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Between Jon Favreau Tweeting the making of and USA Today and Entertainment Weekly covering promotional bases in more-traditional ways, we may actually be sick of Iron Man 2 by the time it’s done shooting, let alone by the time it opens next summer. Okay, that’s not at all true, but isn’t it still a bit premature for EW to feature the Iron Man sequel on its magazine cover already? Even with Comic-Con around the corner?

Well, the mag and the production might at least be a little more careful about what is being let out of the figurative poly bag so early in the game. After all, on the day that Paramount releases the first official (and initially blurry) look at Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow the online discussions shouldn’t be focused on Mickey Rourke’s cockatoo. Never mind that not all the reactions to Rourke’s quote in EW aren’t negatively the sort of preemptive backlash studios fear, the distraction from the big sell alone should be cause for slight alarm.

Personally, I’m more excited about the bird than the chick, anyway, seeing as how awesome Rourke was with a little dog sidekick in Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Let’s see the rest of the blogosphere’s reactions to Rourke’s new pet after the jump:

• Mark Graham at Vulture is excited about the cockatoo, too:
  

  It seems as if he compensated for his seemingly homemade costume by adding some Rourkian flavor to his role as Whiplash. “I don’t want to just play him as a one-dimensional pussy,” he says. “[Favreau] let me have a cockatoo, who I talk to and get drunk with while I’m making my suit.” Consider us sold!

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline is down with the idea of the additional villain:
  

  For a second we thought he meant a Cockapoo, which would have made for a lesser-threating sidekick, though could have elicited fond memories of his beloved red carpet companion, Loki. But a drunk cockatoo is cool, too — squawking menacing encouragement into his ear between greedy swigs of malt liquor from its feeder.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk did pay first notice to the ScarJo photo in a separate (sleazy) post, but his interest in the Rourke quote is definitely stronger:
  

  I like to picture Mickey Rourke doing his lines, and then in the middle of a scene throwing down his script in disgust.  “Aw hell, this crap’s too one dimensional!  But I know how to fix it: Fetch me a fifth of bourbon, and a parrot!“ And they’ll do it.  Because it’s Mickey Rourke.  He can bring a tear to your eye, because you know you’ll be seeing not just a drunk Russian yelling at his parrot, but his humanity.

• Fark.com gives Rourke the “HERO” tag, and commenter “IMDWalrus” makes us hope the new Oscar rules end up paying off:
  

  The first Iron Man was a solid superhero movie. Add in Mickey Rourke and drunken banter with parrots, and you’ve got an instant candidate for Best Picture.

  Okay, maybe not. But it should be.

• Erik Davis at Cinematical, who deserves some credit for pointing out the quote to most of the otherwise drooling fanboys (including myself), is worried about the cockatoo:
  

  Folks, we’ve been together for a long time now — and I’d like to consider us veterans when it comes to analyzing upcoming superhero movies. Is there any possible way a drunken Russian-accented Mickey Rourke chatting up a cockatoo can work? Granted, we know nothing and we’ve seen practically nothing of this film yet … but am I the only one who cringes a little when I read that quote? Like, is this really the first info you want to tell us about the sequel?

• Mark at I Watch Stuff sarcastically notes his own reason for concern:
  

  Inside the issue, Rourke explains how he made sure his character wouldn’t be a flat, boring villain. By requesting he have a bird, obviously…Nothing adds depth to an antagonist like an avian sidekick. There’s a reason Jafar from Aladdin is probably our most complex and nuanced villain.

And just for good backlashy measure, let’s take a look at some negative points regarding the ScarJo pic:

• Marc Bernardin at Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch notes a potentially damaging comparison:
  

  I wouldn’t have thought it, but we’ve got a battle of the comic-booky redheads brewing, with Rachel Nichols appearing as Scarlett in August’s G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. And ScarJo has come out swinging.

• Simon Dang at The Playlist sees a different G.I. Joe similarity and raises it a Spider-Man character:
  

  The fact she and Mickey Rourke are appearing together with Stark himself leads us to believe the two share more than just Russian ancestry. Looks like a cross between Mary Jane and Sienna Miller in “G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra.”

• Sean at Film Junk hurtfully brings up a past offense to fanboys:
  

  Who knew Scarlett Johansson would look good in black leather? Go figure. Let’s just hope she can make up for her terrible performance in The Spirit.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba criticizes ScarJo for being a mouth-breather:
  

  Scarlett Johansson, as the Black Widow, still can’t keep her goddamn pouty mouth shut. Seriously, lady: Close it. Not half-closed or three-quarters closed. Shut yer trap. Are you trying to catch flies? Or do you have no interest in keeping your saliva inside your mouth.

• And finally, Katey Rich at Cinema Blend spotlights another actor/character who isn’t helping the movie:
  

  Also Don Cheadle, playing Rhodey this time, admits his lack of Iron Man knowledge: “I always thought Iron Man was a robot.”

Shortly after Sundance 2009, Paul wrote a post explaining why he walked out of one of the festival’s biggest buzz-suckers, the romantic comedy 500 Days of Summer. “I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left,” he wrote. Acknowledging that he couldn’t “write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch,” he instead decided to “write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it,” using a particularly glowing blurb about the film as a bounceboard. Pouncing on a much friendlier comparison to Garden State, Paul wrote 500 off as a weak copy of Zach Braff’s break-out: “It’s kind of like if Garden State had been turned into a TV series, recast, cancelled, then bought by USA network and restarted.”
I did see (500) Days of Summer all the way through (the parentheses were added to the title after Sundance, presumably in a nod to one of the film’s visual tics), so I can review it, but I can’t say Paul’s instinct based on the first thirty minutes was off the mark. The film begins with an on screen disclaimer, an “author’s note” declaring that what we’re about to see is not based on real people or events (punchline: someone named “Jenny Beckman” is nonetheless a “bitch”); shortly after the picture begins to roll in earnest, a deep-voiced gentleman narrator informs us that “This is not a love story.” The aggressive out-of-the-gate broadcasting of all that (500) Days of Summer is not foreshadows what it actually is: a film full of signs with nothing to signify, a mashup of a decade’s worth of Sundance cliche, a confirmation of the obsolescence of the notion that “independent film” could seek to subvert business as usual.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Tom, a wannabe architect who falls in love with Summer (Zooey Deschanel) at the Los Angeles greeting card production company where both work. Summer, the narrator tells us, was “just another girl … except she wasn’t” — as evidenced by her power to get landlords to offer lower rents and high school boys to buy Belle & Sebastian records. Tom falls in love with this minx in bangs and high-waisted pants at first sight, but the swoon is not quite mutual. After they more or less reenact the famous “but do you like me like me” scene from The Wonder Years at the only karaoke bar in the world that has The Pixies on the books but not “Born to Run,” Summer soon assents to “holding hands in IKEA and having shower sex,” but she repeatedly reminds Tom that she’s “not looking for anything serious.” So suckered by what he likes that he can’t see what Summer is like, Tom chooses to ignore this warning. In scenes shuffled between and/or rendered redundant by inconsistently deployed structuring devices (the aforementioned narration, intertitles assigning action to specific points on a 500 day timeline), the narrative hopskotches between Tom and Summer’s courtship, their break-up, and Tom’s varying attempts to either get over it or get Summer back.
These structural agitations might have had more power if employed by filmmakers with original insight into age-old romantic disconnects, but unfortunately, there’s little going on under the surface here beyond a gender flip of the thesis of He’s Just Not That Into You. That studio comedy, as I wrote when it was released, is “tougher, bleaker, and much more talky than you’d expect it to be,” but it also “understands who its audience is, and that ultimately, that audience doesn’t come to the movies to get their expectations subverted.” The first film to market is ultimately the more interesting one, and it’s less manipulative, too. Where He’s Just Not That Into You teases nuance before conforming to genre expectations, 500 uses its high concept design and totems of a romanticized long-lost counterculture (Joy Division t-shirts, conversations about The Smiths) as cover for a rendering of the rules of the romantic game that’s as deeply shallow and and ready-to-eat safe as any studio product. Of course, awareness of its artifice is built in. Late in the film, too lovelorn to write greeting cards, Tom breaks down at work and rants about how “it’s these cards, and the movies and the pop songs, that are responsible for all the lies!” Well, only some of them.
Co-produced by Diablo Cody’s agent Mason Novick and lensed by the cinematographer of Juno, there’s no question that Summer, though Marc Webb’s directorial debut, comes from a by-now-familiar cinematic line. Like Napoleon Dynamite and Waitress, Little Miss Sunshine and Garden State, before it, 500 Days of Summer was purchased by studio dependent Fox Searchlight after its Sundance premiere; like those films, it melds dysfunctional romantic and/or familial relationship drama with cutesy visual quirk and a catchy (though totally milquetoast) hipster soundtrack. Not every Fox Searchlight release hews to this template, but those that don’t tend to end up playing second banana as cultural phenoms to those that do (see the distributor’s two 2008 Oscar horses, Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler).
You can’t blame Searchlight for buying these films — all of the Sundance pick-ups named above earned enough in their initial box office runs to rank amongst the distributor’s Top 25 grossers to date, far out-performing award winners and critical favorites such as Boys Don’t Cry, The Ice Storm and Waking Life. The numbers speak for themselves: where their corporate parent and other “real” studios use explosions and comic book heros to foot the bill for the rest of the year’s production/distribution slate, Searchlight has sad sack underdog heroes and loveably eccentric kewpie-cute girls. (500) Days of Summer has both. Think of it as the Searchlight house style perfected and taken to the brink of self-parody (judging by the trailer alone, the upcoming Aspergers love story Adam would seem to push fully into Weird Al territory, but we’ll see). Its biggest selling point is its formula, but its most lasting effect is the extent to which it reveals the formula’s limitations.