So far the only 2008 movies I’ve seen in the theater were 1) The Spiderwick Chronicles, a kid’s movie I saw with kids, one of whom got more than a little scared (he was scared of the big CGI thing; I was scared of Nick Nolte). 2) Iron Man, which answers that deep need, introjected at the age I first learned to read, to see comicbook heroes on the big screen.
The film, the first made by Marvel Comics own production company, sets a standard that perhaps the other Marvel Comics-to-movie franchises will follow, which is to say: it’s essentially like reading the comic book. The Spiderman series has moments that comply with that formula (particularly in the first one) but the problem they’ve encountered is extremely ham-fisted writers creating the "romantic interest." In the comics, you could skip those panels if, like me, you were about eight years old and girls were basically somebody else’s problem (and women, with like breasts and stuff, were kind of embarrassing). But in the film, you have to sit through Kirsten Dunst’s earnest efforts to inhabit a vision of Mary Jane that has nothing to do with the snappy, sassy, guy’s gal that Marvel created. It’s woesomely bad, in other words. Iron Man fares better with Gwyneth Paltrow as the gal Friday that even guy’s guys (who had moms too) realize that even heroes might need, and if she’s got to pine, at least let her pine prettily (and snappily). That’s pretty much it. Robert Downey Jr. is a man who, whatever his failings may be, understands that the point of being on screen is to be entertaining. And he does that well. And Jeff Bridges is sleazy and nasty and uses one helluva voice.
Will I see Ed Norton assay Bruce Banner? Who knows, as a kid I easily tired of The Hulk’s “me Hulk, you human” antics so it’s not like I’m eager for the treat. It’s typical of American tastes in general (which I seem to be always on the outs with, even when I dumb down to the easily consumable popular stuff) that there will be two films of the musclebound numbskull before even one bona fide effort to give us Cap Am . . . or Thor. Do Thor right, I dare ya, I double dare ya. The after-the-credits ending of Iron Man gives us a glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (which is just a fun idea), and supposedly we will eventually get The Avengers, in some incarnation that might include Cap and Thor, and of course Iron Man, so, we’ll see.
But this, like the amazing quality of toy action figures since the ‘90s at least, is all more than a bit “too little too late” for this wizened ol’ superhero fancier. I can take heart that my grandkids will have it better, I suppose. But will they really? I remember how wondrous it was to walk into a news stand selling comic books -- there was a store in Wilmington that had all the comics in slots filling an entire wall. I wouldn’t trade the rapt wonder of standing in front of that wall for the first time with much, certainly not with sitting in a movie house to see whatever version of those heroes Hollywood, in its infinite effort to pursue the ersatz, makes available to the ticket-buying millions.
3) Son of Rambow, a Brit movie about kids making movies which should have been better than it was -- it went for treacly when it could’ve gone for sharp (when’s the last time we had a true child visionary, other than that kid that sees dead people?), and 4) Then She Found Me -- one of those female midlife crisis movies, via Helen Hunt, boasting a surprisingly effective Bette Midler (boasting the kind of “work done” that Hunt obviously eschews) and a good dramatic outburst from Colin Firth as a harried single dad, and which, in the end, makes the viewer want to go out and adopt a Chinese baby girl . . . anyway.
When I was just a little boy
I threw away all of my action toys
while I became obsessed with Operation
With hearts and minds and certain glands
you gotta learn to keep a steady hand
and thus began my morbid fascination
–Andrew Bird, “Dark Matter” (2007)
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