Iron Man 3 - none of this makes sense

As with a lot of the films I end up blogging about on here, I sometimes wonder why I bothered watching them.  Iron Man 3 came out in May this year and was definitely one of those films I had no intention of paying nearly £10 to see.  The character of Iron Man is on the surface a very interesting one.  The man underneath the suit is Tony Stark, a one-time weapons mogul who got kidnapped by enemies of America and managed to escape after forging a powerful suit from bits left lying around their cave - a bit like MacGyver I guess.  When he realises that a war wound threatening to critically damage his heart can be kept at bay by a device that also powers his suit, man and machine merge to create Iron Man.  He subsequently decides that his time as an arms dealer has only been a force for evil and chaos in the world, and resolves to reform.

That's what happens in the first film anyway.  By the time the second one comes around Iron Man has to hit Mickey Rourke a lot of times because he has the audacity to declare that the Iron Man suit has created an end to war.  But what they were really doing was setting up Avengers Assemble by introducing Scarlet Johansson and Samue L Jackson as yet more characters in the Marvel universe.  With Iron Man 3 though the film looks like it isn't even setting up a sequel.  It's a film that feels like it only has half a script with characters that are hardly fleshed out.  Avengers Assemble has come and gone and I'm left wondering why they made the film.  Apart from money of course.

The plot holes are rife in Iron Man 3.  There is very little reason for anything in the film to occur.  Tony Stark ends up going after the 'big bad' Mandarin, but he only does it because his slightly douchey security guard accidentally gets himself involved in an explosion.  But that's just the start.  The film spends ages referencing things that happened in Avengers Assemble rather than actually telling a new story.  It carries on as if the memory of Martians invading New York in that film has only caused an incurable psychological rift in Tony Stark's mind as opposed to the collective mind of the whole of Humanity.

The one saving grace at all in the film is Ben Kingsley's exceptionally entertaining performance at the Mandarin.  It's a good job he's in there chewing the scenery up as Guy Pearce is utterly terrible in his role as the arms dealer who's trying too hard to be like Tony Stark used to be, plus Rebecca Hall is totally wasted - all she does is stand around being doe-eyed for most of the film before getting rather unfairly shot out of hand.

Now I'm not a Marvel fanboy, and so I don't know if Marvel fanboys love all this stuff.  What I do know is that I don't care about Marvel building a massive universe in which to spam out endless bland franchise movies about their characters.  If this is what Marvel suerhero movies are going to turn into in the near future then I'm afraid I'm going to lose interest pretty quickly.  Thankfully the resolution to this film indicates that we might not be seeing much more of Iron Man in the future.  And if you're worried that's a spoiler - don't be.  I've probably just saved you from watching a pointless car crash of a movie.

Byzantium - British vampires are best

Man I love the modern age of film releasing.  I remember first seeing films in cinemas in the mid 1980s, where if you missed it on the big screen you would have to wait years to see the thing later on a fading VHS at my Nan's house (she had a video player - we didn't).  Not so these days; and so after feeling disappointed to miss out on seeing Byzantium in cinemas in the spring I had to wait out only the summer months before being able to catch up.  Billed in some places as the thinking viewer's alternative to the Twilight saga, Byzantium is a vampire story in which Clara (Gemma Arterton) and Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) play so-called Sucreants.  They live off human blood and have lived for more than 200 years each.  As we are introduced to them, we see them having to leave town quickly after a vampiric order they appear to be on the run from catches up with them.  Clara ruthlessly murders her vampiric pursuer before telling Eleanor to get her things and hitching a ride on to the first truck out of town.  Why are they on the run?  Well that's something that gets revealed slowly as the film unfolds.

While looking for an image to post in this review I stumbled across quite a few pictures of Gemma Arterton's heaving bosom on Google.  There's a lot of that in this film, but there's even more blood, pain and soul searching.  While Clara is happy to live a life of lies and deceit to stay one step of the order and keep her head and body in one piece, Eleanor is tired of living on the run and longs to tell her truth.  She writes her story into a diary and then throws the pages to the wind before anyone can read them.  The idea of vampirism is presented here as something of a sentence to endless purgatory, rather than a glamorous ticket to instant cool.  Clara survives the only way she knows how, which is to sell her body.  Eleanor preys on the aged, drinking the blood of men and women who are close to death and agree to her ending their suffering. When Clara takes advantage of a potential customer and shacks up in his dead mother's house, she sets up a brothel to make ends meet.  Meanwhile, a chance encounter between Eleanor and a local boy gives her an emotional outlet she has never had.

There are a couple of plot points that don't seem to make much sense.  Such as why Clara and Eleanor return to the town of Clara's upbringing if they're on the run?  Perhaps it was such a long time ago that it hardly seems to matter to them.  Then there is Eleanor's constant run-ins with local boy Frank.  She seems to conveniently bump into him all over the place.  Perhaps we can put that down to some sort of superior vampire sense that draws her to him?  Or something like that.  But the main one is why Eleanor is only getting bored by the ennui of being a sucreant now, why not 50 or 100 years ago?  Perhaps it's because they've returned to their home town?  Maybe.  The thing the film does well with its plot points is not to get bogged down in the whys and hows of vampirism.  When one of the vampires discovers that they've drunk the blood of someone with Leukaemia there is literally no hint that this might turn into a plot point, other than to identify a character who because of his cancer feels close to death and therefore drawn to vampirism.

So what I'm saying is that plot points aren't really what Byzantium is about.  It's a story about two women trying to independently survive in a world that doesn't want them while being pursued by a deeply misogynistic order obsessed with killing them.  It's a film that asks questions about the lies people tell and then have to live with in order to survive.  It's also a film that presents vampire mythology as it might appear in the real world, in which to become a vampire you have to run a terrifying trial of blood and then to maintain your secrecy you sometimes have to kill in cold blood.  Impressive then that the film succeeds in presenting both Eleanor and Clara as sympathetic characters, despite Clara acting out of desperate callousness on more than one occasion.

Byzantium is a very slow film, but it's an intense character drama with a smattering of extreme violence that does the things a vampire film should do - the film likely gets its 15 rating as much from its language and sex as its violence.  I can't understand why the film did so badly at UK cinemas.  I guess it was marketed at the Twilight crowd who were expecting something a little more light-hearted rather than a horror / thriller crowd who were happy to allow its slow-burning drama to play out.  I am recommending Byzantium.

In the Fog - Do not watch when depressed

Jesus Christ has anyone ever made a film before this that stares for so long and so deeply into the abyss humanity's dark side?  In the Fog is an unrelenting trudge through the muddied plains of Eastern Europe, marching without emotion towards the conclusion that at its heart human civilisation is nothing but a brief respite from our selfish and warlike nature.  But that doesn't necessarily make the film a bad one, as we shall see.

In the Fog is set at a non-specific point during the Second World War on the Eastern Front.  Given that the action is set somewhere in Belarus and the power of the German occupiers seems all-encompassing, we can probably assume mid-1942.  The film opens with an execution by hanging that happens out of shot.  A group of local men are hanged for some unknown crime and the onlooking crowd are warned of the perils of messing with their German overlords.  Cut to two men traipsing through a forest.  It soon becomes clear that these men are Soviet resistance fighters on their way to find a man from the village named Sushenya.  As the dialogue progresses we come to learn that Sushenya was not hanged with the others, rather he was released and the resistance fighters want to know why.  If the Germans didn't hang him then he must be a collaborator - mustn't he?  If he's a collaborator then he should be shot - shouldn't he?

There are plenty of films that use time and space to allow depth to form in their story.  In The Fog does this and then some.  Here we follow our resistance fighters walking through a forest, crossing a stream, and then partaking in a perfunctory conversation with Sushenya's wife about onions - even though they all know why they've come for Sushenya.  It all serves to emphasise the normality of these people and tedium of their lives, juxtaposed against the world-encompassing events sweeping up everyone around them.  The reality of being a Soviet resistance fighter is hardly heroic, rather it's a boring job much like any other.  As the truth about what really happened is slowly revealed in flashback, Sushenya becomes a sympathetic representation of human civilisation as a whole, trying to do its best to the right thing while people around him take advantage of the opportunities the chaos of the war has presented them.

After about 90 minutes Sushenya makes a speech to no one in particular about how he can't understand how the people in his village have become savages so quickly.  He wonders how everyone who knew and trusted him implicitly just 12 months ago is now hunting him as a traitor.  Is it because they can't comprehend that he wouldn't sell out to the Germans to save his own hide?  Is the reason they can't comprehend it because they know they would also defect under the same circumstances?  If so then why are they so quick to condemn him and hunt him down?  After all, it might be one of them who next has to choose between death and collaboration.  He wonders where all the good in the village has gone, and how quickly the veneer of civilisation is washed away.  This is the heart of the film, it's an thought-provoking message that the film-makers clearly wanted to deliver to the world.

As the film's final scene plays out, there is a brief moment where you think things might be left hanging on an ambiguous thread that dangles the slim possibility of future hope.  But a single sound tears that away in an instant.  Overall In the Fog is an exceptional film to watch.  It stares long and hard into the depths of human souls and finds frightening things there.  Good though it is, it's a film that you shouldn't watch if you're in anything less than an entirely coherent emotional state - because it's depressing as hell.