David Denby makes an interesting point in his review of Iron Man (here, for how ever long it is posted) and it’s been bothering me ever since. He seems to have struck at the heart of what’s wrong with most comic book adaptations, and perhaps only an art mongering intellectual type who probably never read comics as a kid could have noticed it. He notes that Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark, is great only when unarmored. When he dons steel, we can no longer see his face, and the film loses its main attraction. Worse, when he faces off at the end against villain Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), “they disappear into their armor and battle like two oversized beetles.”

I realize now that this anonymity of battling bruisers that makes up the last 40 minutes of most big budget comic book adaptations has been what’s bored me about them. Yet these sequences are probably the most faithful elements adapted from the comics, at least in spirit. As a kid, I found the Marvel battle sequences dynamic and cinematic; as cinema I find them a bore, with nothing really at stake as two masked, mostly CGI figures swing at each other to standstills.

And I had high hopes for the adaptation of Iron Man, because from the trailer the film appeared to be one of the closest, more accurate adaptations of the original comic, unlike with most of the other Marvel men who have come to the screen. And the first half of Iron Man is accurate, as proven by a refresher course in the series provided by Iron Man: Beneath the Armor, (Del Rey, 224 pages, $19.95, ISBN 978-0345506153), a tie-in book about the character by Portland, Oregon movie reviewer, novelist, and comic book writer Andy Mangels. Mr. Mangels was also the editor of a fetish magazine called In Uniform, and Tony Stark’s encasing but self-sustaining garb is probably the ultimate uniform. But Stark’s sartorial splendor is much better read about in the comic than seen on the screen, where it and its wearer are reduced to animated cartoon characters thanks to the CGI.

Mangels’s book is an excellent survey of the Iron Man mythos, from the character’s introduction in Tales of Suspense issue No. 39 in December of 1962, through the numerous transformations in artists, villains, and the uniforms (they get sleeker), and even including Stark’s bout with alcoholism, a characteristic “tragic flaw” with which Marvel’s masters liked to humanize their superheroes. Mangel’s book benefits from frank interview snippets with Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, who established the character in the first story, though not with input from the late Don Heck and Jack Kirby, who drew the comics (along with Steve Ditko for a phase), and whose own writing skills were crucial to the creation of this and other Marvel figures, as Mangels shows (for example, Lieber says he would give Heck a script with a beginning and end and Heck would fill in the middle).

Another nice thing about Mangels’s book is that it is a movie tie in that doesn’t tie into the movie, which goes barely mentioned and wholly unillustrated. The book is not an excuse to praise the artistry of the film. Though Mangels does some sociological scene setting, one wishes that he had gone in for more in the way of sociological or thematic analysis (what does Iron Man’s prophylactic encasement mean), but the author’s depth of knowledge of comic books makes up for this absence in its vastness. He seems to know everything about the 70-year history of the format and is able to trace antecedents to Iron Man in earlier publications. I wouldn’t say skip the movie and read the book, for after all, the first half of Iron Man is fairly good for what it is, but Mangels’s book offers a salutary compendium that shows just how little of the comic books ever really make it into the movies.

Not to get all sociological on you, but I’ve noticed a few trends in movie content of late. The least significant, and most boring, is the college-set comedy-drama, a sub-set that includes the “ironically” titled Smart People, with Juno star Ellen Page, The Visitor , the sluggish, airless new drama from the director of The Station Agent , and Starting Out in the Evening .

But a more interesting new trend is the “quarantine” movie. This is a film that posits the arrival of some aggressive and murderous agent or a grave disease that necessitates the isolation of a building, town, or country. The recent, derivative action film Doomsday kicked off the trend, with its premise that Scotland is the sealed off land of disease spreaders, within whose walls no one knows what goes on. And there is even a comedy variation, in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay , the sequel to the popular (on DVD, anyway) pot comedy, although the humor is more cloacal than cannabis oriented, and the boys only spend about five minutes of screen time actually in Guantanamo Bay.

A forthcoming thriller is even called Quarantine and concerns an apartment building in Los Angeles sealed off by the CDC with firemen and a news crew trapped inside (this film comes out in October). Finally, there is the A&E channel remake of Michael Crichton’s tale, The Andromeda Strain, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott, starring Benjamin Bratt and Christa Miller, and to be aired in late May. The four hour mini series updates the Crichton novel (filmed once before) with some X-Files governmental paranoia, but is sluggish and talky, though the production values are high for a TV show. It lacks the suspense of the similar Outbreak. ; Blindness, meanwhile, has a high pedigree: from a novel by Jose Saramago , and directed by Fernando Meirelles, it stars indie standbys Julianne Moore, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Mark Ruffalo as residents of a location afflicted by an epidemic of blindness that leads to a vast quarantine (it comes out in September).

Why the sudden interest in enforced confinement? The subject is easy to trace as a cinematic trope, at least back to recent zombie movies such as 28 Weeks Later and Land of the Dead and more obscure recent movies such as Right At Your Door . On the higher ideological level, perhaps the theme is born of post 9/11 anxieties, in which Americans suddenly feel isolated, no longer jet-setters but lepers and pariahs on the global stage. Or maybe the theme speaks to a fear of being reduced to Medieval living, as the economy tanks and a feral society seems just around the corner.

Perhaps the theme is born of guilt. The American imperial juggernaut is out of control, and the people are either indifferent to it or helpless to stop it. A guilt-induced wish to simply withdraw into a shell may be reflected in these films, with the uneasiness of such isolation reflected in the fact that such tales are rooted in the horror and sci-fi genres.

A funny thing happened while I was watching Shine a Light.

I got bored.

This was an unexpected reaction to the latest film by our “greatest living director,” surely a sobriquet that must be retired in the face the rising careers of Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and of a film that spends a good deal of its iMax screen time showing the wiggling of a 64-year old man’s anorectic buttocks in your face.

But how did our greatest living director and the world’s greatest rock and roll band manage to bore us? Martin Scorsese lover of music, editor of Woodstock, maker of numerous other films about music including the Band’s farewell concern movie; The Rolling Stones, whose longevity is testimony to their energy and persistence, and to the iconic frieze of their early catchy and moody hits, whose subject matter was so often not top 40 material. In the end, the only interesting parts of the film are the very beginning (quasi b&w documentary footage measuring the chaos of organizing the shoot) and the very end (a patented Scorsese POV “rabbit warren” take of someone leaving the stage and passing though a multitude of sycophants, including Scorsese twice), both seemingly faked.

Everything seems to work right on the film. Much money was spent. Many lights were rigged. The cameramen, led by Robert Richardson, manage to create an intimacy on stage, and we feel we are there, just a few inches from Charlie Watts. There is even a pissy moment between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards during a song (though someone else had to point it out to me). The film may in fact be educational to budding rock musicians who can alternatve studies of this film with cached episodes of Rock Star.

But given this technical coup and the prestige of everyone involved, why was I so bored after about the third song?

I think that there are two reasons. Scorsese didn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the Rolling Stones beyond what we already know, which is that he loves their ’60s movies and often uses “Gimme Shelter” as a signature song. Sure, he intersperses old interview excepts of the band, making statements than that are “ironical” now in light of their success and septuagenarian progress, but those moments turn out to be kitschy and obvious.

The other problem is the Rolling Stones themselves. When all is said and done, it’s just a rock and roll band. They get up, do 18 songs and walk off. Sure, there’s some smoke and flashing lights, limp gestures towards the sort of arena rock that hypnotizes the young, but the songs are discreet units, a mix of old hits, played slightly different to relieve the band’s boredom with them, and execrable covers or newer songs that sound like strained efforts to come up with a tune, of any kind, now. Instead of on the stage of the Beacon playing for their contemporary, Bill Clinton, and the group of uniform metronomic young women, part staff and part scions of the elites who could afford the tickets, ringing the stage, the Stones should be off in a smokey road house bar somewhere out on 101, where Jagger’s chicken wing dancing and pointing and other terpsichorean ticks will still seem fresh.

The key flaw in the film is the play list. The songs aren’t organized in a particularly interesting or emotionally elevating manner (and the Stones are continually at a lost at how to end them), plus they bring on the occasional guest musician, such as the White Stripes guy who provides eye candy and little else, Christina Aguilera, a belter suited to a better genre of music, and Buddy Guy, trotted out so that the Stones can pay living homage to the music that influenced them.

I was also confused by the iMax presentation. I’ve only seen one previous iMax movie, at the local science museum, about polar explorations, and there the screen was the size of a dam; at the theater where I saw it, the “Regal” Bridgeport, it just seemed to be a regular sized screen with an especially loud soundtrack. Someone needs to write me and tell me what I am suppose to be getting out of the iMax experience.

But despite its high tech presentation, Scorsese’s film fails to the the one thing its title announces, shine a light on the phenomenon of the Rolling Stones.

I get a lot of questions…. (not enough though, keep sending!) One of the questions I get asked often enough is;”where should I take my car to get serviced?” So I figured I would start telling you… So for the next few weeks, I am going to travel from shop to shop, find out what the rates are, who is the best, and who is down right bad… So I will be able to tell you here, where to get an alignment, oil change, engine repair, machine shoped, and car dyno. And even recommend some good parts stores for getting the job done yourself, right, and the first time!

IMS Electronics Recycling is holding a free public electronics recycling event on Saturday, April 19, from 9am-5pm at their Vancouver location (address and map below). What qualifies as e-waste, you ask? Computers, monitors, televisions…to find out if what you need to get rid of is considered e-waste, call IMS at 360.750.8883.

2401 St. Francis Lane
Vancouver, WA 98660

View Larger Map

Believe it or not, despite the inconsistent silence of this blog, I have indeed seen some recent films. As a group, however, they prove interesting only from the auteurist perspective.

Take Jumper for example. In its advertising, it touts the director Doug Liman, of The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, of which this film shares not an iota of their perhaps overrated talent. Jumper is about a guy who has the knack to teleport himself anywhere in the world, including the interior of bank vaults, which allows this teen to finance his self-education. It’s a somehow familiar premise, derived from the novel by Steven Gould, but rendered structurally inept in the script credited to David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls (only his third movie since his surprise, mysterious debut as the credited writer of Fight Club), and Simon Kinberg. There’s way too much backstory getting in the way of the plot, as Joe Bob might say, and there is a boring DaVinci Code - Nightwatch - Underworld component in which a cult of vicious Christians led by Samuel L. Jackson hunt down and kill all “jumpers” because “only God should have such power.” Nor is the teen-oriented love story worked out very well, with Rachel Bilson continually crabby in her demand for information from Hayden Christensen, continually mute to her on the subject of his power. And Christensen (who I kept thinking was going to be Ryan Phillippe or Justin Timberlake, probably because of that soft drink commercial where the singer is reeled in my sips on the fluid) is annoyingly passive for an action film hero, continually finding himself tied up or cornered by the bad guys.

As far as Liman’s work is concerned, it is clear now that The Bourne Ultimatum is the lesser of the three films in the series, and that from Smith on his films are descending into structural chaos, ultimately unsatisfying action films full of sound and flurry, but conveying nothing. In fact, the movie Jumper reminded me of most was the recent, execrable, lazy The Bucket List, with its similar jumping around among similar locations, though through the more conventional means of a Lear jet. Jumper leapt off the screens with the alacrity its main character employed to teleport himself out of danger. Unlikely as it seems, a Jumper 2 is in the works.

Doomsday is the third film from the interesting director Neil Marshall, whose previous Dog Soldiers and The Descent are stylish and original. As a Marshall film, it continues his concerns with professionals facing down implacable foes. As a movie movie, however, Doomsday is an anthology of maybe your favorite films, from Escape from New York to Road Warrior to 28 Days Later, and even The Lord of the Rings, vaguely, with Malcolm McDowell as an ersatz Gandalf or Saruman. The film comprises scenes of unabashed homage (if not downright theft), and the innovation of having a tough chick (played by the convincing Rhona Mitra) at the center is not so innovative after the many variations of Underworld and Resident Evil and their sequels.

Marshall’s Tarantino-esque magpie-ism may have been cleaning artistically but it calls into question what seemed the originality of his first two films. Dog Soldiers and The Descent remain valuable, however, for the force of their sheer filmmaking verve, a vigor weirdly diluted in the chaos of quotation that is Doomsday.

Drillbit Taylor is offered up (somewhat misleadingly) as a Judd Apatow comedy, which it is tangentially, as it comes from his producing hand, is written by Apatow crony Seth Rogen, and stars his wife, Leslie Mann. But this film, too, is an update of a sentimental ’80s favorite, My Bodyguard, which this film slyly acknowledges through a cameo by the earlier comedy’s bodyguard, Adam Baldwin. And in its use of a trio of teens who resemble the guys from Superbad, it comes across like an unofficial prequel to that movie.

Drillbit Taylor coasts on the charm of its bodyguard, Owen Wilson, who still has the power to carry a movie, and the intense interest some viewers will have in the subject of the bullying crisis, which the film takes to psychopathic extremes, almost suggesting that there is no real solution to the problem of bullying other than murder (which may be true). In any case, Drillbit Taylor is sadly not laugh-out-loud funny like that minor masterpiece Superbad but also isn’t as super bad as other reviewers have suggested.

88 Minutes is a film that sat on the shelf for a while (it is copyrighted 2007), and is one of those “real time” movies with a rather severe deadline for its hero: shrink-prof Al Pacino has been given 88 minutes to live by the proxy of a serial killer (Neal McDonough) he helped convict. Suspects and friends who help or hinder him in his short term quest include Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski , Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Benjamin McKenzie.

88 Minutes is an enjoyable little thriller with a terrific cast that is probably best suited for the small screen, where director Jon Avnet has his roots, and whose style he cannot throw off, despite making five features thus far. In its emphasis on the partnership of unlikely allies it is consistent with his earlier output but lacks the visual distinction or originality that the material invites.

Also from the shelf comes Chapter 27 (also 2007), a film with very little reason to be. For some reason writer and director J.P. Schaefer,whose first film credit this is, thought it would be interesting to explore the psychology of Mark David Chapman (Jared Leto), who shot John Lennon (unseen here) in 1980. It’s not. Watching a crazy person enact and interact with his internal terrors for 84 minutes is neither edifying nor kind to the memory of the slain Beatle.

It’s easy to see why Leto might be drawn to the project. It enabled him to pull a De Niro and alter his body image for the nonce (though the poster rather exaggerates the amount of Chapmanesque tonnage he put on). And for Lindsay Lohan, who plays a fictional Lennon groupie who shows Chapman the ropes outside the Dakota, and who is touching in the role (surprisingly so, probably, to her detractors, but not to those supporters who have stuck with her through the haze of distorting publicity), it was a convenient assignment: some seven scenes in locations agreeably close to her own Manhattan digs (though I suggest that LL not do another assassination-theme film at least for a little while). Chapman may be worthy of deep psychology exploration (and there is a competing film about him, released in 2006), but he is the killer of a cultural hero and the sneaking sympathy for him that the film reveals is offensive.

I was curious to see Vantage Point because it was the first “presidential assassination” film to come out in a long time (I can think of In the Line of Fire in ‘93, though the series Prison Break recently dwelt on the subject), partially because it seemed like an odd time to proffer the subject of a presidential killing, right in the middle of a disputations election campaign. The paranoid in me wonders if the media masters were trying to prime us for some candidate elimination, the way several assassination movies came out prior to the death of JFK. But Vantage Point proved to be more a thriller version of a “web of life” film, with the film (no president is killed) at first following the viewpoints of several witnesses of an incident in a public square in Spain, in serial order before backtracking to the next witness, whose segment adds more complexity, until the film settles into a Bourne-style chase film (it’s directed by Pete Travis, who comes from TV, as does credited writer Barry Levy). Then by coincidence I received the new Atlantic which briefly turned into a fan magazine, with a cover story on Britney Spears and the paparazzi, and a terrific essay by Ross Douthat on Hollywood elites’ obsession with ’70s paranoia films and the failure of the recent spate of Iraq films, a piece that seemed to directly address my worries, before going on to an intriguing explanation for the low box office temperature of Iraq dramas.

“The age of George W. Bush and the Iraq War meshes much more neatly with the industry’s ’70s nostalgia,” he writes. “Just not quite as neatly, perhaps, as Hollywood seems to think. As we’ve seen, the broad-brush similarities between the two decades have been used to impressive cinematic effect. But because the two decades don’t map precisely onto one another, the ’70s revival is more successful, both artistically and at the box office, when it’s intimated than when it’s made explicit. And the closer a movie hews to real-world events, the greater the strain of making the Vietnam-era mood fit the Iraq-era facts.”

Read the story, then hear the author interviewed.

Thinking today about the Oscars and the Coen Brothers I began reflecting on the Chigurh character in No Country for Old Men. I recall reading in one of the early reviews that Chigurh (who obviously comes from the Cormac McCarthy novel) is unique to the Coen Brothers’ filmography, a figure of malevolent evil that tilts the rest of the film, indeed their output, off balance. Or maybe I wrote that in this blog and no one else made such an observation. In any case, whenever a character or theme seems to appear out of nowhere it is enlightening to look at the filmmaker’s whole filmography and see if there are antecedents lurking in early shadows. And Chigurh turns out to be a purified, reduced, concentrated form of a character who has appeared in Coen films since their first feature,

I began by comparing Chigurh to, of all people, The Stranger (Sam Elliott) in The Big Lebowski. The cowboy isn’t evil, but he is omnipresent. He is the over-voice, the color commentator, (maybe even the shaper of fate like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9). In other words, he has the same preternatural knowledge of other people’s doings and motivations as a serial killer does in a 13 movie, and if Chigurh resembles anyone at root, it is Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal. And in fact the Coens have blended narrator and killer on occasion. PI Loren Visser (M. Emmett Walsh) in Blood Simple is both storyteller, prime mover, and malevolent force. Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls (”Tex” Cobb) is a simplified version of this foe, as is The Dane in Miller’s Crossing. Then there is the near-sub-human Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) in Fargo. Even the guy who beats up Steve Buscemi in Paris, je t’aime is a miniature version of Chigurh.

The Coen films that don’t seem to have this narrator/force of evil are The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou? (unless it is John Goodman’s Big Dan Teague), Intolerable Cruelty, <emThe Man Who Wasn’t There, and The Ladykillers (arguably their weakest films). Do they need this figure in one of its varieties to give themselves a solid through-line in tales that are otherwise wittily unpredictable?

The point, however, is that often the role of tale-teller and evil implacable force are combined into one person. Chigurh likes to improvise little bullying bet-oriented narratives with his victims’ lives haging in the balance. Charlie Meadows (Goodman again) is a storyteller as well, indeed a better storyteller than the high-priced, pretentious playwright whom the studios have summoned to Hollywood.

In fact, Barton Fink may remain the key Coen Brothers film, the gateway to all their concerns, such as language, social hierarchies, and the ability to weave tales. The film begins by showing the pulleys and curtains that lurk behind the surface of theatrical storytelling. It ends by showing the source of all storytelling, the head, completely detached and neutralized. Fink is contrasted with a famous writer whose secretary, it turns out, writes his novels for him. Storytelling, and then selling that story, appear to be the Coen Brothers’ big themes, and No Country for Old Men is another variation of their exploration of American loquacity and self-mythologizing. And the Coens’ use of the “avenger-narrator,” well, it really completes a film.

Okay, here is something that I see on a daily basis: people buying cheap brakes. Their reason? “They’re all the same.”

WRONG. Brakes are not all the same. When you are offered a $10.00 set of brake pads at the auto parts store, dont think, “WOW, what a great deal…” Instead think, why are these pads so cheap? Which lasts longer, a $10 pair of shoes or a $40 pair? Do the off-brand batteries from the dollar store last longer or does the Copper Top do its job? A good set of OEM pads are more expensive than the ‘hook’ set (which are advertised to get you into the store, where sales reps then upsell you…LET THEM). But there is a reason they’re more expensive: the pads are designed to meet or exceed specifications set by the manufacturer as to what is SAFE for your vehicle. Pads are not changed every year, they will last for a very long time on your car if you have the right set. You are taking your safety in your hands! Not only your safety, but the safety of everyone around you - pad quality affects your stopping distance (as do your shocks, so test them too). Think about it: if your wife and children were in front of ‘that guy’, wouldn’t you like to know his car is capable of stopping as it should? I guess I’m just on a rant here, but for my safety and yours please do a little more digging on what’s best for your car. I’m also not saying the more money, the better the pad…I’m just saying sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. Just go with what is recommended for your vehicle. The pads are designed to work with your entire system. Let them do their job. :)

All I can really say about every product I have used from PIAA is WOW! The overall quality of the product is fantastic. The 520 series lights we received for the XJ were fantastic. The housings themselves have now taken a slight beating on the trail, but have held up flawlessly. The 520 series lights come with the wiring harness and relay. For our install we actually modified the harness that goes inside, and replaced the switch that come with the kit with a piece from K4, and a green LED light. We mounted them flush next to the shifter in the center console. This gave us a clean installation, with a factory look. With h-4 conversion housings we were also able to use PIAA’s Superwhite H4 bulbs. And what a difference it makes over sealed beams. To anyone who lives out in the sticks, where street lighting is non-existent, I highly recommend these bulbs. They have a terrific output on low beam, so much so that I often don’t click over to my high beams. So to help keep yourself safe, and improve your lighting, I can’t recommend PIAA’s halogen replacement bulbs enough.