For the record, I offered to pay up to twenty dollars of the subscription fee for eHarmony to see how it worked. The free trial gave me my answer: word association. Lots and lots of word association. Page upon digitally delivered pages of adjectives to rate on a scale bookended by ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘strongly agree.’ They even throw some synonyms in there to judge your consistency, the later kue and eh period paraphrasing the question of religious orientation no less than four times. Perhaps the whole thing is a front for the education sector to get some double-blind testing on national English comprehension.
Danielle and I saw the new Iron Man movie. The script wasn’t as tight as the first one, stretching some of the characters a bit thin and showing some holes under the strain. I was more than mildly disappointed with the treatment of the S.H.I.E.L.D. characters. Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson are both fine actors and a pleasure to watch, but one is just too cool to be the hard-edged and driven Nick Fury I know, and the other is just not-Russian enough to be Black Window. In fact my favorite employee of their little operation was Agent Coulson, whom you might remember as the acronymically-impaired guy from the first movie, but he gets suddenly plot-holed out of the script almost immediately after being introduced. His unflappable, no-nonsense attitude and quiet patience are the qualities I’d really like to see more of from Fury.
But enough griping about the tertiary supporting cast. Iron Man does a lot more, well, being Iron Man in this film. The suit gets a lot more screen time in the movie, especially if you include War Machine. There are a lot of hilarious one-timers in there, and all the action sequences actually advance the story, which focuses primarily on character development like it’s prequel. The villains kinds of take a back seat again, which is a shame because Mickey Rourke is very talented, but Stark has always been more than able to get himself into trouble so the tension isn’t really lost. I don’t want to spoil too much, but they’ve dealt with the character’s iconic alcoholism in an interesting, though kind of round-about way that kind of dilutes it’s overall importance to the character, but drives him to be the Tony-Starkiest Tony Stark I’ve ever seen.
What I’m trying to say is that overall, the film hasn’t lost the focus that made the first movie so great, just that it gets a little rough around the edges, probably from trying to do a little too much. The bottom line is that you want to see it.
Now where’s my damn Helicarrier, guys? It had better be good!
Ja.