Iron Man 2 Review

Iron Man 2: It takes all the fun and excitement out of the original Iron Man and chucks them into a fire. I'm seriously stunned by how inept the sequel is at creating an enjoyable cinematic experience. Nearly every aspect of the movie, be it story, acting, even song selection, was botched.

To start with, the big AC/DC buzz around the movie was apparently a lie. There are only two AC/DC songs in the entire movie and they play at the very beginning and very end. Way to go marketers! Maybe you can advertise Led Zeppelin in Iron Man 3 and then not put their songs in either.

Secondly, the pacing is horrendous. In fact, it's probably the worst part of the action movie. There are only three (technically four) fight scenes in the whole movie and they all come incredibly far apart. The very first fight scene itself only arrives about a third of the way through the movie. That might have been tolerable if not for all the faffing around in between battles. However, before I continue with the bland uninspired fight scenes and dumb plot I have to address the characters.

The movie begins by introducing the boring, cliche, straight-out-of-a-James-Bond-movie Russian bad guy Ivan Vanko (played by Mickey Rourke). Vanko is mad at Tony Stark for something that Tony's father might have sort of  maybe been possibly involved with decades ago involving Vanko's own father, and now his father has died from old age unrelated to any of those events. So immediately the fact that the main antagonist has no motivation doesn't help. It also doesn't help that Mickey Rourke gives a terrible performance. However, he isn't the worst actor in the movie. When Watchmen debuted many people complained about the performance of Maria Åkerman as Silk Spectre II, saying she was too flat. Now, personally I disagree with that assessment but I do understand what they were saying. But Åkerman doesn't compare at all, at all, to the terrible performance of Scarlett Johansson in this movie. Her character is so dull and lifeless that she actually brings the rest of the movie down with her. To be fair, I will say that Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Samuel L. Jackson all turn in good perfor-- wait, stop. What are Jackson and Johansson even doing in this movie? The answer: Nothing. They play S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives whose only roles are to market other Marvel movies like Thor. In fact, their presence contributes to a full third of the faffing around that occurs in Iron Man 2, mostly in the soul-shattering vacuous middle.

Also, sorry to say it, but Don Cheadle sucks in this movie. You can feel his apathy oozing off the screen. It makes the movie drag more than it already was.

Iron Man 2 feels like a superhero movie collided with a romantic comedy chick flick, or maybe Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Cocktail parties, congressional committee meetings, what is this? You know what I think of when I think about Iron Man? Boring political dialogue. What, you don't? Most of the faffing around has to do with the contrived Tony Stark / Pepper romance and the senate hearing is preposterous. That's a good word to describe the plot of the movie: Preposterous.

In the first fight scene Tony Stark is driving in a race car (just because) when Ivan Vanko shows up in his high-tech killsuit he built out of pirozhki in his poor rundown apartment in Siberia. He attacks Tony with his car bisecting laser whips but despite the fact that Tony doesn't have the Iron Man suit and is disoriented after being hurled through the air he is able to just barely evade each strike by Vanko, the ridiculousness of which is so great that we are instantly thrown out of the movie. Vanko moseys along, taking his time, apparently in no hurry to kill Tony Stark before he either runs away or gets into Iron Man suit. You might guess his reason for doing this is to prolong his revenge, really making Tony afraid, but no, that's not the reason. Why doesn't Vanko kill Tony? Because the script says so. Then Tony suits up and the fight ends in (no joke) thirty seconds. All that build up and the first fight scene one third of the way through the movie abruptly stops.

Wait, no one knew Tony would be in the race because he only decided to participate in it spontaneously, yet Vanko is already near the track disguised as a mechanic. The only way that Vanko could have known to be there was if he was clairvoyant, yet he knows. Why? Because the script says so. It's pretty bad when you get into plot-hole territory (too bad it's not the only one).

Later, Tony is being an irresponsible drunk at his birthday party, stumbling around in the Iron Man suit and blasting beer bottles because he's upset about dying. Oh, did I forget to mention that Tony is dying from a defect inherent in the palladium power source in his chest that keeps him alive? So did the writers. In the first movie. How does Tony resolve this problem? He stumbles upon an old elemental model left behind in another model by his father and (no joke) manufactures a new element in his basement which can also be used as a life saving power source but which doesn't contain the same toxicity as palladium. I wish I were making that up. Also, I was apparently completely mistaken in my perception that in order to create a new element you need a team of trained scientists, a highly controlled environment and a particle accelerator. Evidently all you need to do is fire a laser beam into a triangle.

Anyway, Don Cheadle shows up, steals one of the other Iron Man suits from Tony's basement and proceeds to get into a pointless fight with Tony that occurs only so that the movie can have another fight scene, and endear Tony to the audience by having him endanger nearby partygoers. Because they're both in nigh-invincible robot suits the battle resembles two empty buckets being clanged together.

The common problem with these fight scenes is that they hold no tension whatsoever. In the first one the tension is dissolved by the preposterous escapes Tony makes, in the second by the fact that both fighters can't be injured. In the case of Scarlett Johansson's battle not only do we not care about the character but also she dispatches the nameless henchmen with complete ease. In the big climactic battle Tony goes up against tens of robots about as affective as paper-mâché barbie dolls, or the droids from The Phantom Menace. They die from crashing into things at relatively slow speeds, being punched, shot, kicked, and from particularly aggressive noogies. Then Ivan Vanko arrives in his new supersuit and engages in a (no joke) thirty second battle.

At this point everything comes together in a way that is impossible. After defeating Vanko, the stereotypical villain reveals that he rigged all the robots with explosives that will soon blow. Also, Pepper (only Pepper, no one else) just happens to be standing right next to the only robot that crashed near her location and Tony has very little time to fly to and rescue her. Unfortunately Tony has no idea that Pepper is in this predicament and even if he did he has no clue where she is, so tragically she dies. Tony is overcome with grief and I'm just kidding; of course he somehow obtains knowledge of exactly where she is and flies over and rescues her just in time. How? Because the script says so. Then, despite Tony having been a drunken asshole the whole movie, Pepper professes her love for him. Peachy.

Why Adrian Monk Doesn't Wear Gloves

A joke doesn't work if you cheat. I bring this up because a lot of writers, especially television writers, seem to think it's okay. What do I mean by cheat? A standard punchline formula is:

Character #1: Question directed at Character #2?

Character #2: Response.

Character #1: Pun playing off Character #2's response.

A problem occurs when, in order to make the joke work, either Character #1 or Character #2 has to phrase their question/response in an incredibly awkward manner that no real person would phrase it like. This should immediately tip off the other character that they're being had, but the script doesn't allow this because the implausible joke must be facilitated.

Essentially, the problem is that all things cease to be funny when logic is abandoned. To my main point, why doesn't Adrian Monk just wear gloves?

In the television show Monk, Adrian Monk is a detective with OCD and germaphobia. Because he is involved in police work he has to go about crime scenes handling (often dirty) evidence. In addition, he often has to shake hands with others. Because of his germaphobia he frequently either can't do these things or must wipe his hands with sanitary towelettes. This leads to frequent "funny" encounters, such as when he wipes himself clean after shaking hands with a black man who then (of course) accuses him of racism. Instead of doing the obvious (explaining that he has germaphobia) he stutters and sputters and the black man and his friends give him dirty looks the rest of the scene. This is supposed to be hilarious but isn't because logic and common sense dictate that this scene shouldn't occur.

So next time you see writers trying to weasel a joke past rationality you can ask yourself "why doesn't Adrian Monk wear gloves"?

Rap Music: It Sucks!

Let's face it, rap music sucks. Sure, there are exceptions such as "O.P.P." and "White Lines," but in general the genre sucks. So why is this the case? I posit it's because the majority of rappers are untalented hacks. From my exhaustive and highly scientific research into the rap music genre, I have concluded that a rap song will only be successful if it's subject matter is about at least one of the following:

1. Bitches
2. Hoes
3. Skanks
4. Tramps
5. Harlots
6. Floozies
7. Sluts
8. Hussies
9. Prostitutes

Although the demeanor, mannerisms and social behavior of the human female in modern American society are frequent subjects of the genre, rap songs can also be successful if they are about:

1. Guns
2. Drugs (preferably cocaine)
3. Gangstas
4. Niggas
5. Homies
6. Da hood yo!
7. Motherfuckers
8. Badonkadonks

But really, why does rap suck? To begin with, rappers have retarded names like Snoop Dogg, Flava Flav, and Xzibit. Rap songs tend to feature poorly sung, dumb, misogynistic lyrics backed up by incredibly repetitive beats which I doubt they created themselves. When they aren't objectifying women, rappers sing about other similarly cliche, uninspired subject matter that's become a staple of the genre, like tits and hating gay people. This is probably the result of the homogenous (that's homo-genous rappers, don't worry, I'm not accusing you of being pinko fags) nature of rap; rappers are almost all young black men, or white men trying to act like them. The lack of diversity in rap music hinders creativity by encouraging rappers to repeat the same formulaic garbage used by other successful rappers. This has fostered a creatively bankrupt system in which rap as a medium can't evolve. Rap music hasn't changed in 20 years. It was bollocks then, now it's just new bollocks.

The Top 5 Worst Movies of All Time: Introduction

Since the invention of movie making there have always been movies which people consider to be bad. Although many bad movies simply "suck" there are a few which, and I believe this is the technical term, "blow" or even "blow chunks." A movie is said to blow when it exceeds the maximum threshold in any given unwanted area of movie making. A film can be morally offensive, such as when it depicts shameful racist or sexist caricatures. It can be artistically offensive, meaning the film is of such poor quality creatively or technically that you're offended by it, as though the filmmakers are insulting your intelligence; in my mind nothing is worse when making a movie than apathy, because normally after a bad movie you can take solace in knowing that the creators at least tried to make something good, but it's obvious when zero effort went into a movie and that it was only a sleazy attempt to separate you from your money. A film can also be boring, which is the worst possible scenario. A horrible movie can at least be fun to rant about after seeing it, but a boring movie is a deadening movie. A boring film drains any enthusiasm or spirit you had going into it so that you can't even muster up the energy to complain about it.

Having said all that, I'd like to run down what I consider to be the top 5 (or bottom 5 depending on how you look at it) movies I've ever seen. Strangely enough, none of them are movies you'd expect to be on a worst of list. None of them are Battlefield Earth or Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo or Caligula. All of them are in fact movies other people actually like. I guess I'm just an outsider. If a movie appears on my list that you personally like, please, give my points a fair listen. I certainly don't blame you if you like them; I'm not an art snob. But first, before the bottom 5, an honorable mention. Something to whet the appetite before digging into the main course. I present to you, the reader, my thoughts on Heavy Metal.

Heavy Metal is not so much a film as it is a Kindgarten student's unfinished 90 minute flash animation. It is singularly the worst animated movie I've ever seen (spoiler alert: none of my top 5 worst movies are animated). It's hard to know where to begin because every aspect of Heavy Metal is absolutely atrocious. Let's look at a screenshot:

The animation is hideous. Outlines are crude, jagged, in many cases unfinished. Shading and contrast are very poor. Shading and animation pop in-and-out of numerous shots. Human bodies are exaggerated and disproportional and the women have breasts the size of their heads. Tons of pointless T 'n' A and sex scenes where the female character's will spontaneously, and for no reason, give themselves over to male character's they've known for 30 seconds. Of course, when T 'n' A shows up to a movie her drug-addled boyfriend Blood 'n' Guts is often not far behind. The movie is saturated with pointless and disgusting scenes of brutal death and dismemberment. The lip-synch is horrendous, worse than sock puppet theater. However, even if the lip-synch were done well it wouldn't matter because the voice acting is flat and uncompelling.

Every scene in the movie is completely nonsensical. The movie is broken into various disjointed and incoherent segments that make no sense even within its own warped logic and the segments themselves are barely held together by a haphazard narrative. If that weren't enough, every scene is bursting with mind-numbing stupidity.

The ultimate travesty of the movie is its soundtrack. In a movie called Heavy Metal, filled with tits and violence and muscled action hero dudes riding dinosaurs to rescue busty princesses, the majority of the soundtrack is not heavy metal music but instead bland orchestral scores, and the few heavy metal songs in the movie are dull. Also of note, Heavy Metal has the worst scene in movie history of a genitalia-less robot built by coke-addicted aliens having sex with a red-headed human nurse sucked into the alien space ship by a giant vacuum, and that's saying something.

Nostalgia Critic: Top 11 Villain Songs

I love the Nostalgia Critic. I think he's incredibly funny and I visit his website, ThatGuyWithTheGlasses, all the time. That said, I thought his latest video, Top 11 Villain Songs, was very sloppy. A lot of the songs seemed like poor choices and some didn't even make sense being on the list. So I thought I'd go through the list and explain why I felt it was so poor.

To start with, I assumed that all the songs on the list would be dark and menacing songs sung by a villain. I also figured because of that criteria that there would be a lot of songs from older Disney animated movies, and this being the Nostalgia Critic, that that would work out fine. To recap, the rules as I saw them were:

1) The song must be dark and menacing.

2) It must be sung by a villain

3) It must be nostalgic (i.e. old)

According to the criteria, how well did the songs do? Very badly.

Already we've run into trouble and the list hasn't even begun yet. In the title card for the video we see five figures. Four of them star in villainous songs in the video, but the fifth one, Oogie Boogie, the one who's centered in the middle of the image and standing in front of the other figures is not featured. Why would you put him there if you didn't intend for him to be in the video? Moving on...

11) "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" from How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Problems again. The song is not sung by the villain, it's sung by a narrator. Okay, fine. But then the song is also whimsical, about Christmas, and in a children's cartoon. We're not starting out very dark or menacing. However, the song is catchy and well sung, so I'll let it pass.

10) "Shiver My Timbers" from Muppet Treasure Island

Again, wtf? The song is sung by a chorus of random unnamed pirates and goofy muppet creatures. There is no established villain and the song is neither dark nor menacing. To make matters worse, Doug Walker admits to not even having seen the movie. C'mon dude, take an hour and a half out of your video making time and watch the movie. The fact that he hasn't seen the movie means some of the impact is lost and he can't comment/joke about any of the contextual things that happen around the song.

9) "Friends on the Other Side" from The Princess and the Frog

Three songs in the video gets good. The song is sung by a villain, it's dark, menacing, colorful, well made, and the villain's voice is very diabolical sounding. Just one problem: The song is from 2009! What the hell are you doing putting something from 2009 in a Nostalgia Critic video?

8) "Pretty Women" from Sweeny Todd

It's not dark or menacing in any way, it's just plain goofy. It's also really stupid.

7) "Sweet Transvestite" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show and "Dentist" from Little Shop of Horrors

The Nostalgia Critic puts both songs at this number because they're similar. Indeed, they're both similarly out-of-place. Both are over-the-top silly songs that have no place being on a best of list for villainous songs. Both don't feature a villain: Steve Martin's character is more of an asshole than anything else and Tim Curry's character doesn't seem at all villainous, although even if you conclude that he is the song itself isn't villainous either.

6) "In the Dark of the Night" from Anastasia

The song is awful. As the Nostalgia Critic himself points out, the villain isn't so much singing menacingly as he is "talking in rhyme with musical accompaniment" (a problem that will afflict additional movies on the list) and the "prancing pink bugs" don't help the already bad atmosphere. To top it off, the song sounds more like a religious choir song than a villain song.

5) "Poor Unfortunate Souls" from The Little Mermaid

I would say it was an all around well made villain song with catchy lyrics but, and this is the key to understanding why this song is bad, Ursula's voice is like getting ear-raped by the devil.

4) "He Had It Comin'" from Chicago

This is not a villain song. This is a song about villains, not sung by them. It's also silly and over-the-top. I just feel... fuck.

3) "Be Prepared" from The Lion King

The villain is not singing, he is, again, talking in rhyme with musical accompaniment.

2) "Secret of Survival" from Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Goofy. Silly. Fail.

1) "Hellfire" from The Hunchback of Notre Dame

What I find ironic about the #1 song is that it's the worst song on the list. Not only is the villain talking (not singing) with musical accompaniment, he isn't even bothering to rhyme. The background music itself is the most bland orchestral/choir music you could possibly come up with.

I'm seriously shocked at how bad the video was. None of the songs worked. Hope the next video won't be a disappointment.

An Exercise in Desperation: American Dad and The Cleveland Show

While Family Guy was in its 4th season (i.e. when it was still good) Seth MacFarlane debuted a new show called American Dad. Made at a time when the bullshit Blue States vs. Red States atmosphere was being upplayed, the show's sole Colbert Report-esque gimmick was simply not enough to carry it. What should have been a single episode of Family Guy was instead transformed into an entire series thanks to MacFarlane's ego. I remember thinking at the time "why don't they just make more episodes of Family Guy?"

My personal opinion is that American Dad was an experiment by FOX to see if they could simply make the same show over and over and maintain viewership. Apparently they were successful. American Dad is identical to Family Guy in both animation and comedy style, and the characters are blatant copies of Family Guy's cast. As Family Guy is already a rip-off of The Simpsons, American Dad is therefore a rip-off of a rip-off. Being unoriginal does not necessarily indicate lack of quality; being grossly unfunny does. I quickly removed American Dad from my schedule. I never would have guessed after that that MacFarlane would try his humorless hands at another rip-off, nor how much worse it would be in his second attempt. Looking back on the detestable event, I should have recognized what American Dad, ill portent that it was, foreshadowed.

MacFarlane's spin-off, The Cleveland Show, proved to be even more disastrous than previous works. With all of the problems of its predecessors present, The Cleveland Show had the added bonus of making fun of black stereotypes. This was ground zero. The offspring of comedic clones, The Cleveland Show was born with gnarled limbs and contorted body, its hideous visage the result of genetic degradation from the repeated cloning process used to bring about its abominable existence. Now effectively a rip-off of a rip-off of a I just threw up in my mouth, this was the sign that MacFarlane had finally lost his mind.

Behold the face of horror and weep.

Update: Family Guy, now in its 8th season, has made somewhat of a comeback. The newest episodes, whilst not great, are occasionally marginally good and may merit a chuckle or two from the casual viewer. However, I still maintain that the show is irreparably damaged.

Update: And then there was the episode wherein Stewie consumes canine feces.

The Downfall of Family Guy

Family Guy is like a great buddy who, over the years, slowly succumbed to alcoholism. You want to remember the fun old friend you used to know, but all you can see now is the boozed up loser vomiting behind a dumpster in front of you. The show (so thoroughly unfunny now it hurts) has lived far past its prime. I can fondly recall the days of Chitty Chitty Death Bang and The King Is Dead putting a big grin on my face. Then the Earth went around the Sun a few times and now Family Guy can regularly be seen staggering around alleyways in a drunken stupor.

On January 31st, 1999 the world got its first taste of a brilliant new comedy. The show was top notch quality, far ahead of its time, with raunchy cleverness and a unique style of humor that many would come to mock (Matt Stone and Trey Parker) but which the fans loved. Though the critics labelled it a Simpsons knock-off, the fans knew this was something else, something new and exciting. Then Fox cancelled it after two seasons. I suppose viewers had to stop living in the dark ages and figure out that it was past the year 2000 and, yes, you could in fact say "penis" on TV. Fortunately they did figure this out and strong DVD sales prompted Fox to renew Family Guy for a third season.

The show came back with the The Thin White Line, and though it seemed a bit different from past episodes, it was still very good. It wasn't until season 5 that I really started to worry. By then I could see the seams of the show unraveling. It wasn't as funny, clever, and especially not as subtle as it used to be. It was getting worse, and as much as I wanted to deny that fact, I couldn't. Airport '07 stands out in my mind as particularly offensively awful with its making fun of disabled people. I knew the death knell had rung when the season finale Meet the Quagmires stole its entire plot right from season 3's Death Lives. Still, there was a tiny, glimmering bead of hope within me that the show would get better, a bead which was thoroughly crushed upon seeing Blue Harvest. Family Guy's shot at parodying Star Wars, the episode is so unfunny it makes me wonder if the Family Guy writers are not in fact manatees (all credit to Matt and Trey). Blue Harvest breaks no expectations with its completely banal, overextended jokes about trying to move furniture and its jokes about pedophilia (Ha ha, pedophilia! What a riot).

Looking back on the show, I can see there were many indications that it was worsening, the most prominent example being Stewie's character arc. Anyone wondering about when the show's quality was declining need look no further than at how flamboyantly gay Stewie is acting in any given episode. Beginning as a hilarious diabolical genius baby bent on world domination, I can think only that Stewie's slow but steady transformation into a Pinot Noir-sipping fashion fetishist art snob is the result of the occasional release of methane from Seth MacFarlane's ever expanding head.

It's sad how Family Guy went off the rails. In trying to watch the newer episodes I feel a painful knot in my stomach, my body's reflexive response to beholding total imaginative emptiness. At this point there is no way the show can relapse into goodness, forever being tainted by its last three seasons. Personally, I recommend taking Family Guy out behind the shed, then sending it to live on a nice farm somewhere. But hey, if you like lots of jabs at Disney's alleged antisemitism, fart jokes, and deafsploitation, then Family Guy is definitely the show for you.