Iron Man 3's cliche ridden script causes mass constipation.

My friend and I saw Ironman 3 for his birthday a few days ago. The Marvel movies, with the exception of Captain America, have all come out around his birthday so it has become a tradition of sorts. We go to our local theater, get some popcorn, and watch whatever new movie Disney/Marvel has churned out. I say churned because none of the movies have felt like a succinct statement. They range from passable to horrid (I'm looking at you Captain America). These movies are not made as art they are made solely for profit. And I am not particularly upset by this. I enjoy going to these movies with my friend and chuckling to ourselves at the unintentionally funny dialogue and often questionable use of CGI.

This went on until Avengers came out. This was supposed to be the big thing, the superhero extravaganza we had all been waiting for. But the fun seemed to have ended there, everyone actor in the movie felt like they were forced to be there, with the exception of Mark Ruffalo, and the movie felt like a contractual obligation instead of a fun time. Not just contractual for the actors but for the viewer too. Everyone has to see the next Marvel movie lest they miss the ending teaser and be stuck behind the superhero movie buzz until dvd release.

Avengers had a clunky script, poor direction, plot holes abound, and astoundingly unoriginal art design. I say this as a Joss Whedon fan, he should not have directed this film. The movie was passable at best and me and my friend left the theater with mixed emotions. We considered this both a failure and success on Marvel's part. Then something strange happend, the Marvel fan-boys started yammering about this being some sort of nerdy "high art" and referring to Avengers as a classic of the genre. I guess I am a little baffled by this because I am not sure if people realize that these Marvel movies are sub-par.

By sub-par I mean that if these came out at any time previous to this they would be regarded as b-movies. The majority of these movies have cheap looking special effects, a weak script, a underwhelming cast, and poor direction. Hell most of these movies only have two acts. They are weak movies that only make money because superhero movies have been the "big thing" for the past ten or so years. The Marvel series pales in comparison to the Nolan Batman films and even the Raimi Spiderman movies. Not to say these movies are terrible, they are just weak. Except for Iron Man 2 and Captain America, those are terrible, and Iron Man 3 is only a little bit better.


Iron Man 3 was directed and co-written by Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black. I consider myself a fan of Shane Black mostly due to his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (His only film up until Iron Man). Kiss Kiss is a wonderful genre deconstruction that could only be made by someone who knew the buddy-cop genre as well as Black. Robert Downey jr. stars in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with unbridled enthusiasm and in my opinion gives one of his best performances. In most of Iron Man 3 Downey looks as though he fall asleep at any moment. This brings us back to the contractual obligation once again. I get the feeling that a few years ago Downey was worried that his career would slip down the drain as quickly as he made his comeback so he signed two huge contracts (Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes). He is now living in the fall out of that decision. His lack of enthusiasm matches most of the cast with the exception of Guy Pierce and Ben Kingsley, both are having their first Marvel experience.

This movie was bad, not so bad that it offended me, and I certainly wouldn't ask for a refund. As Tony Shalhoub said in the great Barton Fink "It's a b-movie!". I wouldn't expect to much more. But if these fan boys want me to judge this as a piece of art, well game on.

The first act is basically just plodding exposition framed around Stark's narration (Oh geez). It opens on flashback that explains the bad guy's superpowers and why he hates Stark. So not much for mystery or intrigue, fast forward to present day Stark and company are responding to the events at the climax of Avengers. What we get is some of the most heavy handed "metaphors" of the reaction to 9-11 (Gosh how edgy). We get laughable dialogue from the always characterless Gwyneth Paltrow as she talks to the irredeemably awful Jon Favreau and the rest of the cast of bored actors. Then the plot kicks in and Iron Man's house gets blown apart by the villain  The action looks so vanilla and devoid of character you could have taken it from any Michael Bay action film and just pasted Iron Man into it. The CGI laden climax to the battle looks closer to a video game cut scene then a respectable film.

Act two reveals some of the more obvious plot to Tony Stark, but not to the audience who has figured most of it out by now if they have half a brain. Stark meets a young boy that is reminiscent of Anakin in both appearance and lack of realistic dialogue. Of course the little kid's father is out of the picture given that father figures are the sacrifical lambs of the superhero genre. So Stark takes him under his wing and two god awful action sequence play out while he investigates in a small town. The plot picks up from here as Iron Man goes out to seek revenge on the villain. A mildly surprising twist happens, but the twist only reveals that the bad guy is even less interesting. The plot putters along from there into the final act.

The third act is by far the most interesting, not due to any original writing or directing, just through it's sheer absurdity. The finale feels like one of those fake trailers on youtube with the premise of "What if Shane Black wrote and directed a Iron Man movie". We get a white guy (Stark) and a black guy (Don Cheadle) running around with hand guns quipping to each other. The whole thing actually takes place on the final set piece of Lethal Weapon 2. Yeah that ship loading dock thing. I'm not joking all of this stuff happens! There is even the obligatory Shane Black torture sequence where Stark is tied to a bed frame. Thankfully he doesn't get tortured, instead the pain is inflicted on the audience as we hear the, I hesitate to say comedic, quipping between Stark and his captors. And god the quips in this movie are terrible, I have never missed Joss Whedon's over sarcastic and unrealistic dialogue more. The quips in this movie never reach self "aware action movie camp" or actual comedy, the back and forth dialogue in this is just stale and unfunny. The kind of jokes that were unfunny 30 years ago and Shane Black just hasn't realized it yet.

So in the last minutes of the movie we see a horrid and over long action sequence with the head villain. Then we are witness to one of the worst faux-dramatic moment/person dying sequences I have ever had the displeasure of watching. It fails to fool anyone and it is so embarrassing to me as a moviegoer that I contemplated leaving the theater. I wish I had because I would have missed the horrible action sequence of the aforementioned "dead" character coming back and having an action sequence. Afterwards the narration takes back over as Stark tosses a object that once held high meaning to him into the ocean and walking away. The cliche checklist has been filled to the brim, cut to credits.

Of the many problems with the movie I think the most interesting is the villain. All of the bad guys in this movie have the same power which leads to the same fight scene over and over in different locations. Some of the henchmen are not given super powers solely for plot convenience which is pretty obvious and tiresome after the first few times. The bad guys are also very boring in basically every regard. Their special effects don't look good, their back story is poorly done, and most annoyingly the main bad guy breaths horrible looking CGI fire and then never uses it again!

I don't want this review to scare anyone away from this movie. The film is perfectly watchable and entertaining. I wrote this review in such a critical manner to prove a point. These movies are not made to be works of art, they exist to make people money. Sometimes a movie like that can be fun and even interesting and still make people money. Iron Man 3 is not one of those films.





-SP McDonald

Modern Vampires of the Shitty

After recording two consecutive albums that I enjoyed (No simple feat), the New York City band Vampire Weekend have been teasing their third release for a while now. Three singles have been released off of the album (Diane Young, Step, Ya Hey). Now this is where things get a little messy for me. My feelings on the singles were mixed to say the least. I thought that Diane Young was cloyingly simple, and Ya Hey had a strange pitch shift effect in it that took me out of the song. Step, the best of the three, rips off the chord progression from a Bread song by paying homage to a early 90's hip hop song by Souls of Mischief that sampled a cover of it. (Actually homage is going a little easy on it if you ask me).

So needless to say I was worried about the overall quality of the album. I expected it to go down like their second album Contra. I hated Contra's first two singles (Giving Up the Gun and Cousins) but when I listened to the whole album every other song on it charmed me. That did not happen with this album. The plane has crashed, the car has flipped, and Vampire Weekend has shit the bed on this release. It is almost like Ezra Koenig and his band of merry-musical-trust-fund-children have intentionally tried to hurt me. In fact that is how I am going to take this entire experience!

You see Vampire Weekend was that one band I could list when people would say that I am just biased against modern "indie-pop". Vampire Weekend was different from the Grizzly Bears and Deerhunters of the world. They had passion and nostalgia and the ability to write a damn good pop song. Go ahead and listen to their first album and tell me that it isn't 11 songs of gloriously unabashed pop! I wonder what happened. Who was it that insulted Ezra? Perhaps they condescended to him as "a pop musician". Maybe it was on his cameo in Girls (Ugh...). Whatever happened, the band have taken to changing their sound. The kind of change where music critics will inevitably say that they are "growing up". "Aging" in the music world is apparently code for making less interesting or relevant music thn.

Vampire Weekend have stripped off a lot of those world beats that were part of what made their past two works so interesting in comparison to most pop songs on "alternative" radio. And as they dial back the african rythms and synthesizers they amp up the string sections. The sound on is record is much closer to the squeaky clean chamber rock/baroque pop of a band like Grizzly Bear or Bon Iver. The key difference  in instrumentation would be the large amount of pitch shift used throughout the album. The pitch shifts are actually a perfect little metaphor for what this album really is: both an attempt at something new and a dumbed down version of their earlier work.

In regards to the first part, for about half the album we get Vampire Weekend trying for a slower side. This would be on of my major complaints of the album. The album's first track Obvious Bicycle accurately illuminates the problem of the album's slower songs. There is not a memorable moment in this entire song! It sounds like any band could have recorded it with Ezra singing it. This goes double for the song cycle in the middle of the album of Don't Lie, Hannah Hunt, and Everlasting Arms. I don't think it's even a song cycle, it just feels like one big 10 and a half minute song that lulled me to sleep like Justin Vernon wrapping me up in a blanket of symphonic pablum. The worst song, Hudson, is perhaps the most revealing about the album. It shows Vampire Weekend's biggest limitation so far. Their absolute ineptitude at writing the dark and brooding. Which is fine, some bands can only write certain songs. What is very far from fine is that this song made the album, or that it was even recorded. Surely someone had to hear this and realize it was terrible! Then the album ends with a minute and forty seconds of what I suspect is supposed to be an "ambient" statement of sorts. Or maybe they had some sort of quota of shit to fill and they cranked this out in 5 minutes on a smartphone.

As to the latter part of the earlier statement, every sound heard on this album sounds so produced, and just about anything interesting about the band's sound has been filed down to an album that sounds nice to everyone but interesting to no one who hasn't been heavily medicated. The only positive growth I see on this album is the mild experimentation on the one-two punch of Finger Back and Worship You, which just sounds like Animal Collective if you made them put on ties and pumped them full of mood stabilizers. Plus Finger Back (along with Ya Hey) has this horrible Lou Reed wannnabe spoken word section. So as it turns out the three singles which I found so underwhelming actually turned out to be some of the best stuff on the album.

Maybe I shouldn't get so upset about this band which is perhaps merely a hybrid of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and "Diet Brian Eno". Maybe you would say I am being overly sensitive over a pop band making a simply mediocre album. You are probably right, this album isn't really a knife in my back, but go back and listen to California English or Oxford Comma and then think about it for awhile. This album fell short, which might not be the greatest crime but in the face of two pop masterpieces it feels like so much more... I guess in the end the greatest sin of Young Lion is that when it ends the next song that plays is Mansard Roof.





-SP McDonald