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What the hell, I just posted it again. Very pleased with myself at succesful download from my own memory–numbering helps. Now let’s see it the original post reappears or if this vanishes again. Please re-post your comments on Iron Man.

1. We love Robert Downey Jr, that’s a given. It’s a love that endures drug addiction, bad movies, prison, rehab, prison, and rehab again. It makes perfect sense that an actor we first noticed in Weird Science should appear in his first blockbuster Iron Man as a geek arms dealer who makes himself a suit of super armor.

2. On the most drugged-out day of his life, Robert Downey Jr is still a better actor than 95% of what’s out there. If anyone can navigate the absurdities of playing a comic book hero, it’s Downey. The storyline of Iron Man even follows his career arc: early success, early excess, incarceration and torment, escape, constant temptation (In one scene he’s surrounded by powder–desert sand, but still powder), then redemption (Because in Hollywood, big box-office is the only kind of redemption). Still, it says something about Hollywood that two of the finest actors of their respective generations, Robert Downey Jr and Jeff Bridges (among his brilliant performances: The Dude) have to put on full metal armor with their faces covered in order to score a major hit.

3. Wasn’t Gwyneth Paltrow once an Oscar-winning actress? Why is she playing a damsel in distress? A loyal and efficient damsel, but still in need of rescue. To the filmmakers’ credit, she doesn’t suddenly turn out to be a kung fu master.

4. I enjoyed Iron Man! There’s something to be said for low expectations. Watch the movie until the very end, after all the credits, even if the theatre staff are sweeping the floor under your feet. Something happens.

5. Poor Ewan MacGregor, reduced to drivel like Deception. I haven’t seen it, but from the trailer it looks like drivel. James MacAvoy now has his career. Is Jimmy more ambitious? Does he have a better agent? Is he simply luckier? Or has Ewan’s constant full frontal nudity actually hurt his chances? Is that even possible?

6. I can’t wait to see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay! These days even stoner comedies have to involve torture and “the war on terror” as Hollywood expiates for (and cashes in on) its “liberal” guilt. It goes without saying that all superhero movies will involve same, and for maximum political correctness, all the villains will turn out to be American.

From The New Republic: Stop Trying To Kill Robert Downey Jr!