It's been throwing it down most of the afternoon and night, cold and windy too. Ick.
Needless to say, no flea market. Mom and I went to the movie and she agreed to go to Iron Man. :) After, we picked up some groceries and went back to hers to have a bite to eat. I got back here before it got dark because driving in the night in the rain is not fun.
I know it's not my usual type of film but i do like Robert Downey Jr. and he didn't disappoint. I have no familiarity with Tony Stark/Iron Man in the comics so i have no idea how well the character kept to the books but i quite like him. He was a dirtbag at first, shallow, immature, spoiled rotten. He certainly got his eyes opened when he was kidnapped in Afghanistan and he realized that the enemy, too, had their hands on the weapons his company made. Here he thought he was defending the free world and instead, it's a Stark free for all. Well, not free obviously. He's a billionaire. His captors want him to build this weapon of mass destruction but he builds a suit of Iron instead. First, though, he has to build a little power supply. See, he got hit by shrapnel and the bits were working their way towards his heart so a doctor installed an electro magnet hooked up to a car battery to keep them away. Tony invents this mini version of an "Arc technology" power supply and installs that in his chest instead. (Yes i probably got that wrong a bit, but it was a massive generating thing he'd invented at his company headquarters). That done, he goes about making his suit of iron, with technological weapons in it, and it can fly with power boosters. He makes quick work of the captors and shoots high into the sky over the balls of fire and crash lands arse first into the desert.
See, that's what i liked about Tony Stark. things aren't as simple or smooth as they are for most super heros. So anyway, he makes it back home to California and builds himself a high technology version out of titanium. He wants his company to stop making weapons and do something else. His long time partner who was also his late father's partner isn't too happy about it. Tony decides he has to take the weapons away from the bad guys so that's his first mission. He also has a sort of side kick in the body of a military general Rhodes and he of course has a beautiful and trusty assistant, Pepper Pots (Gwyneth Paltrow). Faran Tahir plays a very good villain from the first half of the movie and Jeff Bridges plays the long time partner Obadiah Stane.
All the performances were great. The pyrotechnics were excellent. Even the cgi wasn't so far fetched or intrusive. Of course there was a lot of it but it was well done other than fake bodies flying everywhere which i really hate done in cgi. The story was good, the stunts too. The subtext near but not quite romance between him and Pepper was there. I guess it has to be. It's a standard superhero plot device isn't it? You won't be surprised by the "twist" because that's pretty much a standard plot device too. Scenery was pretty bleak, Nevada standing in for Afghanistan but the house that Tony Stark owned, perched precariously on the edge of the coastline? I kept thinking, boy one good rainstorm and that is *so* down the drain! Cool computer work too in Tony's lab. I got what i expected, more character than just mindless action but there's a healthy dose of that too. RDJ's Stark was sardonic and sarcastic and flawed, not smug or overly tortured or righteous...in fact, his character is just the way i like 'em. Good fun, this flick.
Also saw the Indiana Jones trailer and it looks fantastic! Opens in a couple of weeks!
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