Why Iron Man 2 is Terrible

Alright. Running out of steam. Just saw Iron Man 2 last night. Hated it on the basis of a muddled plot. Here we go:

Iron Man2 was written by Justin Theroux and directed by John Favreau. The film continues the story from its predecessor, Iron Man, and includes too many diluted plot obstacles for our protagonist, Tony Stark, Iron Man (let’s just count ‘em, just for fun…): 1) Mr. Stark is dying from an adverse chemical reaction to the element that powers his shiny suit and keeps him alive. 2) Stark’s known tendency for excess is amplified by his knowledge of his impending death and is causing publicity problems. 3) The U.S. government wants to legally obtain his suits to use their technology for the armed forces. 4) Stark’s friend, Lt. James Rhodes, desires to obtain these suits for the government. 5) A Russian scientist’s son, Ivan Vanko, seeks a vague revenge upon Tony Stark, or more specifically, the legacy of his father. 6) Stark’s commercial competitor, Justin Hammer, breaks Vanko out of prison because he, too, wants a piece of these magic suits to sell to the government.



Wow. That’s a lot of plot for a running time of just over two hours.

Maybe I’m just not a comic book person… I enjoyed the Nolan Batman films. And Sin City…. no, this one’s just bad.

It’s gotta be tough coming up a with a sequel to a comic book film adaptation, though. With the first film, you have the origin story, which usually contains the hero overcoming some obstacle (usually himself/herself), fighting off a villain or villains, and then riding off into the sunset. But a sequel needs to have the protagonist going through more obstacles, whether these are internal or external. It looks like Favreau and Theroux went hog wild with these obstacles. We’ve got two internal problems for Stark, and four external problems. Instead of focusing on two or three problems for the main character to overcome, the plot gets diluted by introducing a host of issues for Stark. This limits the amount of time the film spends on each narrative hurdle, and makes each one seem less important to the overall story. This results in a film where the plot seems simultaneously rushed and watered down. Maybe it was intended to make the viewer feel the strains of main character Stark. But I wasn’t stressed out for him. I was bored. Granted, I did not have unrealistic expectations about being “moved” by this film. I just wanted a ‘lil mild entertainment. Failure.

Good Books and Bad Movies, Bad Books and Good Movies (Part II)

So from the previous blog, we understand that some books with a strong narrative voice make bad movies when this voice is not somehow included in the film adaptation. However, many movies are able to capture the narrative voice. This, combined with other visual and narrative elements, could result in an overall better story than the book. To examine how this works, we’ll take a look at the movie Fight Club and the book that it was adapted from, which shares the same name.

Fight Club is a book written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996 and adapted into a movie (director: David Fincher, screenplay: Jim Uhls) in 1999. For brevity I will absolutely skip any plot summary (just stop now and go watch it before I ruin it for you). While I can’t honestly claim that the book is BAD (much of the dialogue is extracted directly from the book), the movie does a far better job of telling the story. Let’s take a look at why:

Like Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, Fight Club’s story is driven by the narrator’s voice. But unlike BoC’s film adaptation, Fincher decided to use this in his film as voice over narration. This is much easier to do with Fight Club since the narrative voice belongs to a character in the story, in this case, the protagonist of the tale. This narration makes extra sense for the story of Fight Club, which is literally the story of an internal battle within the Narrator.

But what makes Fight Club more compelling as a film are the visual elements that are unattainable within the text. For instance, there are several moments in the film where a frame or two of Tyler Durden’s image appears in the background of a scene. This accomplishes two things that are not available in the book: First, it mimics the actual splicing that Durden uses in the story while he is working as a projectionist (splicing pornographic images into children's films). Second, it foreshadows the onset of Durden as a split personality of the Narrator, which is not revealed until later in the film/book. Limited to text only, the book is unable to include this explicitly visual component.



Similar to this, the visual difference between actors Edward Norton and Brad Pitt cannot be adequately accounted for in the text. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the text of Fight Club falls short on describing these two characters. The film, therefore, tells the story better simply because the experience of actually seeing these two physically different actors would lead a viewer, much more than a reader, to believe that they are in fact separate people, which is necessary for the story to have its element of surprise.

So a successful film adaptation depends on many factors (choice of director, actors, screenplay writers), but most importantly depends on the type of story being told. A good adaptation first requires a good source. A successful book becomes so from creating a compelling narrative, just a good story. This narrative vision must somehow be captured by those that wish to transfer it to film.

Three parts Coke, one part Budweiser, one part... cassette tape?

Yep, that’s right. Stir. Enjoy.

This blog is in response to Clay Greer’s two blogs that cover capitalism in Falling Down and greed in There Will Be Blood, and has nothing to do with those two films.

However, the focus on the themes of greed and capitalism in Clay’s blogs stuck in my head and rattled around in there while I watched the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) with a friend who had never seen it. Briefly: Blade Runner is a movie that takes place in a futuristic and very Japanese Los Angeles. It centers around a character named Deckard (Harrison Ford) whose job it is to track and terminate artificially created humans (called Replicants) when they stray from their duties of off-world superhuman manual labor.

I have seen this movie several times, but this time watching it I had the above mentioned themes of capitalism and greed in mind, and noticed lots of not so subtle product placements within the film. First, a giant electronic billboard displaying the classic Coke logo shows up three times in scenes depicting Deckard being transported in a flying car. The repetition of this product placement seems to say, “Like that flying car? Well, Coke paid for it.”


There is also a chase scene in which neon Budweiser signs appear behind Deckard as he chases a replicant through a bar. “When you’ve had a long day running down artificial humans through L.A., why not settle down to a nice cold Budweiser?”


And the final fight scene of the film between Deckard and a Replicant named Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) atop a not-so-futuristic building includes a slightly out of focus TDK neon sign in the background of several shots. “Dramatic end of film fight scene brought to you by TDK, fine purveyor of all your cassette tape needs (it’s still 1982, folks, no CD’s or mp3’s yet…).”


Although these product placements no doubt earned the film some extra cash, which in turn probably helped fuel the production of the film (successful sci-fi has never been cheap, and the flying car scenes which showoff the landscape/cityscape of futuristic L.A. still look believable, nice work for 1982 and no CGI), I can’t help but wonder if there is more being said within the content of the film by including these product placements. For instance, does a film that depicts a culture materialistic enough to artificially create human beings benefit from capitalistic product placements within the film? Perhaps Ridley Scott uses these product placements to say something about such a society. He could be warning his viewers of how close our reality is to such a society. Or, he could just simply be allowing a few corporations to pay for his expensive science fiction film. You decide.

And away!

Good Books and Bad Movies, Bad Books and Good Movies (Part I)

“Oh, did you like that movie? Then you should read the book.”

I have heard this plenty of times, and in my experience, it seems that most folks who have seen a movie based on a book that they have read prefer the book to the movie. But why do people feel this way? Is there more information included in the book that can’t fit into two hours (or more… Hollywood is digging the epics these days…) of screen time? Shouldn’t the movie, as a mostly visual medium, suck the viewer into the story world with more efficiency? Are words on a page more powerful or compelling than the combination of images on a screen and audio out of speakers?

To understand these questions, let’s take a look at two different movies adapted from books. Here in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we will take arms with the bookworms and look at Breakfast of Champions, a great book, but a teeeeerible movie.

Breakfast of Champions is a book written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in 1973, and adapted into a movie by Alan Rudolph (director/screenplay) bearing the same name in 1999. The book and the movie share the same plot (don’t laugh, some adaptations do not share the same plot): Dwayne Hoover (played terribly by Bruce Willis) is a successful used car salesman in Mid-West America who is on the brink of insanity when the writings of a visiting science fiction writer, Kilgore Trout (played by Albert Finney), push him to violent madness.




The movie does a decent job of handling the ensuing craziness of one of the main characters, Dwayne Hoover. The shots of this character “going insane” include overlays of some kind of lava lamp effect, unconventional camera angles, and audio of voices that appear to be in his head. However, Bruce Willis was a terrible choice for the role because of his history of being typecast in the role of an action hero. I kept waiting for him to blow something up or look sternly off camera… But let’s take a look at how the movie compares to the book.

The first thing a viewer will notice about Breakfast of Champions that differs from the book is that the movie is missing the crude illustrations that Vonnegut includes in his book. In the preface for his book, Vonnegut plainly spells out his motivation: “This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself… I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly – to insult the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ to scrawl pictures of a flag and a asshole and a lot of other things with a felt tipped pen” (Vonnegut, 4-5).





Vonnegut’s crude and simple drawings add to the satire and humor of his book and Rudolph neglected to somehow incorporate this into his film (granted, this would be tough… overlays of felt-tip pen drawings on different shots? nah…). However, the biggest gap between the book and the movie is the lack of narrative voice. In this book, Vonnegut claims to be trying to “clear [his] head of all the junk in there… trying to make [his] head as empty as it was when [he] was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago” (Vonnegut, 5). So, in the book (like all of his books), Vonnegut has the undeniable narrative authority; the reader is always clear that this is Vonnegut’s story, and that he is telling it. In Rudolph’s movie adaptation, there is no narration. Granted, this is easier when the narrator of a story happens to be a main character in the story (read/see these successful book/movies: No Country for Old Men, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

So books with a strong author-based narrative voice may not make good movies because this narration has no place in film except as a voice-over narration, which could be hard to explain to viewers when that voice does not belong to a character in the story. However, this does not mean that all books tell better stories than all films. In the next blog, we will take a look at how a movie can outdo a book in storytelling.


print credits: Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Random House, 1973.

photo credits:
1)https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUa2l9bCXC0t6LhmQ8Cihx01IsNrxEtfObKCd8JcfrhSzdDy3xnXMtJIUUGjPCJIcXxmLtPaAi7EqTo-Bfvv8__fDlG2X72Kg0ZpCBicorJcfjoMNUzxU_-QBatEF1_M3xMtGu7HwdFdE/s400/Breakfast+of+Champions+%233.jpg

2) https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUg1W-t6LtLVF1Fc6eyuW5YmnAQrgc3d9kyWZ0cuBof14wAOyMpgvRaSTP6afh65cvsTFmaxe8DfjaTCyztMObaSCyhMfjF6PGUVJIWvOIWCu5t8DvOHcZEgXaY6nvpiE6WwA-MIJg/s400/vonnegutchart.jpg)

Intensity and Apathy in Jarmusch's Down by Law

I am torn: We could call it intensity and apathy. Or we could call it intense apathy… Or apathetic intensity… Take your pick, this movie has got plenty of it.

Jim Jarmusch’s film Down by Law centers on two different New Orleans low-lifes (Zack and Jack) who are both duped (by different folks and in different ways) into taking the fall for a crime they did not commit. Zack and Jack end up in the same cell together, and the rest of the film focuses on their time in prison (with an Italian named Roberto for comic relief) and their unlikely escape.

Although there is little action in the film, the movie maintains an intense feeling (all black and white, grimy sets, long quiet shots, and sparse background music) while Zack and Jack respond to everything that happens to them with an overwhelming sense of apathy.

After the opening title sequence (which briefly introduces our two leading men), there is a scene in which Zack’s girlfriend is outrageously throwing his personal belongings around. She smashes his records, claiming that she “is completely finished with (Zack).” She asks him why he “can’t stay at one (radio) station a while,” which informs the viewer that he is more than likely an out of work DJ. However, throughout Zack’s girlfriend’s rant, Zack remains docile in a sitting position, seemingly just casually waiting for this rant to be over. He certainly shows no signs of wanting to save his current relationship. In fact, the only point at which Zack rises from his position is to stop his girlfriend from throwing his shoes out the door: “Not the shoes. Not the shoes,” he says. So Zack does care about something, and it turns out to be his shoes: a practical man, perhaps. His girlfriend struggles with him for possession of the shoes, yelling, “Come on hit me motherfucker!” She seems to just want Zack to show some kind of passion, and since he has no passion to work and no passion for her, maybe she can get him angry enough to show some sign of emotion. However, she fails, and Zack calmly tells her: “I guess it’s over between us, alright?” So his girlfriend’s intensity is met by Zack’s total apathy.

This same apathetic response shows up in the next scene, but this time it is Jack who seems to have no worries or cares. This scene shows Jack, the pimp, counting a small stack of cash while a nude prostitute, Bobbie, maintains a one-way conversation with him. Like Zack, Jack is apathetic and detached from the dirty world around him. Bobbie tells him that he “doesn’t understand any kind of people,” and that he “sure doesn’t understand women at all, and a pimp is supposed to at least understand women.” She tells Jack that “if [he] was a good pimp he would’ve hit her by now, or done something.” So like Zack’s girlfriend, Bobbie is unable to elicit any emotional response from him. In fact, it is clear that Jack has not paid any attention to Bobbie’s speech, but only responds by stating, “You sure can talk, can’t you baby?” At one point in the scene when Jack is prepping himself in the mirror, Bobbie even holds up a loaded gun at Jack’s back (which the viewer can assume he sees based on the position of the mirror in the background), which also results in no response from Jack. Bobbie just flops her arm back on the bed, still holding the gun, but gives up on getting any rise out of Jack.

So the film’s introduction to the two main characters shows them much in same light: unresponsive, detached, and apathetic to the serious and dirty world around them.

Sound and Color in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic

One way a filmmaker can make a movie more effective is through the use of sound and color. To understand how this works, let’s take a look at one scene in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.

The Life Aquatic is about an oceanographer named Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) that has hit a low point in his career and decides to seek revenge on an animal called the “jaguar shark” that attacked and killed his best friend and fellow crew member, Esteban. In this scene, Zissou’s ship has been overrun by pirates.



The scene begins with Zissou bound, blindfolded, and on his knees along with the rest of his crew. The scene cuts from the camera in front of Zissou, to different shots of the backs of Zissou and his crew. The film shows these different shots from behind again, but in rapid succession, accompanied by several indecipherable voices whispering. This way of presenting the quick shots with whispering illustrates the panic and hopelessness that the crew feels in their predicament. To further drive the point home, Anderson employs a bluish tint over all these shots, and all of the crew is wearing some form of blue (the crew in their uniforms, Zissou in his bathrobe). The blue tint to these shots could be used to show the passive and subordinate position of Zissou’s crew. It could also be used to match the blue of the ocean and the sky in the background of most of the shots, signaling that the crew believes they will be somehow lost at sea (whether shot or thrown overboard).



Directly after the whispers, there is a quick jump to a shot of Zissou in the water from earlier in the film when his friend Esteban is killed by the jaguar shark. This shot focuses on Zissou’s face, which is described earlier by another character in the film as Zissou having “the crazy eye.” This shot is quick, only a couple of frames, but when the film returns to Zissou on the boat the blue tint is gone and has been replaced by a brighter, orange tint. Through Anderson’s use of color, the viewer is led to believe that something has snapped in Zissou, and his passive (blue) attitude towards the pirates is now replaced with an aggressive (orange) attitude.

Zissou immediately bites through his hand bindings and stands up, telling the pirates, “I said get your ass the hell off my boat.” He punches a pirate, steals his gun, and throws him overboard. Then the audio of the action on screen is stripped away and replaced with the loud dirty guitars of Iggy and the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy.” Zissou makes his way to the front of the boat while firing several rounds at the pirates. However, the viewer only hears the background music of Iggy and the Stooges. The only audio that the audience hears from the action on the screen in this scene is one gunshot from Zissou that he uses to save an intern crew member, that intern’s one yell when his dead attacker’s machete slices into his shoulder, and a pirate’s exploding grenade. The rest of the shootout’s audio is replaced with the song “Search and Destroy.” Although the viewer only hears a few sounds of the actual action taking place, the energy of the shootout is still effective by letting the noisy rock-and-roll almost exclusively dominate the audio of the scene.


photo credits:
(http://www.chud.com/articles/articles/2832/1/DVD-REVIEW-LIFE-AQUATIC-WITH-STEVE-ZISSOU-THE-SE/Page1.html)

(http://blog.clarkhuot.com/tag/crazy-eye/)