Word: ironizing
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...spoken, ecumenical humanist. A mini-aubade in "Become Becoming" likens dawn ("the air's first gold") to "that color of Amen." In the Emersonian "Evening Hieroglyph" he compares flitting birds to "decimals or numerals reconfiguring/ some word which, spoken, might sound the key/ that rights the tumblers in the iron lock/ that keeps the gate dividing me from...
...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...
...Iron Man is based on a marvel comic character introduced in 1963, Speed Racer on the Japanese animated TV series Mach GoGoGo, launched in 1967. The two new movies share the scientific optimism of that time, when the study of physics was, briefly, both a patriotic duty and a nifty option for American students; when doctors began installing artificial hearts; when President Kennedy said we'd go to the moon within a decade...