silversolitaire

In other news, I've finally gotten around watching Iron Man on Monday. I loved it. It was most excellent. There's really nothing to complain about it. Except perhaps the changes they made in Stark's personality that bothered me a slight bit. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the comics Stark is pretty much unapologetic about his weaponmaking business. He does have some moral concerns occasionally, but most of the time Iron Man just beats the shit out of baddies, takes out competitors and then uses the research for himself. But I can see why they made that change. I'm also not too hot on Stark outing himself as Iron Man in front of the press. How the hell is that going to work out?

In general the film was ailing a bit from the lack of a definite villain, but that's a problem the comic books have, too. Jeff Bridges did an excellent job, I thought, and I just adored those magazine covers at the beginning. 21-year old Stark was simply darling. Took me right back to my great Robert Downey Jr. love in the 90s when I was all over him with Air America, Hearts and Souls, Soapdish and Chances Are... Paul Bettany as Jarvis' voice was awesome, too. It just gave the whole thing such an elegant quality, I thought.

There was a bit of a stretch in the last quarter I thought where the movie was teetering at the edge of becoming boring. Well, not so much boring but it was like, "Okay, now he's done testing his suit, he blew the shit out of the ebil terrorists... what's going to happen now for the remaining half an hour?" There just wasn't a conflict. But that only lasted a couple of minutes until they established Stane as the villain. Of course that was a bit of a "duh" thing, but from a purely narrative POV there was no villain there and IMO they could have set up a long-term complication a tad bit sooner to keep up the suspense. But that was just a minor draw-back.

The humor was excellent, Robert Downey Jr. clearly was born for this role and I just can't wait for more of that! I'm still chuckling when I think of those suit testing scenes. They're always my favorite. I love that in Spider-Man best, too, when he tests out his powers and tries to get comfortable with them. Dummy, the fire safety, was just so funny. Yay for anthropomorphized robot arms. And as I said before, I just loved Jarvis' dry humor.

So, overall it it was a very enjoyable experience. Now we just have to wait for the sequels to fuck it all up.