Word: ironizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...seem naive glorifying scientific innovation in an age of surface-to-air missiles (the kind Tony Stark's company manufactures in Iron Man) or exalting auto races at a time when many Americans have trouble paying for the gas that gets them to their jobs. But summer movies are parables, fairy tales that, for a couple of hours, let us dream while we're awake. And it's not the worst idea to have stories that both address our intimate relationship with machines and allow us to feel good about the connection. In fact, it's downright American...
...movie about how to get along with your computer. Favreau and the Wachowskis know this. Their films show their heroes blending with robot suits and race cars in order to vanquish the bad guys. And in doing so, they've provided plenty of standard action-movie pleasures. Iron Man gives you a guy flying over L.A., disrupting military aviation and confronting a villain in even larger metal couture. Speed Racer boasts enough auto-erotic car-nage to make Grand Theft Auto IV seem, by comparison, like a jalopy junkyard...
...spectacle of people taking control of their destinies by building beautiful, useful machines with which they're perfectly in synch. They 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, Steve Wozniak and Dale Earnhardt--to the grease monkey as genius...