Film review: Iron Man 2 (12A)

Who is Iron Man? What is Iron Man? I only ask because in this sequel to the winning original we enter, by an unmarked side entrance, a philosophical debate along the lines of Trigger's broom (if the handle and the head have been changed, is it still the same broom?)

Not that the writers wrestled too long with the conundrum. I suspect they sat scratching their scalps with the butt end of a 2B and wondered where to go with the franchise till one grizzled vet slapped down his Venti Latte and piped up - Iron Man Two? I'm thinking... maybe... Two Iron Men?

So what is Iron Man? Is it the suit or is it the man? If Pea-Shooter without his pea-shooter was just a guy called Guy, could we all raise Bics to our lips and put an end to evil?

It's a telling question in terms of the plot because for much of the time Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) isn't Iron Man. He isn't even Tony Stark.

Indeed, you're taken back to Will Smith's dissolute superhero Hancock for a parallel - a twisted vision of superpowers for rank and selfish pleasures.

Stark uses Iron Man to shoot cantaloupes tossed in the air by be-meloned blondes at a drunken party. He body-pops like some metallic MC Hammer. He does high kicks to heavy metal at his eponymous expo. He stretches his devilish charm to the limits of our tolerance.

Because Tony Stark, technological genius and flawed human being, is wrestling with mortality - and losing. He has less than a year to live because his life-saving heart gizmo is pumping him full of poison. So what's the point? He's "privatised world peace", so might as well get jiggy with it, as Will would say.

So Don Cheadle, all American hero Lt Col James Rhodes, takes a spare suit and becomes Iron Man for a while, temporarily relieving himself of sidekick duties to hand over the weapon to Uncle Sam (in the shape of Garry Shandling's smarmy senator) and his evil cohort-in-capitalism Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell as a live-wire wacky corporate rival).

Little does the government know that Hammer has brought on board Ivan Venko (Mickey Rourke) who necessarily drags along his waspish alter-ego, Whiplash. Hammer wants to harness Venko's desire for revenge over Stark for the sins of his father but Venko's Whiplash has a bigger sting in mind.

God loves good genes. Robert Downey Jr and Mickey Rourke have traced similar lines in their private lives. The former emerges as a charismatic hunk, the other a bloated wreck. However, both are blessed with cinematic presence and although their performances are lessons in contrast (RDj is all bombast, wit and verbiage while the Rourkester is a mumblin', pick chewin' Rasputin) they are effortless scene stealers and make the not-inconsiderable Rockwell look like a mouse in the house.

There's a lesson in here somewhere about gender equality too. Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) nags and harries and worries till she's Marge Simpson in Manolos but Stark promotes her from PA to CEO to keep her fretting fruitful.

Meanwhile Scarlett Johansson gets to kick-ass and show the boys a thing or two but she has to change into a catsuit in the back of an Audi so that tells you something about the arc of post-feminist womanhood. Whatever. Did I tell you the bit about her changing into a catsuit?

Either way, the movie - slow and unsatisfying in patches - still packs a punch. An early encounter in which Whiplash slices through the field of a Monte Carlo race cars to reach Stark is a spectacle steeped in screen dollars while the final showdown between the Iron Men and Whiplash is a lesson (from director Jon Favreau) in how to put on screen a grand finale with tempo, verve and slick methods of dispatch.

Iron Man may save the day but Robert Downey Jr - again - saves the franchise. Are they the same thing? Put LeBeouf in the burgundy bodysuit and see how that works out for you.

Stage review: London Assurance, Olivier

Lordy, lord, what a joyous treat the Olivier has on offer.

Truth be told, I didn't think I had the energy for two hours 40 of hand-me-down Restoration comedy with the usual round of turn-on-a-sixpence affairs, mistaken identities and off-the-shelf archetypes.

You could put the plot down on a postcard - cosmopolitan father and reckless indebted son dispatched to the bucolic countryside where, through a mangled mix-up, they love indiscriminately and in a manner likely to trigger the greatest number of confusions.

But there's an alchemy here. There's an energy and affection and relish on the stage that is contagious.

It's the sort of production where you leave the theatre a bosom buddy with the stranger next door because you're imbued with a renewed affection for humanity.

It's like the freezer's broken at the ice cream factory, such is the quick and unceasing succession of treats.

There is Simon Russell Beale, as Sir Harcourt Courtly, a preening, plump, pretentious dandy, 57 but claiming only 39. He gurns like Les Dawson and yelps with camp outrage. He is a bull in ballet shoes cursed by bunions, every contortion of gut and gait a calculated dag at the funny bone.

We have cigar-chomping, hard-drinking, fast-talking Fiona Shaw as Lady Gay Spanker more manly than Sir Harcourt could ever be. Tally-ho and game for a laugh she encourages Sir Harcourt's affections to save 18-year-old Grace the ordeal of a marriage to the primping buffoon.

We have circling entourage of impeccable support with blunderbusses packed with bluster - Mark Addy as bluff countryman Max Harkaway, Paul Ready as Hugh Grant-a-like Charles Courtly, Nick Sampson as snide valet Cool, Matt Cross as Mr Dazzle, the mischief maker, and Michelle Terry as earthy Grace, the object of two men's affections.

And, my oh my, we have yet to enjoy the unassuming comedy cameo offered by Richard Briers as bumbling Dolly Spanker who occasionally lifts himself from an encroaching slumber to rumble and roar into life like a hand-cranked Rolls on a cold morning.

Irish stage genius Dion Boucicault, 21 at the time of writing the work in 1841, may have bought the plot contrivances wholesale from a man on a street corner but a combination of Nicholas Hytner's sprightly direction, some modern jibes (inserted by Richard Bean), some knowing nods to the plot's essential silliness and an ensemble who tuck into their clownish setpieces like hungry farmboys at a suckling pig make this the funniest and finest night in London.

Election, recession, debt and chaos? This piece of uproarious escapism is the perfect antidote and the surest guarantee of a laugh this side of a manifesto launch.

– From April 2010

Book review: Solar, by Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan, with his fastidious prose and eye for a wrenching setpiece, has always managed to capture the shock that erupts when chaos enters a neatly calibrated life.

In his latest work, he has done something of a volte-face. In his anti-hero, Michael Beard, the overweight, balding Nobel Laureate with his best years behind him, he journeys with the chaos that is to be inserted into other people's equilibrium.

He has borrowed the MO of Martin Amis, creating a darkly comic series of episodes that reflect the neuroses of our times.

The flabby physicist is a fine if disagreeable creation. Attracted to women and trouble, he half-heartedly trades on his Nobel prize to secure himself a few journeyman posts in which he might, by pure fluke, save the world from environmental catastrophe.

Although he mostly wants to be left unbothered, life has other ideas and his professional and personal worlds collide to send him reeling further away from his dream of uninterrupted sensual overload.

Blending McEwan's sophistication with Beard's low comedy results in a beguiling mix. While the story lacks a thorough spine, it is nevertheless diverting, intelligent and, probably in the face of looming Armageddon, essential.

From April 2010

Stage review: Andersen's English, Hampstead

The words - as you would expect - flow thick and fast. They toy leisurely with grand ideas, luxuriate in their space (they alone are blessed with the commodity) and deal with marital awkwardness without a stutter.

For this is the claustrophobic, hectic house of Charles Dickens in Gad's Hill in 1857 and, added to the confusion of children, sidestepped emotions, hillocks of furniture and carefully calibrated gaps between diffident couples, there is Hans Christian Andersen, the children's author and house guest who observes this tumult with an author's eye for discord but a clunky ear for a foreign language.

This central conceit - by playwright Sebastian Barry, handled by director Max Stafford Clark - offers comic relief in a hand-wringing piece that is fluid and finely acted but speckled with missed opportunities.

Danny Sapani finds warmth and comedy in a character who offers the audience an invite into the Dickens' soap opera but not much else. His one useful role is to understand the plight of Catherine Hogarth, baby-machine, genius-prop and out-of-favour spouse.

She shares with the Danish man her heartache, offering lines that he cannot understand to play out on an Englishman who chooses to understand them even less.

For Dickens is an unfeeling whirlwind capable of unerring sentiment on the page but not in the home. David Rintoul makes these contradictions richly human in his portrayal of a man plagued by a fierce, if misdirected, energy.

It is left to Catherine to hold the house together and the anguish and confusion displayed by Niamh Cusack is palpable and moving.

There are subplots too - Lisa Kerr's Irish maid is affecting as the resolute - and pregnant - maid who defies her master's cloying hand of benevolence. Dickens' daughter Kate (Lorna Stuart), son Walter (Alastair Mavor) and sister-in-law Georgie, a curiously clinical acolyte (Kathryn O'Reilly) all bear the wounds of their many swirling turns in the author's gravity.

And they are not alone in their head-spinning wooziness.

Writer Barry flicks specks of bright colour at the canvas. Step back and they make sense - but distance is what is required from a production that is crammed to the gills with just so much stuff.

- Andersen's English runs at the Hampstead Theatre until May 8. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com

– From April, 2010

Stage review: The Gods Weep, Hampstead

The Gods Weep, full of soaring feats of imagination and low-down skullduggery, is a demonically bonkers production that reveals, in all its excess and glory, what theatre can do when unleashed with its blood pumping hard.

There's a squirrel on a skewer, a rape, a crudely broken arm, a cut throat, a Shakespearean battle, a boardroom carve-up, a recovered cake, a string of expletives, an astrologer, loud bangs, executions and dollops of double crossing, a dissection of food security in the Third World, rain, blood, regurgitated porridge and a cat in a bag that, like Schrodinger's own, might or might not be dead.

It's all in there in Maria Aberg's unflinching take on Dennis Kelly's text. Don't stop to tick off the boxes because there'll be another thing in a minute. Don't rest your hands because you'll be hiding behind them soon enough, to block out a gruesome visual or stifle a laugh that might or might not be appropriate.

This orgy for the senses is not to everyone's taste. (A gaggle of shell-shocked seniors took advantage of the interval - two hours in - to make good their escape.) But once you find the rhythm, you can do nothing but admire the sheer full-on theatricality of this thrill ride.

The story, at least at the outset, makes sense. In a manner adopted by King Lear, Colme divides his business empire between two feuding boardroom rivals, Catherine and Richard, while flinging his son out into the corporate cold, claiming he's too nice to follow in his tyrannical father's footsteps.

While the two execs take advantage of Colme's impotence, the son seeks revenge and Colme spirals into a fugue state of pain, delusion and despair, nursed by Barbara, the unwitting daughter of a man he had ritually destroyed simply because he could.

In his fevered state, he imagines (or does he?) the boardroom battle as a physical, guerilla war that brings to the fore the provenance of this RSC production in an Act that is bizarrely reminiscent of a Fry and Laurie sketch.

(Two bloodied, gun-slinging soldiers share tea.
Old Soldier: What did you do before?
Martin: I was executive head of communications? You?
Old soldier: Financial advisor. Future and hedge funds.)

When all is done, we are alone with Colme and Barbara on a hillside under a tarp. Barbara coming to terms with the man she knows to be her father's tormentor, and Colme, now a burnt-out innocent, seeking redemption, shelter and makeshift lamb kebabs with equal levels of blank fervour.

All this - and there's a lot of it - all this is played out with straight-faced rigour and savagery that is entrancing and perplexing.

Jeremy Irons nails Colme. From slick-suited master of the universe to guileless, burnt-out hobo, his skill for nuance survives this blizzard of action to tell a touching and truthful tale.

Joanna Horton finds in Barbara that hard-edged, sentimentality of the beleaguered pram-faced princess that is an anchor point in a swirl of unravelling.

Jonathan Slinger as Richard, Helen Schlesinger as Catherine, Luke Norris as son Jimmy and Nikki Amuka-Bird as Beth, a victim of Jimmy's emotional machinations, are uniformly compelling in an RSC production that is gloriously flawed in its structure but played with such visceral conviction that the impact is enhanced, rather than reduced, by incredulity.

- The Gods Weep runs at Hampstead Theatre until April 3. Go to hampsteadtheatre.com

From March 31, 2010

Book review: Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

BOOK
Little Hands Clapping, by Dan Rhodes
Canongate, £10.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Dan Rhodes presents a modern grim fairytale that takes the reader to a blackly comic world peopled by eccentrics, romantics and monsters.

REVIEW
Enter the macabre world of Dan Rhodes at your peril, for within its dark recesses are gruesome secrets that are reliably modern yet as as old as tradition.

The action is mostly set in a German museum dedicated to suicide. Overseen by a grey man who wants nothing more than to be left alone, the museum has, to his dismay, become a magnet for an assortment of grim (and Grimm) characters.

The old man, the seemingly good Dr Frohlicher, the beautiful but tortured Madalena and the grotesque townsfolk all find themselves bound together by this lugubrious showpiece.

Rhodes' lucid prose is deceptively simple. He is bursting with stories - no character is deprived a quirk, a back story, a purpose - yet he writes at the pace of a funeral cortege.

He delights in his creations and their predicaments and they come to form part of the folklore of your psyche for the duration of the book - but he never forgets to undercut his sinister aspect with a droll one-liner that acknowledges precisely how far we have to travel to meet him halfway.

As with all fairytales, good and bad are finally returned to their respective boxes. While Rhodes might dwell on the dark side for a lifetime, the reader gets to see the world the right way round again before bedtime.

Affecting stuff.

– March 9, 2010

Book review: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

BOOK
The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris
Viking, £12.99
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Author's follow-up to an impressive debut offers an ambling narrative.

REVIEW
Joshua Ferris came to public attention with his redundancy-era office story Then We Came To The End.

His award-winning debut heralded a droll modern voice - easy going, perceptive and relevant. His second novel requires all those skills to cajole the reader to the end of a story that is so essentially sad that its rewards are hard-won and rare.

Ferris' sinuous style, his rich descriptions and his telling examination of the human condition are spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down.

Not that there is any conventional treatment for New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth. He walks. He can't stop himself. He might swoop down to collect a backpack of survival gear - for when he stops, he sleeps - but there's no halting his "benign idiopathic perambulation".

No-one knows why he walks and Ferris takes us from the accommodation of an embarrassing ailment in the office environment, through the travails of a family imploding in the face of a predicament to a fully-fledge rail-at-the-gods psychological breakdown.

Like Tim himself, the novel drifts and avoids all attempts at structure (a subplot about a murder is the closest thing to conventional storytelling, but goes nowhere) but there's no doubting Ferris' confidence and rigour in his handling of such a singular and abstract subject.

– March 8, 2010

Review: Henry Moore, Tate Britain

EXHIBITION
Henry Moore
Tate Britain
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In the most important exhibition of the sculptor's work since his death, visitors are invited to re-appraise the genius.

Picture: Reclining Figure, 1929 / The Henry Moore Foundation

REVIEW
Henry Moore opened the door through which hundreds of sculptors poured, imagination rich with his inspiration. Trouble is, time passes, fashions change and Henry Moore stood motionless by the door while the party rattled on elsewhere.

So Moore retreated to parks and public places and his vision became an adornment for municipal offices and a roost for fat pigeons.

But Henry Moore is new again. Despite the ubiquity, despite his national treasure status, despite his dulling familiarity, Moore has a whole new batch of things to say to a whole new millennium of people who didn't witness the slaughter of his century.

Time to revisit Henry Moore. See him anew in the biggest exhibition of his works since his death in 1986.

Normally with these grand exhibitions, the placards provide the narrative but this one... this one is different. This one urges a visceral response - Moore provides the work, you find the narrative. You chisel away at a Moore till the story comes.

Sculpture doesn't move me. I didn't get Henry Moore till now. The reclining figures just looked wrong. Distended and upended and round-about. Holes and string and thunder thighs.

But my narrative emerged once I had immersed myself in Moore.

My narrative was this: Michelangelo saw a slab of marble. He chipped and hammered and from this crude stone came David. Came perfection.

Moore, who had seen the horrors of the trenches and the misery of the Blitz, could not find perfection in his world. We were not there yet. So he found a lump of Horton stone or an elm and he tried to capture re-birth, a new start, faltering forms having another bash at civilising themselves.

The figures emerge like aliens; like freak flask babies; like a Terminator turning from floor tile to T-1000 via a silvery gloop.

Plain, innocent faces peer inquiringly from crayon-drawn torsos. Organic bodies - broad-backed, full of life and precocious sex - combine primeval atoms to find a distorted form that is too early, too uncomplicated, too uncertain to be the kind of beast that could organise a holocaust.

They have a will to live. So they seduce and conjoin and gestate and suckle. They are perplexed but imbued with vitality. They wait for evolution to make them David.

Moore was inspired by the so-called "primitive art" of non-Western cultures, dedicated to sex and religion. Mother and child, the totemic and universal, are recurring motifs throughout the seven rooms - and such is his feel for the primal that his drawings of the Blitz feel like a stark warning of the fate that will befall these figures when they venture too far from their Eden.

No, sculpture doesn't move me. Life does though, and Moore manages to capture this - and more. He captures the ache for resolution that is life's default setting.

- Until August 8. Go to tate.org.uk.

Review: Neil LaBute trilogy, Greenwich Theatre

March 2, 2010


STAGE
Neil LaBute trilogy
Greenwich Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
With The Furies linked to Helter Skelter and Land Of The Dead, Dialogue Productions launches a pincer movement against the human heart.

REVIEW
In the end what have we got? A few shards shooting around our system, reminding us that once we were connected, that we are not divorced from our actions.

Shards that steal our breath and reason. The residual fall-out from acts of "emotional terrorism".

That undercurrent of tension links these three short plays by Neil LaBute staged, by director Patricia Benecke, with bleak simplicity to counterpoint the complexity of worlds shattered by betrayal and violence.

LaBute picks up his characters when they've crossed the line, or are about to cross the line, and he watches as they dig themselves into holes trying to rationalise their guilt and turn it into something almost... beautiful.

Frances Grey, Stuart Laing and Patrick Driver are affecting and dysmorphic here, with Grey requiring the greatest swing of emotions. Her plight(s) are writ large in blinking, rheumy eyes which flicked left and right but never had the resolution to focus.

Of the three Land Of The Dead is the sharpest - a man and a woman apart emotionally and physically as she contemplates an abortion on a fateful day when the words "too late" never seemed more pertinent.

Helter Skelter is the richest, charting the fluctuating battle lines of a couple coming to terms with infidelity.

The Furies, the weakest and most unfelt, is an extended skit with two gay lovers splitting hairs over a break-up, one fed poisonous retorts by his witch of a sister.

Despite their silkiness, none was comfortable and each found an explosive, exaggerated climax to give the feuding a final flourish.

LaBute knows how people talk and he knows how they act. He doesn't judge because he finds grace and disgrace in equal measure.

Review: Two Women, Theatre Royal, Stratford

February 27, 2010


STAGE
Two Women
Theatre Royal Stratford East
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In a bruising interpretation of a Martina Cole novel, gutsy East End housewife Sue Dalston faces a life in jail for murdering her abusive husband.

REVIEW
Truth be told, I was not the target demographic for this one. In a cardboard world where all men are bullies, paedos or wimps and the middle class are cold, calculating snobs, I was lucky to escape this girls' night out without with my hickory dickory docked.

I'm not the right sort, as it goes. End of. That's not say that I didn't admire the sheer balls-out, never-knowingly-undersold interpretation of Martina Cole's pulpy novel which plays like EastEnders sans the genteel sophistication.

Rape, incest, slags, sluts, sorts, backhanders and brasses busy the stage to recreate the frantic (too hurried) tale of an abusive marriage over the decades; a story that sees wife Sue banged up at the outset for 'ammering bad boy hubbie Barry.

Sue Dalston is brilliantly played by feisty Cathy Murphy - part Green Street bruiser, part raw nerve in trackie bottoms - while Marc Bannerman's Barry is such a wide-boy he sidles on stage like a crab (reflecting the STDs he's brewing in his callards).

Look out, too, for excellent support from Alison Newman as gal pal Doreen and Sally Oliver as Barry's posh totty Roselle.

Tough task cramming generations of a novel into a stage play and writer Patrick Prior is too in awe of the source. Doesn't help that he is inclined to recap, state the bleedin' obvious and dash for the doof doof when the going gets tough.

(In fact, the title says Two Women, but the secondary tale about Mattie, a middle class nutcracker, is a needless subplot.)

Still, this is a gutsy attempt by director Ryan Romain to strike a common chord with the audience, in values and vernacular, and there's no doubting the marketable provenance of the original.

More protofeminists than singles night at Harriet's, more f-words than a Gordon Ramsay pluckfest, this scratching, fizzing hellcat of an evening will sell out quicker than a Cockney sizing up drums in Brentwood.

Up the 'ammers.

- Until March 20. For ticket details go to stratfordeast.com