Word: ironized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
Among our most prominent romanticized notions about the probabilistic iron cage is the assertion that an infinite number of monkeys, given time and typewriters, will almost surely compose the works of William Shakespeare. Rather than hold to the comforts of that theory, in 2003, researchers put six Sulawesi crested macaques to the test for a month. They turned out just five pages of text, largely filled with the letter...
...knows that there's an American style - best displayed in the big, smart, kid-friendly epic - that few other cinemas even aspire to, and none can touch. When it works, as it does here, it rekindles even a cynic's movie love. So cheers to Downey, Favreau and the Iron Man production company. They don't call it Marvel for nothing...