Too Many Movies: An Obligation Born Purely Out Of Reverence

This week, Matthew J. Brady hit the indy theater and caught some boutique film called Iron Man 2, while Tucker barreled through Predators, Starship Troopers and Shake! Otis at Monterey.

Iron Man 2
Only two months after everyone else, 2010
Matthew J. Brady

I think I've figured out what it is that makes these Iron Man movies work so well (other than, you know, enjoyable characters, solid action, cute banter, and Robert Downey, Jr. just being himself), and that is seeing Tony Stark build shit. The best scene comes around two thirds of the way through, when Tony figures out about a new element that his father discovered a few decades previous but left encoded in a Tomorrowland-style city-of-the-future for Tony to solve at the last moment before he dies of plotsustanium poisoning (if you're wondering how Papa Stark knew exactly what plot device Tony would need and make sure it was available for him at the perfect moment, the answer to that question is "shut up"). Following a cool bit of holographic problem-solving (another thing this series does so well: instead of having Tony pound at a keyboard excitedly, he uses crazy, impractical 3-D displays that he manipulates as if they are solid, crumpling up armor designs into balls and throwing them across the room, spinning displays around and manipulating them, doing all sorts of stuff that doesn't make much practical sense, but sure looks cool and is pretty visually interesting to boot), he sets about doing some hands-on work, bolting high-tech-looking equipment together, stacking junk on top of other junk and measuring to make sure it's level, and jackhammering holes in the floor to get at wiring, all culminating in some sort of particle accelerator that he operates with a gigantic monkey wrench, aiming a laser in a destructive path across the room until it magically does something good to that thing he sticks in his chest. This is all bullshit, stuff that's supposed to seem like something somebody might do if they were creating the kind of technology that Stan Lee dreamed up back in the 60s, but it's just realistic and down-to-earth enough that we get the idea that if only we had taken a class in electrical engineering, we might be able to build an Iron Man suit too. That's a pretty great bit of wish-fulfillment for viewers to latch on to, and when you pile all the rest of the cool stuff on top of it, it makes for a hell of an entertaining movie. You could certainly build a franchise on worse.

Walt Goggins Has A Knife, Is Rapist
Also called "Predators", 2010
Tucker Stone

This is a pretty useful take on Predators that mostly focuses on how horrible a movie it could've been while going maybe a bit too far down the road of praising the original. It paints a decent picture of the few positive responses that the film is getting--that it's nowhere near as bad as it could have been--and it gives a respectable nod towards the (basically ignored) director who handled what's been marketed as a Robert Rodriguez creation. (In that vein, here's another chapter in why I love Ignatiy Vishnevetsky. That guy is the real fucking deal.)

"Not that bad" has a lot of legroom. I'm an unabashed pants-creaming fan for the original movie, so I'm not in the least bit objective or reliable a source, but even with that aside--I'd tentatively agree with almost all of the criticisms in those two articles linked above--I found a share of genuine enjoyment in this thing. Despite a constant, fan-obsessed insertion of way too many "remember this" moments (the most irritating being when Adrian Brody removes his shirt and showcases why boiled chicken and personal trainers will not, in fact, make you Arnold Schwarzeneggar), there's geeky moments that are pretty effective/funny, like when a patent pending Awesome Japanese Dude uses a sword and reminds you of both samurai movies AND that part in the first movie where Billy whips out his machete and grits his teeth.

[I'm sure I'm not alone on knowing this, but it bears repeating: the insurance company hired a bodyguard to protect Arnold, Jesse Ventura, Carl Weathers & Bill Duke from Sonny Landham, because Sonny Landham apparently couldn't stop himself from fighting any and everybody that happened to show up in his general vicinity when he ingested alcoholic beverages. Sure, he's chucked all that away ever since he Mel Gibsoned out and called for "genocide" on "Arabs", but for a brief moment in time, Billy was the hardest of the hard men.]

Being the only card-carrying member in the Brothers of Walt Goggins fellowship (membership is still open!), I can also tell you with great accuracy that Mr. Shane Vendrell does a damn fine job in this film, and he is actually in it for a lot more than the previews make it seem. He's stuck with some really horrible lines that seem to exist mostly because it gives Topher Grace a chance to respond sarcastically and remind you that he's still pretty irritating, but the Gog does his best, and when he finally dies, a part of you will die with him. (Especially because that means you're stuck watching Alice Braga pretend that she A) cares about Topher Grace and B) has respect for Adrian Brody, and neither of those things are possible. It's actually harder to believe in a human being caring about those two characters than it is to believe that a fat Laurence Fishburne could survive "for ten seasons" amongst killing machines capable of taking out Carl Weathers and Gary Busey, even though they set up the whole "Predators are wimps now" when they had them team up with Sanaa Lathan back in 2004.)

Here's the thing though: Abe Sauer is right. The original Predator--and to some extent, Predator 2--are the kind of movies that reward rewatching, the kind of movies that a certain age demographic are going to keep returning to, again and again, no matter how many times their brain points out how silly it looks when slow-motion bodies go diving off high structures in the first thirty minutes. That original film was classic 80's perfect, a dead serious action movie made because a producer bought an eightball and said "let's make a movie where Rocky fights E.T.", and it was cast with a bunch of charismatic muscle freaks who were contractually obligated to act like badass motherfuckers. There's jokes in Predator, but they're dry, stupid jokes, the kind of jokes that only appeal to a bunch of guys who are never more irritated than when some CIA jerk-off tries to pretend he's part of the club. Watching that movie, the fiction that you buy into isn't the alien, it isn't the danger, it's the team, the idea of facing what-the-fuck-ever with your nearest and your dearest. It's that sexy-as-hell fiction of the adult male relationship that never gets exchanged for domesticity and maturity--living like a boy in the woods, playing Hunter/Killer with real guns; Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on actual in-your-dick steroids. 

Predators isn't that. It's an action movie that's not confusingly shot or heavily dependent on CGI, and that's great, but it's also a meta-joke, an idea/fantasy gone widescreen. It's a guy like you--or me, or anybody who watches Predator even though Netflix has dropped off a big boy movie--getting a chance to make his version of what should've come next. Rodriguez had the money, and he had the pull, and he satisfied himself. 

But he's twenty years too late to satisfy anybody elses.

Starship Troopers
Always living life down, Verhoeven, 1997
Tucker Stone

The satire is still spot on, even more than it was when it was first released (how closely does Casper Van Dien's "kill 'em all!" line delivery parallel a Fox News blast?), but the other thing that hasn't changed since '97 is the runtime: Starship Troopers is fucking long. The action sequences hit a boring drone around the 17th time that somebody is dismembered by the robotic looking bugs, only breaking north whenever a newer, cheesier death arrives, like the closing tail-fuck brain-sucking that nurses Patrick Muldoon's prismatic skull. The special effects were good enough to get an Academy Award nomination, which is kind of a clue to how long the Academy Awards have been, you know, pretty fucked up and weird, but it's hard to look at any of them now. (It's remarkable how much Alien has worked its way into the contemporary visuals of science fiction, because man-oh-man do the interiors of spaceships look ridiculous when they're clean and pristine. 2001 is the only exception I can think of--otherwise, it would behoove the future generations to cover those sets in rust.)

Part of the reason the film works (when it does) is the casting, and the way neither Van Dien, Jake Busey or Denise Richards seem to realize what kind of movie they're in, or what it is that they're doing in it. With the same who-fucking-cares attitude that constantly torpedoes Verhoeven's career, the actors are pure window mannequin, cranking through the expository dialog without a shred of human emotion. (Denise is the best for this, using the same tone of voice to break up with her long-time boyfriend as she does to describe how a window works, what color a spaceship is, ad infinitum.) But while it helps the Nazi propaganda aesthetic, it doesn't help the movie to have it packed to the brim with charisma-less surgical cases who can't act, and somewhere around hour one, the "these people are horrible!" jokes wear thin. Verhoeven tries to manage his way around this by re-using his old Robocop-era commercial gags, he even wheels Michael Ironside out to explain to a virgin why the virgin should get his fuck on, but you're never really able to escape from the throes of Casper Van Dien, or the way Casper Van Dien yells at you, with his lobotomy stare and his razor blade browline. It'll always be a bright spot in the "take the money, shit on the people who gave it to you" library, but no, there's no good reason to watch this again.

Shake! Otis at Monteray
Pennebaker shot it in 1967, it was released in 1987
Tucker Stone

This is 19 golden minutes of absolute perfection.

-Matthew J. Brady & Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Jason Michelitch]

I know Pennebaker wanted Monterey Pop to end with Ravi Shankar, as a sort of denouement of regular pop music and a way of pointing towards what he thought the future would be, but I love how the Otis section just reaches out from the middle of the film and completely dominates. Even Hendrix can't quite compete.

And, of course, sticking Simon and Garfunkel in for 30 seconds near the beginning when they were easily the biggest name headliners at the show is one of my favorite mean documentary jokes of all time.

[Tim O'Neil]

I think I'm going to write about Predators because I think people are totally thinking too hard about this movie. It's PREDATORS ripping peoples spinal columns out and building statues out of meat and bone - what possible criticism can be made about that concept that isn't ultimately reductive?

[Matthew Craig]

The plural.

//\oo/\\

[John Pontoon]

None of you were alive when this happened, but Hendrix and Redding's performances at Monteray were released as a single LP, one guy to a side. It was good.

True(ish) rock anecdote: Neither The Who nor Hendrix wanted to go second (and thus follow up the other act... or maybe it was first that they didn't want to go?) Anyway, Hendrix lost the coin flip and, like, pulled out all the stops, as you may know. After he was done humping the amp, pantomime-pissing on his guitar with lighter fluid, setting it on fire, and then smashing the on-fire guitar to bits... after he walked off the stage, Townsend asked him for a piece of the guitar. Hendrix replied, "You want me to autograph it too, honky?"

Last anecdote, this one is definitely not apocryphal: Me and a friend went to see "Starship Troopers" in the theater, but we were running late. We walked in on the scene where Casper and Muldoon fight for no reason (Y'know, where Van Dien gets suplexed onto a breakaway table?) and thought we were 10 minutes late... but we had walked into the wrong multiplex room and joined the movie 1:10 into it. From the point we walked in, the movie was nonstop mayhem and flying viscera and like that, and it ended after an hour and 20 minutes of Quality Kill with like no exposition whatsoever. We thought it was the most ass-kicking thing ever made.

Anyway, I still love the movie even after seeing the beginning, I think it's hilariously fascist. Those words never went together before, so, mad props says I.

[mateo]

A) Starship Troopers is non-stop awesome. I especially love everything.

B) I ignore this, because it compromises the awesome, but there is no doubt that Paul VerDutchname totally intended this a a vicious satire of fascism and war but

C) It was so awesome, that no one stopped to really consider what kind of sissy worldview was intended and just

D) loved the shit out of every minute unless they were

E) Dutch and/or hippies and/or allergic to A, C, or D.

I'm from New Orleans, and I say KILL 'EM ALL!

[Lord Buff]

In Iron Man, i think the idea is that Howard Stark knew the arc reactor was poisonous, but couldn't create the element with the technology in his time, so hid the secret formula for later.

It's not made very clear in the film though, so I also thought it was massive coincidence.

[John Pontoon]

Re: The "New Element," maybe Howard coulda thought up a new ISOTOPE of an element, or a new compound or something, but the elements pretty much just go in numerical order, y'know? Ununsextium, ununseptium, ununoctium, you get the idea. Plus they all exist for like picoseconds of time before decaying into a lower number that's more stable. It's all a buch of hooey!

Plus how does being inside a tin can help a guy survive a fall of a mile down? I could understand if he stepped out of the falling armor just as it was about to hit, but as is it just doesn't jibe with my prejudices about bodies in motion and their, how shall I put this, "tendencies."

[Abhay]

I don't know anything about Iron Man-- an issue here or there aside, I never really read it on the regular until Fraction. So: where did all that stuff about Iron Man's parents being important even come from?

That's how I remember that big The World's Most Iron Man arc coming to a close, Iron Man's parents being all gross. Which-- kind of came totally out of nowhere for me, but maybe I missed a few issues since I can't do the art, but I don't even know.

And then the movie was all "FATHER." Which-- granted, "FATHER" is the theme of every comic Stan Lee wrote between 1961 and 1975, but like...

Is Tony Stark's daddy issues a well-established and important part of that character that is important for fans? Like, in the 60's, when he was fighting the commies, would he also just stop and be like, "I never told my dad I loved him, Mecha-Trotsky."

I always just thought he was a dude who drank a lot and liked girls-- which is a combination that has always kind of been enough for me. Why can't he just be that?

[John Pontoon]

The Daddy Issues stuff wasn't any part of the Iron Man thing-matter that I read, which would stop around 1990 or so. After that is when the Hulk got his BTW Dad Killed Mom retcon, so maybe so too was it for Anthony Stark also similarly.

[Jason Michelitch]

Pretty sure there are some daddy issues in Orson Scott Card's Ultimate Iron Man, but I could be wrong due to never actually fully reading that book.