Film: Jon Favreau: Iron Man (2008)

I concede, I have never seen Swingers. I've also never seen The Princess Bride, or The Grifters, and I really don't remember Beautiful Girls. Missing a part of Rob Reiner's ouevre - or Stephen Frears', or the late Ted Demme's - doesn't seem to preclude me from catching enough references to pop culture to enjoy my social life, or from fully grasping the cavernous depths of When Harry Met Sally... or...whatever else Frears and Demme did (IMDB, currently decked out in fantastic Sex and the City garb, reminds me that they also did the respectable High Fidelity and the Boogie Nights wannabe Blow, respectively. What an adorable pink trim below the Flatiron Building beside the IMDB logo!).

I suspect the same holds true of Jon Favreau and his magnificent attention to Robert Downey, Jr's outfit in Iron Man, which isn't afraid to combine graphic contemporary war violence with the multilayered comic iconography of its star. Oh, and there's Gywneth Paltrow too. No, really. She's in this, but you might miss her behind the glare coming off Jeff Bridges' bald pate. If you care. You might. Some do. I'm told. There's nothing really wrong with this film, in the sense of causing offense, or failing to satisfy the thematic demands it establishes, or in not providing the necessary scene coverage so that you think the characters have suddenly, inexplicably moved from shot to reverse shot, causing a catastrophic rupture in your suspension of disbelief (unless you couldn't care less, or if it's raining on your wedding day), although it might come as a surprise how quickly Downey's character goes through his Crisis, and how early on in the film. Or not.

No, Iron Man does exactly what it says it will, giving Downey a bright shiny red flying suit of impenetrable non-iron alloy packed with concealed weapons with which to kill bad weapons-smuggling Afghanis (weapons supplied by Tony Stark - Iron Man's businessman alter ego - the implications of which frontload the movie with a curiously unsustained moral dilemma. Why not pursue that? In this dangerously hi-tek day and age of militant WMD-wielding cavemen, there's no foreseeable end to the mileage Iron Man might have gotten from extended rape-like exploitation). There's an energetic sex scene, plus the unbearable sexual tension between Paltrow and Downey, which, who knows, they could consummate onscreen. Suit optional. Thrusters recommended. Oh, and Peter Billingsley's in this, and Terrence Howard. I don't really remember either, but in fairness to the movie, I'd been working all day on a prison shoot in Georgia and entered into the movie exhausted and profoundly distracted by the nearby crunching of popcorn. Or the sipping of soda. Whichever.

A friend of a friend - not exactly a friend of mine, more like a second friend - observed that using RoDo, J in a film like Zodiac is cheap, essentially capitalizing on his iconic stature to lend prepackaged dynamic weight to his part. That you're getting Robert Downey, Jr, as opposed to a performance in a role. I argued against this stance vigorously at the time, certainly over drinks in a bar-type atmosphere somewhere in Manhattan with other people I probably knew vicariously through friends, but now I think I missed her point. She denied it, but she CLEARLY HATES RODO, J. She hates his quirky mannerisms, his way of investing subpar lines of dialogue with legitimacy and fantastic lines with angel dust, and his near androgynous appeal as a screen presence. She HATES all this. Or she hates the star system. Honest to good sweet Jesus, if I find out she went to Sex and the City, or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Secret Realm of the Hidden Power of the Platinum Cock Ring, or Lord help me, shopped for designer footwear, I will track her down and defend RoDo's honor with a swift beat. I swear. That kind of lazy pretension has no place in mass culture, and only serves to underscore the hateful, exclusive nature of High Art. In a movie like Iron Man, he binds us in a warm woolen comforter of familiarity, pacifying our deep-seated personal fears and anxieties, and lulling our sore strained minds into a preternatural calm, like Ambien, like weed, like a warm spring breeze in the park on a Saturday.

I can't say how loyal Favreau is to the comic book source material, but I only recently got into the comics world. I just finished Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics", a vastly entertaining and insightful analysis of the ways narrative operates in the frame-based visual media. I would bet my next income tax return that Favreau's read it, loved it, digested its every observation, and distilled them into his filmmaking craft. I might not know for sure until I saw Swingers. Somebody lend me the DVD. Or VHS. I know you've got it.

Iron Man on IMDB

Music: Hot Hot Heat: "Happiness Ltd." (2007)

I am a fan of any band who can sell out without completely losing what brought them to the brink of selling out in the first place. The whole notion of selling out, frankly, is completely underrated. Unfortunately, Hot Hot Heat hasn’t the first fucking clue why they gained a following with their first (the fantastic “Make Up The Breakdown”) and, to a somewhat lesser extent, second releases (the less inspired but often wonderful “Elevator”) and, having apparently lost complete track of what makes them a sometimes great band, their sellout attempt with their third album, “Happiness Ltd.,” is a near total failure. This album sucks. I’m stopping short of giving it one star because it’s not completely devoid of redeeming qualities, but I’m tempted to just because I’m so fucking pissed at them for doing this to me.

This is a band that spent their first two albums attempting to perfect a sound that I have literally not heard anywhere else in the indie rock universe. A nearly perfect combination of “totally fucking weird” and “totally fucking fun.” With their third release, they have dropped both “fucking weird” and “fucking fun” and replaced it with “fucking dull.”

Listen to “So So Cold.” “Waiting for Nothing.” What the fuck is this shit? This is the same band that came up with “Bandages” and “This Town” and, like, every track on their last two albums? What the fuck happened? Can they hear their singer? His vocals? Yeah, those don't work on this crappy emo nonsense. He sounds like a fucking lunatic. You guys used to write songs that were perfectly appropriate for a singer who sounds like a fucking lunatic. They were awesome. And you even used to pull off powerful, emotional material (which you're clearly striving for on the new release), like your masterful “Jingle Jangle,” without sounding like goddamn Fall Out Boy. Can...can you, like, go back to writing weird quirky shit and stop trying to remake yourself as some kind of hack homage to the Killers? Because the Killers are better at this shit than you are, even if their second album sucked.

Thank you.


"Happiness Ltd." on the iTunes Store:

Film: Errol Morris: Standard Operating Procedure (2008)

Errol Morris is not a terrific storyteller, really. He's a marvelous interviewer, eliciting stunning frankness through his Interrotron, and his collaborations with cinematographers Robert Richardson and Peter Donahue are intoxicated with light and motion, paring action to its sparsest visual expression. His editing is patient, and that may be his downfall - as a storyteller, anyway. Like Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and most clearly The Fog of War, he cuts Standard Operating Procedure to the meditative rhythms of introspection rather than driving narration, slowing what might have been speedier plotting - in the choppy hands of more literary filmmakers - to the near halt of interrupted memory.

For a few years, since seeing The Thin Blue Line, I found this both spellbinding and tedious beyond reason, in the way that, say, watching the earthly progress of a rising tide might be. Especially in that film, where I felt Morris was trying to convince me of his subject's innocence of murder, his method seemed beside the point, slow for the sake of lingering on details that have no functional, legal meaning: the slosh of a milk shake, the blast of gunsmoke. The artfulness was not beyond me, but for what reason? It seemed counterproductive, and worse, his storytelling was slack as a result.

I have since continued to feel this way, watching The Fog of War, or Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (Mr. Death seems to have married this inclination perfectly with the man himself, Fred Leuchter, whose introspection seems at best halting and fixated), but lately it's affected me differently. A recent review of The Fog of War struck me less for its protracted narrative than for its fluid commingling of first person recollection and immediate visual breakdown of those very spoken thoughts. His images, and the rhythms he employs to piece them together into a story, seem more intuitive and moody than they are necessary, almost as though they are a copout, a way to avoid showing talking heads for two hours. Except that he does show talking heads, talking a lot - and his images evoke extraordinary mood.

Standard Operating Procedure is in every way a standard operating Morris film. We have seen the same methods, used to even greater emotional and narrative capacity in the past. Nevermind that this time his subject is a prominent contemporary moral conundrum - the prisoner abuse documented by photographs at Abu Graib - Morris is doing nothing new. In fact, he may be slipping. His interviews are more numerous than usual, more lackadaisical in tone, and go on and on and on when the dramatic arc of the film might be considered complete. Yet when he got around to it, I was mesmerized by his filmmaking. Danny Elfman's pulsing Danny Elfman score at last seems loaded with the gothic horror weight Tim Burton always hoped it carried (but that Tim Burton's films never supported), and it's generously ladled out over recre after recre, as prisoners are beaten, humiliated, tortured, and violated by a largely unseen pack of U.S. Army personnel. Only they are seen, repeatedly, in the photographs they took of themselves in the act, as well as their interviews, and in the interviews of each other. This marriage of retrospect and instant analysis now, in Morris' career, has graceful flow, of the lofty, smoky bent of a man morally attuned to judging the actions of his subjects from a distance - and inasmuch as one is morally willing to allow him that judgment, pulling it off. I let him, because I agreed with him. But judgment aside, his craft is absolutely impeccable. It's so pleasurably precise, in fact, that I cared less when his storytelling slowed to a predictable shuffle, and then stuttered to a whimsical close with an observation about the birds returning to the walls of the prison every evening. Which isn't even the end of the film, but the last moment that has stayed with me.

I feel roughly the same about Morris' filmmaking style as I do about David Lynch's. For everything I love about both - their immaculate visual craftsmanship, their wonderfully wayward editing choices, their monomaniacally personal approach to subject matter - when it's time to fill in the plot gaps and make a narrative whole out of the cinematic experience they've conjured out of spit and imagination, I just get a little bored. The kind of boredom I feel watching most narrative-driven films, the kind that creeps in when the mechanics of storytelling are less interesting than the mysterious impetus to ensure the story is adequately told.

Standard Operating Procedure on IMDB

Music: Bryan Scary and the Shredding Tears: "Flight of the Knife" (2008)

This record, like Bryan Scary's previous release, is as much a work of impressive pop-rock mastery as it is a testament to the danger of not knowing when to say "that's a wrap." It is mastery insofar as all but one of its tracks (the effective if ultimately forgettable "Mama Waits") are bold and inspired exports from an intricate, precise and focused songwriting mind. But Scary's hyperactive talent gets the best of him all too frequently, as all of the songs are, to varying degrees, marked by inconsistency and a curiously short span of attention to detail.

It is, however, masterful and, as such, clearly warrants four stars. Songs like "The Zero Light," "Imitation of the Sky" and "The Curious Disappearance of the Sky-Ship Thunder-Man" tempt me to give it five. None of these are immune to Scary's sometimes irritating tendency to launch into frantic diversions that seem to do more to highlight his immensely talented band's technical abilities than to accomplish anything in service of the song (the ridiculous ending of "The Zero Light" ; the unintentionally comedic bombast of the prog-rock tinged bridge of "Imitation of the Sky"). They are, however, full of brilliance and inspiration. The measured, steady, epic development of the second verse of "The Zero Light." The frenzied but oddly adorable verse melodies in "Imitation of the Sky." The strangely sweet ending and steady, potent arrangement of "The Curious Disappearance of the Sky-Ship Thunder-Man" (I hate that title).

Many of the other tracks are equally demonstrative of incredible ability and, some more than others, Bryan Scary's maddening inconsistency. "Son of Stab" is a sequence of brilliantly conceived harmonic and textural motifs that ultimately fail to work together in service of some greater affect but, nonetheless, are incredibly fun on their own (in particular the two vocal rounds leading into a balls-out rock-out moment near the end). "Heaven on a Bird" has disarmingly personal moments and is at times nearly perfect. "The Purple Rocket" is fun as fuck. "The Fire-Tree Bird" is an amusing, perhaps accidental, homage to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

On the whole, it's as incredible an album as it is maddening. Every track is worth a listen, particularly if you can overlook or tolerate the occasional meander into uninspired, vapid, overly-scripted noodling. Bryan Scary's brilliance is in how carefully he scripts his songs. He should leave the noodling for his live shows (which are remarkable for their energy and enthusiasm) and concentrate on writing songs which show off his intricate songwriting, not how intricacy can sap the life from a jam.

Flight of the Knife on the iTunes Store:

Music: Vampire Weekend: "Vampire Weekend" (2008)

These guys are freaking everywhere. This is one of those strange albums that seems to find this inexplicable mass appeal among Anybody Inclined To Listen To Indie Rock. I've never found a really reliable explanation for this bizarre phenomenon. It's not like this album is part of an unusually commercially viable subset of "indie rock," it merely has great pull amongst the indie rock set. It's far quirkier and obscure than far less popular indie rock albums... and, yet, here I am, reviewing an album that I was referred to by, like, everyone. I have noticed that this type of album usually has something critics herald as a "unique" or "new" or "quirky" sound. The sound weirds the proceedings up just enough for the vast armada of tone-deaf indie rockers to latch on to it and almost enough for everyone to eventually notice (or resign to) how uninspired and dull the songwriting is. Thankfully, "Vampire Weekend" is neither uninspired nor dull. It is, however, by and large unworthy of the glowing praise so frequently heaped upon it.

Vampire Weekend seems to have struck the perfect balance here. Not only is the production wittily sparse and specific (even as it feigns laxity), the songwriting seems to hearken back to mid-20th century rock, without making this point too dramatically to offend. All this being said, it's an adorable album and, if this is your thing, you'll get a month or two of great listening out of it. That's more than worth the asking price. The weaker tracks ("Bryn" and "One (Blake's Got A New Face)") are given undeserved but enjoyable charm by their clever production, and the stronger tracks ("Oxford Comma," "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa," "M79" and "A-Punk") exhibit the same charm in production and complement it with inspired, if overtly simplistic, writing.

In short, it's a delightfully weird album. Arcade Fire on Prozac and cocaine. It's a deliriously silly and often immature affair, but when things click it is shockingly affecting. It has the kind of quirkiness that people will either quickly respond to or swiftly reject -- an admirable quality. Either way, I would recommend that any lover of pop-rock give this a listen. Enough of you will get a kick out of it, if only for a brief period. The album shows enough real emotive power to suggest future work with more lasting value but at this early stage Vampire Weekend have yet to demonstrate anything more exciting than their potential.

Vampire Weekend on the iTunes Store:

Ratings System

Holy Immortal Fuck
This is truly incredible. This will probably melt your fucking face off. It might actually hurt a bit -- but you'll be happy about it. Something like "kick-ass" may be the phrase. Either way, you need to check this out.


Mortal, But With Lofty Aspirations
This is damn good. It has moments of obscenely awesometastic splendor, and probably a few moments of inexplicable and disappointing poop, but maybe you should take the high's and try to live with the lows.


Only If It's Your Thing
On the whole, this has its moments. If the general style is something you consider interesting, then give this an extra star.


Only If You Have Nothing Better To Do
Honestly, this may have a few redeeming moments, but on the whole it's uninspired or, worse, downright spectacular in its crimes against non-fucking-horrendous shit. If you're bored, maybe it'd be fun to find the good in it. It may be in here, but...your efforts in finding them are probably best spent elsewhere.


You Have Something Better To Do
Seriously. If you have overdosed on Percocet, you at least still retain sufficient motor function to do something else. Anything but this, please. I can't even guarantee so-bad-it's-good comedy here. I don't give 1 star to all but the worst of the worst.