Comments on Today The Stranger Suggests

I've got nowhere to say this so I'll just say it here:

I have to respectfully disagree with Andrew Wright's review of Ironman.

I'm pleased to see that the film is so highly rated by the Average Joe raters at Rotten Tomatoes.

Andrew, it seems to me that the films action sequences are just perfect. There's not too much and not too little. A lot of people have a grossly over-emphasized view of comic book action scenes/battles. They think the things should be largely extended and melodramatic. But if you look at any of the old books much of what takes place happens in the exposition outside of fight scenes.

Even then the fight scenes are often quite simple. They're the antithesis of the fights of anime TV series like Dragon Ball Z where the protracted punching and kicking leading up to one special move takes two different episodes to accomplish.

What I don't understand is your immediate pronouncement that the cast doesn't live up to its potential, but you don't really explain that. Instead, you resort to praise of the same cast members. Perhaps this is just a failure of your review, and I know that can happen. You seem to have not been able to connect the dots. If you're going to provide an if-then, you should really give us the "then."

Back to the action scenes for a second: they are what they are ... action scenes. Why would you expect the same "fix" of characters during this time?

However, while I do question your logic in the review, I also believe you're just wrong. Each fight scene has basically a different tone to it. We get humor, anger, anticipation, precision, hope, loathing, fear out of a variety of battles. Each has its own version of tension and entertainment.

I wish you had a bit more space so you could have perhaps expounded a bit more. I think that may be one problem of the review. It's too short for what you wanted to say.

Wow. Someone's taking Iron Man (It's two words, Mr. Super Fan) wayyyyyy too seriously.

um, slog is crashing the shit out of my firefox (working on safari). anyone know whats up?

dr. gonzo, same thing is happening to me. FF completely locks up when trying to load the slog page, but it loads fine via Safari.

i've seen this behavior a few times in the past, but was never certain what caused it. i'm thinking it might be one of the ads, but no knows.

i can load some of the recent specific postings (i.e. http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/05/currently_hanging_97 ) without troubles, but don't feel like trying to see if all of them work. unless the stranger wants to pay for debug testing.

@3: Yeah, sorry this problem is getting you. We're aware of this issue, but so far haven't been able to isolate it. It's some combination of a bug in Firefox (for Mac) and/or Flash, and our content, but it's not consistent, and it seems to also have to do with the position of certain content on the page. When the bug is triggered, Firefox doesn't exactly crash, but it's rendering engine freezes, so it stops updating its viewport. The best we can offer right now is this little trick: If you resize the browser window, it seems to wake up the renderer and everything is okay. Not a terribly elegant or satisfactory answer, I know, but an answer, at least.

We're doing whatever we can to track down the real cause of this bug, and have filed it with the Firefox project, but not being able to reliably isolate the issue makes it very hard to get any action on it.

Screw you Poe, don't judge me!

I completely agree Sam, the action sequences were something that has been sorely lacking from a lot of cinematic comic adaptations of late, namely, balanced with the overall tone and structure of the film in which they occur.

Sure, it would have been easy to have set up a non-stop series of action sequences ala "Transformers" (of which we will never speak again), but that would have put those scenes completely at odds with the rest of the film.