Iron Man Three (2013)
Directed by Shane Black. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley, Rebecca Hall, William Sadler, Miguel Ferrer, Jon Favreau, Ty Simpkins.

For people worried that the individual Iron Man series within the greater Marvel Cinematic Universe was in trouble, have no fear: Iron Man is back on track because Shane Black has got your back.

Iron Man Three (yes, that’s what the end credits call it, and therefore it’s the official title) starts off the Marvel Movie-verse Phase 2 with a self-contained story that feels like a great five or six-issue comic book arc. You remember: the kind that Marvel used to pull off in the days before they “evented” everything to death with Skrull infiltrations and Norman Osborne conquering the world. I hear that currently the mad robot Ultron is doing the heavy lifting for Marvel’s crossover event. Maybe this means we’ll see him in Avengers 2.

This compressed approach for Iron Man Three was the correct choice coming off the huge success of The Avengers; the new Iron Man flick needed to show that Marvel’s individual heroes could still carry their own installments — their own magazine titles, so to speak — without the support of crossover mania. With Iron Man Three as the best of the Iron Man movies so far, it promises that Thor and Captain America will have superior returns in their own follow-ups. That will be quite a feat for Cap, considering how great Captain America: The First Avenger is. But it’s in the realm of the possible, as Shane Black shows everyone with Shellhead the Third.

This is a movie that will also ignite a huge debate over its changes to the comic canon. (Wait, what do I mean “will”? The battle has already started in a forum near you.) Although the script by Black and co-writer Drew Pearce uses the popular Warren Ellis Extremis storyline from 2005–06 as a starting point and features one of Iron Man’s main villains, The Mandarin, they have fashioned a story that stays true to its own internal character logic and freely jettisons major sections of Marvel Comics history both to goose the audience and give them unexpected thrills. It’s actually a touch annoying to write a standard “review” in the modern Internet spoilerphobe understanding for a film like this where I have to dodge talking about major plot points. The thrill in writing about a movie like Iron Man Three comes from getting geeky and detailed about how it toys with famous characters and undercuts expectations.

But I’ll play by the rules here — for now. You do deserve to see Iron Man Three knowing only as much as you’ve seen from the marketing. And that means I’ve negated the rest of what I am going to say. Nonetheless, onward…. and I do promise a minimum of “spoilers.” (I hate that word. Can we ditch it? I’ve found out “spoilers” before and yet not had the film “spoiled” for me. We need a better term. How about “twists”? There you go: we’ve already got a good word. Occam’s Razor Rules!)

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As I write this, April is just around the corner, and now that Hollywood’s best and brightest studios no longer know how to calculate the beginning of summer, I smell blockbuster season ripening fast on the vine. Just think, in mere weeks, we can all flock to see Star Trek: Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Wolverine, Oblivion, Pacific Rim, Elysium, and Man of Steel.

What do nearly all of these movies have in common? I’ll tell you, spoiler-free: the fate of the world will hang in the balance.

Which is why I shall be staying home –– again –– for blockbuster season. If I have learned anything in all my forays into drama, it is this: cinema offers no more boring subject, no greater snoozefest, than global peril.

Heresy, I know.

But I’m right. Here’s why.

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About a month ago, The Avengers (Amazon, B&N) came out on DVD and Blu-Ray. My guess is that most avid superhero fans have probably already gotten their copies. Even if superheroes aren’t normally your thing, though, I recommend getting the film, especially for those who are writers or aspiring writers.

When the film came out in theaters back in May, I wrote an article “What Writers Can Learn From Joss Whedon’s The Avengers.” All of those points are still valid and if you haven’t seen the film, the writing is top notch. The bonus materials on the blu-ray, however, give you glimpses into more than just the film-making process, but a good glimpse into how to craft a good story. Some mild spoilers will be revealed below, if you haven’t yet seen the movie.

Tor.com has compiled a pretty good breakdown of the commentary, for those who want a more complete glimpse of what Whedon discusses.

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On a recent Friday night, I sat down with my wife to watch The Thief of Baghdad (the definitive Korda/Powell version, from 1940). Thirty minutes later, my wife was fast asleep. When she woke up, she said, knowing I planned to mention the film to Black Gate’s readership, “What are you going to write about this?” Her notable lack of enthusiasm could, of course, be due to any number of factors, but only three reasonable alternatives present themselves: A) my wife is entirely lacking in taste; B) my wife has been replaced by a cantankerous alien entirely lacking in taste; C) this particular movie might well cause many a discerning viewer to harbor similar sentiments.

Let’s be clear: The Thief of Baghdad is one of the most universally acclaimed fantasy films ever made. Even my old (well-loved) copy of The Movie Guide gushes. “Perhaps the most splendid fantasy film ever made,” writes James Monaco and his various contributors, ending the review with “Film fantasy just doesn’t get much better than this.” Halliwell’s is equally enthusiastic, and they don’t like anything. Time Out raves. Coppola and Lucas cite it as a significant influence.

The story is crackerjack from start to finish. (Spoilers here: if you don’t want the plot, skip to the next paragraph.) Ahmed, the king deposed by Jaffar, his own Grand Vizier, falls in love with a princess whom no man can see, and of course vows to see her repeatedly. Ahmed is aided by Abu the thief, but of course Jaffar has designs on the very same princess. When Jaffar kidnaps her, Ahmed and Abu follow, but Jaffar conjures up a storm that separates our two heroes. In order to find Ahmed again, Abu must gain the reluctant help of a fifty-foot genie (the exceptional Rex Ingram), then steal the Eye of the World from a temple guarded by, among other things, a giant spider and giant octopi. Finally, with Ahmed captured and about to be beheaded, Abu swoops in on a flying carpet to save the day.

Given all this, how on earth did my wife (or some random alien) pass out?

The Thief of Baghdad has not aged gracefully. It’s essential viewing, yes, but only for buffs of either fantasy films or Old Guard Hollywood. The inconsistent special effects are the least of its problems; worse by far is what one might call presentational acting, but is in fact mostly just plain bad. Even Sabu, the Indian star who first made it big with Elephant Boy, is revealed to be a truly wooden performer. Conrad Veidt, as the cruel-as-an-adder Jaffar, comes off as a well-oiled villain, but he’s horribly miscast; he’s German through and through.

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Two years ago I walked out of a theater showing The Expendables, shaking my head in mild bewilderment. I don’t just have a high tolerance for ‘80s action cheese; I actively embrace it. I was nearly as excited about the release on Blu-ray last week of Death Wish 3 as I was about Jaws’s simultaneous hi-def debut. (Well, not really, but that’s my way of drawing your attention to what an over-the-top great/stupid movie we have in Death Wish 3.) But 2010’s The Expendables pushed none of my buttons. It was dull, the action flat, and Stallone seemed to think audiences would care about the tangled romantic lives of his and Jason Statham’s characters (at the expense of the rest of the cast). Stallone also seemed ignorant of the premise’s goofy appeal and played too much of it straight. The film ended up wasting most of the names on the marquee and couldn’t live up to its modest goals. It was also badly tarted-up with occasional post-production blood to get an R rating after it was shot for PG-13. It was a misfire for what looked like a simple shot.

Yet it made enough money for them to take a second shot, and when I left the theater after seeing Expendables 2, I felt they hit the target. I won’t go so far as to say “they got it right,” because “right” isn’t something a movie like The Expendables 2 would even know how to define, but the folks aboard this go-round sure “got it better.” It’s the best dumb fun movie of the summer for fans of the old-school testosterone action pics.

Here’s all you need to know about what kind of movie the filmmakers on Expendables 2 have put together: During the finale and within the space of thirty seconds, there are three lines quoting The Terminator, a line from Die Hard, and a reference to Rambo. Chuck Norris strides onto the screen through a haze of combat dust to the whistling strains of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Stallone grunts “Rest in pieces!” after he and company shred some fools with a rain of bullets. Dolph Lundgren plays the brains of the team. And Jean-Claude Van Damme is the villain.

How much more of a review do you need after that? The Expendables 2 is utterly silly, and everybody seems aware of it and rides the wave of ludicrous puns and over-the-top action with bloody smiles. Between making the two films, someone must have gotten the memo that the whole concept is actually a gag.

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Tomorrow, I’m headed off to GenCon for a brief stay. My schedule this year has been a little hectic, what with a couple of book promotions, some revisions, some drafting, and an unexpected knee surgery, so I didn’t plan a whole lot of convention time. Now I’m regretting it, because GenCon is a lot of fun, and being there just for Saturday is going to feel a little like seeing the pie and only getting to eat one cherry.

There’s so much to see and do that I only recently learned about the Writing Symposium, a series of tracks about the writing industry for gaming and media fiction and all sorts of genre fiction. Writers and editors far more famous and influential than me will be speaking and offering advice as well as writing critiques, among them Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson, and Mike Stackpole. Next year, I fully plan to be more involved.

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The Bourne Legacy, Paramount’s attempt to extend their successful Jason Bourne franchise — based very loosely on the novels of Robert Ludlum — does give the impression of the first film of a trilogy. It feels like The Bourne Identity (2002), the inaugural movie of the Matt Damon trilogy: it’s a starting point with some excellent sections, but also the nagging sense that all the finest moments are yet to come. Overall, there is something slight about the enterprise, making it a minor disappointment for a film I hoped would salvage August. Will Expendables 2 be this year’s “August Surprise”? I never thought that might be a possibility at the beginning of the season.

Doug Liman directed The Bourne Identity, but it was Paul Greengrass sitting in the folding green chair for the next two films, The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and it was his work that shoved the series into the high octane world of dazzling foot pursuits, close-quarter pummelings, shaky-cam car chases, and earnest people trying to get control of the world by walking fast while talking on cell phones. And audiences loved it. Those two films are the defining spy movies of the decade, easily besting the re-boot of James Bond (in the Jason Bourne mold, natch).

The Bourne Legacy, under the direction of Tony Gilroy, who wrote all three previous entries and made an impression as a director with Michael Clayton in 2007, collects the elements that made its predecessors work: whipcrack action with jittery cameras, raw global espionage, and top-level actors playing the gray-shaded manipulators attached to their phones and computer displays. What it doesn’t have is a compelling enough character story at the center to hold it together, or a resolution that satisfies beyond the need to signal a sequel.

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In a charming case of movie irony, the new Total Recall has already been mostly forgotten, even though it only came out on Friday. The Dark Knight Rises, in its third week, handily crushed the Len Wiseman-directed remake. I’m writing this on Tuesday, and it already feels as if the movie was never even released: it was a dream implant that never took, and the original memory of the 1990 Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger Summer blockbuster has already taken back all the cerebral space. Nonetheless, I’ll still perform this brain autopsy on Total Recall ’12 to see why no one bothered to show up except for people writing reviews.

If you were to pick the right approach to remaking 1990’s Total Recall — aside from simply not remaking it all — you would want to try it “straight,” focusing in on the everyman aspect of a protagonist in a cyberpunk future who discovers that his whole life is a false memory implant, and in truth he’s a dangerous double (possibly triple) agent. It is, after all, a nifty SF-noir concept, delivered courtesy of the Philip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” and refashioned into a feature film concept by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who also created the original screenplay for Alien.

And this re-make of Total Recall does that: it plays the movie as a straightforward science-fiction adventure film done in the current style. But… it was handed to Len Wisemen to direct. And he turned out the same film he always turns out: broadly competent but utterly dull, slick, superficial, and ultimately disposable. Producer Neil Moritz, responsible for the “Fast and Furious” franchise, should probably shoulder a good part of the blame as well, because the by-the-numbers execution here is what he does best unless he gets a director who clicks with the material.

Despite publicity hand-waving about “going back to the literary source,” this certainly isn’t a remake like the Coen Brothers’ True Grit. Len Wisemen’s Total Recall does a beat-for-beat copy of the plot of the 1990 film with a few background substitutions and a number of bizarre moments of meaningless karaoke imitations (the three-breasted prostitute, the “two weeks” lady at the security station, ripping out an implanted tracking device), but with all the fun drained from it and slathered over with the same polished SF glean seen on movies since the early 2000s. Fans of the original will find themselves bored to the point of wishing the whole thing was a memory implant gone wrong — a schizoid embolism! — and viewers who have never seen the original will yawn over watching the same old junk they’ve slogged through for years… only with even more lens flares!

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Dear Black Gate Readers and all my friends at the site,

I’ve decided not to post a review of The Dark Knight Rises this week as I originally promised. I had planned to get a review up later today, after watching the film in the morning. Although I watched the film as planned, the horrible events in Colorado at a midnight screening of the movie last night have made it impossible for me to write about it at this time. A tragedy in a movie theater, a place where I’ve spent so many happy times in my life, strikes close to me. I tried to begin writing a review, and found I couldn’t. I hope, perhaps at the end of the summer when I do my wrap-up for the season, to speak a bit about The Dark Knight Rises. My thoughts are with the victims of this horrific tragedy and their families.

A lot of writers I know are pretty good at self-sabotage. It’s not that writing is hard, exactly, except that it is. Physical labor and exercise isn’t required, and it sure doesn’t look like you’re doing much when you’re staring at that screen and pecking away at a keyboard. But getting good work, consistently, means constant effort. And constant effort = work. I’d like to have those moments where an entire chapter writes itself and stays virtually unchanged through every draft because I can hear, see, and picture it so clearly the first time; but it just doesn’t happen very often. The trick is sticking with the process so that the reader can’t tell which chapters you labored over and which chapters flowed naturally the first time. And that takes time, and effort, and sometimes it’s easier to do nothing.

I’ve learned different ways to practice self sabotage over the years, and different ways to fight my tendencies. Never keeping computer games on my computer, no matter how great they look, for instance. I won that battle. But there are two others that cropped up this last month. One is an old enemy. The other one is new.

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