Day 1: Iron Man 3 (2013)

Iron Man 3
Director: Shane Black
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Ben Kingsley

Comic books have always been important to me.  I grew up collecting them before I ever really knew how to read.  To this day, they are a major passion of mine.  Aside from watching movies, reading comics is my favorite hobby.  When I was a kid, I always watched Batman and Spider-Man cartoons.  It was exciting to see my printed heroes break through the pages and make their way into actual moving pictures on my TV.  There were very few comic book movies that were worth watching, so animation was my destination for non-comic superhero media. This changed the summer after my 8th grade year when Bryan Singer's X-Men was released.  It was amazing to see superheroes taken seriously on the big screen.  Since then, the past 13 years have been jam packed with comic book movies that outdid anything attempted in superhero films before.  This all sort of built toward last summer's Avengers movie, arguably the grandest expression of comic book fandom ever shown at the cinema.

Iron Man 3 marks the first post-Avengers Marvel movie, part of their "phase three" building to an inevitable Avengers 2.  This movie, though, manages to transcend its connection with the wider Marvel universe to tell a solid story about Tony Stark the man rather than Iron Man the superhero.  It is better than the messy, over-packed Iron Man 2 (which was redeemed by Sam Rockwell) and is probably better than even the first Iron Man (which failed to present a compelling antagonist).

Iron Man 3 gets so much right.  It focuses on telling a human story while still delivering great action.  Robert Downey Jr. is so charismatic as Tony Stark that I think I'd watch a whole movie just about him running Stark Industries and hanging out around the house.  I feel like this movie really took advantage of its own continuity.  By having all the necessary back story already taken care of, this film was able to just jump into the action immediately.  This is the benefit of Marvel building its universe.  It will trust its fans to pay attention enough that each new generation of films will delve deeper and deeper into the Marvel mythos and tell more interesting non-origin stories.

Anyway, this is getting ramble-y (can you tell that I'm out of practice with movie criticism?)  Overall, this was an excellent action movie that kicked off what looks to be a pretty great summer movie season (which I much prefer to awards-y season later in the year).

Lesson learned: Fighting aliens can really mess a guy up mentally.

PS- I'm doing some backlogged posts for movies I've watched in the last week or so.  I get out of school next week so regular real time posting won't start really until then.