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Hawaii, United States
I'm Kieran. I live in Hawaii. I like to watch movies a lot and I make them too. I also play around with flash animation, so you'll see a lot of that in my blog.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Two New Reviews: Iron Man and Underfist

Its been about a week since I saw both of these movies, but the powers of procrastination slowed it down considerably. That being said, lets start with Iron Man.

When I was ranting about the republican-ness of the titular character of Iron Man as displayed in its trailer several months ago, I reached the right (no pun intended) conclusion for the wrong reasons. While Iron Man is definitely a republican film, it does its best to seem as democratic as possible, including the section shown in the trailer. Tony Stark is essentially a republican hero, who's solution to everything is to blow it up real good and then pretend that he didn't blow it up (except for the agonizing "joke" taking place in the last few seconds of the film). Despite the fact that after presenting Stark as a right wing war fanatic the director has him go through an experience that supposedly makes him liberal, he merely makes a transformation from a bold faced military man to an apologetic and secretive vigilante. This changes him from extremely dislikable to mildly irritating in a slightly charming way. Now of course, that doesn't change the fact that there are in fact people in this world who agree with Tony Stark's politics, but the problem is that those people aren't the target audience. Iron Man has managed to infiltrate the other side's choir, seem like he's preaching to them, and in fact be preaching to the other side. So the film's flaw is not that it is essentially right wing, but the fact that it quite effectively pretends to be left wing. However, the other problem is that as a film, it is well paced and well made, and incredibly entertaining, with generally well constructed action and character development, and a plot that successfully manages to build tension. Technically its an incredibly well made film, with excellent pacing and special effects (although it lags a bit in the beginning and becomes a bit implausible at the end). The special effects, filmmaking and writing make Tony Stark far more likable than he should be, and I don't know if that's a good thing. Technically its a four star film, politically a two star film, so I give it 6/10

And now for something completely different.

The other film I watched last week was Underfist, an hour long cartoon spinoff of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Obviously, I'm not going to review it in the same way I did Iron Man, so I'm introducing a new rating scale. Generally I rate movies on a scale of one to ten, but my new Guilty Pleasures rating system only goes to five. I will use this scale to rate cartoons and other films that I seem to like for no particular reason other than it appeals to my personality. As such, these reviews will be much more biased.

To be honest, there is very little plot to Underfist. Its something to do with candy trying to take over the world, but that doesn't especially matter. What does matter is that there's a guy with a chain-saw for a leg and a hand that can be virtually any weapon, a talking, singing, spider, "The One Eyed Weirdo", a kid who somehow manages to be "half mummy, half vampire, half nerd" and Fred Fredburger, who likes to spell his name real good and say "YES". If that sounds good to you, than we're on the same page. If not, well, you're probably missing out on either some pretty big laughs or some pretty strong migraines. That being said, theres plenty of action and name spelling, and just enough plot to make it comprehensible (but I totally didn't understand it the first time watching it, but I think that had something to do with the fact that I taped it from TV and put said tape into my barely functional VCR). Underfist is perfectly suited to the Guilty Pleasure scale, because I love it, but I don't know if you will. I don't know if that makes any sense, but I give it 4.5/5

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