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Iron Man 2
By Scott Mantz

Robert Downey Jr., who reprises his role as flamboyant billionaire Tony Stark in "Iron Man 2," knows how to make an entrance.

Encased in the red-and-gold metal suit that he created to stay alive, he leaps out of an airplane and rockets into the festive Stark Expo, where he touches down on a huge stage surrounded by an adoring crowd. The mechanical suit gives way to a beaming Stark, who raises his hands in triumph, and proudly announces, "It's good to be back!"

Before the first "Iron Man" opened, Downey's career was in shambles. But when "Iron Man" got great reviews from critics and grossed more than $582 million worldwide, he made the comeback of a lifetime.

When "Iron Man" was over, moviegoers wanted more, and now they're getting it with "Iron Man 2," which arrives with huge expectations. Screenwriter Justin Theroux and returning director Jon Favreau tried hard to meet those expectations, but maybe they tried too hard, since the resulting film suffers from the same trappings as past superhero sequels: too many characters, rushed pacing and poor plotting.

It's not that "Iron Man 2" isn't good. In fact, it's good enough, but it falls short of its predecessor. But even with humor and great action scenes, it feels too conventional.

The first "Iron Man" ended with Tony Stark revealing his identity to the world on live television. Now that the cat's out of the bag, everyone wants a piece of him - or rather, his costume, which would give any nation possessing it a huge military advantage. But in an effort to preserve world peace, Stark vows to keep it close to the vest, much to the dismay of Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell), a fast-talking rival who's vying to pick up where Stark left off in the weapons game.

It turns out that Hammer is the least of Starks problems, when a revenge-fueled Russian scientist named Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke), a.k.a. Whiplash, crashes Stark's party at the Monaco Grand Prix by brandishing the same technology that powers the Iron Man suit. If that wasn't enough, Stark's living on borrowed time, as the power source that initially saved his life is now killing him. With the help of his thorough second-in-command, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), and his loyal friend, James "Rhodey" Rhodes (Don Cheadle), Tony Stark must prove to the world just how invincible Iron Man really is.

Where the first "Iron Man" was a straightforward origin story that gave Downey breathing room to show off Tony Stark's swagger and confidence, "Iron Man 2" almost smothers that charisma. That's because the busy story is rushed along and feels too derivative of another superhero sequel that left fans disappointed: "Spider-Man 3." Like that film, "Iron Man 2" finds its hero falling from grace and fighting his best friend who betrayed him in a gratuitous battle scene.

It also has too many characters, and none are fully developed. That's especially true with Mickey Rourke, who's hot off "The Wrestler" with bulging muscles and tattoos all over his body. But his villain has a weak motive that's been done far too many times before.

Scarlett Johansson, who plays secret agent Black Widow (though she is never actually called that by name), barely makes her mark with just one action scene, while Gwyneth Paltrow has less to do than she did in the first film. Don Cheadle takes over as "Rhodey" Rhodes from Terrence Howard, and he makes the role his own, especially after he finally suits up as War Machine.

'PLEASE GIVE'
NICOLE ALWAYS GIVING
By Sean Chavel

Chick flick has for some time now, maybe two decade's worth, had a derogatory slant to it. Maybe it is because most of them, either starring the likes of Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey or maybe the two of them together, stink of moldy cheese. But if there exists one stable reliability to the genre it is writer-director Nicole Holofcener who has never made a bad feature. Her latest film is Please Give and once again Catherine Keener is her star subject.

During her career, Holofcener has made "Walking and Talking," Lovely and Amazing" and "Friends with Money." Her latest film opens with a graphic montage depicting the tragedy of mammograms. Not really a tragedy, that's overstatement, but it takes a delicate beautiful thing and makes it, uh… makes you want to close your eyes at the indignity. These opening seconds are the least appealing element of the film. But maybe it was meant solely for the female audience to identify with (and not me). It used to be men that gave women a hard time in Holofcener movies, now you can add the doctor's office.

Then there is the human consciousness. Kate (Keener) and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) are in the business of buying the vintage antiques of the recently deceased, sometimes buying apartments of the deceased. Kate and Alex live in a high-rise unit, next to a unit inhabited by the elderly Andra (Ann Guilbert). She is cared for by her granddaughters Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), who share a range of good and bad opinion of Kate and Alex, whom in essence, are bargain-hunters.

The fizz in Kate and Alex's marriage is deflating their sense of worth. Perhaps the problem is that they share every waking minute together (can marriage and occupation co-exist?). They have an overweight and generally insecure teenage daughter Abby (Sarah Steele), whose self-esteem would boost if only somebody bought her a two-hundred dollar pair of jeans. But Kate doesn't buy her jeans, or buy her skin care. Not when there are starving homeless people on the street. Alex could also step in and buy for his daughter, but he invests elsewhere too, in the lives of strangers.

This story is as much a marriage deconstruction as it is a portrait of the two granddaughters next door. Rebecca is an attractive and hard-working radiology technician who barely gets out to date (she prefers guys that are the cute type, like Thomas Ian Nicholas who plays Eugene); while Mary doesn't date she does get around in various meaningless flings. But the story set-up is that Rebecca and Mary are neighbors to a married couple they don't like because they look like they want to leech on their grandmother as soon as she passes.

Then the surprise is that Rebecca and Mary make friends with them, only it is made in a singularly paved way. Rebecca becomes closer to Kate, while Mary becomes closer to Alex and their daughter Abby. Defined by different avenues, each friendship becomes its own privatized confessional. Kate leaks out her guilt to Rebecca for what she does for a living. Alex pours out his frustrations on lack of excitement in his marriage to Mary. And Mary becomes Abby's skin care specialist, and lousy advisor on beauty since to her beauty is skin deep and nothing else. Rebecca carries all the guilt between the two sisters. Seething is this unspoken rivalry between sensitivity and shallowness.

But all of this description fails to convey what a talented writer Holofcener is who cares too much about her characters to give them false objectives. Shall I reaffirm to you that the film ends in the humbling, realistic way it should end without being hammered with overblown dramatic ploys? What's criterion is that Holofcener writes jokes worthy of Woody Allen in the 1970's, but with a pro-feminist spark interpolated into it. She writes characters that are real and rounded, vulnerable and neurotic, smart and courageous - at least courageous for contemporary New Yorker types. And she finds varied and individual details in her characters. Holofcener puts the brains back in chick flicks and reinstalls the idea that at least a few chick flicks out there are made for the grown-up thinking person.

'SOLITARY MAN'
THE BACHELOR IS OLD
By Sean Chavel

Solitary Man is Michael Douglas' best performance in years, which is an edgy, slick-talking movie that is simultaneously wicked and funny, and yet more than anything, it is as uncompromising as it promises. Douglas is going the route where other aging actors of his generation - Jack Nicholson, Sean Connery, Mel Gibson - have gone themselves. Douglas plays the untamable playboy who lusts after younger chicks and finds no moral error in his behavior.

Luckily, Douglas' character Ben Kalmen happens to be a very rich guy. But the catch is that writers and directors Brian Koppelman and David Levien (they wrote "Rounders" and "Ocean's 13" together) make Ben a guy who has smashed his own reputation and is dangerously close to losing his luxuries, like his high-rise New York penthouse. He spent all of his money buying his way out of jail, he explains. This implies that Ben's lawyers kept him away from dire fraud charges over his auto manufacturing business. But whatever happens, Ben is dressed to kill. Or at least to thrill. Ben is so narcissistic that he thinks as long as he is present in the room; he is a thrill to everybody.

Barely besides him in his life are his ex-wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) and his daughter Susan (Jenna Fischer), yet it's the daughter that puts up regularly with listening to Ben's lewd sexual conquests. But everywhere Ben goes, he thinks he has the right to invade in on other conversations. Ben's current girlfriend Jordan (Mary Louise Parker), asks him to escort her daughter Allyson (Imogen Poots) to a college university orientation, and Ben hardly misses a beat to bust in the younger frat boy turf.

The uncompromising aspects of the story involve how Ben, not only tries to get laid over the weekend, but that he actually does. Which trickles is a domino effect of bad luck and backfiring - risking reputation, respect of family and a bank loan which he is relying on - which sends Ben nose-diving. He's left leaning on Jimmy Marino (Danny DeVito) to give him a job at a diner, and college kid Daniel Cheston (Jesse Eisenberg) who needs the aging bachelor to mentor him in the art of talking to girls.

When a rich guy like Ben though falls down hard it's enough to make him want to change his ways around, at least according to the usual Hollywood screenplay. But Ben still wants to hit on girls, and now that he resorts to a campus town, that means 19-year old girls. The Humbert Humbert perv in Ben doesn't want to let up. But he doesn't want to see that he is now woefully out of place at college parties.

Douglas, whom judging on this colorfully grandiose performance, is getting to the age to play a perfect Robert Evans if ever given the opportunity, that former Paramount studios honcho and lady-killer that fell hard after a string of flops and personal bad publicity. Playing Ben, he's still the kind of Basic/Fatal character that made Douglas an icon 20 years ago, except that "Solitary Man" happens to be a story emboldened by harsh revelations and consequences. Yet at the same time, it is fun to see Douglas revel in a character steeped in slick, lecherous conduct because he is so damn persuasive in action. Do guys like Ben ever enter 12-step programs as long as they still remain wealthy?

There are some select readers present that still crave anti-commercial movies when they become available. So far this year, I count three really good ones for you: "Greenberg," "Chloe," and "Solitary Man." These are the movies that feature characters that sound like real intelligent people, the kind of people with grey shadings of good and bad behaviors. But if any of you out there that ever thought that Michael Douglas was a great actor denied a challenging role, well, then this is the challenging role he was born to play.

A Nightmare on Elm Street
By Anthony Lund

It was only a matter of time in the current glut of horror remakes (Halloween, Friday 13th) until one of the undoubtedly greatest imaginings of modern horror cinema was given an update.

If anyone doesn't know the story of Freddy Krueger then you don't frequent the world of horror, or possibly even cinema, very often. Devised by Wes Craven in 1984, Freddy Krueger was depicted as the spirit of a child murderer, trapped in the world between dreams and reality and finding ways of bridging the gap to continue his murderous spree from beyond the grave. His iconic status grew with the subsequent sequels until Nightmare 6, when the comedic value had taken over from the shocks, leaving Freddy as a wise-cracking pop culture figure rather than the evil monster of his early years.

Then, in a stroke of genius, Wes Craven brought Freddy back from the dead in New Nightmare, a film within a film that reunited the cast of the original film as themselves, pitted against a Krueger that was no longer confined to the cinema screen but had been released into reality. This was a darker Krueger, more like that seen in Craven's original film. Years later and Krueger reappeared in the Nightmare/ Friday 13th crossover, Freddy vs. Jason, a film that fans loved and served its purpose of bringing together two of horrors greatest icons in a bloodbath showdown.

Then all went quiet on the Freddy front until an announcement that Michael Bay's company Platinum Dunes was going to remake the original. With the success of Rob Zombie's reimagining of Halloween, and the so-so Friday 13th remake (which while not bad added nothing of value to a pretty straight forward film franchise), the reaction to the new was mixed.

Now, finally, the wait is over and Freddy stalks the teenagers of Elm Street once more. Like the original, the teenage cast is led by Nancy, who turns out to be Freddy's nemesis and instigator of his ultimate downfall. The five teenagers' dreams are haunted by Freddy, and as expected one by one they find themselves being killed off in the most grisly of ways while trying to discover the secrets of who Krueger is and why he is killing them.

The story is not identical to the Wes Craven original, which is a sure-fire plus point, although there are some iconic scenes from the original to be found in it and there are more than a few passing similarities in the storyline other than just the characters. The first death scene involving one of the female cast being flung around the room as her unseen attacker slices and dices her, and the glove in the bath scene both make it into this remake, landing it somewhere between a straight remake of the original and a new take on it.

With a production team that have worked on remakes of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday 13th, Amityville Horror and The Omen, as well as blockbusters Watchmen and Transformers, the film's production is obviously in the hands of the well tread and qualified. The only dubious appointment is Samuel Bayer as director, being best known for music videos for Green Day and television commercials. As you would expect this does lead to some snappy directing, so don't expect anything slow and unnerving but more jumpy and straight for the jugular, in your face camera work for the most part.

The cast, led by Watchmen's Jackie Earle Hayley as Krueger and supported by the likes of Clancy Brown (Carnival, The Shawshank Redemption), Lia D Mortensen and an up and coming teenage selection play their roles well and while Haley will never overtake fan favorite Robert Englund as Krueger, he does bring something new and refreshing to the character, in both his role as the scarred demon and his human incarnation in a flashback.

In the end, any remake should be taken at face value.

Whether you were a fan of the original, a fan of Freddy or new blood to the franchise then there is something for you in here. Spot the familiar bits compare the styles of Englund and Hayley or just go along for the ride. Whatever your opinion of the film, with Michael Bay at the helm and a legion of eager Freddy fans awaiting the release, there is little doubt that the Nightmare bandwagon is still rolling on with money spilling out in its wake.

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