The quick rundown is I liked it. Wasn’t horrible wasn’t the greatest super hero movie ever but worth my 7 bucks or whatever movies are now. I think there are maybe 2 types of people who won’t like this flick, people who are super hardcore Iron Man fans and people who are super movie aficionados.

Spoilers Below

They do kind of have a lot of stuff going on in this movie but I only actually think one thing was  unnecessary. The part where he’s being poisoned by the arc reactor seemed like a way just to pull in random elements and it was resolved in such a quick manner it seems to almost downplay how severe that condition actually was.

Stories they played:

• Arc reactor poisoning
• Russian guy hatred
• Hammer hatred
• CEO change
• Father hates me
• Building War Machine
• Scarlett Johansson spy
• US wants Iron Man
• S.H.I.E.L.D. recruitement

A lot of those things are linked together but I guess the overall feeling after watching it is that the pacing is so fast and the story is only weakly held together that it feels like you’re just running from scene to scene. The bit with recruiting for S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers is so weird since Iron Man is a part of that team and it doesn’t seem like he’s reluctant to join in the continuities I’ve read/watched. The post credits part wasn’t as big as a reveal or teaser as much as I would have liked though.

Ok anyway, that’s the bad stuff. It had great action scenes. The racetrack at Monaco was incredible. Rhode vs Stark was cool, Black Widow infiltrating Hammer Industries was totally great and the final action sequence was also very cool. The final battle was short but at the same time an event happens where you think “He should have done that first” and then the final battle pops up and it resolves rapidly so you think “Oh well ok I was hoping for more action but then again I just said he should have done this thing first to end it fast so I guess I see what happens when I get what I ask for.”

I hear Iron Man 3 might have Mandarin in it which might be really wild since he’s basically a crazy Chinese guy with 10 rings from an alien race that grant him totally incredible powers practically through magic. So I’m not so sure how they’ll make it more believable for live action. Hopefully IM3 is a much more focused story keeping all the action from IM2.

Finally got around to seeing it and really enjoyed it. Possibly spoilery review past the break.

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I don’t know where I even saw the advertisement for Desert Punk, and no one I know had seen it. But somehow, since I’m on a run for short series, I watched it because it was only 24 episodes.

The basic premise is that the guy is a mercenary in the desert far far into the future after nuclear war has destroyed the Earth. He’s this shrimpy guy but also somehow totally awesome. So the show follows his exploits as he does various jobs.

The show starts out pretty great and is very entertaining for a while, then at the point I hit the ending it all goes downhill. The show goes through what I now call “being Kenshin’ed” as apparently the show diverts from the manga and ends in a way that doesn’t make sense what-so-ever. Characters change radically in 6 episodes and the ending is just so horrible that I would only ever recommend the first 18 episodes and maybe try to read the manga, though I have yet to do that yet to see if the manga ending is any better.

Perhaps calling it Kenshin’ed is too harsh since the filler to Kenshin was just boring and not a horrible rewrite of all that I loved about the show.

Anyway, the show’s first 18 episodes are good, the last 6 are terrible. If you’re really bored you could watch it but without a true ending the show isn’t as memorable as the last few series I’ve been watching (Gurren Lagann and Last Exile).

Well I was supposed to be using Last.fm at work and Pandora at home, but I’ve since just stuck with Pandora. The simplified interface makes it much easier to customize stations whereas in last.fm it’s a bit more complex than it seems like it has to be, certainly when compared to Pandora. Maybe I’ll give last.fm another shot, but Pandora’s simplicity seems like it’s too hard to beat.

I think the RSS feed cheats and gives the full story anyway.  Spoilers below though and if you’re reading on a feed just skip past.

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Rock Band adds some bands you never heard of and you end up loving them. Last time with the Lochley pack it totally ruled. This week they’re adding in a band I’ve never heard of but the first song sounds great! Can’t wait!

Street Fighter 4 fever is making full swing it’s last week before it hits shelves. This trailer has me at the edge of my seat. Kind of wondering what the opening theme will be for the American version though. I do like the catchy Japanese one.

I was very resistant to watching this series because of the lack of Kevin Conroy voicing Batman but I finally relented.  To me, that is the absolute voice of Batman.  It’s like recasting a part that an actor had for 30 years for no reason.  Anyway, the premise is simply Batman + obscure DC hero fight obscure DC villain.  By comparison, Batman The Animated series focused on Batman and more of his detective like abilities.  This show highlights sort of the antics of Batman as a crime fighter fighting zany villains.  By just that description, you could say it’s worse and maybe geared for a younger audience, however the series isn’t so bad.  Maybe after watching so much Smallville and not seeing epic superhero fights, this is the balance.  I’d say it’s worth watching, but not taking seriously. Though I do wish there were more Green Lantern.

I grabbed the new Xbox Live Experience (XBLE) this Wednesday fairly late.  I wanted to avoid the potential problems that may crop up with billions of Xboxes try downloading at once or if there were any major bugs to avoid it until they were fixed.  Fortunately, it looks like Microsoft did a great job with distribution and the only bug I know of is some units won’t play sound when hooked up through HDMI which doesn’t concern my unit at home.  I take an HDMI cable to travel with my Xbox though so I’m not sure if it affects me when I’m at my parent’s house or at a friend’s playing Rock Band.

I have to say, I enjoyed the blades a bit more, there’s two menu options that feel completely useless and can clutter up the new menu system.  You can get rid of one, but you still have to deal with the other which is basically just XBL online video stuff.  I was greeted with the avatar creation system and made a fairly close looking guy to myself.  It felt very mii-ish but had a bit more customization.  No chance to see what the point of the avatar is yet since I don’t own any games that use them, but maybe they’ll be cool.

I installed Rock Band 2 to the hard drive.  It takes a bit.  I loaded it up and didn’t notice any phenomenal loading time difference.  I won’t say I didn’t notice any difference, it did seem a bit faster, but it won’t make the songs load up in 2 seconds or anything.  I did notice that the Xbox itself is very quiet, which is a huge plus when it used to be an annoying background noise.

Now based on this great Lifehacker article I installed TVersity onto my desktop and was able to stream all my video files except for .mkv extensions without any trouble.  I’m sure there’s a way to get those to stream but I haven’t messed with it yet, either way, I’m loving the new streaming options.  I even got some classic Star Trek up on the TV.

There’s one glaring issue with the Xbox and it’s unrelated to any new change and probably won’t affect people with new widescreen TVs.  But I have an old 4:3 HDTV.  So the Xbox setting for high def pushes it to 1080i mode which is fine, but when displaying content in 4:3 it should revert to 480p automatically like my DVD player does.  Now when watching 4:3 content, I get in in this centered little window on my TV and it’s annoying to manually switch.

Overall, the changes are kinda minimal for such a long wait for this update.  The best feature is installing to HD, but some games are hit and miss.  Halo 3 doesn’t like being installed for instance by design.  I’m dying to know how good the Netflix thing is because I kind of want to dumb regular cable for Netflix since I don’t end up watching a lot of TV anymore.  There are some things that I might really have a hard time not occasionally watching (Adult Swim/Globe Trekker/Food Network) so it’s a hard decision.

Brightening up your post-mid-week boredom I present a catchy tune:

The Cab – Bounce
Metallica – The Unforgiven III
Metallica – The Day That Never Comes
Mute Math – Typical
Coheed & Cambria – No World For Tomorrow
Coheed & Cambria – Gravemakers & Gunslingers
Coheed & Cambria – Once Upon Your Dead Body
Fall Out Boy – The Take Over The Breaks Over
Yellowcard – Lights And Sounds
Fall Out Boy – Fame Infamy
Tonic – Jump Jimmy
Sixto Sounds, Zircon – Lunatic Moon
Bang Camaro – Night Lies
Orange Range – Thank You
TiA – Ryuusei
Gorillaz – 19-2000