Iron Man 2 - A Review

As all movie reviews go - I do not apologize if you read this and then tell me that I spoil it for you.

Tony Stark is a narcissist, and the scriptwriter (forgive me for not googling your name) did a good job of using an insurmountable number of “I“s in the show.

Right off the bat, as the heavy suit falls from a C-130 in to a roaring crowd at the Start Expo, Anthony Stark - played to perfection by self-absorbent flavor of the month Robert Downey Junior (check out his article n the December ‘09 Esquire) - let loose a barrage of bigotry worthy of the bringer of world peace.

Heck, I even caught the eyeball roll when he had to share the limelight with a video footage of his old man Howard. That was before he did a test check on the toxicity of his blood. The audience is introduced to Iron Man’s first dilemma - he is dying.

Then comes problem number two - because all superheroes need to lead a complicated life - Pepper Potts.

Ex-Secretary and now CEO of Stark Industries, love interest Gwyneth Paltrow not only has to continually look good, but also has to handle sharing HER limelight with vavavoom Scarlett Johansson. That, and she’s kept in the dark about Tony’s health issue while having to run the company which now apparently functions as Iron Man’s PR consultancy firm.

Every superhero movie needs a villain. Every AMERICAN superhero movie needs a villain with a weird accent. Iron Man has Ivan Vanko, played by Mongolian-looking-Russian-Accented -American actor Mickey Rourke.

He tears things apart in the movie.

And now we get to the main point of an action movie. Big explosions and lights and fireworks so real you get warm and sweaty watching it.

Golden Village at Yishun offers an experience like no other in cinematic-reality. While other theaters boast high-tech 3D projectors that bring the action to you, GOLDEN VILLAGE YISHUN 10 is the only cinematic wonder that takes you into the heat of the explosions and high-flying stunts YOU PAID TO ENJOY!

They do that by turning off the air conditioning.

Iron Man never felt more real. When Tony Stark made his escape from the cave in the first part, I bet all he thought about was how to add in that air ventilating system into the next model.

Iron Man 2 features more explosions and flying objects to rival the first, and with the introduction of sidekick War Machine, it promises to be a slug fest like no other.

Me, I got a personal tour of action - right into the hot balls of fire that is the idiocy of cinema management. I bet it does wonders for the soft drink sales (which they jack up like 40 billion times).

Three Stars.

Doodles

“Don’t you get it? It’s not about you or us or whatever stupid thing that you did anymore!”

I could hear her from three blocks down, blaring at the poor man who happened to wake up on the wrong side of bed. With another woman. While his wife came home from a long night working as a waitress in a club.

But in places where I work, it’s all normal. Chaos and strife is the way of order around here, and sometimes you’re just left to thinking about how you managed to end up here in the first place.

Hope is a prospectus given to the imaginative mind of a 5-year-old. It’s a gift handed to their naive and untainted minds. As they step through the one-way rotating door of reality, it’s sad that most of them left the catalog behind.

I was a fat kid, sitting at the back of the class everyday. I liked to draw, and I’d draw everywhere I could - on the tables, in my textbooks, on myself, on other people… Life was a big white canvas for my pudgy hands.

And I loved my drawings, not that I can remember much of them now. They were innocent depictions of an otherwise derelict and forsaken human soul. Fast-forward thirty-five years and you have the resultant exposition of what remains as each creative scribble and doodle oozes out from a young impressionable mind.

Drawings became words, words turned to photographs, and photographs turned a means of survival in the damp corner of the street we have to call home.

I walked towards the screaming and stopped at the door, looking up and taking my time to compose myself. Traces of the fat kid still lingered as I shook off the urge to snap a romanticized perspective of our old neighborhood.

I shrugged it off with a glance at the news stand - nothing good, just like what we have here.

As the door slammed shut I made my way up to where the commotion was, one heavy step at a time. The floorboards have definitely seen better days, and the walls looked like they were permanently covered by a sheet of vomit. Heavy footsteps echoed mine as we made our way past each other. She was crying and emotional.

“Excuse me, but I can’t help but notice what a natural beauty you have,” I said the lines I used to stay up all night rehearsing.

“Get away from me, jerk!”

She shoved me aside, and I fell the fall I’ve done so many times. It helps that as a fat kid, you were never short of a good push and tease. The motions were graceful, the resulting cry of pain sharp, and the look of hurt afterwards priceless.

“Oh my god, are you ok? I didn’t mean to hurt you!” She came running back.

That was all the cue I needed. Too many times have I seen this happen, and too many times it has succeed. In this dark world where people mistake chance for hope, it’s easy to find desperate people not in their state of mind and take them away from what they treasure.

Forced into a life of misery, our streets are paved with a network of women offering sexual services in hope that they would be set free from the chains of reality that I put them in. A touch, a fall, and sweet words - promises of a chance at leaving the muck they see themselves in.

All this, from the harmless doodles of a fat five-year-old.