Iron Man 3 in the New Yorker...
A review with a lot of ten-dollar words: “IRON MAN 3”: A SHELL OF HIMSELF by Richard Brody.
It took me a while to decipher this sentence: "The political import of the movie follows surprisingly on that of “The Avengers.” In both, the menace underlying the plot is the hijacking of American weaponry by the country’s enemies." What weaponry, I thought? The battle over weaponry was with Obadiah Stane in Iron Man 1. Or did he mean the nuclear bomb? It made no sense till I realized he was referring to the Tesseract - a bit of Asgardian weaponry that was in no way American, but it was in the hands of the Amercians - since S.H.I.E.L.D. now seems to belong to the U.S. government.
I liked his comment: "...As the country’s increasing population of disabled and mutilated war veterans becomes more prominent, Stark, with his panic attacks, takes his place among them. The war on terror has become a perpetual state of terror, and its weaponry (including the continuous struggle to maintain, upgrade, and devise it) has become an unbearable burden."
And the sentence: "There are critics who see in “Iron Man 3” a poster child for the studios’ failure to make movies for adults..." I checked the ink and the reveiwer cited, Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, seems to have simply missed the point of the movie - all the points of the movie - which had nothing to do with the any bombs in Boston. I confess that I did watch the whole movie without once thinking of Boston. What, all terrorism relates to Boston now?
Anyway: it looked like a movie for adults to me, by any yardstick except that of people who think superheroes are an intrinsically juvenile idea. Which makes no sense to me at all.