Watch This! Iron Man 3 Bonus Review, And a Note About Twitter

Okay, so you'll remember that I had promised a review of Iron Man 3. I figure that I better get it up today, because by next week it will be fully irrelevant. So here are my quick and dirty thoughts on the latest Marvel superhero movie.

Better than Number 2, not as good as Number 1.

The first Iron Man movie had an impact on me in that it made superhero movies seem less juvenile. I liked the Sam Raimi Spiderman films...for the most part, but if you watch them now you will undoubtedly notice that they've aged and now appear pretty cheese-filled. Iron Man, on the other hand, had this older, suave, sexy, smart hero with a cool origin story. Robert Downey Jr. was perfectly cast as Tony Stark. This remained true throughout the second Iron Man, and of course in The Avengers. But Iron Man 2 suffered from overstuffed syndrome, where it tried to do too much and ended up falling short of the brilliant simplicity that was the origin story. Iron Man 3 is a more successful story because it dials back a bit and just tells the story of Tony Stark having PTSD and getting overly dependent on his suits.

Tony spends a lot of time outside the suit in this movie, and that's for the best. It ends up being a more human, more character based story. He has panic attacks, he screws up his relationship, he makes colossal mistakes, and he has to kind of MacGyver his way through defeating the bad guys. It's interesting and fun as hell. I also loved that Pepper took a slightly more active role, actually becoming involved in the action portion of the plot instead of standing on the sidelines.

The movie is not without flaws, as we see the usually brilliant Tony making some enormously stupid moves. I'm not sure if that's all to do with being sleep deprived or being arrogant or what, but yeah...kind strayed into TSTL territory. The big issue that the uber-fans have, though, is the way that the villain known as The Mandarin is handled. I'm not invested enough in the Iron Man comic universe to care about that at all. If I were? Yeah, I'd probably be pissed.

So, yeah, Iron Man 3 is worth seeing unless your inner fanboy/girl will implode do to extreme deviation from comic book continuity. Or whatever.

My other note for today is that my original Twitter account is now sadly inaccessible to me.  I no longer have access to the original email that it's connected to and so, unfortunately, I can't do much to fix it and I've had to let it die. I never actually tweeted frequently, just post sharing and the like. What I really used it for was to keep up with authors and other bloggers and the obvious entertainment purposes of easy stalking. It's been hard to be without that tool, so I've started the arduous process of setting up a new account. The new username is @PenguinKumer. As before, follow me and I'll follow you. We'll all get along fantastically.