Iron Man 3 marks the first reunion of director Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr. since 2005’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a film that, though less successful than it deserved to be, acted as the springboard to bring RDJ back from the Hollywood wilderness – a film that, in short, made it possible for him to star in 2008’s Iron Man. So it’s fitting that the trilogy should come full circle in this way. Certainly there are nods to Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: the voice-over introduction, the buddy-cop routine between RDJ and Don Cheadle, the knowing and tongue-in-cheek attitude to the big showdown. But beyond this, Iron Man 3 delivers exactly what we’ve come to expect from the franchise: explosions, high-tech suits and a villainous plot that doesn’t exactly make sense. This is not to say that Iron Man 3 isn’t a great comic book movie; it is, because it fulfills the anticipation of fans and neatly ties up its story with a big, comic-book flourish.
What makes Iron Man 3 particularly good is that it manages to tie up the story of its two previous films as well as resolve the ending of last summer’s The Avengers. To do this, it has to skirt around some pretty dark territory (Tony Stark’s post-traumatic stress, for one) and a storyline lifted from the complicated Extremis arc. While some of the film’s plot threads are left unresolved, this is okay – Iron Man has never been about the gritty reality of, say, Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Instead, Iron Man 3 gives fans what they expect and plays to the strengths of the franchise: big bangs and impressive geekery. These it does well enough to satisfy both the summer cinema crowd and the heavy-duty comic books fans, along with just enough humor to keep things light, and an unexpected delight in Sir Ben Kingsley, who as “the Mandarin” gives (in my opinion) his best performance since Gandhi. Meanwhile, Guy Pearce, playing the villain, shows why he deserves more big-screen roles.
I think Iron Man 3 was one of the best blockbusters of the summer because it manages to fulfill its major premise and stay true to its characters, while also ending a trilogy and ensuring that enough doors are left open for 2015’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. If it didn’t bring anything new to the table, this is forgivable: in a summer remembered as much for its flops as for its successes, Iron Man 3 showed that sticking to a proven formula can be rewarding enough.
Hannah Arendt is one of that breed of films which aim to dramatize a particular moment in a person’s life that also happened to be culturally significant. This is a well-worn pitch for a film – in the last few years we’ve had The Queen, The Iron Lady, A Dangerous Method and The King’s Speech, to name but a few, and they generally fall into one of two traps: they treat their characters as sacred, or they exaggerate the events they portray.
Hannah Arendt does both. It tells the story of the genesis of the “banality of evil,” a phrase that political theorist Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) uses to describe the actions of high-ranking Nazis. The film follows her travels to Jerusalem to attend the trial of Albert Eichmann, a key player in the Holocaust, by the newly-created State of Israel. Arendt’s theory, and the eventual theme of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, is that Eichmann and others like him were not motivated by politics or philosophy but by the desire to follow orders – he was a bureaucrat who simply obeyed the law.
Hannah Arendt does an excellent job of portraying the development of this idea, at the expense of realism; in order to make the story more interesting, the film has to develop characters to a degree where they look more like caricatures. It also makes Arendt herself seem more like a questing heroine than a cool-headed political theorist. The Arendt on screen has no faults and very few weak moments, and even her actions, like lighting a cigarette in a dark room, take on a dramatic quality. In a flashback, the philosopher Martin Heidegger tells her that “thinking is a lonely business”, summing up the overriding theme of the film – individuality. As if to hammer the point home, Arendt spends most of the film alone, with critics on every side.
Yet though it is occasionally heavy-handed, this is a film with every respect for its source material and heroine, and it is at pains to make this obvious: as a work of love alone, Hannah Arendt is a great film because it manages to deliver Arendt’s philosophy in a clear and straightforward way. For being able to make political theory interesting (and dramatic), it stands out: the climax of the film is a seven-minute lecture delivered by Sukowa, which manages to be just as gripping as any courtroom drama. This is no mean feat, yet Hannah Arendt manages to be carefully measured, intelligent and insightful while generating enough energy to keep the story moving. Hannah Arendt stands out against films in which much more happens but much less is said; It’s rare to see a film in which very little happens but every scene is meaningful.
— James Rayneau
So there you have it, our favorite films of the Summer of 2013. Anything we missed? Let us know in the comments below!
