Word: ironic
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...This notion of self-made heroism is the theme of the first two blockbuster movies of the summer season. We saw it last weekend when Iron Man, the one where arms merchant Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) builds himself a heart, opened to $102 million at the domestic box office last weekend. Now comes Speed Racer, based on the '60s Japanese animated TV series, Mach GoGoGo. It's the new sound-and-light show from brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski, who in 1999 stamped the template for high-IQ effects entertainment with The Matrix. I don't think...
...action-movie terms. It boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison, like a junkyard jalopy. Beyond that, there's the edifying display of people taking control of their own destinies by building beautiful, useful machines. The heroes of Speed Racer and Iron Man could be the garage geeks who paved Silicon Valley with cybergold; or Hollywood's visual-effects alchemists, translating their fantasies into pixels to create gorgeous movies like these. Iron Man and Speed Racer are tributes to practical ingenuity and manual dexterity, to real American innovators like Edison and Ford...
...Catherine Mayer's reference to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations could usefully include Smith's cynical view of politicians: "that insidious and crafty animal vulgarly called a statesman or politician." Gordon Brown's many soubriquets - Iron Chancellor, Clunking Fist, Prudence Brown, Ditherer and Mr. Bean - suggest why an authoritarian Chancellor makes a poor Prime Minister. Brown's obsession with minutiae is best demonstrated by his Byzantine tax-credit system, which requires taxpayers to complete vexing forms to reclaim the tax that was due to them in the first place. What is frustrating is that he constantly reminds British...
Tony Stark tinkers in his lab to build a gadget that will keep him alive and a metal suit in which to house the artificial organ: the media dub him Iron Man. Speed Racer drives the car built by his dad to win the big rallies and in the process becomes one with his souped-up T180...
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but the first two big movies of the summer season are about men fusing with their machines. And instead of being conquered or corrupted by their ambitions, the new machine men triumph. The implicit message of Jon Favreau's Iron Man, which earned more than $100 million in its opening weekend, and of Larry and Andy Wachowski's Speed Racer is that we've dwelled too long in the crypts of antiscientific dystopia. We live in an age of sophisticated machines. They do much of our work for us; we spend most...