Guess my brain is a little contaminated, too. It was a long weekend.
Friday was a strange day. Cheryl and Mary were on a field trip to Detroit to see what it looks like in the pouring rain and windy cold. (Hint: it looks wet.) That left me in charge of the rest of the crew, figuring out what to do for dinner (Hint: everyone loves pizza) and what to do for entertainment (Hint: maybe we could watch Avatar for about the sixth time). We had an overnight guest (special friend of Deb) who had not seen the movie. And we had another overnight guest (special friend of James) who wanted to play Age of Empires with the boys (but somehow ended up on Facebook doing instant-messaging instead). And I had this special stash of Mountain Dew...
By the end of the evening, and some time into the morning, everyone was seriously caffeinated. It was a miracle any sleeping occurred at all.
Don't worry, I didn't have to handle it all by myself. Cheryl and Mary got home in the nick of time (8:30 pm) to save me. So Cheryl and I were able to hide in our bedroom without a care in the world while the kids attempted to sleep (they failed). Our only concern was that the singing might go on all night.
We all woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (can we still use that term?) on Saturday morning, ready to ... no, no, that’s not what happened. Actually, we all slept in like a bunch of lazy bums. It took forever for everyone to get up. The girls got up first and made breakfast for themselves and then started laughing their fool heads off, which woke everyone else up; so then we all got out of our beds and tromped downstairs (intending at first to tromp on the girls’ heads) and got our own breakfasts; and then, it was time to check the morning news on the various Internet devices scattered around the house.
James and his friend, after a rousing session of "Who's on Facebook?", were picked up by another friend and carried off in a cloud of dust to catch the new Iron Man movie. Soon afterward, Adam and I roared off in a cloud of dust to catch the new Iron Man movie. The girls just sort of hung around the house singing and laughing and playing Barbies or Legos or something.
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Movie Review Interjection
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Synopsis: Tony Stark is being pressured to relinquish his Iron Man suit by the Government (and by his arch-rival, Justin Hammer, CEO of Hammer Industries). He refuses, expressing his opinion that he has “privatized peace”. He is also being pressured by his friends to grow up. He refuses, because he is an idiot. A Russian physicist, Ivan Vanko, becomes the villain Whiplash (or Blacklash) in an attempt to revenge his father’s humiliation at the hands of Tony’s father, for whom he had once worked, and slices Tony’s Le Mans car in half during the race and is promptly arrested. Tony’s best friend, Lt. Col. James Rhodes (“Rhodey”), takes the old Mark 2 Iron Man suit and hands it over to the military. The military hands it over to Justin Hammer for upgrades. Hammer liberates Vanko (Whiplash) and hires him to create an army of drones based on the Mark 2 suit. Tony hands over the reigns of Stark Industries to Pepper Potts. Everything is set up for disaster!
Commentary: Iron Man 2 is kinda cool. Got lotsa techno-geek stuff to keep the boys happy. Got some face-to-face between Tony and Pepper to keep the girls interested. Got a lotta plot swirling around like snow in a blizzard. And, like most movies, it’s got some issues.
If you don’t want to know particulars about the movie – move along, little dogie, move along. Here be dragons.
BEGIN SPOILERS
(1) The Physicist’s Phury
At the beginning of the movie, Ivan Vanko sits in a little apartment watching his father die. Why? Ivan and his father are both physicists. Very intelligent. Ivan’s father had fled to the US but was deported because he tried to get rich off his inventions and Howard Stark (his employer) didn’t like it. Or something like that. So the Russians, instead of taking this genius physicist and using him to build bombs or reactors or something, exile him to Siberia. Then for some reason, they let him come home again as he is dying? Does that make any sense?
Ivan is very, very smart. Smart enough to find people to make him fake passports. And he has the money to pay them. Where did this money come from? Why are these two super-smart physicists not working for the Russians in some top-secret weapons facility? Or, if the Russians don’t want them, how about helping out the Iranians or the Arabs or the North Koreans or any one of a number of terrorist groups? There’s big money out there. Obviously, Ivan has some kind of money, because he has enough to buy all that expensive (even if slightly ‘used’) equipment he’s got all over the place. He has enough equipment to build his own super-battery power source, plus all the fancy metal gear to turn himself into Whiplash (or Blacklash). And he’s got money to fly to Monte Carlo. And money to bribe someone so he can get a set of those orange jumpsuit things he’s wearing by the track. But apparently, for some reason, he doesn’t have the money to get his father to a decent medical facility, or get a decent apartment. And with all them brains and moneys, he ain’t got no better revenge plan than to step out onto the track at Le Mans and chop Tony’s car in half. STUPID.
(2) Moonlighting Redux
I’m jumping ahead a bit here, but the whole point of the thing with Pepper Potts is that Tony is too vain | stupid | selfish | self-absorbed to notice that she’s head-over-heels in love with him even though he doesn’t deserve it (and there’s a very long psychological explanation for this very common problem, the “good girls fall for bad boys” thing). But that’s to our benefit because, like Maddie and Dave in “Moonlighting”, the tension between them gives us an excellent opportunity to enjoy some verbal sparring. There was a little bit of it here, but as soon as Pepper gets to be CEO, she’s overwhelmed by the responsibility and becomes annoyingly business-like. So at the end she has to go through the obligatory “I can’t take it” scene where she resigns and gives him back his company so she can become the old, Tony-obsessed Pepper Potts. And they can go back to the way things were. Or at least they should. Instead, they end up kissing. It’s lame. It’s too early for the “serious relationship” thing. This is only movie #2! There is still at least one more movie’s worth of zingers they can sling at each other before they go all mushy on us..
(3) Final Fight Fiasco
The final fight was too short. Not the final fight, I mean the FINAL final fight. You know the one. Where "Rhodey" and Tony fight Ivan-the-Terrible near the little stream. They’ve already spent most of the valuable fight time dealing with the drones. Now they have to take down Ivan (aka Whiplash). By all reasonable estimates, this should be at least a ten-minute scene. But for some reason, it is no more than a minute. He throws them around, lashes them with his whips, and then, using what they’ve learned from Ghostbusters, they catch him between their palm-thrusters and fry him. Huh? That’s all they had to do? Combine their little palm-laser thingies? Wasn’t he impervious to them before? Did the physics suddenly change?
(4) Chrono-drones
Why do the drones give warning (via the blinky-blinky power thingies on their chests) before they blow up? Who was the genius that came up with THIS stupid idea? Evil villains, take note: Never, ever put timers or big, flashing power sources on the front of your bomb devices so that the good guys have an opportunity to get out of the way or defuse them. If you want them to blow up and take everyone with them, just LET THEM BLOW UP. It makes for a fantastic ‘dark’ movie ending.
Imagine it: The drones blow up, taking most of the Expo with them; Tony and Rhodey are saved by virtue of their suits, but poor Pepper Potts is ‘peppered’ with shrapnel. Tony suffers a huge emotional crises because Pepper is gone. Setup for the next movie, where it stops being just a game for Tony because now he realizes the seriousness of the stakes.
(Of course, there could also be a teaser at the end of the movie showing that Pepper Potts has been miraculously put back together by some gee-whiz device from Nick Fury and his Avengers, and has now become a super-hero in her own right…)
(5) Construction Crunch
How on earth does Tony Stark build all that fantastic hardware by himself, in a ridiculously short amount of time? Sure, he’s a genius with all the money in the world. But he’s only one man, with so many hours in a day. Have you ever tried to fix a sink at home? Do you remember how long it took? All day, right? There is absolutely no way on earth that the incredible, amazing Tony Stark can single-handedly build his own cyclotron in order to create a new element in what appeared to be days (if not hours). No way.
This is the same problem I had with the original movie. I didn’t really believe he could create that first crude suit inside that cave (or whatever it was), even with the help of that other guy, whatshisname. Not in three months. Not in three years! With hydraulics, electronics, pulleys, gears, motors, and power supplies. Uh-uh.
Suspension of disbelief is one thing. Suspension of common sense is another.
Final Note
By the way, please don't rush out of the theater. You'll want to sit through the entire (and I do mean ENTIRE) credits to get the 30 seconds of "teaser" for the next big Superhero movie. We laughed at all the people who left too early. Those fools!
END SPOILERS
Saturday night was not Mother's Day, nor was it Mother's Night, but we went out anyway. The kids were having a wonderful time doing ... something ... and there was plenty of leftovers in the fridge and we needed to run out and do some grocery shopping, so we figured they could handle themselves for a few minutes. Turned out to be about three hours. We went to Costco, then to the grocery store, then stopped by Noddles for some yummy Asian food, then spent oodles of money on paint at Home Depot (under the deranged thought that we're actually going to have time this spring to paint our bedroom).
Sunday was Mother's Day, but since we had gone out the night before, and the kids actually didn't eat any of the leftovers but opted for Kraft Mac'n'Cheese instead, we had lots of leftovers to eat. Which we didn't. Instead, we ate the roasted chicken we'd gotten at Costco the night before. It was yummy! So we still have leftovers.
Want some leftovers?
So I still don't know why my eyes are hurting so much. I'm going to soak them tonight in the shower and see what happens. Meanwhile, you can soak your eyes with this latest image of my two goofy daughters with their new hairstyles.
3 comments:
They are not weird. They are beautiful.
And your weekend sounds like a great one.
Have fun with your bedroom painting.
Where's the photo? did they make you take it off? It's not showing up on my end.
Sorry...it got inadvertently removed when I made an update. I'll fix it!
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