A Meditation on Iron Man 3 – Or Why Sequels Suck

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , , ,

 

I won’t frame this post as a movie review.  I won’t synopsize the plot or provide a detailed opinion on it as a movie.  Instead, I’ll use watching the movie as the launching pad for a rant.  Because rants are fun (for the writer).  Unloading on a movie that disappoints and especially one that trades on the good reputation of an earlier installment feels like a noble action.

I’ll start out by saying I really enjoyed the original Iron Man movie.  Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges and the supporting cast; Terrence Howard and Gwyneth Paltrow, provided plenty of entertaining content to this comedy/adventure movie.  That movie was fun, exciting and highly entertaining.

Alternatively, Iron Man 3 is none of those things.  It’s a complete waste of time.  The plot is confusing and essentially meaningless.  All of the characters are annoying and uncompelling.  Even Downey’s Tony Stark is surprisingly uninteresting and poorly written.  He is suffering from anxiety attacks based on his experiences in the Avengers movie that occurred before this film.  He has several of them during the movie and they just seem so contrived and pathetic that it feels like really lazy writing.  So, by the end of this movie, I’m feeling fairly unhappy with the time I’ve wasted watching this crapfest.

So, this is what you get with these movie franchises.  The first one is probably very good.  There’s good writing, good acting and an original idea.  But two or even three sequels down the road you end up with a crappy director, hack writers and a much less talented supporting cast.  And voila, an awful movie.

Now it doesn’t have to be this way.  There have been movie series where the quality was more or less maintained.  Downey, himself for instance, was in one such.  His two Sherlock Holmes films were almost equally interesting and entertaining.  But in general, Hollywood has an equation where sequels are a money-making strategy where quality is abandoned after installment one.

So, what’s my point?  Well, there isn’t one.  Except that I was so annoyed watching this movie that I wanted to carp and moan about my outraged sensibilities.  Robert Downey Jr. is an amusing actor who can carry a picture to great effect if you give him a decent plot and some good lines to recite while he mugs for the camera.  It would have been entirely possible to allow his character to carry this movie without any expensive supporting cast if they had only invested in an actual story!

And so, the takeaway is “caveat emptor.”  Do your homework when it comes to sequels and make sure you don’t pay for a movie that is just a pale shadow of its predecessor.  Luckily, I watched this for free on my cable service.  But I did waste more than two hours of my, at this point, limited time left on this mortal coil.

And shame on you Robert Downey Jr.  You’re better than that.  Now go make the third Sherlock Holmes movie.  And don’t let them phone it in!

This One Sums it Up

photog Current Events

This must be occurring to urban Democrats just about now.

When there are no police and your only weapon is your bare hands and they come for you it’s going to be a little too late to start talking about your constitutional rights. Hey maybe they’ll respect your rights because you voted for Biden. You can try telling them that. But I don’t think they speak English.

Surrounded by Imbeciles

photog Current Events ,

I was trying to relax tonight and take a break from the world.  I went to a high school athletic awards ceremony for one of my grandsons.  It was exactly as anyone who has been to such an event would expect.  Coaches make short speeches in praise of the athletes and the kids seem uncomfortable and awkward as they stand on stage and accept the awards and the applause of their peers and relatives.  From my perspective it was very rewarding.  To see the young people behaving civilly and appropriately while the outside world is descending into barbarism provides a splinter of hope for the future.

I came home in the glow of good spirits and was prepared to watch with Camera Girl, the pre-recorded episode of her current favorite tv show, Wheel of Fortune.  But alas, it had been pre-empted by a news report about Donald Trump being indicted by the Justice Department for possession of some supposedly classified documents.  We were fast-forwarding through the recording so I couldn’t hear any of the audio but I could read the banner under the video and that was what it was about.  But what can you do?  When you live in a banana republic these are the things that go on.  So, I looked for some other way to amuse myself, although my buoyant mood was substantially quenched.

I had recorded the Keanu Reeves remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”  Previously I had seen short segments of the film while looking for something to watch and it hadn’t looked too promising but I figured, “How bad could it be?”  Well, I found out.

The original movie had suffered from a lethal dose of sanctimonious pacifism.  This latter edition is orders of magnitude worse.  In addition to having the painfully wooden acting abilities of Reeves on full display for most of the film, it also tried to convince us that John Cleese was an Einstein-level physicist and that Kathy Bates was the Secretary of Defense (although the latter would make perfect sense in a second Biden term).

And in this remake the aliens aren’t going to destroy Earth.  They were going to save it by eliminating mankind.  They even went to the trouble to airlift animal species off the planet to save them for after the Earth had been swept clean of man.  And even after Klaatu is persuaded to save humanity from his swarm of ravenous nanobots, he imposes some kind of draconian solution that renders electrical generation, anywhere on Earth, impossible.  In other words, he saves us but pushes us back into the pre-industrial era.  Here is Gaia’s revenge.  Instead of Keanu Reeves why didn’t they cast Al Gore as Klaatu?  It would’ve been the perfect cherry on the sundae of this pile of crap.

And somehow, I found a perfect alignment between the Trump indictment and the sensibilities of this dismal mess of a movie.  We’re surrounded by imbeciles.  Only an imbecile would believe that the indictment was anything but naked partisan lawfare.  Only an imbecile would enjoy the self-loathing and junk science that informed this vacuous mess.

We’re in a lot of trouble.  The country is run by very bad people.  And unfortunately, the stupid obey them implicitly and the stupid are in the majority.  I’ve been trying to guess what the most likely outcome for all of this will be.  It almost seems that the destruction of our civilization will be accomplished momentarily.  The cities are crumbling and the economic wealth of the country is being drained off before our eyes.  Maybe the speed with which the damage is being done will panic even the stupidest leftist into changing course and throwing out the Democrats.

But somehow, I don’t see it.  I think they’ve figured out the bread and circuses routine sufficiently well to keep the Millennials and Zoomers sitting in their parents’ basements right through the apocalypse itself.  Lately the pediatric transitioning has elicited a response from people.  But is it just a reflex?  Is the brain already gone and this is just the muscles spasming?  Sorry, this is so dark.  But right now, I think we’re in a very dark place.

Lord, save us from the imbeciles.  They’re everywhere you look.