It's been months and I dunno. WordPress just doesn't feel right. I miss my blog on here. I'm thinking of opening it again.
15 December 2013
1 May 2013
29 April 2013
At My Friend's House
Last Saturday, I had the good pleasure of hanging out with a close friend who was visiting town. These are some pictures I took in her place.
28 April 2013
26 April 2013
Personal Review of Iron Man 3
Iron Man 3 sets the stage for Phase 2 for Marvel's plan of expanding its Universe. Naturally, when the teaser posters came up in my little town, I knew I would not be missing this movie no matter what. After having seen it today, I'll be blunt, Iron Man 3 was a great movie, but not a perfect one. It was definitely a step up from Iron Man 2, but not necessarily better than the first Iron Man film. The plot was laden with surprising twists and turns, but not all the surprises were good.
We see in the first film very heavy hints at a future coming of the Mandarin; terrorists stand before a flag showing the 10 Rings, exactly as the fake Mandarin of this film used. However, this was ignored on account of Black's ignorance about the Mandarin and his place in the Marvel Universe of modern cinema. It is a slap in the face of comic book faithfuls everywhere to be sure, but Black could not have gone through with the movie had Marvel not given it a stamp of approval. So what if fans of comics are betrayed so long as the profits keep coming in, right?
Iron Man 3 resembles TDKR in it's portrayal of the villain as a face for some shadow organisation. But again, TDKR actually had Bane. His authority might have been made up, but Bane was still Bane. The fact that the Mandarin never existed in Iron Man 3 means that this iconic villain will never be seen in any Marvel movie starring this generation's cast. This would be the equivalent of having a Batman universe without the Joker - unimaginable, unforgivable, and entirely underwhelming.
If you get rid of the Mandarin element, the movie is actually really good on its own. The Extremis arc is one of the better known arcs in the Marvel universe. Guy Pearce played a good villain even though his motive to kill the President seemed half-baked. Gwyneth Paltrow kicked some ass, which was fun to watch. The Iron Legion gave us awesome aerial battles and a fireworks show to end the evening. The incorporation of Harley, though finely executed, seemed a little cliche and pandering to the soccer-mom crowd. Sir Ben Kingsley portrayed the best Trevor Slattery imaginable, and gave us a nerd-gasmic glimpse of the Mandarin he could have been. But the film's many failures were balanced as well as possible by Robert Downey Jr.'s flawless portrayal of Tony Stark, the one thing we can always count on in these films.
With a Guardians of the Galaxy movie confirmed, I was certain that at the end of the movie, Tony would head off into space. Stark was talking about how there are gods and aliens out there, while he was just a man in a can. It seemed like a little tidbit that he would go into space looking for more aliens and gods at the end. With his house blown up, the only thing that seemed to tie him to earth was Pepper. So when it seemed like she had died, I was just waiting until he suited up to leave Earth. However, as soon as it was revealed that Pepper was actually still alive, all hope that he would leave evaporated. He didn't leave. He did, however, find the courage to finally get the operation to remove the shrapnel from his chest.
If I had gone to watch the movie without knowledge of the Mandarin, I would have fancied the movie even better than the first one. But because I saw the trailers and know about Mandarin, I cannot say this is the case. If Black had designed the Mandarin directly from the comics, super-powered rings and all, Iron Man 3 would have surpassed even the Avengers. If he had removed the alien rings and simply made the Mandarin a mortal terrorist, the movie would have been on par with the Avengers, but because he had chosen to omit Mandarin completely, the movie does not even come close to the Avengers.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
I will not be getting into too much detail here, there are plenty of other posts online for that. Instead, I will be addressing only one bold move in the film that I'm not particularly happy about - the Mandarin reveal.
Turns out there was no Mandarin in the movie. The Mandarin from all the trailers never existed. Sir Ben Kingsley plays a guy named Trevor Slattery who portrays the Mandarin simply as a stage face for Guy Pearce's character, Aldrich Killian - the real villain in the story. Trevor does not even have a clue that the guy he's working for is a terrorist. From the movie trailers, I thought the focus of the movie would be on the Mandarin. Instead, the focus was on Extremis. Now, I don't hate the Extremis focus, but I feel like I was lied to by the marketers who used the Mandarin to get me to buy a ticket. The false advertising did put me off a little bit.
 |
| It's a trap! |
Jon Favreau, executive producer for the film, was quoted as saying:
He has 10 magical rings — that just doesn’t feel right for our [franchise]… So it’s either tech-based, or the rings are not really rings. But maybe with Thor and all those others, you’ll introduce magic to that world and it won’t seem so out of place.”I don't know what the hell this guy's smoking, but the rings are tech-based. They're alien tech, but they are tech nonetheless. Oh well, but at least we still have the Mandarin as a villain, or so I thought. Shane Black, the director of the movie, originally gave the impression that though the Mandarin would not have magic rings, but he would at least be a real villain:
I hate to break it to you, but he’s not from space in this. The rings are rings. They’re showmanship, they’re accoutrements. They’re paraphernalia of warfare that he sort of drapes himself with. He studies Sun Tzu, he studies insurgency tactics. He surrounds himself with dragons and symbols of warlords and Chinese iconography because he wants to represent this sort of prototypical terrorist who—we use as the example Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now—may have been an American, may have been a British National, someone who is out there doing field work, supervising atrocities for the intelligence community who went nuts in the field and became this sort of devotee of war tactics, and now has surrounded himself with a group of people over which he presides, and the only thing that unifies them is this hatred of America.Ignoring Black's moronic denial that the Mandarin was a space alien (when was the Mandarin ever a space alien?), I guess he wanted his Mandarin to be reminiscent of Nolan's Joker, grounded in reality but still recognizable from the comics. And I would have been on board even with that. Sir Ben Kingsley played a terrifying Mandarin even without the rings. With such talent, Black could have created a Marvel villain that was on par with Nolan's Joker. But what does he do? He decides to cut the character off completely. I'm not mad because the character was not presented exactly as in the comics. I'm mad because the character never existed at all! I'm sure he thought it was an avant-garde move. In reality, it was just a stupid one, shockingly asinine and inexpressibly disappointing for those of us who know the Mandarin well and expected him to exist. Toward the end of the film, in an act that only deepens the wound of Mandarin's nonexistence, Killian boasts to a bruised and desperate Tony, "I am the Mandarin!" While unknowing movie-goers who went to see action with no understanding of the comics will accept this replacement, comic book purists simply can't. Aldrich Killian is not the Mandarin, and that line just doesn't suffice to please the real fans.
We see in the first film very heavy hints at a future coming of the Mandarin; terrorists stand before a flag showing the 10 Rings, exactly as the fake Mandarin of this film used. However, this was ignored on account of Black's ignorance about the Mandarin and his place in the Marvel Universe of modern cinema. It is a slap in the face of comic book faithfuls everywhere to be sure, but Black could not have gone through with the movie had Marvel not given it a stamp of approval. So what if fans of comics are betrayed so long as the profits keep coming in, right?
Iron Man 3 resembles TDKR in it's portrayal of the villain as a face for some shadow organisation. But again, TDKR actually had Bane. His authority might have been made up, but Bane was still Bane. The fact that the Mandarin never existed in Iron Man 3 means that this iconic villain will never be seen in any Marvel movie starring this generation's cast. This would be the equivalent of having a Batman universe without the Joker - unimaginable, unforgivable, and entirely underwhelming.
If you get rid of the Mandarin element, the movie is actually really good on its own. The Extremis arc is one of the better known arcs in the Marvel universe. Guy Pearce played a good villain even though his motive to kill the President seemed half-baked. Gwyneth Paltrow kicked some ass, which was fun to watch. The Iron Legion gave us awesome aerial battles and a fireworks show to end the evening. The incorporation of Harley, though finely executed, seemed a little cliche and pandering to the soccer-mom crowd. Sir Ben Kingsley portrayed the best Trevor Slattery imaginable, and gave us a nerd-gasmic glimpse of the Mandarin he could have been. But the film's many failures were balanced as well as possible by Robert Downey Jr.'s flawless portrayal of Tony Stark, the one thing we can always count on in these films.
With a Guardians of the Galaxy movie confirmed, I was certain that at the end of the movie, Tony would head off into space. Stark was talking about how there are gods and aliens out there, while he was just a man in a can. It seemed like a little tidbit that he would go into space looking for more aliens and gods at the end. With his house blown up, the only thing that seemed to tie him to earth was Pepper. So when it seemed like she had died, I was just waiting until he suited up to leave Earth. However, as soon as it was revealed that Pepper was actually still alive, all hope that he would leave evaporated. He didn't leave. He did, however, find the courage to finally get the operation to remove the shrapnel from his chest.
If I had gone to watch the movie without knowledge of the Mandarin, I would have fancied the movie even better than the first one. But because I saw the trailers and know about Mandarin, I cannot say this is the case. If Black had designed the Mandarin directly from the comics, super-powered rings and all, Iron Man 3 would have surpassed even the Avengers. If he had removed the alien rings and simply made the Mandarin a mortal terrorist, the movie would have been on par with the Avengers, but because he had chosen to omit Mandarin completely, the movie does not even come close to the Avengers.
25 April 2013
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