcastic and serious when he needs to be. He owns the screen. He if they would have had anyone else as Stark the film might have fallen flat on its face.
Gwyneth Paltrow is fantastic as pepper and does her part well. Granted, at times she seems to over act her part a bit but it’s forgivable. As for the rest of the cast, they were great! The whole cast was one of the best I have seen!
The Story is very solid combining great character with a strong action subplot. It flows at a perfect pace and never seems to stop or drag at all. There isn’t much else to say about it. It was fantastic!
The visual FX from the trailer looked great but they look unpolished. Well let me tell you what, they are absolutely superb in every way in the film. The suite looks beyond real and the action sequences are done so well combining the real world with the computer generated one that you wont even be thinking “is that CG?” at all.
Overall, Iron Man is by far the best summer kick off movie ever along with, in my opinion, the best superhero movie of all time! If you haven’t gotten a chance to view it, go, go now and watch it time and time again. You won’t be disappointed!
With it's box office run coming to an end the DVD of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer hit store shelves on October 3rd. I am pretty sure most fans were out on day one to get it but for me I had to wait untill today as I have been in the middle of nowhere... sucks I know. But I finally made it to Wal-Mart and the first thing I picked up was the Power Cosmic Edition of the DVD. So, Here is the Review of this summers blockbuster.
The Film:
The Film I am not going to spend much time on. It was decent but nothing amazing. Fun, but not as fun as it could or should have been. The acting was sub par but a step up from the first film.
There are a few things that are good that I must point out and that would be the visual FX. It does excel in this area with the Silver Surfer as he looks amazing. He just screams cool. The action was a step up from the first film and the film was better paced giving it a better more polished feel.
Now, for the bad. It was a HUGE let down with the big guy in the movie, you should know whom I am talking about. Instead of a Giant planet eater he was a cloud, a large dust cloud. The FX for him were decent but nothing great but thier whole rendition of the caracter was just awful. Another awful thing about the film... the worst thing in my opinion would be the score. It wasnt good in the least. it didnt portray any emotion and didnt add anything to the film which, if I am right, isint it needed to add somthing to the film. It just sounded like some score written by a jr. high music student.
Overall it wasnt to bad of a film. It was entertaining but it had so much potential that was waisted with a bad script and sub par acting.
My Grade: 7/10
The DVD:
Now for what this review is really about. The DVD.
The DVD Case and Contents:
The selling point for DVDs is the box and so on. You go to the store and you pick up the dvd and look at the back and check it out a little. The Case for the single disc dvd is cool and features the four heroes and the silver surfer. It reminded me alot of how the first DVD cover was. The dvd inside the case was a double sided disc that contains both widescreen adn fullscreen verisons of the film. I hate double sided discs so this pretty much pissed me off. The single disc dvd also contains two commentarys by the director and some others. nothing to great. overall the single disc dvd is nothing but average.
My Grade: 7/10
The Double Disc DVD has a very flashy cover featuring the Silver Surfer. It was pretty awsome. I was expecting alot from this DVD after getting the extended cut of the first film which in my opinion had some of the best packedging ever. I bought it and as soon as I got the the car ripped open the shrinkwrap and was HIGHLY disappointed. The DVD seemed rushed and as if it was nothing more then a chance to get money. (which is all it really is.) The discs were my highest complaint. The two discs were a double sided, just like the one in the single disc, and a single sided disc. It didnt match and that drove me nuts. it was just a mess. there was no insert or anything but some dumb ad. overall a very promising cover is shot down by disorganized contents.
My Grade: 7/10
The Features:
In the single disc as mentioned above there is really nothing. rather boring but thats why you pay less.
My Grade: 7/10
The double disc contains several very intresting special features along with the film. Its worth the extra few bucks to get it. especially if you are a fan.
The most intresting feature was The Background of the Silver Surfer. it was very informative on the caracter and was fairly intresting.
The second most intresting was a feature about the big dodge car... oh yeah. It was very intresting and was interactive and highly entertaining. I really enjoyed it.
The other features are pretty standered for a DVD. A making of feature, A featurette about scoring the film, the trailers and a couple others nicks and naks. Nothing to great but if your a fan its worth watching.
My Grade: 8/10
So, there you have it. Its worth the buy if you a fan but if you just want the film and single disc will do fine. its got flaws in the packedging and so on but nothing to messy.
My Final Grade: (single disc) 7/10 (double disc) 8/10
Spider-Man 3 opened with an amazing $151.2 Million Dollers! it was a hight that only a superhero could reach. with that said, its pretty darn obvious that people were there to see it. but what did people think about the film. Rotten Tomatoes quotes the film up in this mini review. "Though there are more caracters and plot lines, and the action sequences still dazzle Spider-Man 3 none the less isint quite as refined as the first two." with that said I have randomly chosen a review to post here. The Review is brought to you by Richard Corliss of the Time magazine.
The movie audience has been on a post-Lenten fast lately. Last weekend's total take at the domestic box office was only $77.7 million — a most unlucky number for the studios dumping their clearance-sale titles on an apathetic market. For filmgoers, this was the purge before the binge. A heady month is ahead, with Shrek the Third and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ready to pick the public's pockets. And this weekend: Spider-Man 3, which on its own is guaranteed to top last weekend's cume. Anything under a $100 million launch would be disappointing for a threequel with a budget in at least the quarter-billion-dollar range. These days directors of special-effects epics can spend money faster than Tony Soprano at the roulette table.
Tony, in moments of crisis, has an anxiety attack or orders someone's death. In Spider-Man 3, Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire), the young-adult nerd with preternatural powers, gets covered in intergalactic black stickum. Once he's gooed, he's bad — bad for him, anyway, which is still better than most of us on our best behavior. He spends much of the movie trying to resist the temptation of outlawry, the nefarious fashion of basic black.
This plot device has tested the credulity of some early viewers of Spider-Man 3, as I gleaned from snippets of Jon Stewart's chat with Maguire on Tuesday's Daily Show. "Here's what I buy," Stewart said teasingly. "A supergenetic spider bites you on the hand and you yourself take on some of the characteristics of a spider. [But now] apparently something falls from outer space and it turns into a black suit. And that for me is where the Spider-Man series, y' know, loses its believability."
Plausibility isn't the biggest challenge for the comic-book-movie fan base. Sentimentality is. An Ain't It Cool News review, supposedly written by the mother of a friend of AICN critic Moriarty, tosses Spidey 3 into the sar-chasm by informing us that "There's only about 25 minutes of actual Spidey footage in this movie — which makes all kinds of room for: That darling Mary Jane singing (two songs!). Peter Parker crying. Harry [Osborn] crying.... The Sandman crying. Eddie Brock crying. Mary Jane crying. Aunt May crying.... And yes, I might as well tell you, there ARE a few action scenes that get in the way of all the interesting stuff between the characters and their relationships and their ordinary, everyday lives."
No question, this is one wet action movie. It sets a world's record for so-called tough guys shedding tears. Harry Osborn (James Franco) gets weepie over his father's death, and enraged at his belief that Peter was responsible for it; he vents his rage in the supervillain guise of the New Goblin. Before being transformed into the irradiated Sandman, Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church), the recidivist hoodlum — and murderer of Peter's sainted uncle — goes all soft and moist as he clutches his young daughter's locket. Peter has a jewelry fetish too: his aunt has given him her wedding ring, which he plans to present to his girlfriend Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). But our hero has more urgent concerns. His protracted adolescent funk has given way to an anxiety crisis, from which his ability to soar over the city saving lives cannot extricate him.
Spidey 3 is essentially a romantic drama punctuated by SPFX chases. It's about bonding, breaking the bonds and retying them, tighter than ever. The major characters all are in need of sensitivity training, and they all get it, often just before they die. They beg for forgiveness, understanding, and love. The emotions are so exalted, the movie is like opera without the arias. And virtually all of these sob-sisters are guys. It's got more noble man-love than any movie since ... well, since 300, except that these action figures don't have the Spartans' gigantic, tumorous abs. I can hear the fanboys shouting, "There's no crying in action movies!" I can't imagine them hugging this movie to their man-bosoms.
Which could be why I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre — to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors — is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show. With, yes, 25 mins. of fabulous fights. Peter's tussle with Sandman, and his aerial battle with the supersonic skateboarding New Goblin, are plenty snazzy. But anyone can do that; in action movies, everyone has done that. What's better, in a threequel, is rethinking the characters, the franchise and the genre.
SPI-DENTITY CRISIS
It's not a bad idea for superhero trilogies to follow the formula set down in the Superman films of the late 70s and early 80s. First movie: the hero discovers his secret powers. Second movie: he shares he secret with his girlfriend. The third movie is about how it's not so super being a hero. Success, that cruel muse, threatens to transform him into a corrupt cartoon of his earlier, purer self. Recall that, in Superman III, a blend of kryptonite and tobacco tar split the Man of Steel in half, into good Supe and bad Supe. Christ battles antichrist, and they're the same person.
In Spidey 3, Peter is starting to fall in love with his reputation. It's not enough that he save people; he must be seen saving them. "They love me!" he cries with a dawning pleasure. Celebrity is this superhero's cocaine. The headlines are the high — that, and the attentions of ultra-blond trophy girl Gwen (Bryce Dallas Howard). The "something from outer space" Stewart referred to is really just an expression of the inner conflict between the old and new Peter. "Who are you?" Mary Jane demands, and Peter honestly replies, "I don't know."
What he does know is that he feels a rush in the black suit he never got in the red one. Problem is, Peter is still enough of a nice kid that he can't quite pull off the attendant arrogance. When he combs his hair forward, he's still a dweeb, not a dude. When he tells a villain, "I guess you haven't heard I'm the sheriff round these parts," he's still geeky-gawky, closer to John Mayer than to John Wayne. His attempt at gangsta swagger doesn't cut it either. There's a weird racial aspect to the goo-suit: it gives Peter not just black impulses but a black (Afro-American) attitude. Bopping down the street to a hip-hop rhythm, he's laughably gauche — a white kid playing at soul man, a good kid who's not very good at being baaad.
Spider-Man 3 isn't very up-to-date either; indeed, it's defiantly anachronistic. Black-Peter is fond of 40s jive talk ("Now dig this") and antique hipster choreography. Mary Jane, who harbors the outmoded ambition to be a Broadway musical star, sings a ballad ("They Say It's Wonderful") from Irving Berlin's 1946 show Annie Get Your Gun. The film's main emotional points are loyalty to your parents, or parent figures, and fidelity to your friends — the lessons of the uber-square Andy Hardy movies from the 40s. And Spidey 3, like the first film in the series, is a kind of remake of the mid-50s Rebel Without a Cause, in which a mixed-up kid must leave home to create a more satisfying surrogate family, with a pretty girl and another lonely boy.
Mary Jane — M.J. — is the ostensible focus of Peter's yearnings. But except for her showbiz career (which suggests she wants the kind of public recognition that's showered on him), her worries don't mirror his. For M.J. has a crush on herself. When she asks Peter, "Do you love me?" the implied tag is "...as much as I love me?" An action film needs a love interest, if only for the hero to untie her from the railroad tracks, but not one who's a narcissist. And M.J. is way more self-absorbed than the movie is M.J.-absorbed.
Fact is, the Spider-Man love story has grown older without maturing. In their early 20s, Peter and M.J. are like a middle-aged couple; he's too consumed by work to pay attention to her hopes for a career. The pair's attraction is assumed rather than displayed. That's why the film's one slice of heterosexual sizzle is the kiss between M.J. and the smitten Harry — the girl's mouth tastes like strawberries to her erstwhile beau. Peter's dilemmas may be internalized; but Harry's love, like his rancor, is volcanic.
SPIDEY'S SOFT SIDE
There's one villain who enjoys the job: Eddie Brock (Topher Grace), a.k.a. Venom. "I like being bad," he exults. "It makes me happy." The third of Peter's rivals, Eddie-Venom is the reckless spirit of what teens would do if they dared, if there were no consequences, no censorious adult monitoring them. His tone of impish hell-raising seems out of place amid all the agonizing analysands — Peter-Spider, Flint-Sandman and Harry-Goblin — seeking to purge their inner demons, receive absolution for their sins. In this very serious movie, only Grace and Raimi regular Bruce Campbell, in a nice cameo as a varry Franch maitre d', seem to be having the outsize fun normally associated with comic-book capers.
Raimi made his cult rep with the two Evil Dead horror films and the comix-inspired Darkman. But he's gone sensitive before, as in the Kevin Costner baseball drama For Love of the Game. In the last two Spidey films he's teamed with screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who in a 40-year career has scripted such weepies as The Sterile Cuckoo, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Bobby Deerfield, Julia, Ordinary People, Dominick and Eugene, White Palace, Anywhere But Here and Unfaithful. The rules for Spider-Man 3 are closer to the ones for those wayward domestic romances than to action-movie guidelines. Except for one thing: the love and friendship drama is about the men.
That sounds out of synch with the prevailing tone of pop culture, where sentiment has been largely banished, in favor of the male attitudes of cool, tough and ironic rule. Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.
I've often complained on this site about how Hollywood movies ignore women, or turn them into figures of fem-machismo. Now I see that, in the burliest genres, men's roles are being feminized. Peter Parker may be affianced to M.J., but their love seems pretty shallow and perfunctory. His most intense relationship is with Harry, his friend and surrogate brother — someone to try to talk sense to, to banter and battle with, to caress lovingly when he's hurt.
Science tells us that, within the next few decades, women will be able to reproduce without men; guys will be obsolete. It'll be different at the plexes, though. You can bet that, years from now, Spider-Man 13 will be tracking a mid-life Peter through more rocky relationships with other difficult males, and being stalwartly sensitive about it all. If movie men are getting in touch with their female side, who needs movie women?