Iron Man

An email from a friend contains what I thought was an insightful review of Iron Man. Here it is:

I enjoyed IRON MAN. Well, actually, I didn't enjoy Iron Man the hero -- or Iron Man the computer-generated special effect -- or even IRON MAN the movie as a whole -- but I loved watching Robert Downey Jr as the solipsistic Tony Stark, hellbent on reinventing himself as Iron Man: it's a funny and nuanced bit of business, beautifully handled by a brilliant comic actor. The best scenes are those in which Tony is alone in the garage-cum-laboratory -- alone except for JARVIS (and that sophisticated fire extinguisher that is seemingly made to do only one thing -- extinguish fires -- and just won't leave the stage until it's had the chance to fulfill its destiny as a fire extinguisher). My favorite line is Tonys's remark after being borne aloft -- magically -- by boots of his own design, skittering around the room, and then coming in for a wobbly two-point landing: "OK, I can fly." He's just performed a technological miracle, but his mind is racing ahead to the next challenge, the next step in becoming Iron Man. He's a genius who takes no pleasure in his genius, he's too busy looking ahead to the next thing. This is all conveyed to the audience in a line or two and in an attitude, with a brilliant economy and flair. (I also liked the funny-tender scene in which Pepper Potts helps Tony replace the little "arc-reactor cup thing" that keeps his heart beating. I liked it because it was intimate in a yucky way, yucky in an intimate way, and the partly improvised dialogue both funny and sexy, in the old-fashioned, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, screwball comedy style. And because it was something fun and unexpected that arose out of the material -- and, in the end, proved anything but gratuitous to the storyline.) I read online that the sequel is scheduled for April 2010; I hope that now that all the throat-clearing exposition has been accomplished the writers can craft a really good movie out the world they've created, the way they did for SPIDER-MAN 2 (the Dr. Octopus chapter, which was the best of the lot, don't you think?). They just can't forget that what is really compelling about Iron Man is the actor in the suit, not the suit itself, or the physical punishment it can take . . .

Albino alligator

No special reason for this post, except that I thought this was a fine photo of an albino alligator. The alligator is named White Diamond, and he grew up in Florida and is now on display in Germany. He (or she?) almost looks as if he’s carved out of ivory. I was reminded of the legend that alligators (perhaps albino) dwell in the sewers of New York City, and of the 1996 film Albino Alligator, which made only $350,000 in the US despite the efforts of Gary Sinise, Matt Dillon, William Fichtner, Viggo Mortensen, Joe Mantegna, and Faye Dunaway.

Days of Heaven

Days of Heaven has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. When it played a few months ago at the Film Forum in New York, Jenn and I went to see it and noticed Willem Dafoe in the audience. I was amazed at how well I remembered practically every scene, including seemingly random images like the silvery, shivery catspaw that brushes for a second across the surface of a pond. The eerie voiceover by Linda Manz — 16 years old but playing a somewhat younger girl — is the heart of the movie, as Robert Ebert pointed out in a sensitive essay. I was pleased that he was so struck by one of the same passages that struck me, when Linda (the character shares the actress’s name) is escaping with her grown brother and his lover on a raft. Linda’s curiosity has survived the traumas she’s seen, but any empathy for strangers is gone, or at least dimmed.

The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on the river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before. And you could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn't see what they were doing. They were probably calling for help or something or they were trying to bury somebody or something.

In the last scene, Linda has escaped in the early morning from a heartless foster home and has met a new friend by the railroad tracks. Linda has nothing and no one, but she is concerned about her friend.

This girl she didn’t know where she was goin' or what she was gonna do. She didn't have no money or nothin'. Maybe she'd meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.

I got a little teary when I saw that scene, just as I did the first time more than twenty years ago.

On the Beach

On Saturday night Jenn and I watched On the Beach on Turner Classic Movies. I had read the book long ago, but didn’t remember much about it, except that it was set in Australia, where survivors of a global nuclear war are waiting for the fallout to reach them. The movie was extraordinarily powerful but never sensational. Though the premise is the complete annihilation of humanity, you don’t see even a single dead body throughout the film. On the Beach stars Gregory Peck, as an American submarine captain stationed in Australia. His wife and two children died while he was at sea, a fact he hasn’t been able to accept. Peck falls for an aging but attractive Ava Gardner, whose weakness for alcohol has been reinforced by the approaching end of the world. Anthony Perkins is a young Australian naval officer (his light accent seems to come and go) married to a high-strung wife. Fred Astaire, in his first nonmusical role, plays a brooding, lonely scientist who shows enthusiasm only for his Italian sports car. It’s a longish movie without much action, which leaves the viewer to think about what is going to happen to these characters. The American sub sets on a mission to the north to sample the air in hopes that the intensity of the fallout has diminished. It hasn’t. On the way back, the sub stops at the deserted port of San Francisco, where the view from the periscope shows nothing living on the hilly streets. A sailor whose home was San Francisco deserts the sub and swims ashore, knowing he will have only a few days to live. Next morning, in a weirdly funny scene, the sub raises its periscope a few feet away from the dock where the sailor is peacefully fishing. Captain Peck has a brief, friendly conversation with the deserter before the submarine cruises away. The most striking thing about On the Beach may be the calmness with which the characters face the end. They go to their jobs, throw parties, take care of their families, go fishing, and even have love affairs. They may argue a little about whose fault it was that the bombs fell, but the arguments peter out pretty soon. There’s no longer any point to arguing. My limited experience with disaster leads me to think this is just how people would react. I once took off on a flight from Los Angeles that circled a couple of times over the ocean, then returned to the airport for an emergency landing. The cabin attendant repeated the emergency landing instructions with her voice cracking. I’m sure many of us thought these were our last moments, but nobody yelled or screamed or carried on. With the end of the cold war, people stopped worrying about this kind of global catastrophe. But with poorly guarded nuclear devices and materials scattered around the world, each of us is in at least as much danger from a smaller attack that could still erase a city and render vast territories uninhabitable for generations. It’s not a cheery subject for the campaign trail, but I hope the presidential candidates have given some thought to it.