psocoptera (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
psocoptera) wrote2013-05-06 02:55 pm
psocoptera) wrote2013-05-06 02:55 pm
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three reviews make a post (but I will separate them for ease of spoiler-avoidance)
1: Iron Man 3. I loved it. Two quality hours of Tony being Tony, in all the ways he is awesome and many of the ways he is obnoxious. I love that he has genuinely developed as a character, that the events of past movies have affected him, not just the PTSD (although I loved the PTSD thread - the way he's made armor after armor, and has been working on armor that can be flown remotely - it sets up some great action sequences but it's also so completely character-motivated in-story) but the way he *tells Pepper* what's going on with him. The way he sends the armor to Pepper when the house is attacked (favorite scene, ::hearts:: forever).
Reasonably good Pepper being awesome. I would have liked even more Pepper-with-Extremis, some explicit discussion of the idea that, if the problem with Extremis is "regulating", Pepper is inevitably going to win this fight because no one regulates, no one rides the high-energy chaos and channels it into something productive, like Pepper.
I really liked all the different people we saw wearing the armor, reflecting all the different things it can be - a cage, a disguise, a shield, a tool, etc. I like that the movie played twice with the "superhero's dilemma" schtick, once with the "you can carry four out of thirteen fallers" and once with the President vs Pepper, and in both cases the answer was "you don't have to be a lone hero, figure out how to be part of a team, how can you get those people to help save each other, how can you get backup". Maybe some influence of fighting with the Avengers? (Which makes the barrel of monkeys scene make sense, which otherwise doesn't seem to have much of a place in the film.) And yet it's still ultimately Tony, just, he's figured out how to apply a force-multiplier to himself, he's the one who built the suits, he's the one holding up the barrel-of-monkeys chain, as is appropriate for his movie.
One scene that stuck in my mind I haven't seen discussed anywhere - when he's buying fertilizer and other supplies at Home Depot, I was really braced for some sort of run-in with local law enforcement, or at least a dubious cashier. "Scruffy guy in black sweatshirt and baseball cap buying bomb-making supplies" is a loaded image, for me, especially in the context of previous imagery of the bomb-site memorial, and, I don't know. I just thought it was really interesting, the way that signalled Really Not Okay to me, except that it's Tony and he's the hero so it *is* okay, but nobody there knows that, and in a movie that's playing so explicitly with the image of the Foreign Terrorist, this little cameo image of the Home-grown Terrorist can't be completely random, so, what does it mean? Maybe just a clue that appearances can be deceiving, or maybe a suggestion that in being an angry guy wanting revenge (following Happy being hurt), in making weapons even though he's sworn off weapons, Tony is playing into the cycle of violence that The Real Bad Guys TM want to exploit?
1.5 Also my kids made it through being babysat with NO TEARS, a major first for Q. It's SO much nicer to be able to think about going out without it meaning guaranteed misery for the home team. Go Q (and his loving sitters)!
Reasonably good Pepper being awesome. I would have liked even more Pepper-with-Extremis, some explicit discussion of the idea that, if the problem with Extremis is "regulating", Pepper is inevitably going to win this fight because no one regulates, no one rides the high-energy chaos and channels it into something productive, like Pepper.
I really liked all the different people we saw wearing the armor, reflecting all the different things it can be - a cage, a disguise, a shield, a tool, etc. I like that the movie played twice with the "superhero's dilemma" schtick, once with the "you can carry four out of thirteen fallers" and once with the President vs Pepper, and in both cases the answer was "you don't have to be a lone hero, figure out how to be part of a team, how can you get those people to help save each other, how can you get backup". Maybe some influence of fighting with the Avengers? (Which makes the barrel of monkeys scene make sense, which otherwise doesn't seem to have much of a place in the film.) And yet it's still ultimately Tony, just, he's figured out how to apply a force-multiplier to himself, he's the one who built the suits, he's the one holding up the barrel-of-monkeys chain, as is appropriate for his movie.
One scene that stuck in my mind I haven't seen discussed anywhere - when he's buying fertilizer and other supplies at Home Depot, I was really braced for some sort of run-in with local law enforcement, or at least a dubious cashier. "Scruffy guy in black sweatshirt and baseball cap buying bomb-making supplies" is a loaded image, for me, especially in the context of previous imagery of the bomb-site memorial, and, I don't know. I just thought it was really interesting, the way that signalled Really Not Okay to me, except that it's Tony and he's the hero so it *is* okay, but nobody there knows that, and in a movie that's playing so explicitly with the image of the Foreign Terrorist, this little cameo image of the Home-grown Terrorist can't be completely random, so, what does it mean? Maybe just a clue that appearances can be deceiving, or maybe a suggestion that in being an angry guy wanting revenge (following Happy being hurt), in making weapons even though he's sworn off weapons, Tony is playing into the cycle of violence that The Real Bad Guys TM want to exploit?
1.5 Also my kids made it through being babysat with NO TEARS, a major first for Q. It's SO much nicer to be able to think about going out without it meaning guaranteed misery for the home team. Go Q (and his loving sitters)!