"Ironically, iron is the only element I never shot or snorted," said Robert Downey, Jr., who today takes iron as a supplement and Iron Man as a compliment.
"Show me another super hero with a night light built into his chest," said Downey. "I can always find my way in the dark to the super bathroom for a super pee."
"And thanks to my Iron Manly gloves, when my hand gets really hot I can press trousers like nobody's business," he added.
Hey, "trousers" was Downey's word, not mine.
In the hot zone of Afghanistan, Downey is captured by terrorists who are convinced he knows where the best poppies are. Things look dire until Downey constructs a fully armed flying robot suit out of tin cans, aluminum foil, and some Silly String. And, as Sean Hannity likes to say, "If you can't escape terrorists in a fully armed flying robot suit, then you can't escape terrorists."
Downey has to fight his way out of one of those famous Afghanistan caves by firing missiles at the bad guys. Firing off missiles...in a cave? Hey, it makes perfect sense to me.
Not only does Iron Man mark the return of super heroes to the summer cineplex, it also marks something much more ignominious: The return of facial hair.
Downey, with his weathering face and midnight-colored goatee, looks less like a hero in a tin can and more like a magician in a tin can. "Watch me blast a rabbit out of my hat - and then lure it towards the night light in my chest," Downey announced.
And then there's Jeff Bridges who seems to have turned into an old man between his last movie and this one - and an evilicious one at that. There's no hair on his head because hair is scarce in a world with a beard that thick. "That kind of beard is normally reserved for accompanying Kevin Spacey to awards shows," quipped director Jon Favreau, and I can assure you I don't know what he means.
Bridges spends numerous minutes on-screen using an unlit cigar as a prop. Either light that thing, Jeff, or stick it back in your pants where it belongs.
Skipping the facial hair is Terrence Howard who looks terribly uncomfortable here, like a round peg in a square hole - or at least a rectangular hole sized to fit lots of legal tender. "Lots and lots of legal tender," muttered Howard.
And there's Gwyneth Paltrow, who is growing blander as she grows older. "I do anything and everything that Mr. Stark requires, even if it means polishing his headlight - so to speak."
Downey is a ladies man, because what dame can resist a dude who manufactures advanced weapons systems? "And don't forget the night light in my chest," said Downey, who knows a deal closer when he sees one. I mean, the man has a stripper pole in his plane. "It's a good thing I don't own a bike," he added.
Downey's company name, "Stark Industries," is stamped on every weapon he manufactures, right next to "sponsored by Coca-Cola and Burger King."
"The Iron Man suit's not actually Iron," Downey explains, "it's Gold Titanium Alloy. But 'Iron Man' sounds more like a super hero and less like the chassis of a MacBook Pro."
If only part of Downey's costume had been a gorilla suit, this could have been a dandy '50's drive-in flick!
Suited up, Downey takes to the sky, outracing jets as he views a busy set of video images rolling over his eyes. "Initiate evasive maneuver!" Downey commands his viewing screen, "and start up that new episode of Monk!"
The big climax has less to do with terrorists and more to do with Rock-em-Sock-em Robots.
Look, this movie was perfectly fine when it was called Transformers, and before that when it was called RoboCop.
Iron Man is acceptable early Spring fare, but it's no Spider-Man.
Writer: "It's The Wizard of Oz meets The Karate Kid."
Producer: "Any Dancing Excuses-for-Stars, kid?
Writer: "No, just The Wizard of Oz meets The Karate Kid."
Producer: "Jet Li, Jackie Chan, plenty of stunt people floating around like feathers in a breeze, and the ghost of Ralph Macchio, too? I'm sold!"
And so am I, actually. Forbidden Kingdom is loads of fun!
A kung-fu-obsessed teen browses a Chinatown pawnshop where a magical staff awaits its rightful owner.
"Do you want this magical staff?" asks the elderly Chinese proprietor, whose demeanor and caked-on makeup suggests a much younger actor who has never actually seen an old man unless he's in a movie played by a much younger actor.
"I'm a teenager," says the boy. "My staff is already magical. It just wishes it could conjure beyond that corner of my imagination where the cast of Gossip Girl lives."
Michael Angarano, who's usually cast as "young" versions of bigger stars with more screen time, is the teen who falls off a roof and, thanks to that magical staff, drifts through a dimensional portal into ancient China, suffering no ill effects in transit, except for noticeably puffed-out hair.
"The winds of space and time are nature's blowdryer," Angarano explains.
He looks around and is lost amidst fields of rice and a chest of hair.
Well, one hair anyway. But fields of rice!
This is the ancient China of warlords and swordsmen wearing vast quantities of sparkly eye shadow. "I will fight you to the death!" says the Jade Warlord, "but first...Aesthetician, where's my Ming Maybelline?! Cook, where's my hasenpfeffer?!"
"Blue eyeshadow went out in the 1280's!" Jet Li shouts at the Jade Warlord, and there's no kung-fu move stronger than hurling a catty cosmetics critique.
Enter Jackie Chan, a nutritious part of any kung-fu breakfast. He's a "traveling scholar," a.k.a. "homeless drunk." But a homeless drunk with mad combat skills! And he's not only drunk, he's immortal. Or maybe, like all drunks, he just thinks so.
Jackie regales Angarano with fifteen minutes of mythology to lay out the plot for this movie in language so simple even I can understand it:
Angarano must return the staff to the imprisoned Monkey King at Five-Elements Mountain, where all five elements will get Mischa Barton stopped for DUI. There, he must defeat the Jade Army, mid-ranked in value between the Silk Army and the Frankincense Army.
Wow, the Monkey King looks the part! "I am the son Rip Taylor and Gwen Stefani never had," says his Furry Highness. "And I fight with the cuchi-cuchi of a hundred Charos!" he shouts as wires fly him to a guest spot on the Jerry Lewis Telethon.
And what would a movie about ancient China be without a brew offering everlasting life to he who sips it? "Today we call this brew 'a production deal with VH1'" said Ralph Macchio, wistfully.
"Teach me to fight," Angarano begs Jackie, "and to wear sparkly eye-shadow like a man, albeit transgendered."
All of this hassle over a staff.
"Where I come from we don't fight over a stick unless it's a beef one from Hickory Farms," said Country star Keith Urban, who arrived in Hollywood looking for wife Nicole Kidman, whom he hasn't seen since their wedding in 2006.
And then there's the moment we've all been waiting for: Jet Li vs. Jackie Chan:
Snake pose!
Eagle pose!
Crane pose!
Extinct dodo pose!
Cowering Don Knotts pose!
Remorseful David Hasselhoff pose!
Each pose more fierce and couture than the last, girlfriend!
Through the gate of no gate to fulfill the prophecy goes Angarano.
Dan Myrick’s name may be familiar to you if you remember a little movie he co-wrote/directed called The Blair Witch Project. Dan’s got a new movie opening on April 23rd at the Tribeca Film Festival called The Objective.
Here’s an abbreviated transcript of my conversation with Dan. Check out the audio here for the whole thing.
Dan, your new movie is The Objective. What’s the story in a nutshell?
Well, basically, it revolves around a group of special forces guys that are led into the sacred mountains of Afghanistan by this CIA agent, and they're supposedly in search of this cleric to get a statement from him to help with their effort with the Northern Alliance, and it ends up being kind of a mystical search for a UFO that this CIA agent is on, and so strange things start to happen to these guys, and towards the end of their mission, you find out that they're up against something that none of them were really prepared to deal with.
So this is almost kind of like Iraq War meets X Files?
In a way, yeah. At its heart, it's a good old fashioned kind of psychological thriller.
So it’s more Mulder and Scully in fatigues rather than just being fatiguing.
Yeah, that's a good way to look at it.
So Scarlett Johansson's in this movie.
Not Scarlett, no. Her sister, Vanessa. It's funny how everyone goes, hey, the Johansson's, as long as there's a Johansson in there.
Is there really a Vanessa Johansson in this movie?
Yeah, yeah.
I was just making that up about Scarlett. I thought I was helping you, and obviously, you don't need any help.
No, actually her sister has a small little role towards the end of the film as the CIA agent's wife, so there is - we have one degree of -
One degree of Scarlett.
- of Scarlett there, yeah.
That's one enough for me. No Baldwins, though, you don't have any Baldwins.
No Baldwins, sorry.
Now, you guys filmed this in Morocco? I've heard that from other people who have shot other things in Morocco that the bugs there are the size of goats.
Well, we didn't run into a lot of bugs. We did run into a lot of goats though, so the goats are definitely the size of goats. But yeah, we spent most of our time out on the desert, and we didn't run into too much wildlife out there, except for the occasional camel and there's a few critters running on the ground, lots of scorpions.
Not to imply anything about this, but Michael Bay would have brought the desert to him.
Yeah, well, I think he has enough access to sand to do that, so he would build that on a stage somewhere.
Now, is it true that the Sex and City movie was filming right down the way from you guys on the desert in Morocco?
Yeah, I'm sure. It was a little glitzier production than ours was, but -
Yeah, well, you know, Carrie's outfits play off so well against the backdrop of mud huts -
Oh, yeah, I'm sure they coordinated that, the full color scheme.
When can we expect The Objective in theaters around the country?
Well, I hope soon. We are going to Tribeca with the goal of getting a distribution deal that will go domestic and hopefully theatrical, so that's kind of the holy grail for us and we have high hopes for it. We think it's a very cool and intriguing movie. It’s a thoughtful genre film that's a little bit out of the norm that I think Hollywood is used to putting out, and we hope it gets picked up.
You know, post-Blair Witch, there must have been tons of stuff thrown at you.
Yeah, certainly, it was fortunate that Blair offered us a lot of opportunities, and fortunately, there's - finding good scripts and good projects to get behind are rare. And we certainly had a lot of stuff thrown at us that, you know, I wouldn't have really considered high on my list of quality films -
I’m going to guess that you had next to nothing to do with that Blair Witch sequel, Book of Shadows.
Yeah, I mean, Ed and I -
Wait, here's my theory, and you tell me if this is true. You finish the first movie. It's this huge hit beyond anybody's expectations, and the suits come to you with a big wad of cash, and a really new, fast, sporty car, and they say, let us use the name “Blair Witch,” and this wad of cash is yours, and you can drive that big, new, sporty, fast car anywhere you want, as fast as you want.
Yeah, I mean, they had the cash, not the car. I should have asked for the car. I mean, it was sort of like that.
You remember all those idiots that made the Blair Witch spoofs?
Yeah.
I was one of those idiots.
Oh cool. I think you owe me a royalty or something.
Uh oh. Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned this. My idiotic spoof was called the Walt Witch Project, where I went to the wilds of Disneyland and was attacked at the end by Pluto, or as I called him at the time, a big goddamn dog.
Now, that's scary.
It was scary, and although, you know, the sequel, Walt Witch II, Book of Shadows is off in the distance somewhere for me.
That's a much bigger budget too, I'm sure.
Back to the original Blair Witch: I think people have completely missed the boat on something. Everyone keeps asking whether there will be another Internet-driven phenomenon like Blair Witch. I think the Internet didn't drive the movie at all. In fact, it was exactly the opposite. You guys created a magic show. I saw a few minutes of it on TV the other night and the documentary parts are really a hundred percent authentic. It was a magic trick, and while we were watching your hands, you had things up your sleeves, and I think people have underestimated the impact of that.
I agree with you a hundred percent. I think you know, definitely the Internet helped us get the word out and helped drive awareness of the film, but ultimately the movie and the core concept of the film is what really people got their teeth sunk into, I think. That concept of missing footage was very compelling for people, and the movie ultimately had to pay off, and so we were lucky that our execution had really not been done to that degree before, and it was kind of new and it was counter-programming to Hollywood stuff, so there was a lot that went into making Blair successful, but I always like to believe you had to have a good story, good characters, and good execution. Otherwise, it's just going to fall flat on its face no matter how much hype you have.
Do you have people asking you, "Hey, Dan, The Objective, is this going to be as big as Blair Witch?"
I mean, I don't think anybody can predict that. I'd be happy if it was a quarter as successful, even remotely successful as Blair Witch, you know? There's never going to be another Blair Witch again. There may be something like it or similar in its own way and huge and groundbreaking. But Blair came at a certain time, you know, and the genesis was five guys who got together and came up with this concept at a time when the Internet was coming up and reality programming was coming up. So all those things intersected at once to make it what it was, and they'll be another intersection of something else.
But The Objective, I like to think of as just a good, solid film. Hopefully, it'll be successful, and add to my body of work that isn't just about Blair Witch. It's about Blair and several other things, so that's my long-term hope.
By the way, has it occurred to you that the entire Iraq War is kind of a rip off of Blair Witch?
Well, yeah.
Because, after all, what did we go in there for, right? And we never found it, did we?
We never found it, and we didn't know what we were getting into.
Right, and now we're not going to get out alive.
It's much scarier, actually.
In Blair Witch you also tapped into something that defined “scary” in ways people didn't understand then and still don't understand now, because, fundamentally, the movie was about an invisible witch you didn't see who was really good at crafts.
Yeah.
Right?
Very good at crafts. That is spooky in its own right.
But here's my point: The movie was full of stuff that was a little bit odd, you know? It was the odd-ness of the climax that was terrifying, I thought. Just the fact that there's a guy standing in a corner facing that corner not moving was horrifying, and it was just a guy standing there.
Well, fear is rooted in the unknown, and that's what a lot of studios and filmmakers don't get sometimes. It isn't so much about throwing in some cliché that we think is scary. It's really rooted in our survival instinct that what we don't know and understand scares us. So within the limitations of budget, which is what we faced on Blair Witch, we tried to come up with ways to scare people that didn't require a lot of money to execute, and we just skewed on the side of keeping it unknown, allowing that fear to manifest itself in the audience's head rather than trying to conjure something up that we just didn't have the budget to do. Some of my favorite films of the past dealt in that realm of the unknown. What you don't see is much more terrifying than what you do, and I've always thought that that was more powerful.
But isn't it funny how filmmakers forget that all the time, and what have we learned other than if you go to a refrigerator and open the refrigerator door, and then close the refrigerator door, there's going to be something “scary” on the other side of that door which wasn't there before you opened it.
Right. Yeah. I mean, it's tempting. You get these big budgets, and you know, you've got all this cool CGI stuff, all these tools and to play with, and it's hard to resist.
Well, we didn't have that much more money, so it was pretty easy.
Well, it certainly looks like there's some money on the screen and the trailers.
Well, there's certainly more than Blair, which is not saying much, but it depends on the movie and the conceit of the film and how of that you can get away with, because you know there are arcs to film and arcs to the “monster” and you need to have some sort of pay-off in the end, but it depends on how you reveal the “scare,” and I've always liked to convey a level of ambiguity about what you're seeing.
You're not quite sure how to kind of define it, and that I find is scary, so our scare, our “monster” in this film is something that's really kind of hard to define, and several people may have different opinions on that, but I like that. I like when films ask you to define what it is and pose those questions when you're watching them, rather than just giving you, oh here's the witch, here's the monster with big fangs, or whatever. I like when films force the audience to work a little bit.
Why don't we do that more? Why do we take the easy way so often?
Because it's successful. I mean, you can't argue with a lot of these films that make a lot of money at the box office, and until they stop making money, they're going to keep getting made, so it's a little riskier for studios that are putting millions and millions of dollars behind something to take those kinds of chances. I just personally feel as a filmmaker that they end up making better movies that way, but it's just kind of hard to push back against films that are much more mainstream that are making a lot of money.
What’s your take on the “CW network version” of Blair Witch, Cloverfield?
I thought it was very cool. You know, it's interesting how that kind of technique is still being employed, and I always thought that somebody should do it on a big scale like that. I think my only criticism of the movie was that they didn't go all the way with it. That it felt like the characters and actors felt a little too mainstream and I didn't find them to be as authentic as they could have been –
Are you trying to say you wish - you're glad they all got killed, is that it?
I was kind of rooting for them get eaten. I like the monster, but I'm that way on all those monster movies.
The movie is The Objective. It opens at Tribeca and, hopefully, theaters within the next few months. And Scarlett Johansson's sister is in there and probably a third cousin of Faye Dunaway if we look hard enough.
Somewhere in there, if you dig enough.
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