2011 - COWBOYS AND ALIENS, uh huh.

Getting towards the end of my space aliens invade earth and good old American ingenuity repels these slimy creatures film series.  Cowboys and Aliens can distinguish itself from the other two films I have seen by virtue of the fact that this preposterous premise does not have one joke or lighthearted moment in it.  Not once during this film is there even a hint to the audience that this silly film is not to be taken even remotely seriously.

The casting of the film further emphasizes the lack of fun this film should have provided.  Harrison Ford is the completely dour leader of the town who is trying to get his son back who has for reasons I never understood been kidnapped by the space aliens.  Daniel Craig, probably the most humorless actor to ever play James Bond plays a humorless cowboy trying to stop the space aliens.  It appears that Craig is pretty much a "Johnny One Note" of an actor after his performance in this thing.  The guy never cracks a smile throughout the entire film.  Good thing the film has Olivia Wilde in it because what would one of these films be without a hot chick who could get a job as a "Victoria's Secret" runway model running around.

This film has some fairly heavy hitters behind it.  Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard and Brian Glazer produced it.  Jon Favreau, the director of a couple Iron Man films was not unfamiliar with handling this kind of science fiction/fantasy material.  That this bunch couldn't see the weaknesses in the story material is kind of amazing.  I assume they thought the concept and title would be enough to bring in an audience.  Apparently no one wanted to do the hard work to get a decent screenplay out of this crap.

I've seen the director Jon Favreau on You Tube doing Q and A's with directors like Martin Scorsese.  Favreau is an articulate guy and clearly seems to know what he's talking about.  So I can only imagine what was going through Favreau's head during the making of this film.  Was he thinking, "I'll stage this space alien attack the way Scorsese did in Mean Streets."

118 minutes, written by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Damon Lindelof, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, five writers never a good sign for a film.

2010 - IRON MAN 2 - finally got around to seeing this thing.

Been putting off watching this thing, it ended up being what I expected.  This is the same film as the original Iron Man except they just jacked it by being bigger, noisier and more expensive.  In the last film Tony Stark ended up fighting a guy in another Iron Man suit who was more powerful than him.  In this film he fights a whole bunch of bad robots instead of just one robot guy.  In the previous film, Tony Stark is a drunk and a playboy.  In Iron Man 2 he's drunker and a bigger playboy.  You get the picture. 

Not much of a plot mostly a bunch of random incidents.  Iron Man fights some Russian guy with electronic whips, Iron Man fights him again, Iron Man fights his robots etc.  The secret spy organization SHIELD is mixed up in this so called story.  Some agent named Black Widow has infiltrated Tony Stark's company for reasons I was not entirely sure of except that she wears tight clothes and beats up lots of guys. 

Everything wraps up with a big action climax with Tony Stark and his friend wearing some robot armor that shoots missiles.  Lots of computer images blow up.  No picture needs to be painted for this movie.

As far as the cast goes, Robert Downey does his little cute playboy thing again.  Gwyneth Paltrow is probably grateful she is in a hit movie series, ditto Scarlett Johansson.  Mickey Roarke plays some brilliant Russian scientist who builds the evil robot army which is kind of amusing considering Roarke looks like he can barely groom himself. 

125 minutes.