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LOVE COMICS: IRON MAN: It's F*CKIN' METAL!

  • May. 10th, 2008 at 6:09 PM
roaring dragon, spore, monster friday
Or Summer's suggestion: "Iron Man: It's your daily requirement of iron."

Jeff Bridge=Daddy Warbucks. Robert Downey Jr.= both dom and sub, hero and prison bitch. A movie with only two women characters is going to need more soft characters, so Robert gets to have his shirt opened slowly by one man and be made helpless by another. GO SLASHERS, GO!
In an obvious but still literate and clever visual, Downey/Stark is the crippled Hephaestus. On top of everything else, he's a Tesla-like math savant, and a lone creator who has funny verbal interactions with his machine companions. (Some of the funniest lines are Stark  nattering at his waldoes.)

Being an interface wonk, I drooled over Stark's computer and design interfaces, and how plausibly they were depicted. An interface where virtual structures can be built and then tested for fit? That's for me!

The film was real-looking, like a celluloid print that's been showing for a few weeks. Even the CGI battle armor only looked clean for about two seconds. As someone who knows things in use don't stay clean, I loved this attention to detail. I kept a small sketchbook at hand, imagining myself like one of my heroes, Al Hirschfeld, who drew on paper kept in his pocket. I got some great gestures for later memory sketches. I am glad I did, everyone moved so beautifully, and were not varnished and zit-filtered to a fare-the-well.

There's so much more I liked, such as Stark's over-the-top yet believable indulgences and excesses in drink, women and luxury, but I want you to see for yourselves. IRON MAN is a solid, funny and smart action film. You deserve it.

 

Comments

[info]fiveslashfour wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 01:43 am (UTC)
Aaaaah I totally geeked out over the 'puter stuff, too. The dragging and dropping between screens with the stylus? SWEET!
[info]graphicnovelist wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 03:40 am (UTC)
I like that Stark's robots were little arm-waldos rather than ULTRON and Jacosta androids; even more so that they clearly had stunted personalities of their own.

I also love the fact that Stark is the kind of dude who's going to have a retractable stripper pole in his private jet.

But I gotta admit, DAMN does that dude have a tesseract in his chest cavity or what?
[info]dewline wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 12:48 pm (UTC)
Considering that he's managed to miniaturize an "ARC Reactor" to the dimensions of a Big Mac from scraps in a cave, could you put it past this version of Stark to figure how to make tesseracts for real?
[info]graphicnovelist wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 01:17 pm (UTC)
It's just about the only way I could understand how Pepper could get her arm UP TO HER FREAKING ELBOW into Tony's chest.
[info]eyemage wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 04:27 am (UTC)
i so desperately want that interface table too.

its going to be quite quite interesting to see what favreau will do with Mandarin and FIN FANG FOOM!

what did you tink of the post credit cameo?
[info]dewline wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 12:52 pm (UTC)
As to the Mandarin...I think that they're planning to take their time figuring out how to introduce him without deserving to fall into the "Yellow Peril" trap. The whole "Ten Rings" business strikes me as the start of the process, especially with the Genghis Khan references...even if the leader of the contingent holding Stark only wore one ring.

Too short, was that cameo.
[info]graphicnovelist wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 01:18 pm (UTC)
Oh, that was definitely the Mandarin's henchmen, not the Mandarin himself.

And they've included enough potential clues for the Armor Wars storyline as well.

[info]dewline wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 01:38 pm (UTC)
"Lifting More Than One Finger"*, "Armor Wars", "Demon in a Bottle"...

* Inspired by an Iron Man Annual written by Dennis O'Neil featuring the "lord of ten rings" and his designs upon Wakanda twenty-plus years ago, our time.

Edited at 2008-05-11 01:42 pm (UTC)
[info]lois2037 wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 07:20 am (UTC)
I agree completely. Good, good movie!
[info]hangofwednesday wrote:
May. 11th, 2008 06:12 pm (UTC)
I was surprised by how funny the movie turned out to be. I didn't go into thinking I was going to laugh a lot but I did.