Who you gonna believe? The calendar and your lying eyes, or Hollywood?
Friday they shoot off their first blockbusting skyrocket of the season with Iron Man 3, which we’d heard was going to focus more on the billionaire playboy Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) than his full-metal-jacketed alter ego. And, according to our critic Piers Marchant, it does, but new director Shane Black seems less interested in limning the man in the iron mask than making “a film, essentially, about the artifice of making such a film … and by the end, we are waist-deep in the standard comic movie convention of a huge epic battle amongst a backdrop of girders, beams and many, many things that can collapse to the ground.”
Sigh. That’s why Pauline Kael used to take the summers off.
More rewarding is Rodney Ascher’s Room 237, a documentary about the putative “hidden meanings” of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror movie of Steven King’s novel The Shining. The five obsessives who provide the narration have divergent ideas about what Kubrick was trying to tell us — maybe The Shining was about American genocide, or about the Holocaust, or maybe it’s Kubrick’s sub rosa apology for helping fake the Apollo 11 moon landing? While our Philip Martin was left dubious, he found their arguments fascinating. As the Amazing Criswell used to say, you can’t prove it isn’t so!
And then there’s the belated opening of Danny Boyle’s psychological thriller Trance, which is minor Danny Boyle, but Danny Boyle nevertheless. Which means its diverting, if not mind-blowing. And for 1st Night, which opens theatrically as well as on video on demand, we have no opinion. Its makers didn’t make it available for advance screening.
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full reviews.