Live by Night (2016) Review

rating: ****

the story: A Boston gangster is relocated to Tampa and finds unexpected complications in establishing himself.

review: Gangster movies are about as old as Hollywood itself, so well-established that it’s become increasingly difficult for new entries to find any real appreciation. It’s just assumed that everything’s already been seen and done, and if not, The Sopranos was too big a recent phenomenon to worry about what the movies might be doing, too. I think Sopranos spent a little too much time glorifying gangsters, the way Goodfellas did, the exact opposite of how human Donnie Brasco made them, the last time a movie made an impression.

Live by Night opts for an entirely new route. It actually makes gangsters potentially moral authorities.

Yeah. Based on the middle act of a historical trilogy from Dennis Lehane, Hollywood’s favorite author in the first decade of the millennium, Ben Affleck’s adaptation posits an Irish immigrant cleaning up a white supremacist scene by uniting all the undesirables under his empire. He has a black girlfriend (Zoe Saldana), his nemesis is a phony Christian proselytizer (Elle Fanning) and his biggest ally is her police chief father (Chris Cooper). He also wants to replace booze (about to become legal again) with gambling, when no one else sees the wisdom in it.

Like The Godfather, this is a story that doesn’t really dwell on whether or not the basic premise of gangsters is justifiable, but rather whether there is any semblance of honor in what they do. So we follow Affleck around as a hero. His enemies are the viewer’s enemies. His ideas are ideas we can get behind. 

So it’s interesting. Of course, the cast is pretty interesting. Brendan Gleeson’s also in it, Titus Welliver, guys who’re natural fits for this kind of movie. Clark Gregg is there, too, Sienna Miller. Fanning continues to be an inexplicably mature youthful screen presence, in perhaps one of her best roles. Affleck himself never goes out of his way to put the spotlight on himself. If anything, he’s finally found a role that allows him to be the star but also the casual screen presence that saw his best early material (Good Will Hunting, Shakespeare in Love), which often found him in supporting roles.

This is the sort of movie that doesn’t feel like it should be a big deal. But perhaps is for that very reason. It leaves a better impression that way. By not trying to be so impressive, it is. In an era bereft with flashy material, large and small, it’s a welcome digression.

Iron Man 2 (2010)

rating: ****

the story: Tony Stark's afterglow from the big Iron Man reveal is threatened by a business rival.

review.  I hate Iron Man.  I hate the movie responsible for the whole MCU.  I think that if everyone who flocked to see Avengers: Endgame this year actually bothered to rewatch (or surely in some cases, watch) it, they'd hate it, too.  But we have this fiction that the MCU has done no wrong.  Forget that everyone forgets Incredible Hulk is the second MCU movie, or even exists within the MCU, and you get an origin to the whole thing that makes it all the more remarkable that the MCU happened at all.  What saved Iron Man was the fortuitous casting and performance of Robert Downey Jr., and Iron Man 2.

Now, conventional wisdom is that it's actually Iron Man 2 that sucks.  Which is nonsense.  Iron Man 2 is the reason the MCU happened.  And it's the reason why anyone thinks the MCU has been so good.  It's the real template.  And it did it better than just about all of the subsequent movies.

Tony Stark is given a real arc.  A real arc.  This is the only movie, in all his appearances, where he is given a real arc.  And a satisfying one, at that.  He seems like a real character.  The charm of the performance matches, for the first time, the charm of the character.  And built all around it is an incredible assembly, the first great assemblage of characters in the MCU.  This is Scarlett Johansson's first appearance as Black Widow.  Arguably it's her best appearance as Black Widow.  Samuel L. Jackson has his first decent-sized appearance as Nick Fury.  Don Cheadle assumes the role of Jim Rhodes.  Garry Shandling is a smarmy senator trying to match wits with Tony Stark.  Gwyneth Paltrow does more of her Pepper Potts (which is basically the same in every appearance).  Director Jon Favreau, in his second and final film at the helm in the MCU, puts in another appearance as Happy Hogan (inexplicably his most enduring contribution to the whole thing).  Mickey Rourke throws away his Hollywood comebackto play Whiplash, with a wicked Russian accent.  Clark Gregg puts in an Agent Coulson appearance.  And...ladies and gentlemen: Sam Rockwell.

Sam Rockwell's whole career is unfathomable.  How does he keep finding roles?  You'd think after The Green Mile he would've been dismissed into an endless stream of tiny creep roles.  But he just keeps finding decent roles, decent-sized roles.  And you can thank appearances like his Justin Hammer for it.  He utterly lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man in this one.  He lampoons the Tony Stark of Iron Man 2 in this one.  And somehow we never see the dude again.  Absolutely indispensable magic.  But at least they realized instantly how important Loki was (the best thing about Thor by far).

So the whole package is pretty wonderful.  And quite possibly still the best single thing about the whole MCU. 

Iron Man (2008)

rating: ***

the story: Tony Stark is Iron Man.

what it's all about: I've never found Iron Man to be a particularly good movie.  It opened the same year as The Dark Knight, which to my mind was a great movie.  And of course it gave birth to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), which eventually became the only superhero movie franchise(s) anyone really took seriously.  I liked Iron Man 2 a great deal, but the first one?  I never felt particularly compelled to watch it again, and in fact it took me ten years (yesterday) to do so again, and my impression of it didn't at all change.  This is odd for a number of reasons.  One isn't really that it took me so long to rewatch it, but that I really didn't feel like doing so for so long.  Instant desire to rewatch was something I had for Dark Knight.  I couldn't get enough of Dark Knight.  I like superhero movies.  I like superheroes in general.  Yeah, I'm a DC guy.  By this I mean I tend to like DC superheroes and DC storytelling.  It's not just the superheroes but the storytelling, too.  Marvel doesn't often think of its superheroes in the same way DC does.  At the movies, there's really just Logan and the two Amazing Spider-Man movies.  Then there's stuff like the cartoonish logic of Bryan Singer's first two X-Men, Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man flicks.  Ironically by the third one, which looked the most cartoonish, he finally went somewhere real.  So of course fans hated it.

Fans loved Iron Man instantly.  Visually it already looked timeless.  It still looks timeless.  The look of the armor matches up exactly in credibility with what you see in Avengers: Infinity War, ten years later.  That's pretty good.  It looks totally different than anything superhero movies had done before.  That was what made Raimi's Spider-Man pop, what made audiences "believe a man can fly" in 1978.  In that sense, of course the MCU took over the popular imagination.  It did something no one had seen before, and that always hooks the masses. 

But in terms of storytelling...It's awful.  Just...awful.

Tony Stark is sold as a tech genius.  Great!  Fantastic!  In 2008, Steve Jobs was a cultural icon!  Totally legit!  But...Tony Stark isn't sold as a Steve Jobs tech genius.  He's sold as...a weapons manufacturer.  And that's all he's known for.  And...when he says he won't make weapons again...that's it.  He's apparently done.  Forever.  And yet...We see his private lab, and he's got robots working for him.  He's got J.A.R.V.I.S., the virtual assistant who would later merge with the android Vision.  The rest of the world?  Doesn't have those robots.  Doesn't have J.A.R.V.I.S.  I think Siri wasn't a thing yet, in 2008.  Alexa wasn't a thing.  And of course, Tony famously keeps Iron Man to himself. 

Logistically this is idiotic.  In every single sense.  It only makes sense if you're trying to explain how Iron Man happens.  But in the real world, Iron Man makes no sense.  At all.  So you have to either accept the insanity of it or you can't.  And you see how idiotic the whole plot is.

Even as a weapons manufacturer, taking away everything else, Tony Stark makes no sense as a huge celebrity, appearing on every major magazine cover, as depicted in the film.  Weapons manufacturers aren't celebrities.  Name one.  The only "name" weapons developer I can think of is Oppenheimer, and he was never celebrated like this.  When Iron Man 2 shows a vintage video of Tony Stark's dad, it's clearly a pastiche of...Walt Disney.  Hilarious, considering the first two Iron Man movies were distributed by...Paramount.

But even the conceit of Tony being captured in the midst of a weapons demonstration...in the field of engagement...That's stupid.  I'm really sure that would never happen.  And then he gets captured.  And he's got shrapnel in his chest, so the bad guys...have the ability to give him tech that needs to be inserted onto/into his chest.  That can also be modified to power a suit of armor he makes.  Because.

This is the sort of nitpicking fans routinely give movies and/or TV shows they hate.  Usually, I try really hard not to do it, because nitpicking usually is even more idiotic than what these fans are attempting to portray as idiotic.  It's insipid.  It's a poor way to analyze something.  In this instance, though, these were problems I noticed immediately.  I don't normally instantly have these sorts of problems.  I hate how Singer uses Professor X as a macguffin in the first two X-Men movies.  Both times the exact same way.  It's lazy storytelling, something that needs to happen in order to move the story along because no one bothered to think the story through.  In other words, I'm not talking about nitpicking at all (mindlessly being annoyed by story elements while attempting to portray yourself as smarter than the people who developed them), but bad storytelling.  I always hate bad storytelling. 

And Iron Man is, again, beyond anything else, bad storytelling. 

The worst thing?  Even as it completely rejuvenates Robert Downey Jr.'s career, making him far more popular and relevant than he's ever been...Iron Man completely wastes and trashes Jeff Bridges in the process.  How does that even happen???  And you can sort of tell that it motivated him to seek better material, as suddenly he went into a whole career renaissance (Crazy Heart, True Grit, Hell or High Water) with material that was nothing like his lifeless role in Iron Man, the grizzled iconoclast Tony Stark only wishes he'll become, the culmination of everything Bridges had done before.

And Terrence Howard?  Marvel has Terrence Howard, and...nope.  Not in Iron Man 2.  How does that even happen???  Faran Tahir, who would turn up as a Starfleet captain in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, lamented playing a terrorist in Iron Man.  Do you think he ever changed his mind?  In Iron Man 3 they change the whole idea of Tahir's role, giving the lead-up to the Mandarin to a sham played by Ben Kingsley.  They try and pretend real terrorists were never a part of the story.  Yeah!

Gwyneth Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, the Tony Stark assistant who in 2018 would probably be cheering on #MeToo, but instead becomes a slow-burning love interest, who puts up with all of Tony's antics...because.  They never even try to develop her character, not in Iron Man, not in any other appearance.  Clark Gregg, in his first appearance as S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, is mostly asked to dance around the joke of what S.H.I.E.L.D. actually stands for aside from a very elaborate excuse for an acronym.  Leslie Bibb plays a hot chick who's also a reporter for Vanity Fair, which is one of those inexplicable magazines smitten with weapons manufacturer Tony Stark.

Really, it's only Downey Jr. and Bettany who appear fully-formed and presentable for future appearances.  Good solid foundation, sure, but...

We learn late in the movie that Bridges' character was in cahoots with Tahir all along, that he set up Tony to die, as he did his father, to kill the golden goose, because...That part is never really made clear.  It would make sense if it were because either Stark had figured out what he was doing, but...Yeah.  Not in this movie.  Not in any movie.  He just likes to do away with tech geniuses, I guess.  The movie goes out of its way to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that not only is Tony the only person capable of creating the tech he does, but that Bridges' character isn't even in the conversation.  In the era of Steve Jobs?  Bill Gates?  Steve Wozniak???

The funny thing about all this is that 2011's Green Lantern actually borrows a lot of Iron Man's story elements, and does them better, and fans insist to this day that it's a badly made movie, full of plot holes.  Really???  In the interests of full disclosure, Green Lantern is based on a DC superhero, and so you can call bias if you like, but for me it's still storytelling.  Green Lantern has great storytelling.  Iron Man doesn't.

So Iron Man 2 follows it with infinitely better storytelling.  Fans disagree.  But the insanely popular MCU happens anyway.  I can't possibly be upset about that.  There's still good material that results from it, the Captain America movies notably. 

I'd hope that in the years to come, anyone looking to revisit the whole thing recognizes the first one in the sequence for what it is: a ridiculous mess.