Weekly reading/watching meme

[petronia]

Still on the Borges -- 2/3 of the way through the before-last essay, a comparatively long and dense "refutation of the existence of time." Yeah. XD; Then there are the interviews.

I'm pretty broke right now and for the few upcoming months, due to Soon To Be Announced, so I'm not buying any new books for a while; and we have reached the time of year when my reading productivity takes a steep dive anyway, due to alternate options such as listening to very loud live techno, drinking on sunlit outdoor terrasses with friends, watching movies about superheros and Japanese ghosts, and so forth.

Still trying to sum up what I think about Iron Man 3. I'll need to watch it again, but I don't think I'll be compelled to rewatch it an embarrassing number of times. XD; It may be the best of the three, with the caveat that they stop the series here.

1) Applegnat's point re: drone warfare very apt -- IMO one of the more inspired aspects of IM3 is its response to IM2's fatal flaw of "drones are the logical endpoint / drones are inhuman / drones are inhumanly boring"? Like, if Tony builds 40 Iron Man suits, each individual suit will be a work of art and a zillion times cooler than a Hammer drone, but that's a difference of degree (Eames vs IKEA), not a difference of kind (still a chair). Dude cobbles them together because he needs something to do with himself on insomnia nights. The weapon of mass destruction is the brain, not the casing. What's fascinating is that at this point in movieverse, this could as well refer to JARVIS as to Tony. Like, as a practical matter, of course Tony'd blow up those 40 suits once they've been deployed; not only to make Pepper feel better (which is actually borderline OOC by now), but because it's the easiest way to keep anyone from going after JARVIS (this is not stated outright, but come on. We have seen the face of SKYNET, and it is Tony Stark's snarky AI butler.)

1.1) (The gov't/army in IM2 came off as incredibly dumb, because the game-changer tech from IM1 was clearly not the suit, it was the energy source. They go after the suit and let SI, like, usher out the age of oil as a sidebar note. (Does anyone else get the impression that in an early version of the IM3 script, Roxxon had a hand in the Mandarin conspiracy?))

1.2) Wow haha dudes at Marvel/Disney must've been shitting bricks when the whole "homebrew your jihad from items you pick up at the hardware store" story started picking up :| :| :|

2) Pissed off at Shane Black for excising every idea of actual interest from the Extremis storyline: from the SF concept of using nanotech to reprogram the brain to reprogram the body, to Maya being less a love interest than Tony's female science buddy, to the DMT machine elves. ...Not that I was realistically expecting the DMT machine elves. Then again, I was also not expecting the Pepper-and-Maya-in-a-hotel-room fanfic of my secret fantasies, so. AND THEY WERE MOSTLY TALKING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC ETHICS AND NOT SEX WITH TONY STARK?? Does this movie actually pass Bechdel???

(That time in Fear Itself when Tony had to get drunk in order to get dwarves to help him forge his armour, isn't that basically DMT machine elves, though? I am tripping myself out.)

2.1) Rebecca Hall OTOH was clearly playing Warren Ellis's Maya, and was great. NEEDS MORE MAYA. Wonder if Jessica Chastain quit first, or the role was reduced first. Though the thing was clearly edited down mercilessly from a three-hour-long first cut.

2.2) IDK how Pepper can have so much Action Girl shiz to do on paper but get no character development and be less interesting than in any of the previous movies including The Avengers? Like, to make Pepper in the suit or Pepper with Extremis interesting, you have to actually show her reacting to it/changing/adapting as a character, even if it gets reversed? Not just have her go "umm" and END THE MOVIE??

3) Though the fact that the movie ends without actually saying whether or not Tony installs Extremis on himself is kind of hilarious??? I mean... I'm not over-reading into this, am I? XD; OVER TO YOU, WHEDON

4) That time I watched all the IM1/IM2 making-of stuff it became apparent that everyone involved in the Marvel movies decision-making thought the Mandarin was terrible, albeit not all for the same reason. So this is what you get from that, I guess. XD Now for that letter page classic, "Sorry we're not sorry that you don't like the direction we're taking with this character."

Ben Kingsley's career choices seem more sensible than they did before. My pitch is still better, though. XDD

On a side note, I'm impressed they managed to sidestep pissing off Chinese filmgoers over this, then invented a whole new way of pissing off Chinese filmgoers out of thin air. #HOLLYWOOD Guys. Guys. Chinese audiences are not rubes or exotics. I assure you that if someone can afford 180RMB to see a 3D movie in Shanghai for a Saturday night outing, they are middle class and know how to use the Internet and probably speak English, a 3D action fantasy movie means to them exactly what it means to you, and they can tell when you're pandering.

5) But the thing is: from a Watsonian perspective, Tony Stark has now integrated his superhero identity fully. He's grown as a person; he's Iron Man independent of the suit (the point of IM3 is essentially to prove this by taking him out of the suit), and more to the point, both he and Pepper are way more happy and self-actualized than they were in IM1. From a Doylesque perspective, RDJ and GP can play these characters in their sleep, and have probably put as much of themselves into these screen incarnations as is psychologically healthy for them to do (and vice versa XD;). Time to get out before the entire exercise is sleepwalking.

Comments

[ukefied]

I'm pretty broke right now and for the few upcoming months, due to Soon To Be Announced

Way to hold out on us. ; )

[petronia]

Very soon. XD

[canis_m]

Does this movie actually pass Bechdel???

By dint of that one convo, yup. The "Congratulations, you passed!" bell went off in my head in the theater as soon as it happened.

to make Pepper in the suit or Pepper with Extremis interesting, you have to actually show her reacting to it/changing/adapting as a character

I for one got a quite satisfactory kinky thrill out of Pepper in the suit, thanks! Such a specific and personal form of crossdressing! Oh but you meant narratively interesting. XD; On the one hand I sort of liked that it went unremarked upon--as if it were not all that wild or transgressive a thing? maybe happens or could happen all the time? no biggie?--but I did also feel the creative team chickened out, or weren't quite sure how much screentime they could allocate to Action Pepper without (further) undermining Tony's masculinity or hero-of-the-movie status or w/e, so they erred on the side of not enough.

I also felt cheated when we weren't treated to a scene of Extremis!Pepper striding phoenix-like out of the flames, all glowing-eyed and vesuvian, instead of that "surprise attack" reappearance that surprised no one.

[petronia]

Oh, I really liked Pepper in the suit! I just feel it needs to be pushed... I don't know. One step further. What does this do for the character and all that. The immediate narrative need is eg. for Pepper to blow up a thing but the kink isn't actually about Pepper blowing up a thing, it's about Pepper in Tony's outfit/role/body(?)/identity pr0n whatever?? The fic needs another 1-2K words. This would be clearer to a ficcer of the AO3 type, maybe, because she would be thinking "plot whereby girl blows up things = excuse to explore the kink bit," whereas the scriptwriter is a ficcer of the comics fanboy type who is thinking "plot whereby girl blows up things = wunderbar, we're done here." Maybe in the DVD extras.

It's interesting to consider that Tony might have been giving her a chance of being alive and very pissed off as well, given what he's seen the Extremis ppl take by way of damage.

[applegnat.livejournal.com]

2.2) IDK how Pepper can have so much Action Girl shiz to do on paper but get no character development and be less interesting than in any of the previous movies including The Avengers? Like, to make Pepper in the suit or Pepper with Extremis interesting, you have to actually show her reacting to it/changing/adapting as a character, even if it gets reversed? Not just have her go "umm" and END THE MOVIE??

So painful! At least as an unimpressed assistant/anxious CEO she had THINGS TO SAY. She's so memorable in that horrid scene in IM2 in which she and Tony have an argument in her office before she ups and leaves. And here she is in the suit and you feel nothing.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

This is bothering me more the more I think about it. But then I also would have preferred the movie in which Maya was the real villain, even if that got ppl screaming re: Batman parallels.

Went and watched it again, because I missed the beginning. With the beginning flashback I find it a much sadder story, oddly (or not?).

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I saw IM3 with Chrissie!

1)(Does anyone else get the impression that in an early version of the IM3 script, Roxxon had a hand in the Mandarin conspiracy?))

Apart from everyone in Tennessee has a gun/it's a good thing that Tony Stark can buy all that stuff from Home Depot without tripping the FBI's Terrorist Watchlist, this movie's politics are really pretty liberal. There's the whole "we create our own demons" thing, which you can thematically extend to "the US creates terrorists with anti-US agendas through its imperialist policies" (which the Mandarin discusses explicitly (and he's poster boy for opportunistic villainy but he has a point)). The President looks kind of like GW, the Vice President is evil, the dude who gets executed on the sound stage looks like John McCain, and in the end a defense contractor funded by the US gov't is the bad guy (just like in 2).

Also speaking of 2, I think the gov't comes off pretty dumb in this one too, since information about the Extremis project is available to everyone with high-enough gov't security clearance and yet they never make the connection between enrollees in their secret-soldier test program and victims of the Mandarin.

1.2) Wow haha dudes at Marvel/Disney must've been shitting bricks when the whole "homebrew your jihad from items you pick up at the hardware store" story started picking up :| :| :|

Haha, and he's even wearing one of those school-shooting black hoddies >__>

Then again, I was also not expecting the Pepper-and-Maya-in-a-hotel-room fanfic of my secret fantasies, so. AND THEY WERE MOSTLY TALKING ABOUT SCIENTIFIC ETHICS AND NOT SEX WITH TONY STARK?? Does this movie actually pass Bechdel???

That scene was AWESOME. More Maya yes please, though actually I like the idea that she really did come to Stark Mansion as a defector and only pretended to be an evil villain double-crosser when she got caught. I like to think that she was just playing at being a villain waiting for her chance to defect again, and Extremis dude suspected exactly as much, which is why he was so quick to off her the first time she showed concern for TS's welfare.

Like, to make Pepper in the suit or Pepper with Extremis interesting, you have to actually show her reacting to it/changing/adapting as a character, even if it gets reversed? Not just have her go "umm" and END THE MOVIE??

Haha, but actually I liked that she turning into this scary badass who saves TS the instant she had the superpowers to do so, but then immediately turned around like "OMG that was so violent!" I thought it showed that Pepper has an innate knack for being a superhero - she could easily step into the role and be better at it than TS, just like she's a better CEO - but she just chooses to play a different role because only crazy people want to be superheroes. I was also in favor of "if Pepper has to give up her useful but unstable and dangerous powers, than so does Stark, because fair is fair" (Chrissie OTOH thought all of it was selfish).

(cont.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I think the movie actually leaves it fully and intentionally open as to whether Pepper got Extremis removed or stabilized, and if Tony then installed it on himself as per the comic (in the comic it only heats etc. because they were trying to make super-soldiers; in actuality you can program it to, like... grow angel wings, or a wireless receptor, or whatever XD;). Since I was expecting the comics storyline I pretty much assumed that's what he did, because otherwise it doesn't make sense that he can get the shrapnel removed now but not in IM2 when the thing in his chest was killing him.

It would also play into the "the suits aren't Iron Man, I am Iron Man" idea, because the technology is literally inside Tony. orz

And yeah, the more I think about it the more I think Maya honestly wanted to get Tony out of there, because without his help she can't solve the Extremis explodey problem. Although this begs the question of why she didn't go to him before =_= (maybe Killian convinced her that he could get SI on board the normal way?).

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

That makes sense to me (SI on board the normal way). And then he intentionally sets out to piss TS off by putting the moves on Pepper, to make sure the deal falls through and he can do it the way he'd prefer.

And your other thoughts make sense too... I dunno, I was kind of too hung up on all the things that don't make sense in this movie to try to look for sense where it might exist XD.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

(cont.)

Ben Kingsley's career choices seem more sensible than they did before. My pitch is still better, though. XDD

He's soooo good at playing a maniacal drug addict and when that reveal came it was so perfect because (per Chrissie) "there was something melodramatic and fake about the character to begin with so of course it makes sense that he's a 'stage actor'" (lol).

There was tons of stuff about filming in the movie in general, like almost Tropic Thunder levels of meta-referencing. Of course TS's big mistake is saying something imprudent in an interview, of course when the villain is too hollywood-perfect it's because he's acting, of course TS's biggest fanboy works in television.

(The Extremis-in-Tennessee was like watching a TV show, every shot is dictated by Maximum Comedy or Maximum Dramatic Tension and screw logic.)

5) But the thing is: from a Watsonian perspective, Tony Stark has now integrated his superhero identity fully. He's grown as a person; he's Iron Man independent of the suit (the point of IM3 is essentially to prove this by taking him out of the suit), and more to the point, both he and Pepper are way more happy and self-actualized than they were in IM1. From a Doylesque perspective, RDJ and GP can play these characters in their sleep, and have probably put as much of themselves into these screen incarnations as is psychologically healthy for them to do (and vice versa XD;). Time to get out before the entire exercise is sleepwalking.


Again I thought the point was to make a grand gesture in support of having a stable personal life, even if it means dismantling a defense program that actually came in rly rly handy. "It's selfish" and Stark is a selfish person, which is why Rhodes saves the President while he tries and fails to save Pepper. But then dude still has Jarvis so he can always build more.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I also really liked that Pepper spends a lot of the movie walking out on TS in protest over his bad/worrying behavior, and the movie ultimately says she was right to do that, even after it turns out that he was doing useful work and not just shutting her out/being a maniac workaholic out for no reason.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Well, the joke in saying "you're not paranoid if they're really after you" is that yes, you can be paranoid if they're really after you, because paranoia is a psychological state that by definition is detached from reality. XD Like, on the one hand, it'd've made Tony's life easier if he'd had access to 40 remote-powered suits in IM2 and The Avengers as well. On the other hand, if he'd meant them to be primarily remote-powered he wouldn't have built them that way. And the sane, Occam's Razor engineering solution to being offered a traumatic glimpse of vistas of imcomprehensible galactic technology is not to create a different suit for every redundancy that crosses your mind on sleepless nights.

What's interesting about the tech in this movie is that both Tony and Killian/Maya are stuck with alpha-test solutions that are a few levels short of elegant. I mean, it's baroquely cool to have a battle in which Tony leaps from suit to suit in mid-air, but you would never design the modus operandi to be that. So yes it worked, but also it didn't work.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

TL;DR what I mean is, I think the movie wants you to read this as "Tony blows up the suits as a gesture to allay Pepper's concerns" / "Tony blows up the suits as a sign that he's worked through the obsessive spiral that's been eating him up," but I believe that additionally, blowing up the suits at this point would have been the right/IC thing for Tony to do as an engineer/designer/mechanic. I don't think this latter reading takes away from the former, necessarily -- in fact, since being a mechanic is basically Tony's mode of self-expression, I dunno that you can divorce them.