“Okay kids, repress your true feelings to experience this rare moment of familial joy.”

Flocking dork and deceitful bitch road trip.

Jesse Eisenberg has two speeds: superdork nebbish and fast-taking schemer. In RIO 2, he’s phoning it in as the former.

Eisenberg returns as rare macaw parrot Blu, who is now married to his parrot love interest from RIO, Jewel (voice of Anne Hathaway), so there is a noticeable lack of the romantic frisson that drove the last movie; rather, the defining emotion here is jealousy and deceit, as Blu meets Jewel’s old boyfriends from the old ‘hood, and Jewel deceives Blu into her-way-or-the-highway. Also, he and Jewel are parents to three annoying young birds, such clichéd devices they might as well be humans in a White American Sitcom (i.e. the most homogenized banal pablum on Earth). Blu’s constant advice to his rare family is not to adventure too far from the nest, “Birds of blue feathers – flock together!” Makes no difference to the misbehaving kids, a grating element painted as “cute” and “independent” rather than the impertinent snots they would truly be in real life.

RIO 2 is not off to a good start. And it only gets more polly-want-a-cracker…

The theme of this sequel is still about finding oneself, but the dynamics have changed dramatically, not for the better: whereas once a prospective sexy mate led Blu to discovering his powers; now Blu is henpecked into accepting one culture over another, the henpecking euphemized as “Happy wife, happy life.”

All the cast return to play their dutiful roles (Jamie Foxx, George Lopez and Will.i.am as three comedy relief bird sidekicks, Leslie Mann and Rodrigo Santoro as Linda and Tulio, the two human biologists who own Blu and Jewel), all seemingly unaware of the contradictory messages RIO 2 is sending.

Blu and Jewel decide to fly from their home in Rio de Janeiro to the Amazon rainforest, to help their owners locate a rare flock of blue macaws like themselves, whereupon they discover Jewel’s old flock, including her tough old dad Eduardo (Andy Garcia, replete with flat top and militant attitude), and Jewel’s previous suitors (including a parrot with Bruno Mars‘ voice), which makes Blu even more stuttery and irritating.

Their plan was to locate the flock, then return home, but unbeknownst to Blu, the discovery of Jewel’s father prompts her to change her mind about leaving. Double standards kick in as Blu is made to look like he is wrong for wanting to leave this paradise – when that was the plan all along. And Jewel is made to look like a tragic lost child returning home. Jewel deceives Blu into thinking she will eventually fly home with him, when she has every intention to stay in the Amazon, and is hoping her father will indoctrinate Blu to the jungle before he realizes it. Jewel is more of a villain than the actual comic relief villain of this movie! But that angle is never even hinted at. Because apparently – in any species – you’re blameless if you’re hot.

The animation (by Blue Sky Studios) is remarkable, and the story is kinetic enough to keep it mildly interesting: Nigel the Shakespearean cockatoo (Jemaine Clement) is the wannabe thespian from the last movie that Blu injured, seeking revenge for his flightlessness. (He performs an eclectic version of I Will Survive that draws on so many cultural refs your head will spin.) And an illegal group of loggers is clearing the rainforest, which the biologists battle. And a flock of red macaws is moving in on Eduardo’s territory. So a lot is happening. But I just don’t care. Maybe it’s my aversion to small birds – chickens and ducks and parrots – and their icky ass feathers.

RIO 2’s frenetic story concludes with another big carnival dance number, that forces a happy ending on us, pretending that Jewel’s deceit didn’t exist, and that Brazilian carnivals solve everything, as blue and red macaws become friends because the script says so, as loggers stop logging and, we presume, the contracts authorizing that logging were all ripped up by avaricious politicians turned environmentalists.

And we have achieved White American Sitcom.

END

Phallus Metallus.

Hmm, an IRON MAN movie without Iron Man…

Kiddies will fidget, parents will cringe, marketers will hit the roof, executives will cower, and fans of good storytelling will rejoice. Is IRON MAN 3 the best of the series? Maybe. Probably. If you could call this an Iron Man movie. All I know is, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) spends so much time outside his titanium-alloy armor, or in various incomplete stages of it, or in it with his faceplate off, that we wonder if we haven’t walked into a seminar on how to make a movie without its eponymous lead character. And sometimes, even when we’re seeing Iron Man, it’s not really Iron Man; it’s just the armor suit working remotely!

Which begs the questions: Exactly WHO is Iron Man? Is it the man or the metal? Or is it symbiotic? Intentionally or not, the filmmakers have pitted Tony Stark in a battle against his own suit over who owns the penis in the family. This question is answered in the movie’s final frames, and I’m going to tell you what it is – or at least, what the writers think it is. Then I’m going to tell you the REAL answer… But first…

If faithful comic fans can get past the weirdness of being fed so little Iron Man, IRON MAN 3 works on a storytelling level. Y’see, writer-director Shane Black and co-writer Drew Pearce are emphasizing the man within the machine, the humanity behind the supercool, planet-crushing timbre of the titanium; they’re saying the Iron Man armor is nothing without the man within. Whether he’s within or without.

Part Iron, Part Cucumber, All Hero

In IRON MAN 3, a nihilistic terrorist called The Mandarin (deliciously continental Ben Kingsley) rips everything from Tony Stark – his home, his technology, his armor, his girlfriend, even his supercomputer liege J.A.R.V.I.S. – and Stark must use his ingenuity (rather than his vaunted suit of steel) to claw back from the edge of oblivion and exact retribution.

Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) are leading the idyllic life of a non-communicating couple, Pepper running the billion dollar Stark Enterprises firm while Tony tools away in his Iron Lab with his disembodied pal and computer go-fer JARVIS (voice of Paul Bettany), whose sarcasm modulator, we presume, has been dialed up to 11. Tony’s bodyguard Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) is now head of security at Stark Ent. (great to see him reprise his role, even though he is not directing). Stark’s colonel buddy James Rhodes (Don Cheadle), who assumed the War Machine armor for the U.S. military, has been renamed Iron Patriot and given a stars-and-stripes makeover (typical hypocritical U.S. re-branding snowjob).

The subplot, which jigsaws neatly into the Mandarin madness in ways which any canny moviegoer will see a mile away, involves a geneticist named Killian (Guy Pearce, who has been just waiting to pull out such a meatballs and cheese performance since PRISCILLA: QUEEN OF THE DESERT) who was scorned by Tony 15 years ago for not funding his DNA project, exacting revenge on Tony by coming on strong with successes in his field; re-petitioning for funding from Pepper, whom he would like to come on strong. Pepper gets the chance to prove she’s not just a pretty face by standing up and fighting for her man many times, and it is touching when Tony commands the suit to encase her instead of him to save her from falling debris. She then uses the suit not to cower in – like your average action movie chick – but to protect Tony. Tears edge the eyes… And the fact that Gwyneth’s over 40 and we can still see her ribcage when she’s cut down to a sports bra and tights helps vindicate that People Magazine Sexiest Woman Alive award. Not that I agree with the decision, but it helps.

Tony opens the movie by talking about how a man “creates his own demons.” It sounds like absolute amorphous hippie crap until we see exactly how Tony’s most benign actions create malign consequences. I’ve never thought of this before – probably because I’m as self-centered and arrogant as Tony Stark (like all of you, let’s not forget) – but any person whom you’ve stepped on offhandedly, or reviled or neglected out of hubris becomes one of your “demons.” The creation of the demon need not be as obvious as a plate-throwing argument, a national lawsuit or fistfight – your actions could be as seemingly innocuous as not calling someone back after an intimate encounter (lovely geneticist Rebecca Hall is Tony’s discarded squeeze here)… Another example of the movie depending on its storytelling finesse rather than its Pretty Orange Explosions.

Of which there are many, don’t sweat it, thirteen-year-olds. Director Shane Black, no stranger to action (he created the LETHAL WEAPON series, directed Downey in KISS KISS BANG BANG, and “the jungle came to life and took him” in PREDATOR) forges a respectful, riveting drama (based on the Extremis mini-series of Iron Man comics, 2005) that does not lack for suspense, romance, comedy and a wallop of jet-propulsive action – a fulfilling moviegoing experience. The thrilling scene where Iron Man saves a planeload of freefalling people is that clincher that makes you wish wish WISH that this technology existed and that YOU could be the one inside it.

How damn cool is that freakin’ suit?!

Tony’s Mk. 42 armor is most prominent in this movie, and fanboys will get a ferrous kick out of the final sequence where scores of Tony’s suits of differing designs turn up under remote command from JARVIS to punch bad guys. A phallic metallic paradise! Unlike IRON MAN 2, where a bunch of faceless armored suits chased Tony, these suits are all HIM. Not only are they damn cool to look at, it’s a thrilling sequence where he’s jumping in and out of them at whim, as they clack open and clack closed around his body in seconds.

But where did they come from? Didn’t his cliffside house (and Iron Lab) get blown into the sea at the end of Act I?

All I can say is: Lucky for Tony he had his Billionaire Credit Card in his back pocket when the Mandarin blew his house into the Pacific – which once again illustrates the juvenile thinking of supervillains and the writers who write them that way. These supposed evil geniuses can’t comprehend that you don’t destroy a man by blowing up his house and punching his metal suit – you destroy him by freezing his assets. The assets make the Iron Man. For whatever you say about “heart” or “courage” or “physics genius,” if you haven’t got the finances, all the heart, courage and physics genius in the world won’t design and build a multi-million dollar, weaponized, flying titanium-alloy suit. Can any one of us afford to replace the engine block in our car, let alone churn out 42 computer-interfaced Iron Man suits?

And by the way, the Mandarin supposedly only gets Tony’s home address when Tony blurts it out in a dare to the Mandarin on national TV. Shyeh royt!…. Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t Tony thrown numerous irresponsible whore-parties at his house? You think not one of those strippers/hookers, waiters/actors and surfer boytoys who frequented those parties would not have leaked his address for a dimebag or an eight-ball or the promise of an acting career? You call yourself a supervillain and didn’t know where the world’s most prominent playboy billionaire lived until he told you?

At Tony’s lowest ebb, a little boy he befriends (Ty Simpkins) tells him, “You’re a mechanic – build something!” Firstly, he’s talking to Tony while Depressed Tony, who admittedly hasn’t got any suits left, is still sitting behind the wheel of a car that costs more than my house; secondly, Tony then visits a hardware store and plops whatever weapon-making tools he wants into his shopping cart. Thank Iron Christ for that Billionaire Credit Card, right?

So in answer to the question ” Who Is Iron Man?” at movie’s end, Stark – as he did at the end of the first movie – once again assures us of his identity, saying it loud and proud. He assures all the corporate dirt-piggies who will no doubt want to keep their cash cow alive; assures we the fans that even though he removed the shrapnel near his heart, negating the further need for his cool chest reactor, that even though all his gadgets are destroyed, that even with his new mature outlook on life, avoiding danger for his girlfriend’s patticake, that even though he just rid himself of everything associated with that golden avenger, Tony assures the audience and Marvel Studios alike, “I am Iron Man!”

Well, his credit card is.

END

My Favorite Martian versus Garth Brooks.

This story should have stayed in our heads. Reading Stephen King‘s daunting 1000+ page The Stand (restored version, of course), nothing “visual” could intercept our imagination driving onto the wastelands of a dead earth, seeing an unseeable being (Flagg) in our mind’s eye, envisioning the disturbing horrors of the Lincoln Tunnel gridlock, the appendix operation, the suicides and rapes and mean killings.

The Green Miles

To the chagrin of a billion readers, director Mick Garris and the tome’s author himself, King (as executive producer, screenwriter, and actor), offer us a vapid TV visualization of the book, diminishing all its epic impact.

A super-flu has decimated the bulk of humanity and two camps (one Good, led by Mother Abigail in Colorado, one Eeevil, led by Randall Flagg in – where else? – Vegas) amass devotees to stage a Final Battle.

This six-hour mini-series, a direly obvious television production, gives us an intelligent A-Lister as Stu Redman, the tacit leader of the group (Gary Sinise, working his Mini-Eastwood Method), Ray Walston (who still can’t shake that MY FAVORITE MARTIAN Method), Miguel Ferrer (great in anything, here Flagg’s right-hand man), two Brat Packers right at home in TV Land (Rob Lowe and Molly Ringwald’s Lips), and Stephen King himself (playing against type, as a character with an IQ greater than his shoe size, doing a very passable imitation of an actor). Though Ed Harris and Kathy Bates phone in cameos, the production is hobbled by a clutch of talent-challenged aspirin ad veterans that round out the cast.

And the bad guy? The incarnation of hell-on-earth whose visage people could not cast their gaze upon? – a country singer with a mullet! Maybe King made a mistake in naming his menace “Randall Flagg.” Who could tremble before a villain who answers to “Randy”? If Jeff Goldblum (as rumored) had accepted the role of Flagg, we might have had a respectable screen-demon on our hands – instead, the movie miscasts Jamey Sheridan as the Dark Man of our nightmares: a toe-tappin’ redneck with a Def-Leppard-roadie hairdo. The only thing more sinful than Sheridan’s Huey Lewis mullet-palooza was his 80s fashion sense.

Leaning heavily on the delusional proselytizing of their matriarch, Mother Abigail (Ruby Dee), no one seemed to notice that the “epic quest” she entreats four characters to undertake “to make a Stand!” against Flagg’s evil achieves nothing that wasn’t going to transpire anyway. Flagg’s downfall was precipitated by inefficient management, insubordination and bad judgment in recruiting a loose cannon like Trashcan Man (a compulsive arsonist, played with lunatic scene-chewing by Matt Frewer), who delivers a nuclear weapon into the heart of Flagg’s congregation, only to have it set off by none other than the Hand Of God (whadaya know – a deus ex machina as a deus ex machina!). All these events had nothing to do with our rose-mouthed do-gooders and their half-assed jibes at Flagg, ultimately getting crucified for their troubles… Well, trusting to the wigged-out soothsaying of a raving old woman hallucinating from her mixture of Demerol, Cyclizine and down-home moonshine and traveling to The Dark Man’s lair with no plan, no resources, nothing but “the shirts on their backs” was bound to lead to the business end of a crucifix.

Even in the book, simply laughing in the face of the Bad Guy in order to cause empire-crumbling dissension was an obtuse disconnect; a tale so wonderfully kinetic and operatic – brick-walled when one realizes that the author himself had no clear notion on how to wrap that beargarden with any serious impact.

Ultimately, the actual “Stand” spoken of so reverently comprised of interminable walking scenes which amounted to padding, with Stu breaking his leg and sitting out the key plot scenes in a ditch. No one was allowed to drive, with no rational reasons given, other than “Mother Abigail said so.” And after all that meaningless walking – once the Old Testament God of Wrath goes Gomorrah on Vegas with His old-fashioned tabula rasa idealism – Stu boosts a car and drives back to Colorado!

Mother Abigail’s wholly erroneous precognition is surprisingly not even questioned by now and we surmise the townsfolk just want to cut their losses and move on, whilst retiring the old bat to a sanitarium. With her amorphous auguring and everyone else in the cast displaying bursts of psychic linkage whenever required to enhance the plot, the actual “boundaries” of these psychic powers is never delineated.

For example, Stu can “sense” when a character fatally crashes his bike, yet he couldn’t sense that same character building a bomb, premeditating destroying their community. In another case, after two of Flagg’s henchmen kill a Judge whom Flagg wanted alive, Flagg himself suddenly appears and flogs them to death – why didn’t he simply appear two minutes earlier and acquire the Judge himself?

King is justifiably proud of this work; what were once simply motes of his imagination, transferred to typewriter keys, now walking, breathing townsfolk. In a late scene, his joy at seeing “Stu!” and “Tom Cullen!” was heartfelt as their Creator, as well as his character happy for their safe return.

The book is more forgiving in its plot holes and inconsistencies, but that is more telling on the genius of the writer than the content of the tale itself.

END