"no is a complete answer." accurate, but, coming from Tony Stark, also hilarious

the way Jeff Bridges plays Obadiah is so wonderfully gross. even when Obadiah is playing the benign father figure he's creepy - he's just always touching people, especially Tony. just gotta have his hands on everyone. what are boundaries? don't ask Obadiah; he knows exactly what they are and how to use them but he's not gonna tell you that

it's a shame we don't get to see him try to pull that shit with Killmonger in that one episode of what if. dude would've lost a hand (not really, but it would have been made very, very clear that he could have)

this press conference scene. you know, from the moment he tells them all to sit down, these reporters are inwardly SO PUMPED that they're about the have a firsthand account of the breakdown that is surely coming

and then what they get is EVEN BETTER

oh my god, Tony. "hey pepper can you come stick your ungloved hands in my chest no it's nbd don't worry about"

i hadn't really paid it any attention before, but you can tell most of the dialogue in the arc replacement scene is improvised - it just sounds like how people would actually talk in this situation, plus RDJ just straight-up corpses at one point but manages to rein it back in. it works really well

and is a strong reminder of the fact that they were filming without a complete script

how this movie was just not a total disaster comes down to the cast - i've mentioned that i like Howard and Bridges's performances, we don't even need to mention how iconic this role became for RDJ, and Gwenyth Paltrow has taken a real unfortunate turn but she's great as Pepper

unexpected bit of transphobic humor (think G-rated take on that one verse in funky cold medina) yikes

never noticed it before - it passes so quickly and i missed a ton of dialogue every time i watched this before bc i didn't know how much adhd people benefit from having captions on

ugh, real hard to sympathize with Rhodey here aggressively pushing the "keep making stuff that kills people" angle with Tony

oh my GOD i'd forgotten about Butterfingers spraying Tony down with the fire extinguisher after the first attempt knocks him flat, i am CRYING

the prop pizza looks so unappetizing. they had that budget and they couldn't get good prop pizza? a food stylist? come on

"what was i thinking? you're usually so discreet." man, i miss Jarvis. Vision just ain't the same. none of Jarvis's sass, to start

Obadiah's expression is just dangerous for a second when Tony shows up at the event, even as he's smiling. excellent microexpressions from Bridges here

and he goes on to very pleasantly gut Tony while there are pictures being taken

i don't think fandom, aside from the inevitable subset, ever really appreciated what an effective villain he is

Tony watching the news and turning the suit's arm, with this look of quiet fury that never flickers or intensifies even as he gets up to test the repulsor and takes those windows out. what a good, understated scene

the scene with Tony taking down some of the Ten Rings assholes is really good too, and while i doubt it was the intention i think they are manage to sidestep the potential white saviorism here - Tony's not some white dude saving these poor sad brown people, he's a guy whose irresponsibility led directly to these people

coming to hard and he's just trying to clean up some of his mess

*to harm

this is the scene where this truly becomes his life's work, right up until he gives that life doing it. Iron Man is not about people a superhero for Tony - it's about making reparations. he spends the rest of his life letting his guilt propel him and make his decisions, and he makes both very good and incredibly disastrous choices because of it

*being a superhero, what the hell even is my typing today

anyway here's Obadiah fingerfucking the mark one

Pepper with the big brass fucking balls to go directly into Obadiah's office to steal evidence, she is amazing

hilarious: the fact that Obadiah doesn't even blink when he finds Pepper sitting at his computer. terrifying: the way his face changes when he realizes what she's up to. Jeff Bridges nails this shit so hard

he doesn't touch her at all, but the way he gets in her space, makes her track him while he walks around behind her . . . so good. so good

he watches her take off with Coulson, then stalks over to where they're working on making the suits and feels up poor William instead

(BOX OF SCRAPS!!! guy, shows up later in Far From Home working on Quentin's Mysterio team, heh)

Dummy passing over the old arc reactor, bless

oh now i remember why Obadiah doesn't get credit for being one of the best MCU villains - it's because he loses most of his points with the ridiculous Iron Monger suit and even more ridiculous voice filter. it's Bridges's performance that carries him a character. once you lose that he's just a pile of clichés

out of the suit, he's terrifying, but inside it he is instantly downgraded to "meh"

for all that Tony has the big final fight with Obadiah, it's Pepper who gets to kill him. love that for her

"The truth is . . . I am Iron Man." and smash cut to back in black. iconic

i remember losing my mind at that when i saw this in theaters. it's a fantastic twist, it cements the character going forward, it helped shape the MCU, and it wasn't even originally what they were gonna go with

RDJ again

anyway. this movie holds up really well for being such a product of its time in places; little wonder it made a skrillion dollars and paved the way for a massive franchise. i do believe it also saved Marvel, which had been on the edge of bankruptcy for a long time (that's why they sold the Spider-Man movie rights to Sony)

for all the wild swerves back and forth in levels of quality the MCU has made, the movie that kicked it off is a classic

i'm gonna go nuke some dinner and then get started on IM2, which i likewise have no watched for years. i wonder if it's actually better than i remember. the dark world was

artistformerlyknownas do you remember that thread with Matt and Pepper valiantly battling the shoe-eating monster in the library?

OH MY GOD

it was so fun!

i know these days we're supposed to pretend Howard Stark was an acceptable human being, but he DID steal his partner's work and call it his own. NEVER FORGET

the juxtaposition between Vanko toiling in his dark apartment and Tony's tasteless and extravagant arrival at the Stark Expo is not subtle, but it sure does make its point

Tony digging his heels in about the suit not being a weapon, Senator HYDRA not buying it

Sam Rockwell, tragically wasted on one of the least-liked films in the franchise

Enter Don Cheadle, taking Rhodey's character in a very different direction. He has a gravitas that Terence Howard very much does not

after seven years of exposition about the palladium poisoning: "unfortunately, the device that's keeping you alive is also killing you" YES THANK YOU JARVIS WE GET IT

making Pepper ceo is the shingle smartest choice Tony ever made

HI NATASHA

I MISS YOU NATASHA

elon musk cameo, GAG ME

followed by another round of Pepper slutshaming Christine, lovely

the extra overacting behind Hammer during Vanko's debut at the race is just wonderful

hand to her chest, mouth in an O, i love her

heh, i've been watching the later movies so much that the briefcase suit looks positively quaint during its dramatic reveal

so according to Howard, Vanko Sr just wanted to use the tech to get rich, where Howard wanted to use it to change the world, so Howard got him deported. Howard is totally the good guy here

according to Howard

or like, not even Howard. according to fury's telling of the story

you know, Nick Fury, who has a minimum of eight motives for everything he does and is not afraid to massage the truth as necessary

i'm still with Vanko on this one

this is definitely better than i remember it being so far. i think it benefits a great deal from being an early entry in a franchise rather than the sequel to the franchise's most successful film at that point

i bet Coulson has never ever forgiven Tony for treating the shield so casually. in any universe.

(or its prototype, anyway)

(if that had been Steve's actual shield i think he would have just ripped Tony's throat out with his teeth on the spot)

i don't know how creating a new element works irl, but i assume it does not involve slicing a room in half length-wise. Tony is ridiculous

I mean I believe the machine itself was relatively accurate he just wasn't using it right. or safely.

yeah, that's Tony

and here we have Peter's now-canonical first appearance in the MCU



ready to fuck that drone's shit up:

and then Tony sweeps in and blows the drone away, says "good job, kid" and takes off, and if he wasn't already Peter Parker's idol, he sure as hell is now

that kid being Peter was word of god for years, then they finally got the rights to use Spider-Man so it eventually got confirmed as official

whoah really? i didn't know that

yeah

we never see anyone with him or see his face, so we don't really have much sense of how old he is here and we don't know if it was May who brought him or if his parents were still around at this point

and Natasha takes out eleventy billion dudes while Happy is still beating up his one. she is wonderful and i love her

so that was a pretty solid movie, actually, by MCU standards. i remember why it was disappointing as a sequel and unimpressive when there were just a handful of other entries to compare it to, but time and the expansion of the MCU have been kind to it

I never really understood the vitriol it gets. it's not a bad movie

it's not a GREAT movie but it's not bad at all

it's certainly better than some of the ones that follow it