Iron Man (2008)

Now that it’s nearly 2010– a decade after 2000, a year I once contemplated with awe in Ms. Conyers’ Language Arts class because I would be as old as Sting– it’s time to screen all those films I missed almost 2 years ago. The oughts (00’s) were a crap decade. Expectations those of us of a certain age had quietly nursed have been cast to the side of road like the shuck of a blown tire and we now face a deeper, more insidious version of what Hunter S. Thompson memorably tagged “the New Dumb.” The spine of American-style capitalist democracy finally buckled and snapped with the 2000 election (a judicial coup which has been carefully rehabilitated as a minor glitch in the system long since redeemed by the following two rounds of voting); the millenarian contortions of the post-conservative right resulted in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, widowed and displaced people; and neoliberalism– its policies responsible for the greatest economic cataclysm since Black Tuesday– seems to have retained a patina of credibility among those Americans who can’t be bothered to be minimally informed about current events.

Continue reading →