Rewatching Iron Man (2007). I remember watching it for the first time at a friend’s place around 2010 or so. Opens with AC/DC

“I don’t want to see this on your MySpace page”, soldier fiddling with digital camera, extremely sharp. All of this first 3 minutes, super snappy editing
the montage of Tony’s life at the apogee awards is excellent exposition

the cut from “he’s always working” to him gambling is also excellent, giving the award to Caesar… seducing the journalist, introducing Jarvis, the house… Potts… 9 minutes!!
ahaha still hits
Tony successfully persuading a frustrated Rhodey to drink with him is also excellent

Before this was Tony/Pepper chemistry stuff

I’m struck on rewatch how dense and economical and yet light and breezy everything is, effortless mastery
17 minutes before we are introduced to, in my view, the most important character in the MCU: Yinsen

Tony refuses to build the Jericho missile and gets water tortured, I forgot about that. They take him on a tour through his stuff
Tony: either way I’ll be dead within a week

Yinsen: well then this is a very important week for you isn’t it
the construction of the minaturized arc reactor is treated with appropriate reverence
Iirc gulmira is where stark goes to rescue people later

Ramin Djawadi’s music is so excellent, truly on a GOAT trajectory
warlord monologuing about weapons technology and empire… threatens Yinsen, really sharpens Tony’s motivation/resolve… subsequent Mach 1 suit up scene really demonstrates how much Tony does need Yinsen and wouldn’t have made it without him
the Mach 1 reveal is pretty excellent, Tony is treated almost like the shark in a monster movie and the focus on the fear and helplessness of the goons is very smart
And this is the moment the MCU is born.
after Tony’s suit explodes he still has to walk thru the desert, which I’m pretty sure is a Lawrence of Arabia reference, which I imagine is on lots of serious filmmakers’ bucket list
obadiah’s handling of the press conference is very masterful

then we have pepper helping Tony with his arc replacement which is super intimate, and witnessing them navigate this is a treat
now it’s Mach 2 suit building time – meanwhile our villains are piecing together the Mach 1 suit. I feel like there’s a Yorick’s Skull aspect to “look at this mask”

I’m kinda tickled that Obie plays the piano, and the little thing with the pizza
the amount of effort Tony puts into learning how to fly, sorting out the suit, etc makes this scene really pay off
hoity toity party scenes are always fun, if I ever made a movie or a video game or whatever I would absolutely make sure to include one so you can see our badass heroes being nervous and shy about not quit fitting in. Pepper is endearing here
There are some looks that actors can do that can carry entire movies. RDJ’s intense angry wet-eye stare is one of them. And he’s decided to liberate Yinsen’s hometown from the warlords using his weapons
walkin away from explosions!
RDJ’s eyes again always used to maximal effect

One pilot shakes Tony off, which damages the other plane, and Tony gets to demonstrate his heroism by rescuing the pilot despite being threatened
problem with being a ruthless murdersome arse is all the other ruthless murdersome arses
pepper: I quit

Tony: I’m not crazy I just finally know what I have to do

Tony: and I know in my heart that it’s right

genius throwback… Tony really knows how to push people’s buttons (consider how he persuaded Rhodey to drink, journalist to go home with him, etc)
this scene where pepper is downloading the files and Obie shows up is so tense. We just saw that Obie has no issue murdering people so we worry for her. Music starts out subtly haunting and escalates in intensity
epic lil moment that reminds everyone what a bad mf Tony is
Obie’s villainy is really excellent I think because he has this mix of theatricality and competence. IM2 and IM3 villains don’t quite measure up. He might actually maybe be the best MCU villain apart from Thanos, I’m not sure
Tony being saved by his annoying robot was a lovely touch, and then Rhodes comes for him. The opposite of the murderous arsehole problem: good guys run into inconvenient difficulties but they win because they have friends
more suspense/horror tropes in the Iron Monger reveal, subtly well done thing that isn’t obvious
Obie: I’ve lifted you up for 30 years! I built this company up from nothing!

this the kind of shit you can work through in therapy ya know Obie
Ok the one sorta slightly weak bit of writing was I think how they got rid of Obie in the end (arc reactor explosion). idk, off the top of my head how I would do it differently, but I would try to weave more of the narrative into it. But it’s fine, still excellent overall
yea great movie still holds up even without the MCU

opens with AC/DC and ends with Black Sabbath, so good
yea this is where the potential strengthening is, if you wants to make Iron Man 1 even better. Obie has to lose specifically because he was wrong about this
“It’s not mine because I came up with it. It’s mine because I understand it.”
iron man 2 interestingly opens right away by demonstrating that Vanko is a real engineer/technologist like Tony is. We see his father die, we get a sense of the obsession from the posters on the walls… and he does independently invent the arc tractor
*reactor

Tony meanwhile is enjoying his success/victory, and demonstrates his showman chops. we have the budget for dancers now
How come nobody talks about how Tony Stark invented Theranos in Iron Man 2? Also Elon is in it yea and also Larry Ellison for some reason
the Elon cameo is actually very well done, aged well

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More from @visakanv

Feb 10
I gotta do a thread of things that are marketed/ wrongly, which is almost all things
1. math is the study of relationships between things. you can use known quantities to figure out unknown quantities. so math is about learning to know the unknown. it’s literal sorcery, to the uninitiated
2. honesty – genuine, spirited honesty– is a source of tremendous power. people will tell kids that honesty is good but they ironically won’t admit that they don’t really know why, apart from some vague handwavey “well lying is bad and bad things happen”aka “we live in a society”
Read 10 tweets
Feb 10
there’s this powerful anecdote about how a firefighter once saved his crew when they stepped into a burning house, and something felt off to him, and he said “we need to get out NOW!”, and the whole house collapsed… turned out the fire was way bigger in the basement
usually this story is told in the context of, the power of intuition. the man sensed that the fire was “off”. later he figured out that it’s because it was abnormally hot, abnormally quiet given the heat, and the fire just wasn’t responding to the water as it normally would
but today I’m thinking about it from the fire’s perspective

from the outside, all burning houses kinda look the same, at least to casual observers

but on the inside, a basement fire is much more powerful, much more dangerous
Read 5 tweets
Feb 10
Here’s a hint, $100,000 marketing advice if you can unpack it

Nike’s snappy tagline isn’t “sports shoes for performance athletes”
Billion dollars if you’re a really bad mf
Trillion if u truly gangster visakanv.com/marketing/valu…
Read 7 tweets
Feb 10
not everyone has experienced a scene growing in prominence/significance so I think it might be worth taking a moment to talk out loud about it so that people can consider it and think about what they want
it’s very difficult if not impossible to have some kind of scene in a public space that does some kind of interesting/important work without getting the attention of the wider world around it. reflect on this, really consider about it, because it will inform your choices
maximising both interestingness and privacy is very difficult to do. interestingness tends to require interfacing with as much of reality as possible. there *are* certainly pockets of deep interestingness that are cloistered-hidden, but by definition, you won’t find them randomly
Read 8 tweets
Feb 9
Ok I’m getting tattooed in a few minutes. I have a request: I’m choosing to get all dramatic about this experience and treat it as a kind of shamanic initiation ceremony. Leave me a message that you would want me to carry past the threshold? What should I remember
stencilled
I have earned the respect of every tattoo artist in this studio and multiple dudes with full sleeves etc. officially a bad mf ❤️‍🔥. always been etc etc
Read 5 tweets
Feb 9
Tchalla: yield man! Don’t make me kill you

Mbaku: I would rather die!

Tchalla: you have fought with honor! Now yield! Your people need you!

^ this seemingly throwaway sentence is tchalla’s real first kingly act
consider how tempting/easy it would have been to kill a rival who had just stabbed you in the chest

but it would have left the Jabari leaderless, humiliated, resentful, and the next leader would likely have been vengeful
a king is a conduit for the honor of his people

a tyrant or weakling tries to hoard it personally, continually demands more adoration, dries it up with his neediness and impulsivity

a good king honors others in turn, artfully, and in so doing, keeps the “honor economy” flowing
Read 6 tweets

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