I saw a city in my sleep,
some vast and ancient Babylon
where great ships moored
against rusted copper skies.
And the people looked to them,
through electric smog, in awe,
and said prayers
that our tongues could not bear to hold.
I found this as an inscription on the frontispiece of a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners which I picked up in a charity shop.
I have nothing to say about Iron Man 3. That is, I have nothing important to say. It’s hard, sometimes, to argue that a film as seemingly frivolous as one concerning the exploits of a futuristic red & yellow tech-knight can have a human story that feels as though it suits the manner in which it is being told. It’s an understandable prejudice, borne out by the execrable quality of any number of abdominal CGI blockbusters whose contents are secondary to their projected gross (e.g. Transformers, Star Trek, Green Lantern, Battleship etc. & etc.), but fortunately there are those few exceptions which go some way to justify the frankly obscene amounts of money spent on them.
It’s not, of course, that the core idea of Iron Man 3 -hubris begetting tragedy- couldn’t be told on a smaller scale; literature and history are replete with versions of that story, but when the genius and flaws of the hero burn as bright as that of modern-day da Vinci Tony Stark and his only slightly more ostentatious alter-ego the monsters created in the wake of their arrogance have to be equally spectacular in opposition: equal and opposite to the hero. Fortunately the film’s director/co-writer Shane Black has form in disguising heart with bombast -in the cult hit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang- and Iron Man 3 marries the narrative focus of the first film with the sheer spectacle of its sequel.
Other than that I have nothing to say about Iron Man 3. That is, I have nothing important to say.
If Olympus Has Fallen is any sort of indicator at all then Conservative America is clearly suffering something of an ego crisis. The all-American (and, most importantly for the audience the film is clearly looking to engaged, Caucasian (Morgan Freeman only gets to be the acting-president) ) Aaron Eckhart plays the President during an entirely unbelievable attack on the White House by an officially unofficial Northern Korean terrorist group, and has the most absurdly hyper-masculine and jingoistic introduction I can recall. First seen boxing against Gerard Butler, the film’s actual star, and showing that he can take a punch to the face without being phased by it, he’s then casually congratulated on curing America’s dependence on foreign oil before being referred to by his Secret Service codename “The Full Package”…
All of this goes by so quickly it’s almost hard to believe that someone could have had the audacity to write such a ham-fisted attempt at characterisation, let alone that anyone would film it, but it’s really all there. It’s also, essentially, the entire thematic content of the film, one message writ block-capital large in red, white and blue crayons. The taking of the White House seemed to have more in common with COBRA’s plan in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, both in conception and execution, than anything that could actually come to pass. Men, women and children are mown down throughout but the American flag is detailed almost pornographically in slow motion as it is shot to pieces then tossed from the roof of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Indeed the capitol’s most priapic landmark, the Washington monument, is literally blunted by the shock of the attack, the nation’s potency called into question and further threatened as their nuclear arsenal is held hostage. But America has, as one General puts it in the film, “the toughest fucking guys in the world”, albeit that they’ve again outsourced to the UK for an action hero, who’s running around in a set-up that feels lazily reminiscent of Die Hard. Except that the hero gets to torture and kill people in the Oval Office, including one person he bludgeons to death with a bust of Abraham Lincoln… Olympus Has Fallen, taken seriously, would be unwatchable, but if you can appreciate how utterly ridiculous it is, and roll your eyes at the nationalism, then you still shouldn’t watch it
Baroque dolls and stuffed animals, given stop-motion animus behind uncanny glass eyes, evoke the more sinister aspects of Lewis Carroll’s often nightmarish and grotesquely non sequitur Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than either Disney’s original adaptation or even their more recent, Tim Burton-helmed adaptation could muster, or rather, could be allowed to muster, as an implacable and largely impassive Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) sleepwalks through the liminal space between Morpheus and Thanatos and her changing relationship to them as she grows towards an age where the latter increasingly influences the former, although this particular instantiation of the character is young enough that the points made are illustrated more for the benefit of the audience than the protagonist.
Whilst the repeated visual elements of the writing desk, which takes Alice deeper into the unreality of Wonderland each time she encounters it, and the use of a bottle of India ink as the unlabelled analogues for the book’s “drink me” size-altering potions indicate the authorial hand behind even this story, seemingly born inchoate from the chaos of childhood detritus, the question of intent is made almost moot by the tight close-ups of a narrating mouth: Most likely the small girl seen bored at the beginning of the film but perhaps even Alice herself, recounting the events in the third-person as some post-Wonderland therapeutic.
There are other recurring motifs in the film; a childish predilection for the increased tactile sensitivity of the tongue abutting a fear of solid and savoury foods which repeatedly turn out to be soured or spoiled, or polluted with pins and screws, or riddled with insects, a similarly juvenile element of repetition, rules learnt and performed by rote until the surety of madness takes hold. The aesthetic, at least as far as the film’s more mundane aspects are concerned, and more generally the cinematography, resemble a more opulently filled film by Werner Herzog, with the animated style that had influenced Terry Gilliam already fully realised, the absurdity and the horror each alive and spurring the other on.
Whilst my recent hiatus has had nothing to do with-
-my current addiction to Marvel’s addictively tedious Facebook opus, an RPG with more grinding than all the phallic and oversized pepper mills in all the Italian restaurants in all the world, has definitely impacted on other areas of my-
-life. These line breaks, for instance, are being used to mark the points at which my attention wanders to the other half of my screen as even now I fail-
-to turn my attention to matters of greater import or substance-
-than a game I don’t even enjoy.
A headache-inducing morass of tedium, testosterone and phallic imagery that telegraphs it’s gods-awful machismo in both the dialogue and action, G.I. Joe: Retaliation is fit only for mockery, opprobrium and as a cruel and unusual punishment.
- Thom Dicomidis (09/04/13)
Michael had truly loved Emma, so that the product of their union had been born a skinless mewling thing with a haphazardly arranged crown of spikey bone outgrowths was, to him, an even greater tragedy. Nonetheless his distress was, as much as such things are quantifiable, outstripped by Emma’s; a prior, though ostensibly lapsed, religious conviction renewed through sheer horror and the child’s gruesome evocation of a raw, bloody and sexless Christ-figure such that her mind simply shut down. With this protective and prophylactic fugue holding fast the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, herself an expert in the presence and effect of religious iconography in dissociative psychological disorders, ordered that mother and child be kept apart while a regime of treatment (which, said course, tacitly assumed the imminent death of the malformed and medically unfeasible baby) could be brought into effect. As days passed and the baby, still unnamed even by a staff whose shorthand sobriquets for patients were generally known to cut mercilessly close to the knuckle, held determined to its hard won half-life, Emma’s condition remained unchanged. Michael, by this point cast in the role of doomsayer, foreswore the visits of both doting and dutiful friends and family alike, keeping a constant vigil beside the oxygen enriched but otherwise undisturbed airs in which the baby cried, almost incessantly, in a pitch which cleaved close to the phlegmatic rumble of boulders grinding together, with occasional breaks to splutter and cough from the ruinous slit which vaguely occupied the place of a mouth. It took no food, and no vein could be found by which to administer even the most basic sustenance, but it persisted in its raucous distress, perhaps in an entirely reasonable protest to whichever such force or entity had seen fit, consciously or unconsciously, to allow its birth. On the eighth such day, with Emma no better and the baby still shrieking with an unflagging commitment to communicating and thereby sharing its pain, Michael tore the incubator apart and snapped the baby’s neck.
It was some months later, spent wandering aimless and anonymous, before Michael, now divorced from his real surname and all ties to a life which had ended with the crunch and crack of a twisted spinal column being broken, came to something resembling his senses. Resembling, that is, in much the same way as one’s reflection in a battered brass mirror, seen through dents and nicks and the patina of passing years, would resemble oneself. In practicality the change amounted to a resurgence of agency just sufficient to understand and deny culpability for the fate that had befallen his family, enough will to obsess. His hand-to-mouth itinerancy, cribbed from stories written when the prospects for such subsistence survivalists were apparently far better, adapted to his new resolve, took in larger towns, edged the outskirts of cities with public libraries which could be raided for “materials”. This ever-growing horde, torn-out pages from books too cumbersome to steal and complete copies of less-lucky works, had begun as work of questionable scientific integrity; the more current works on genetics, heredity and consanguinity mingled with redundant or wrong-headed works, but was soon further diluted by prophecies and paranormal texts which ranged from mainstream manias to even more outré and insubstantial gibberish. He began to construct a new ontology around those specifics which would absolve him, building in justifications upon justifications until the tangled knots of irrational rationalising were unintelligible to their creator and sole purveyor, until the arguments he ran through catechistically were changing on a weekly, a daily, an hourly basis. Eventually Michael could argue not only that the baby was provably from genetic stock which did not taint his familial line in an ad hoc genealogy which extended to a prelapsarian paradise, but that the murder was the predetermined and inevitable conclusion of some formula written in the quantum mechanics of the physical universe, and that he had not, in fact, been there or seen anything at all.
