Sex and the City: The Male Kryptonite

I’ve always wondered what movies like Rambo said about men to women: maybe that the act of justified killing/disemboweling/beheading is a mask for our failing macho image. I’m no Freud, but I can picture women validating our fondness for manly movies with that rationale.

On the flipside, what do men think about women when watching Sex and the City: Women live for the next purse, the next pair of shoes, the next shopping trip? They think that clothing and accessories will fill the voids in their lives left by men, the way violence fills the voids in men’s lives left by women? Uh oh, I mentioned shoes — let the letter writing commence.

And there a conundrum emerges: how can a person with a penis appropriately review Sex and the City without incurring the wrath of the people with vaginas who flock to its mesmerizing glow? It’s impossible. It wouldn’t matter anyway, though, because the women who watched the show are going to line up for the movie no matter what critics write about it. And they'll all think it's wonderful, even if it is clearly not. Because not liking it will be an act of betrayal and women hate betrayal, which is why they come down on men so hard when we do it.

So women will love it, but this man thought it was ridiculously tedious and about 45 minutes too long, a little too episodic and jumpy, and just bland enough to be neither interesting nor boring. That’s the bad. Here’s the good: some of the characters are actually worth caring about (they feel real) and the movie gives them reason to shine in a city where people were born to shine — New York City.

Like the hit HBO show, the one that ended four years ago, Sex and the City follows the city-wide adventures of four best friends — Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda. Like almost every female movie character in New York City, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) is a columnist who rants and raves in writing about her friends’ romantic lives. Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the oldest, is a cougar, an over-40 sex addict one pair of stilettos away from being a complete whore — her words, not mine. She’s since relocated to Los Angeles, where she gawks at a Spanish surfer in the next bungalow. Charlotte (Kristin Davis) is kinda normal with a husband and also an adopted daughter who derails someone else’s entire year by playfully hiding a cell phone at a key moment. Finally, there’s Miranda, a dedicated professional too busy to wax a forest of pubic hair that's spilling from her swimsuit, and way too busy to have a sex life with her husband. So he cheats, no doubt with someone who owns a razor. These are just broad overviews of the characters; the film expands and collapses their dilemmas several times each, revealing that maybe all the women share the same dilemma — men.

Sex and the City mainly deals with Carrie (played so confidently by Parker), the reluctant star who narrates her own story. She has a man problem, too: She loves Mr. Big (Chris Noth), a suave businessman she’s broken up with several times over. He's rich, although we never learn what he does; if he were smart he'd sell women's shoes and purses to the other characters, who toss $500 at things they don't have room for in their closets. The film toys with their engagement — “I don’t want a ring, just a really big closet,” Carries says, proving my point — and their eventual wedding, which may never happen.

As an ensemble piece, Sex and the City is a little too all-over-the-place, with too many different tones and muted moments. Much of it flies on auto-pilot even when it has something interesting to do or say, like when Charlotte, after years of not being able to have children, gets preggers. Just when it tries to get deeper, it cops out with a joke only owners of a Louis Vuitton bag can appreciate. (Speaking of LV: Women, it's a purse, a vessel in which to put stuff. The vessel should not be more expensive than the stuff.) As a thesis on love, though, the film works surprisingly well; it ponders the whys more than the whats and hows. It’s by no means highbrow — diarrhea plays a significant role at one point — but it attempts to justify its motions with its message, mainly through Carrie’s troubled romance to Big.

This Big guy — the movie apparently, and finally, reveals his full name — is supposed to represent the men of the world. He is kind and gentle, treats the friends with respect, pays for dinners, dresses nice, isn't gay (half the other males in the film are) and he dotes on Carrie, at one point even buying her an apartment so nice she refers to it as heaven. He's so wonderful that he starts to not exist, he just drifts into the background like all the other things that come and go in these womens' lives — pastels, Burberry winterwear, vintage jewelry, martinis, heals with straps. At one point his name is said more than we've actually seen him. I'd love to know his side of the story. Surely, he'd put a cap on the shopping, the incessant bitching and clothes that reveal Carrie's underwear (I almost saw Mrs. Ferris Bueller's boobies!).

Love in New York City looks intoxicating. Something about the city — the verticalness of it all, the close quarters, the narrow streets dense with people — makes romance more potent. Love fills and scents the air and the tall stone and steel buildings keep it lingering above your head. On the horizontal plane of Arizona, love doesn’t go up, it goes out, it dilutes into nothing from here to the next Walgreens or McDonald’s. I never wanted to live in New York City so bad until this movie. Only Woody Allen and Spike Lee have written and directed so fondly around the city.

But this isn’t just about sex and its famous city. Punctuating every second of every scene is fashion. Never has a movie so heavily relied on it before, except maybe in Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter, which ended on an anti-fashion note. At one point Carrie and her BFFs participate in Fashion Week and attend a runway show — ironic considering the entire movie is one elongated exhibition of fashion so daring (and often times ugly) that only in New York City could women get away with these outfits. When the credits started rolling I half expected Marc Jacobs to come out and take a bow.

There are three scenes that feature no fashion whatsoever: The first is with Cattrall, who wants to surprise her man with a sushi dinner spread out on her naked body — yes, tuna on her tuna! The second is with Cynthia Nixon as she has makeup-sex with her husband. The scene of Nixon reminded me of what someone once said about Sex and the City: "Everyone gets naked at some point except the one you want to see naked, Sarah Jessica Parker." True. And third, the Spanish surfer showers in the buff revealing his naked penis. Considering how many breasts we see, and that women are the target demographic, I'm thankful it's the only penis that makes an appearance.

It may seem like I've really railed on this movie, and it deserves it, but it's also not nearly as bad as it could have been. Under the right conditions Carrie is an interesting and sympathetic character. I wanted her to find true love. Her happiness was as joyful to me as it was for her. But that doesn't mean Parker is any better of an actress — now that Sex is over she's basically unemployed, as is Ferris. My biggest complaint is that the movie isn't really a movie. It's just an extension of the show. Just because it's on the big screen doesn't qualify it as a film. The characters were already established, the stories already kickstarted, the style and setting already cemented into pop culture. There was nothing really to do except deliver more of what's already been established: that women desire romance but crave new clothes, that women are likely to blame the men just as the men blame the women, that women's lives are complex but they always have room to comfort other women in their time of need. But one more thing …

Funny how the movie will supposedly empower women, yet all these women want are new shoes. Then again, of all the things Rambo could be doing, he chooses to rip out some poor guy’s esophagus. I guess neither sex has room to talk.

***Large portions of this review originally appeared in the West Valley View May 30, 2008.***

Indiana Jones swings into mediocrity

Toward the end of Indiana Jones IV, a bearded, half-crazy archaeologist quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “How much of human life is lost in waiting?” he asks.

Thinking of the 19 years between Indy III and IV, I realized then that waiting wasn’t so bad at all, not when Indy’s return was this: an over-produced, over-written and over-animated bastardization of the Indiana Jones saga. That may seem harsh — as a fan of Indy, it hurts just to type it — but this fourth installment will split fans of the series in dramatic ways. Most will simply love it or hate it, with no middle ground in between. I’ve made concessions for both, although my first reaction was tremendous disappointment.

Everyone is back in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: Harrison Ford is Dr. Henry Jones, Steven Spielberg is directing, George Lucas is producing, and the characters of Marcus Brody and Henry Jones Sr. might be dead but their photos smile from the edge of Indy’s office desk. Even Karen Allen, who played the wily Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark, makes a spirited, albeit unnecessary, comeback. One major replacement: The Nazis, long-time villains of Dr. Jones, have been swapped for the Red Scare, boot-stomping Commie Soviets — Nazis in red.

They all converge on the fable of El Dorado, the City of Gold, which may have been home to a powerful skull carved from a single piece of crystal that has magnetic, and possibly supernatural, powers. The skull looks like one of H.R. Giger’s creations (that’s a spoiler if you know what else Giger has created). The skull is not so much a religious artifact, such as the Ark of the Covenant or Holy Grail, as it is a science fiction relic for the likes of Buck Rogers or Han Solo. Indy wants the skull the way all archaeologists want rare artifacts; the Commie scourge, led by a rapier-wielding nutjob with a bob haircut named Spalko (Cate Blanchett), wants it because it may provide the key to all the knowledge in the universe. Apparently Tiffany’s crystal skulls are just for decoration or they’d all just order one from a catalog.

The first hour of the film is a joyous thrill ride, classic Indy through and through. Showing its new sci-fi slant, Crystal Skull begins at Area 51 in a warehouse full of crates we’ve seen before. Indy, a little older and much creakier, still throws a mean punch, and his whip can still magically attach to anything it’s snapped at. Action launches, literally, from the secret military base until Indy finds himself in a house full of mannequins, and the streets outside are lined with loudspeakers blasting last-minute warnings about eye protection — “That can’t be good,” he says ducking into an icebox. It’s not good, and what he ducks from is a surprise so splendid that I won’t spoil it further.

But later the film takes a strange couple of turns. After a terrific stunt-heavy motorcycle chase through Indy’s university, where Indy meets greaser Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf in a James Dean-approved ducktail), the film seems to flick on auto-pilot to coast through the motions. What goes down is this: obligatory capture, interrogation and escape scenes happen several times; a sequence with a jungle python that is downright ridiculous; and Mutt swinging on vines Tarzan-style through the trees, an episode that is so far fetched I felt like throwing bananas at the screen. Indiana Jones films may be all about campy adventure, but it was always somewhat plausible adventure. Now it’s just campy, but with none of the class.

And what gives, Steven?!?! The director said in interviews that all the stunts would be real people on real locations. It’s obvious they’re computer-rendered, green-screened studio setups. The main scene in question is a jeep chase down a windy jungle path. It’s thrilling — watch how the characters switch jeeps about every 100 yards — although, it feels different in tone and style to all the other Indy movies, which were actually filmed in real deserts and jungles. The scene ends with the jeeps crashing into fields of fire ants, which provide the big squirm-in-your-seat moment that all the films have.

Several chases eventually culminate into a big reveal with the crystal skull that had me furious — I kept thinking, “How could they end it with this?!?” I can’t dissect it here, but the ending, maybe even the last hour, needed some serious work. Also consider a plot hole I would love answered: How many skulls were lost at the beginning of the movie? The CCCP has one, as does a character played by John Hurt, but the end of the movie only features one. Somewhere a skull floats in another dimension. As does the legacy of Indiana Jones, sacrificed here for fake action and boring archaeological secrets.

Watching Kingdom of the Crystal Skull should really make you re-evaluate the earlier films: Why did you like them? At any point were they too farfetched? Were the original movies really that good? If Skull does anything it might make you reconsider Temple of Doom, the movie that most people like the least. After Crystal Skull’s meandering path to its ridiculous conclusion, I found myself appreciating Doom in entirely new ways; it may have been a darker film, but it stayed true to Indy and delivered the action in true Indy fashion. Nothing can top Raiders of the Lost Ark or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, though, which is maybe why some will dislike this fourth entry — nothing can be as good.

It might be contending against impossibly better films, but that doesn’t give Crystal Skull reason to sleep on the job, which is what it does. As it stands right now, it’s on par with any of the Tomb Raider movies or the first National Treasure, both of which were created using leftover Indiana Jones DNA, both of which are mediocre adventure films at best.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though: parts of Crystal Skull are electric, dazzling and filled with imagination and wonder. Other parts are blah. And before this movie, blah wasn’t in Dr. Jones’ or Steven Spielberg’s vocabulary.


I Spy a Goof
Well, maybe it's not a goof if the director intends the goof to stay in the film, and if Indiana Jones is really based on adventure serials then his films should be a poorly constructed to a certain degree. Decide for yourself with this photo of Cate Blanchett rappelling down cliff. Her Commie cohorts are holding onto ropes and nothing else, but Caity is is also being held up by two other ropes or cables. These extra lines aren't just in the photos; I remember them from the movie as well.

***This review will appear in the West Valley View May 23, 2008.***

Yawn, yawn, yawn ... another Narnia

If Jesus equals a lion, and Satan equals a golden compass, and faith equals trusting your spacey sister, and evilness equals wolves and saber-toothed tigers, and atheism equals an armored polar bear … then two and two does not equal four.

This is wacky math; no wonder evangelicals shun science.

That wasn’t intended to be a zing, just illustrating a point — that a film’s subtext can be whatever the viewer wants, be it anti-Christian sentiment in Phillip Pullman’s Golden Compass or pro-Christian theology in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicle of Narnia. Both are religious propaganda to a certain extent, but will your children care? Or even notice? It’s unlikely because, let’s face, that’s a talking badger up there. And he’s making soup.

Besides the kitchen-savvy mustelidae in Prince Caspian, the second Narnia film, there are fencing rodents, minotaur, centaur, bobcats, cougars, cheetahs, bears and a resurrected lion so omnipotent he only shows up when the movie no longer requires his absence. The lion, of course, is either a talking animal or something else entirely depending on your Sunday school status. That is the part I leave up to you.

These animals make up the kingdom of Narnia, a fantasy world once ruled — or maybe soon-to-be ruled; there’s a time element that’s confusing to follow — by the four Pevensie children: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, all of whom are played by the talented young actors who portrayed them in Narnia’s first film, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One day the children are in a subway in their spiffy Hogwarts duds and the next they’re neck deep in trouble in Narnia, which was peaceful at the conclusion of their previous engagement.

They arrive and immediately have to riddle through a silent, long-forgotten war between Narnia and an invading army of Spanish conquistadors. At the center of it all is ousted Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), who’s under the impression that there are good kings in movies like this. Small actors Peter Dinklage (Station Agent) and Warwick Davis (Willow) join up in memorable supporting roles.

Somewhere around the halfway mark Caspian does what too many fantasy epics are now doing — large-scale battle. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, to which Narnia owes its soul, did it all first and, to this day, best. Cliché or not, the fighting is solid in skirmishes at castles, on forest paths and on a large meadow with massive catapults and lines of sword-clankin’ infantry. A stealthy infiltration of a rocky city is a choice sequence, as is an archery contest in the woods that leaves some heads ventilated.

Caspian is better than the first movie because it’s more fluid with its fantasy-world story, its human and animal characters, and its toned-down religious allegory. I still feel that the lion, Aslan, is a pointless hero whose role in anything is never questioned, and should be. He just shows up out of nothing to fix everything. Christ figure or lion, Aslan needs more backstory to pass off as a redeemer of Narnia. I guess it hardly matters, though, since the film will mostly be seen by people who rode to the theatre in booster seats with cheese puff residue on their fingers.

My last review of a Narnia movie ended with a mailbox full of letters from fervent Christians defending their faith as if St. Peter were taking names. In case it isn’t obvious, let me offer this: disliking a movie with a religious slant is not blasphemous. If you really want religion don’t go to a theater (or this review). Go to a church.

Go, Speed, Go!

Speed Racer couldn’t have surprised me more if the opening credits revealed my own name listed as director.

Now, ask yourself, and answer honestly, how much were you expecting really? Whatever your answer is, it wasn’t this: a high-octane, nitrous-injected thrill ride on rails. An explosion of color and sound at Mach 5. A riot-stomping race adventure pre-wired for an Xbox controller.

Filled with seizure-inducing color best viewed from orbit with super-duty sunglasses and supersonic computer animation, Speed Racer was not supposed to be this visually mesmerizing. And admittedly, it is a horrible movie, but it’s the way it presents campy horribleness that is so admirable. It acknowledges the source material — a cruddy cartoon from Japan called Mach GoGoGo!, a title Russ Meyer would appreciate — only to chew it up, re-shape it and then spit it out no better, and quite possibly worse, than the way it went in.

In a racing league no longer impressed with NASCAR’s boring oval tracks, racers drive courses that resemble Matchbox toy tracks: high-banking turns, vertical climbs, loops, corkscrews, jumps, plummeting divebombs and the occasional funnel of spikes. With more maneuvering required, the drivers implement their cars with various skid pads, catapults and retractable feet — someone very clever has already dubbed the effect of these Matrix-inspired add-ons as “car-fu.” So, as you can imagine, driving isn't 100 percent of this sport if only because all four tires are rarely on the road surface. The cars bump and grind, and when the road limits their movements the drivers click a button on their steering wheel launching them upward in wire-fu slow-mo as if Yuen Wo Ping had channeled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon through the Grand Prix.

The star of this league is young driver Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch), who better be glad that he wasn’t a carpenter with that name — although drug dealer would have been appropriate. Speed has turned down a sponsorship deal so lucrative that the sponsor company, Royalton Industries, must destroy him on the race track just for refusing. Royalton, and its boob of a CEO, has a long history of rigging races, buying finishes and controlling the grid to boost its stock. When Speed refuses to be a cog in the Royalton machine he threatens to unseat decades worth of crooked history and rigged races.

Helping Speed maneuver around dirty drivers and fixed races is Racer X, a mysterious opponent whose name sounds nothing at all like the name of Speed’s deceased brother, Rex Racer. Speed Racer and Racer X, besides being able to borrow each other’s stationary, battle their way through the grid to prove that racing isn’t about winning, but connecting spiritually with the road — call it vehicular nirvana. Their passion and talent seems to balance well with the flick's Star-Wars-imperial-senate-like plot, which consists of a lot of politics projected onto high-dollar special effects.

Hirsch (Into the Wild) looks a little like the cartoon Speed. That’s nothing, though, compared to Lost’s Matthew Fox, whose profile looks so much like Racer X’s that it’s uncanny. Christina Ricci plays Trixie, Speed’s eye-in-the-sky navigator. Ricci’s beautiful eyes, as big as hubcaps, look more anime than most real anime. She’s found her calling: Japanese cartoon princess. And speaking of anime, Japanese cartoon characters (blame it on translation technicalities) have the worst diction — run-on sentences, no comprehension of commas or periods, mumbling and bumbling sheets of dialogue. The film may borrow from the cartoon, but its grammar and comma/period usage have improved remarkably.

Speed Racer is one of the most colorful films ever created; mosaics of Skittles have not looked this vibrant. Compound the speed of the cars and those brilliant Tide-worthy colors with a hyper-edited structure — the whole movie is in a constant transition with images overlapping, fading in and out, careening together — and what you get is more like a hallucination than a movie. It also feels a lot like a video game, but for once that seems appropriate. Visually, the whole thing is insane … but wonderfully so. And with so much computer animation I really doubt there was ever a real car on the set except to shuttle the secretive directors, Andy and Larry/Lana Wachowski, to their hotels and back again. So it's completely fake, but then again, who cares? It feels fast and that’s paramount.

But since we're on the subject of its fakeness, let's dissect: the cars can drive just as fast in reverse, they can flip and twirl to avoid sideswipes, they can drive up walls, down cliffs, swing balls of spikes, use bullet-time to dodge rockets and buzzsaws, and hop like kangaroos across a track. All this from the same guy/gal/siblings/whatever who brought us The Matrix — the only thing it was missing was Neo and Trinity hacking the underworld in zero-G. Had it been realistic in any way, though, and it would have lost its muscle, and its zing. So if there's a sequel I expect more of the same and not a stop sign on the digital horizon.

It is with great care — and knowing that somewhere in a damp Star Trek-decorated basement a geek’s heart cries in agony — that I write that the original Speed Racer cartoon is one of the worst ever created. Maybe that’s why it was so popular. This new Speed Racer is an elaborate fantasy of the original. It uses (and overuses) all the elements of the cartoon — including Speed’s brother, Spritle, and his primate buddy, Chim Chim — in just such a way that it pays respect to the cartoon, but also distances itself from it. Self-hating homage or not, it’s delicious fun, the kind of movie that will look righteous on your Blu-Ray system in four months.

Speed Racer is my first guilty pleasure this summer. I won’t promise the same for other adults, but your 12-year-olds will love it.

Iron Man shows his mettle

The summer movie season is best started with a bang. Iron Man comes with a symphony of bangs shooting from its palms. Its conductor: a heavy metal titan encased in, yep, you guessed it — iron. “Well, technically it’s gold-infused titanium, but Iron Man is nice,” the hero says reading his own headlines.

The metal man is played by Downey, an actor who can do no wrong on the screen and do lots wrong in his personal life, which he seems to have ironed out in recent years. His own story parallels that of Iron Man alter ego Tony Stark, an alcoholic who digs himself into a hole with the sharp end of his skewed principles. On that front, casting Downey was an interesting move. Look past that, though. The real reason he was cast: He’s a riot. And shouldn’t all billionaire arms dealers have a sense of humor? Downey’s Stark does. At one point, he holds a press conference while munching a cheeseburger. He tells the press to take a knee, skirt-wearers and all, so he can wax poetic about his life and future while he chomps all-beef patties.

Stark finds himself in Afghanistan selling offensive weapons to the Department of Defense. After a demonstration in which one of his rockets obliterates an entire mountain range — but not Osama bin Laden — Stark’s Humvee escort is ambushed and he’s captured by militant rebels. The terrorists lock him in a cave and force him to build the weapon he tested before his capture. Stark, now hooked up to a car battery because of a heart injury he received in the ambush, agrees to build, but not the peak-flattening missile.

Instead, he fabricates an armored suit that will facilitate a prison break from the cave. On his way out, while crushing skulls with welded fists and flamethrowers blazing, Stark finds something he never expected to find — his conscience. There, in the terrorist camp, are stacks of Stark Industries weapons; all of them are pegged for use on innocent Afghan villagers. He also finds a purpose: to forfeit his money-motivated arms race to begin to pursuing legitimate science. Stateside, the first item on his agenda is a new Iron Man suit, this one sleek and powerful, capable of flight, the ultimate conversation piece for cocktail parties.

Director Jon Favreau, whose only substantial hit before this was the family holiday flick Elf, films his action as if he’s done it a dozen times before. He gives his Iron Man speed and strength in a tangible way that can be felt on the screen — when he flies it feels fast, when he punches it makes your muscles twitch … nothing feels sluggish or weak. The movie actually zings. Notice, through all that zinging, as Iron Man goes supersonic how the condensation cone, or vapor cone, forms around his ore-clad body. That's a little touch, but it really sweetens the scene.

Favreau — who I'll always remember as the guy from PCU who mishears "Show me where the campus is" as "Blow me where the Pampers is" — also gives Iron Man the weapons he had in the comics. Sonic mortars, forearm-fired rockets, repulsor rays, chest cannons … this toaster oven is packin'. Last summer Transformers, featuring supposedly advanced beings, were fighting in primitive hand-to-hand combat; this summer Iron Man, with a real man inside, blasts a hole into the next theater.

The fighting is distributed over about three sequences — too few for a movie this long at nearly two hours — on several continents and at a variety of altitudes, from sea level to the upper stratosphere. A sequence of Iron Man fleeing two military jet fighters stands out, as does the final beat-down of an Iron Man-like baddie, whose massive frame and superior firepower let the metal-clad Stark show off his agility in that candy-colored suit. The audience I saw the movie with hooted and howled most during the first big fight sequence, with Iron Man striking hero poses as he saves an Afghan village.

Surrounding Downey is a wonderful group of Academy Award-winning (or nominated) actors: Terrence Howard is a military researcher who looks the other way when man-shaped blips start popping up on radar screens, Jeff Bridges is Stark Industries’ renegade (and very bald) warmonger, and Gwyneth Paltrow is Stark’s lovely assistant, Pepper Potts, who is destined to be a love interest, if not in this movie then the sequel. Paltrow, who I adore to no end, is wonderful in these kinds of pictures because she acts as if the action and special effects are below her, as if her status in life prevents her and action to even take exist within the same dimension. That attitude worked well in the super-underrated Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and it works here too. And I can't forget Stan Lee, God to all comic book readers. He has his regular cameo appearance, this one, which is a nod to Hugh Hefner, is better than all before it.

Let me return to Downey for a minute. Credit him for giving Iron Man its legs; he makes the movie work. I just can't imagine anyone else doing it justice — surely not the current Hulk, Edward Norton, or current Batman, Christian Bale. People may say Downey plays it so well because, like Stark, he's had his own addiction problems. Maybe, but we also tend to forget that Downey has always been a terrific actor. Now, though, because of his prison escapades, he's a more of a cult figure. Maybe he likes that, maybe he doesn't. I think of him first and last as an actor. And this actor just knocks Iron Man out of the park.

Iron Man is destined to be one of the biggest movies this summer. And rightfully so. It earns it. It’s filled with high-flying acrobatics, robotic geekery, visual invention and a deep sense of reverence for the material from which it came. Comic fans will drool all over it, Downey fans will adore it and everyone else will cheerfully walk away with a smile. It’s no Spider-Man 2, which had double the action, but Iron Man is of a similar caliber. (Although I would argue, taking a cue from The Onion, that Iron Man the movie is not as good as Iron Man the movie trailer, which used that famous Black Sabbath song to perfection.)

Now all it has to do is compete with some serious contenders: The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Let another year of comics at the movies begin.