Iron Man 3 plot points

Iron Man 3 is a well-crafted, exciting, and funny movie but there are some plot points that are not as obvious as they could be. Most of what follows is spoilers.

Tony didn't escape The Avengers unscathed. He is suffering from post-traumatic stress. Seeing Worm holes, aliens, and gods is more than he bargained for.

A plot thread through Iron Man 2 & 3 and the Avengers is the government's reluctance to depending on Iron Man and the Avengers. The Iron Patriot is an example of this - a super hero who reports to the President.

The theme of the movie is "empty suits". This shows up in multiple ways.

Suit #42 gets most of its air time while empty. There is the scene with Pepper where Tony is remotely operating it. This leads to the Barrel of Monkeys skydiving scene in which the armor is also operated remotely. During the entire middle of the movie, the suit is empty and recharging.

Multiple people wear armor. Tony has suit 42 assemble itself around Pepper and Aldritch Killian. Iron Patriot was worn by Rhody, Savin (impersonating Rhody) and the President.

Stark wore multiple suits but never for long. I will bet that he spent less than 5 minutes continuous airtime in any single suit of armor.

The Mandarin was essentially and empty suit. Killian realized that the explosions caused by failures of the the Extremis virus. Killian invented the idea of a terrorist to distract people from the real cause of the explosions. The Mandarin would then give some historic trivia that seemed to justify the bombing. The Mandarin's speeches sound similar enough to Ward Churchill's Chickens Coming to Roost talk and similar speeches from the far left to sound plausible.

Superman at 75

I admit, I lost interest in Superman years ago, possibly decades, but he is the first superhero I can remember.

My first exposure to Superman was probably through the George Reeves TV show. He was also the first comic book super hero I can remember.

That was back i the early days of the Silver Age when Superman was a genre all by himself. He starred in two comics of his own (Superman and Action). He shared World's Finest with Batman. He was a supporting character in Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen. As Superboy, he had his own book and was a backup for the Legion of Superheros. He was also a member of the Legion and the Justice League of America.

The Superman family was huge. It included Superman/Superboy, Superman's co-workers, his adopted parents (who died before he came to Metropolis), his birth parents (who were featured a number of times), his girl friend and best friend from his Superboy years, his cousin Supergirl and her family, his dog, a monkey from Krypton, Supergirl's cat and horse (who was really a centaur), a mermaid he'd dated in college, the bottled city of Kandor, the prisoners of the Phantom Zone, and Lex Luthor.

The list of Superman's powers was lengthy. Besides the obvious super strength, flight, and invulnerability, he could see through anything (except lead). He also had telescopic vision, microscopic vision, and night vision. Using super hearing and super ventriloquist, he could talk with anyone anywhere on Earth. His super breath could freeze things or simply blow them over. He could move faster than the speed of light. If he flew that fast while spinning clockwise he went into the future. Spinning counter-clockwise took him into the past.

With all of those powers, there was little to challenge him so the writers often resorted to imaginary stories or dreams. Other times he traveled to worlds with a red sun where he lost his powers or was temporarily altered with Red Kryptonite.

All of this went out of style by the late 1960s and efforts were made to make Superman relevant. He was given longer hair. Kryptonite was destroyed. Imaginary stories were no longer written. Lois Lane was given a makeover and made a few appearances in a bikini. Superman went from writer to newscaster. He also began facing opponents who could physically challenge him. At the same time a plot formula was introduced and rigidly adhered to. The result was mind-numbingly boring.

In the early 1980s the DC universe was rebooted and Superman's history was rewritten. Almost all of the Superman family was erased. Superman himself was de-powered. He couldn't even fly through space without an oxygen supply.

In the 1990s he was killed and resurrected and finally got married.

In the 2000s, his history was rewritten again and the marriage never happened.

In the 1970s, Superman made his premier in a big-budget movie. The franchise lasted through four movies but got sillier as time went on. The character was rebooted in the 2000s in a movie that made money but left audiences unsatisfied. All of the summer excitement that year went to Pirates of the Caribbean 2 which came out a week after Superman Returns and buried it.

A new reboot is about to come out. It promises to be darker than the previous ones. We will see.

Still, it's impressive that the character is still popular at 75.

Superman's S

I always thought it was obvious - Superman wore a big stylized S on his chest to stand for Superman. In the early versions it was much more obvious that it was an S.

In the original Superman movie, his insignia got transformed. It became his family's crest - which just happened to look like his first initial.

In the new movie it has a new meaning - in stands for "hope" on Krypton.

Who hoo, isn't that special?

Oz the Great and Powerful - spoilers and subtle plot points

Oz the Great and Powerful (OtGaP) is a fun movie. It is officially based on the books, not on the 1939 Wizard of Oz (WoO). Still, they managed to sneak in several images from WoO. There are some other clever plot points that should be pointed out.

Spoilers and trivia below.

In WoO, the "horse of a different color" changes colors. In OtGaP we see a pasture full of rainbow-colored horses.

At one point Oz is attacked by a lion which he scares away with a smoke pellet. Obviously, it was a cowardly lion.

Oz creates an army of scarecrows to fight the flying baboons. None of these talk, though.

When Glinda takes Oz to a protected city, you can see the Yellow Brick road end in a spiral. This is where Dorothy started. In QtGaP, this area is only inhabited by Munchkins but there are other groups in it as well in OtGaP.

While performing in Kansas, Oz is asked to make a girl in a wheelchair walk again. In the China Village, he is able to do this by gluing China Girl's legs back together. Joey King was the voice for both girls.

In Kansas, Oz says that he wants to be a cross between Houdini and Thomas Edison. To defeat the witches, he combines techniques from both, fulfilling his ambition.

In Kansas, Oz tells Annie that he doesn't want to be a good man, he wants to be a great one. Later Glinda (played by the same actress) tells him that he isn't a great man, he is a very good man.

The movie explains why, unlike anyone else in Oz, Theodora has green skin and how Oz went from someone who arrived in a balloon to the giant projected image.

While he is in Kansas, we see Oz project an image. He also uses his quick-drying glue.

OtGaP shares some plot elements with director Sam Rami's earleir Army of Darkness. In both of them, a man is torn from his own world and uses knowledge from some books he is carrying to defeat a supernatural army. Both movies have a pretty character suddenly possessed and become an ugly, evil witch.

All three witches carry a magical item which is the basis of her powers. Glinda carries a wand and can project light and fog. Theodora wears a large ruby ring which lets her hurl fireballs. Evanora wears an emerald necklace which lets her throw green lightening. Since this is destroyed, she must have replaced it with the ruby slippers by the WoO.

Fighting Robots

What happens if a couple of guys get together with some RC (Remote Control) model cars? Chances are, they will run them into each other and see who wins. Now, suppose they started armoring those cars?

That was the idea of Battlebots which had five seasons on TV between 2000 and 2003. The robots were divided into different weight classes and tried to disable each other. There were a few imitator seasons which were never as good.

Enter the Robot Combat League currently showing on Syfy. Instead of small robots on wheels operated by geeks with joysticks, these are giant humanoid robots. Each robot has a pair of operators. One maneuvers the robot and the other controls the arms with controllers that match the operator's movements. It was probably inspired by the movie Real Steel.

It sounds awesome but it isn't. There are showers of sparks which have to be rigged since the robots seem to be operated by hydraulics. Their movements are not fluid. They shuffle around, held upright by a long T-bar behind them. The arms are the main thing that moves. Except for the sparks and the trash-talking, the show is nothing but pairs of Rockem Sockem Robots ducking it out.

Reality and Historic Movies

Movies based on real events are often nominated for Oscars. These are always fictionalized accounts of actual events. People know this but they still expect the movies to be accurate. This has become an issue, this year.

Three nominees are based on real events and all have their own controversies. Zero Dark Thirty shows torture producing results which critics say was not the case.

The big controversy in Lincoln is with the Congressional vote on the 13th amendment which abolished slavery. Connecticut is shown with a split vote (with the names of the people voting against changed to protect their families). Actually, the state's delegation was solidly in favor of the amendment. The vote was changed in order to introduce drama. This is not an important change although people from Connecticut are miffed. Since the movie boasted about its accuracy down to using one of Lincoln's favorite jokes and the sound of his watch ticking, there is an expectation that things were kept as accurate as possible.

The biggest offender was Argo. By the end of the movie the Iranians realized that American Embassy staff members were loose and sent a scary-looking squad to capture them. The pursuit includes police cars chasing a jetliner down a runway. There is also a hold placed on the operation by the President which almost leaves the embassy staff members trapped. All of this was added in order to add suspense to the end of the movie.

I say that it is the biggest offender because the other changes are invisible. You have to have detail knowledge of the actual events to know that anything was changed. In Argo I kept thinking, "This couldn't have happened." When the changes are so over-the-top that the audience starts questioning them then they have gone too far.

Who can create?

Recently the head of the School Board of the State of Ohio got into trouble after she used her private Twitter account to compare the current initiative at banning certain weapons to Nazi Germany disarming its citizens. This caused an uproar that lasted weeks. People insisted that she as comparing President Obama to Adolph Hitler and demanded her resignation. They felt that private anti-Obama views disqualified her from holding her job.

Think about that for a moment before I move on.

That brings me to DC Comics and Orson Scott Card. DC is coming out with a new series of comics about Superman designed to tie in with the upcoming movie and Card is the writer. This has become controversial because Card is a leader in the crusade against gay rights in general and gay marriage in particular.

I am not going to defend Card's views. His views on gays seem 50 years or more out of date. The big question is if these views disqualify him for his job. The activist group All Out thinks so and has started a petition drive to have him fired.

As far as I know, none of Card's views are included in the stories. The controversy is not over the work he is doing for DC, it is over the right of someone to hold views that some group finds offensive.

DC has taken what I consider to be the proper view:

As content creators we steadfastly support freedom of expression. However, the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that — personal views — and not those of the company itself.

This is important because as polarized as current society is, virtually everyone holds views that others find unacceptable. A writer that All Out approves of would be unacceptable to the organization that Card is on the board of. As long as writers refrain from preaching, I don't really care about their personal views.

At the same time, I don't like it a bit when they do preach. I think that does a disservice to the reader.

Even there, I will make exceptions when it is obvious going in that a certain point of view is going to be pushed. A few years ago Marvel re-imagined the Rawhide Kid as a gay cowboy. It was all tongue in cheek with lots of innuendo and in-jokes. Anyone who looked at the cover knew what the content was going to be and had no excuse for objecting. The same goes for DC's new Occupy-inspired comics.

On the other end of the spectrum, around three years ago an issue of Captain America implied that the Tea Party is unfriendly to minorities. That was uncalled for.

My point is that readers have to allow creators to have a variety of opinions and creators need to give the same respect to their readers.