Iron Man 2

We get off to a real bad start here with Tony Stark doing his Steve Jobs impersonation at “Starkland” or some such shit, jetting in with his ego pinned to his sleeve to the roars of the adoring crowd. Exactly like an Apple new-product rollout, except of course that the screaming fans here are pretty instead of pimply, and that Tony’s narcissism is not equal to Steve’s. (Whose possibly could equal it?) We go rapidly downhill from there. Once more it is proved that if you edit fast and blow lots of stuff up, that’s all you really need to make the fanboys happy. And once more I am overwhelmed by how much sheer technical wizardry is expended to produce $200,000,000 worth of crap. About the only thing I enjoyed here was Scarlett Johansson kicking ass near the end of the movie. At least it was human-on-human combat, and I could see what people were doing. What a pass we have come to when I long for a little bit of old-timey Jackie Chan kung foolishness. Oh, yeah, and it was fun to see the grounds of the old New York World’s Fair. So I am reduced to praising the locations. Is that pathetic, or what?