Downey Softener: Iron Man 3

Robert Downey Jr. (right) as Tony Stark, in Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 is a pre-programmed summer blockbuster (of the sort that now opens in the middle of spring) and the second sequel in a comic-book movie franchise (that also ties into the Avengers mega-franchise), but it’s also a Robert Downey, Jr., so attention must be paid. For most of the past quarter of a century, Downey has been the most gifted and unpredictable American movie actor under fifty, which is an official-statistics-sounding way of saying that he’s the best actor in English-language movies who isn’t Morgan Freeman or Daniel Day-Lewis. Iron Man 3 represents a reunion for Downey and Shane Black, who directed the movie and is credited, along with Drew Pearce, with writing the screenplay.

Captain America: Civil War – A Situation Pointed South

Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War.

If you had told me in 2011, after I had just seen Captain America: The First Avenger, that not only would Steve Rogers become one of my favourite superheroes, but that his third sequel would be the absolute gold standard for all superhero movies to follow, I would have laughed in your face. Who gives a crap about Mister Stars and Stripes and his magic shield? But you should cut me some slack – in 2011, there was no way to know yet that Marvel’s plan to dominate the comic book movie market would be such a grossly profitable global success. Captain America: Civil War is pretty much as good as it gets – and I don’t mean that in an equivocating, “we’ll take what we’re given” kind of way. I mean that the ensemble superhero movie has never been done this well before, and likely won’t ever be again. For Marvel and the world of comic book cinema at large, Civil War is a triumph.

Produced and Abandoned: The Soloist (2009)

Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr in The Soloist

I was just about ready to give up on Jamie Foxx. Everything he'd done since his rightly celebrated turn as Ray Charles was utterly forgettable. It’s not that he'd been necessarily giving bad performances, but that his acting was begining to resemble doing chores. For example, while playing a composite of Berry Gordy in Dreamgirls (2006), he was so dull that it was hard to believe that the founder of the exuberant Motown Records could have been so dour. Portraying the homeless schizophrenic musician Nathaniel Ayers in The Soloist, however, brought Jamie Foxx back to life.

Oppenheimer: The Center Does Not Hold

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan makes his bid for movie posterity with Oppenheimer. His three-hour biographical epic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, is culled from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, and transpires over more than three decades (from the mid-1920s through the late 1950s). Many of the roles, both major and ancillary, are taken by familiar, talented actors, and the film, shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, who has lit all of Nolan’s films since Interstellar, is beautiful to look at. Oppenheimer is a serious effort but not, I have to say, a very good picture, though it contains one section, focusing on Trinity, the first detonation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945 – the culmination of the research conducted by the Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer’s direction – that belongs in a good picture: it’s taut, gripping and suspenseful.

Joel Silver's Sherlock Holmes

Guy Richie may be listed as director of Sherlock Holmes, but the most important credit is probably 'Producer: Joel Silver'. Silver - producer of Lethal Weapon (and its sequels), Predator (and its sequel), The Matrix (and its sequels) and Die Hard (and its...you get the idea) - has a reputation for having writers 'design' action sequences for his movies and then, when the script doesn't work and the movie isn't made, stripping those sequences out and using them in ones that end up being produced.

Those thoughts went through my head in the days following my viewing of Sherlock Holmes. This isn't a movie I hated, because the whole cast (except Mark Strong, as the dullish villain) are uniformly ... well, excellent isn't the word. Entertaining, fits better. It's just that after I saw it, I found myself thinking, 'yeah, that was okay', but I just couldn't put my finger on why I wasn't particularly taken with it.

Neglected Gems #35: Soapdish (1991)

The 1991 Soapdish is consistently inventive and high-spirited. The script by Andrew Bergman and Robert Harling takes us into the world of daytime soaps – a delectable subject for burlesque that Tootsie (released nine years earlier) didn’t come close to exhausting. Soapdish lacks Tootsie’s polish and style, and it doesn’t offer the same kind of emotional satisfaction, but it has its own teeter-totter, whirligig pleasures.

Sally Field, parodying herself good-naturedly, plays Celeste Tolbert, the reigning – and grasping – queen of the soaps. Star of The Sun Also Sets for the last couple of decades, she wins the daytime Emmy years after year (yes, the script includes a Sally Field acceptance speech, though it’s tamer than you’d hope). But her love life is going to pot. And though she doesn’t know it, she’s in danger of having her throne usurped by Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty), who plays “Nurse Nan” on the program and is fed up with being stuck in the background. Holding sex at arm’s length like the fruits the gods tempted Tantalus with, Montana entices the show’s horny young producer, David (Robert Downey, Jr.), into helping her oust Celeste. Working around the head writer, Rose (Whoopi Goldberg), who’s also Celeste’s best friend, he dreams up a scheme for having “Maggie,” Celeste’s character, stab a homeless person, assuming that act will lose her the audience that adores her. His plan is short-circuited, however, by Celeste’s discovery, on the set, that the extra cast as the homeless woman is her own niece, Lauren (Elizabeth Shue), who ends up joining the show as a regular. So David casts around for alternative attacks and decides to unseat Celeste by hiring the last person she’d want to play opposite: her one-time lover, Jeffrey Anderson (Kevin Kline), whose character she had written out of the show nearly twenty years ago.

Back to High School: The Great Gatsby

Leonardo DiCaprio in The Great Gatsby

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby bears little resemblance to the slender masterpiece on which it is based – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s now iconic 1925 novel – but that probably won’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed this director’s career. While his critics see him as a sort of Andrew Lloyd Webber of movies whose histrionic period pieces (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet) put one in mind, to borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, of “a dog with the broken bones of a cat sticking out,” few of Luhrmann’s fans would likely contest that characterization. To them, Luhrmann’s movies are carnival sensations, romances to excess that celebrate the hysterical pace of the modern age in brazen, trashy style (and anyone who doesn’t like their cats grafted messily onto dogs is just a purist, patrician snob). There’s a faint odor of schoolyard allegiance that clings to the debate around Baz Luhrmann, and it never fails to make me feel like the teenager who chooses to stay home with a book while all her friends go out to a rave.

Neglected Gem #62: True Believer (1989)

In True Believer, James Woods plays Eddie Dodd, a New York lawyer who made his name on political and civil liberties issues in the sixties. Eddie still likes to present himself as a renegade – he tokes up in his office, he eschews traditional workday dress, even in the courtroom, and he wears his hair in a ponytail. (The salt-and-pepper color gives it the appearance of a powdered wig – he could be an aging Revolutionary War hero.) But the only clients he accepts these days are transparently guilty dope dealers whom he gets off on technicalities and who reimburse him in drug money. He justifies his office full of sleazes by claiming, “The last struggle in the war for constitutional rights is being waged over drugs,” and on some level he believes he’s still sticking it to the bastards in power every time he wins a case. The truth is, though, that he’s grown as cynical as any old sixties warrior: he’s come to believe everyone’s guilty. It’s a fresh-faced law-school grad named Roger Baron (Robert Downey, Jr.), a long-time admirer who turned down more prestigious offers to take a job as Dodd’s assistant, who stirs his dormant spirit. He gets Eddie to take on the case of a young Korean named Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), in prison for eight years for an alleged street killing in Chinatown, who’s just knifed a fellow inmate, the member of a racist gang, in self-defense. Eddie agrees to reopen the Chinatown case, though he goes in assuming that, like all his clients, Kim is guilty as hell. But then a punk beats him up outside his apartment, threatening worse if he defends “the chink,” and that makes him angry and curious. The deeper he digs, the more certain he becomes that Kim was framed. Soon Eddie Dodd is back in the fray.

Neglected Gem #24: The Gingerbread Man (1998)

The Gingerbread Man, from 1998, is one of Robert Altman’s least known movies; even most of his fans probably don’t know it exists. Altman encountered a familiar problem with the screenwriter when he rewrote the script on the set, but the fact that this time the writer he alienated was John Grisham, adapting his own story, added up to lousy PR for Altman when Grisham had his name removed from the credits. (The listed screenwriter, Al Hayes, is an invention.) It didn’t help that the preview screenings were poorly received – and that the recut version, after the studio, Polygram, snatched the picture back from Altman, didn’t fare any better. At that point Altman got his movie back, but without the blessing of the distributor.Yet the movie is a sensationally effective off-center thriller.

Altman’s relationship to Grisham’s material parallels Sam Peckinpah’s to the dead-in-the-water Robert Ludlum plot he got saddled with in his last picture, The Osterman Weekend (1983): he doesn’t scuttle it, exactly, but he transforms it by discovering a theme for it (theme is almost as foreign a concept to Grisham as character), by marinating it in atmosphere, and by using it to set loose a truly dazzling exhibition of directorial technique. The Gingerbread Man is set in Savannah, and its hero is a glib, skillful lawyer, Rick Magruder (Kenneth Branagh, in a loose, energized performance), who’s just come off a controversial, high-profile case. The trial has made him the least popular citizen in the county in the eyes of the police community, because he got a criminal off and crucified a cop in the process (for shooting the perp). Magruder’s personal life is a shambles: his ex-wife Leeanne (Famke Janssen) is hot to gain full custody of their two kids, and she shows up at his firm’s celebration of his victory with her divorce lawyer on her arm, just to piss him off. Rick’s own behavior that night isn’t any cannier: he offers one of the waitresses (Embeth Davidtz) a lift home, after she tells him her car has been stolen, and winds up in bed with her. Everyone in the office sees him show up the next morning in the same suit he left in, and Leeanne, who’s hunting for ways to prove he’s an unfit parent, sizes up the situation correctly when he arrives late to pick up the kids. And when he tries to connect with the waitress again, calling up the catering service to obtain her home number, it suddenly occurs to him that he doesn’t even know her name.(Branagh does a lovely job with this small moment of recognition, when Rick suddenly sees in himself the immaturity and instability that others – especially Leeanne – have been accusing him of.)

Swingin’ Sixties: The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (Photo by Daniel Smith, Warner Bros. Pictures)

The bar for espionage antics in 2015 has been raised unreasonably high by Ethan Hunt and his Impossible Missions Force, so I wasn’t sure at all that an old-fashioned Cold War caper like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. could even compete. Sure, it was the first film by Guy Ritchie since his Robert Downey Jr-led Sherlock Holmes sequel, A Game of Shadows, and sure, the trailer promised a heaping helping of old-school charm and mid-60s mod fashion. But is that enough to put it in the ring with what is, in my opinion, the best action spy thriller in recent memory?

Just Another Tired Action/Superhero Movie: Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

Coming out on the heels of his inventive horror movie The Cabin in the Woods, I’d certainly hoped that writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Serenity) would work his cinematic magic on The Avengers, the much-anticipated Marvel superhero movie which brings together various characters from the Marvel universe: Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk among them, as the new crime fighting unit called The Avengers. Unfortunately, this latest superhero movie is just another tired, pedestrian film whose elaborate special effects pretty much bury anything original, witty or creative inherent in the material. In short, it’s the same old thing: an impersonal franchise movie with little entertainment on offer.

Elementary: BBC's Sherlock – Season Two

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson

One of the great joys of writing for this website is discovering hidden treasures that you can share with the reader. Sometimes you can also warn folks, too, about the dreck that litters the popular culture landscape. But for me the biggest pleasure I get is when one of my colleagues unearths something, writes about it and turns me on to it. That is exactly what Mark Clamen did nearly two years ago when he reviewed the first season of the new BBC TV version of Sherlock Holmes, called simply Sherlock. Up until Mark reviewed it I didn't know it existed. And until that moment I'd also never heard of Benedict Cumberbatch (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; National Theatre’s Frankenstein) who was cast as Sherlock Holmes.

Because of his review (he'd seen it in advance of its Canadian premiere), I was able to keep my eye out for it when the first season was finally broadcast on the Canadian cable channel, Showcase (it played on PBS in several markets, but not on my Buffalo-based PBS station for some reason). I won't rehash Mark's review, but suffice it to say that adapters – Mark Gatiss (who also plays Mycroft Holmes on the show) and Steven Moffat (creator of another fascinating but finally unsuccessful updating with his version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, called Jekyll) – have brilliantly updated to our current era these stories based on Arthur Conan Doyle's. Some of the updating is inspired with twisty variations to the original stories. Some of the updating is incredibly simple, but very effective. For example, Dr. John Watson (a really good Martin Freeman) is a veteran of a war in Afghanistan, just as the Dr. Watson was in Doyle's original stories. Some things never change.

The Incoherent Text: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

In the very early 1980s, film critic and academic Robin Wood wrote an article, called “The Incoherent Text,” about the nature of films from the 1970s. In it, he attempted to analyze Hollywood films, from directors like Scorsese and Coppola, which he felt said several things at once. Wood used Scorsese's Taxi Driver as his prime example saying that the film simultaneously condemned and celebrated Travis Bickle, the psychotic central character. He went on to describe how many of the seminal films of the 1970s had this as their dominant storytelling mode. The only problem with Wood's thesis was that it, too, got lost in incoherence, to the point where it was near impossible to follow his argument in any linear fashion. I'm not proposing that Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is in any way, shape or form a seminal film; I mean strictly that it is for a large part of its running time an incoherent mess.

Where a film like Taxi Driver has a point of view, divided though it may be, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, for most of its first half, has none. The plot is next to impossible to follow leaving you confused, irritated, and generally bored. Basically, if I've got this straight (and most of this came from the second half of the film, not the first), Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris), Sherlock's legendary antagonist, has set in motion a series of events (basically, a series of bombings throughout European capitals that are blamed on various groups) that, in 1891, will cause the outbreak of a world war. Since he has bought up the interests and shares in many munitions and medical supply companies throughout Europe, a world war will make him a very wealthy man. Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) cottons on to this and, with the reluctant assistance of Dr. Watson (Jude Law), is bound and determined to thwart him.

Podcast: Interview with Biographer David Robinson on Charlie Chaplin (1985)

(from left) Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with film critic and biographer David Robinson about the recent publication of his book on the life of Charlie Chaplin, Chaplin: His Life and Art (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1985, revised in 1992 and 2001, and currently in paperback by Penguin).

Along with Chaplin's own My Autobiography (1964), Robinson's official biography would later be used as source material for Richard Attenborough's 1992 biopic Chaplin, which starred Robert Downey Jr. as the famed comedian and film director. Robinson was the main film critic for The Times of London from 1973-1990, and his books include Hollywood in the Twenties (1968), a 1970 volume on Buster Keaton, and World Cinema: A Short History (1981).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with David Robinson as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Friendly Neighbourhood – Spider-Man: Homecoming

Tom Holland as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Homecoming.

Spider-Man: Homecoming’s title is pretty apt, considering it’s not only a high-school drama, but the return of Marvel’s primary poster boy to the warm embrace of their Cinematic Universe. Since Sam Raimi’s original run at the series, which culminated with 2007’s confused, schizophrenic Spider-Man 3, we’ve been subjected to attempted reboot films in 2012 and 2014 that failed to inspire either critical praise or box-office dollars. In more than just the comic-book sphere, Sony Pictures has been desperate for a hit, and everyone’s favourite wall-crawler just wasn’t cutting it. So – in a shocking display of foresight, creative integrity, and financial savvy – Sony execs inked a deal with Marvel Studios to allow Spider-Man to be recast and featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with a first appearance in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. As it stands now, the MCU is officially Spidey’s home, and Sony will take home all the profit from his appearances (save merchandising rights, which Marvel was smart to grab in the deal).

This works to our benefit as moviegoers in a few ways, not the least of which is that a beloved character is finally in the hands of creators who know what the hell to do with him. That Peter Parker (Tom Holland) will be allowed to participate in the ongoing shenanigans of the MCU is another plus, given that franchise’s monster success and its proven ability to deliver smart, emotionally driven superhero stories. With Civil War, Spidey already felt at home – and with Homecoming, he truly settles in.

On Finishing Last: Shane Black’s The Nice Guys

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in Shane Black’s The Nice Guys.

Shane Black has been operating, to use the gaming term, on "god mode" for most of his career. He's one of those filmmakers whose most dismal failures (see: 1987’s The Monster Squad) are still sharper, funnier, and cleverer than anything else on the marquee. This isn't to say he's immune to failure, far from it; even when his films are as smart and compelling as The Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, they're likely to do just as well at the box office as that one did (which is to say, not at all). In lieu of significant financial returns, Black has carved out a nonetheless comfortable niche as a purveyor of genius-level shlock, a peddler of pulp with aspirations of grandeur that, like the characters in his noir-tinted screenplays, never gets the riches and recognition he (probably, mostly) deserves.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) is one of my favourite films, and it’s hard not to see The Nice Guys as a spiritual successor. They’re similar on the surface: a washed-up detective takes a rough-and-tumble type under his wing to help uncover a mystery lurking at the edge of civilized society, set against the glitz, glamour, and hidden agendas of the City of Angels. Everyone has a secret. And everyone has a price. It’s a noir potboiler setup so familiar that, were it not for Black’s talent at executing this kind of stuff (and the relative lack of noir mysteries in cinemas, especially at this time of year), it would be downright boring. Thankfully, a tight script, a great cast, and a consistently charming sense of humour save it from the same fate that Black’s other works have suffered.

Blasphemies and Hosannas: A Hymn for the Arts

Ricky Gervais

The funny if rather nasty jokes about Hollywood royalty that comedian Ricky Gervais unleashed while hosting the Golden Globes on January 16 seemed to shock the assembled crowd in designer gowns and tuxedos. I’m betting most viewers, perhaps in their PJs, were far more upset by those ten little words he used in his final quip of the night: “I’d like to thank God...for making me an atheist.”

With that, the sarcastic Brit certainly was skewering all the televised award shows that feature winners, often with an arm raised toward the sky, expressing their appreciation for divine intervention. The Almighty, if there is one, has nothing better to do than make sure some actor or musician or dancer-with-the-stars gets the coveted prize. Although Gervais also was tapping into a sort of bait-and-switch brand of humor, God-fearing people – of which there are many millions in the United States – possibly hoped he would be struck by lightning before even leaving the stage. Presenter Robert Downey Jr., apparently stunned by an introduction that unkindly referred to his rehab for drug addiction a decade ago, mentioned the evening’s “mean-spirited” tone; the devout multitudes watching at home likely felt more concerned about offending the Holy Spirit.

Group Therapy: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Pom Klementieff, Dave Bautista, Chris Pratt, Kurt Russell, and Zoe Saldana, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2.

Adjusting to the popularity and success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a continuous learning process for me ever since Iron Man in 2008. At first, it was breathlessly exciting to see an interconnected series of films based on beloved characters that was as bright and entertaining as we all hoped comic book adaptations would be (something that the awkward years between Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins couldn’t ever convincingly prove). Then, fatigue set in: we’re closing in on a decade since Robert Downey Jr. made his triumphant career comeback as Tony Stark, and the structural patterns of this entire enterprise have now become clear even to the most willfully oblivious fanboy. The cracks in the façade have started to show, and Marvel Studios now faces its greatest challenge yet in maintaining the momentum of their blockbuster machine, by keeping us all engaged despite the fact that we’re all sick to death of these goddamn superhero movies.

For my part, making this adjustment meant tempering my expectations. I’ve learned never to expect any Marvel movie to be better than the one that preceded it, and this leaves me in a state of nearly always being pleasantly surprised at how competent, engaging, and sometimes genuinely stirring these films manage to be. With few exceptions, the MCU has become very nearly perfect in how authentically “comic-booky” it is: these films are episodic, interconnected, emotionally heightened, character-driven, and disposable in the same way that their source material is. (I admit that I tend to forget each film almost immediately after I see it, and the next one’s sure to be hot on its heels anyway.) There might not be a better example of this formula’s success than James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and there might not be a better possible follow-up to that film than Vol. 2.

Movies For Adults: A Bigger Splash, Dheepan, Maggie’s Plan, Indignation and Hell or High Water

A scene from A Bigger Splash.

The division between films made for adults and those directed at teenagers and young adults seems to be a perpetual reality in cinema today, but it’s even more apparent in the summer when the tent pole superhero movies, sequels and remakes dominate movie screens. Now, I actually go to some of those films, and I quite liked Captain America: Civil War and X-Men: Apocalypse, typical of the consistently well-made and smart Marvel Comics adaptations – though admittedly their formulas are becoming tiresome. (Not enough real chances are taken with the characters, unlike in the comics’ source material and the generic long fight scene where our heroes end up bruised but not beaten is becoming cliché. But since A-List talents like Robert Downey Jr., James McEvoy and Michael Fassbender, among others, essay those roles, and since skilled directors like Kenneth Branagh often take on those projects, the films do make a dramatic impact.) But I also have to admit that most people over 50, such as the bulk of the students who take my film courses, have no interest in costumed caped crusaders and the like. They prefer films rife with adult situations, firmly grounded in reality and, ideally, not too sentimental in the end. Here then, are five films made just for their demographic, of varying quality, most of which say something about how we live now. (I could include here Whit Stillman’s period film Love & Friendship, which is based on Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. It’s certainly dialogue driven but it’s also as arid as Stilman’s other movies (Metropolitan, Barcelona) and saddled with uniformly dull, superficial performances, most notably by the film’s titular star Kate Beckinsale, lamely essaying a scheming, duplicitous widow in late 18th century England.)

Tom Cruise’s Film Career: Nice Try But No Cigar

Knight and Day, Tom Cruise’s latest movie, which opens today, is a reminder, once again, of how he simply can’t hold up his end of the bargain when it comes to creating a charismatic, gripping character on screen. Up against a talented actress like Cameron Diaz he is particularly lost. Cruise, in fact, is the Energizer Bunny of Hollywood. You admire his efforts to act, but it becomes quickly apparent he’s really not getting anywhere acting.