I saw Iron Man last weekend and thought I should blog about it, but there really isn’t much to say. Yes, it is worth paying to see in the theater. The explosions are jolting, there’s lots of action, and desert settings bore me on video but are great in the theater.

Robert Downey Jr. is a great actor, especially when he gets to play himself. He’s a rich womanizing jerk with a drinking problem, and yet somehow you love him anyway and want him to win. It *is* easier once he’s gotten a second disability and had an epiphany about the actual disservice to humanity his company is doing, but even before all that you like him because he’s clever. And America loves a clever man who succeeds, even if some of the success was handed to him at birth.

Then there’s all the nationalistic Afganistan propaganda pasted over the comic’s original Vietnam propaganda. Some of that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I much prefer the attitude about war expressed in Doctor Who– namely, there’s always a choice and if you are *really* clever you can win a war without building bigger, more deadly weapons; in fact, sometimes you can win wars without any weapons or killing at all. And avoiding weapons prevents the whole “What if the bad guys steal our uberweapon?” scenario, which is the whole problem that keeps the Iron Man comic going. But, yeah, still go see Iron Man, because it’s well executed and it won’t be half as much fun on video.

Now that I’ve told you a lot of stuff you already know, I will write about something that you were less likely to already know about, outside of the summer blockbuster Hollywood machine and completely free to experience.

John Smith is an English avant-garde filmmaker who started making films in 1972, and The Girl Chewing Gum is one of his best and probably best known films. It contains footage of a somewhat busy urban street with people going about their daily lives… as Mr. Smith calls out direction of their actions, their entrances and exits.

As the film goes on, the people, cars, and mise en scene behave together in ways that are increasingly improbable and then impossible to direct. It is revealed that just out of the inital shot is the Odeon theater and a lot of the people passing by are going to a show there. Then the “director” reveals that he isn’t really there at all and starts narrating about his actual surroundings. And at the end he returns to describing the action we are watching, but as though the people are characters in a film and there is a plot going on that we get only a glimpse of. It’s as though there is a movie going on around us, but we are only observing it casually as it parades past us.

This is the sort of art I’d like to make. Effects are minimal, just a bit of subtle editing of audio and pausing the action entirely at one point. But it takes viewer expectations and turns them completely around, bringing the magic of cinema into the mundane existence we are all living. And it keeps a sense of humor going throughout. This film is like a Viewmaster containing slides of the world shot through my eyes. It also in effect teaches people how to imagine and see things imaginatively, in case they forgot or stopped around age 12. Great drama is everywhere if you just stop to look for it and don’t ignore your sense of poetry.

Yes, you do have 10 minutes for this.

You can watch the film here: On Google Video

And there is more information about John Smith here: Bio Info

Oh to be alive in the late 60s when cameras apparently fell into your lap if you knew where to look and stock footage was practically given away as well because most people didn’t think that it could be used outside of Hollywood.