Iron Man touched my butthole

I finally saw Iron Man this weekend, and it's still at 93% positive with 208 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, but I thought it was pretty "meh..." overall. I pointed out in a previous post how that's pretty much the same rating Schindler's List has. I have no idea where all this critical goodwill is coming from. Personally, I prefer Batman Begins.

Iron Man starts out pretty strong, with Robert Downey Jr. fighting against terrorists in Afghanistan. I mean, really, that could've ended up being pretty fucking silly, but I think Iron Man pulled it off tastefully enough. However, once he singlehandedly wins the U.S. war in Afghanistan halfway through the movie, it just kind of loses steam.

Look, CGI is great when used subtly. Give me a man in a suit using CGI effects against an army, make it look good, and it's great. Give me two CGI robots fighting each other, you might as well be watching Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam smacking the shit out of each other. That's why I didn't go watch Transformers, that's why I'm not going to go see The Hulk (redux). I'm not impressed by the fantastical feats of cartoons. That's probably why I don't like anime, even the supposed "good" ones like Akira - it just doesn't impress me.

And that's probably why I'm gay for Batman. Live action. Mano-y-mano. People hitting people, not cartoons. Yeah, I know there's CGI there, but I can't fucking see it, so who cares?! It's awesome!

Meanwhile, I've continued cleaning out the DVR.

The Dark - This movie feels like it was made as a low budget direct-to-DVD movie during downtime on the set of the Silent Hill movie. It even has Sean Bean. Turns out it was made and released a year before it. The overall structure is eerily the same; child disappears, mother goes apeshit trying to find her, father shuffles around in crazy mother's footsteps trying to piece together what's going on. It just begs the question, if this movie was already out when Silent Hill was being made, why the fuck couldn't they have learned from its mistakes?!

The Burning - I have a quest to see every movie that made the UK's "Video Nasty" list. I actually vaguely recall seeing this in high school, either on USA's Up All Night, or TNT's Monstervision with Joe Bob Briggs. This is one of a slew of summer camp slasher movies that came out after the success of Friday the 13th. It's hook was that the killer, a groundskeeper named "Cropsy" of all things, was a horribly scarred burn victim. (The other thing it has to differentiate itself from other camper slasher movies of the era is a young Jason Alexander from Seinfeld - with hair!) This movie is good mindless fun, but you've got to think - how hard would it be to kick a burn victim's ass? I don't care if their coming at you with a pair of garden shears, I'm pretty sure just laying your hands on them would be incapacitating, let alone a good, solid punch.

The Black Dahlia - I didn't want to see this, but Gemma's had a hard-on for it ever since it was in theaters. No one really likes this movie, and that's because it's ass. The movie is based off of a fictional novel loosely based on the infamous Black Dahlia murder. Everything but the fact that a girl was murdered and severely mutilated is made up and it all sucks. The photography/cinematography is pretty neat; the movie is made too look like an old photo, but the corpse of the Black Dahlia itself is some CGI abomination seemingly inspired by American J-horror remakes - it really clashes with the rest of the film and not in a good way, in my opinion. The pace of the movie is mind-numbingly slow, the Black Dahlia murder seems to be a minor subplot of the entire movie, and the ending is just total ass and poo smeared together on Wonderbread and served on a paper plate. The best/worst thing about it is that there is something about this movie that just screams, "This was made to be Oscar bait!!!" which is hilarious given just how spectacularly it fails. There's a cheap direct-to-video knock-off of the same name on FearNet right now that is apparently even worse, which is really unfortunate, because this is one of those rare opportunities where an independent film maker with an extremely low budget could have actually have made a better movie.