On weird foods and Tony Stark having feelings

Hemingway and I went to the movies today, after a lazy morning of noodle breakfast and shopping at Asian food stores. I love Asian food stores, these places are magical.

I mean, how can you NOT want to try something called Bang Bang chicken?

So many things I didn't even know were edible. It's pretty cool to be able to go into a place and be able to ask for things like jellyfish head, barbeque pig ears, chicken feet or duck necks. The smells remind me so much of China Town in Toronto. We used to go there every now and again when I was a kid, and I always remember the smells in particular. There were street markets with live seafood and just so much things that were pretty damn awesome for a five-year-old to wander around staring at. I would always have wonton soup (which Hemingway and I made the other day), which I'd nicknamed 'brain soup', being a creepy little bastard, and before we went home mom would always get me koala cookies, because a trip to China Town wasn't a trip to China Town without koala cookies.

Happiness in animal shape.

Later we went to check out Iron Man 3 (Iron Man being by far my favorite Avenger, I love fictional assholes as much as I hate their real life counterparts), which impressed me with being way better than Iron Man 2. I was pretty entertained by their version of The Mandarin, partly because Ben Kingsley is an amazing actor, but also because it was such a smart move to pull with a character that's so insanely over the top in the comics.

Because just look at him!

Something else that really impressed me was that Tony Stark was allowed to have emotions. Now hear me out, all of these characters have emotions in a certain range, but it's seldom that a character as macho and cool as Iron Man feels any kind of emotional repercussions of his acts. There's just no backlash for killing bad guys or saving the world from gods and aliens - it's all in a day's work. This movie started out by showing Tony Stark in full-blown insomnia mode since the ending battle of The Avengers, and later showed him having panic attacks as a result of what could probably easiest be labeled PTSD. This is huge. As someone who's had my fair share of panic attacks (and in light of yesterday's heightened stress levels regarding going out with O and Sand), I was so happy to see such a strong character as Iron Man freaking out the way he did - people ask him too much about the wormhole from the end battle in The Avengers and he broke down, ran away and was sure he was having a heart attack.

I was pleased to see them show panic attacks not as some mysterious psychological disorder, but as just what it is - a momentary overload from handling way too much stress for way too long. Sure, they passed quickly enough, but obviously they'd have to shorten the duration for the sake of pacing, but just to have such a prolific male lead character show such emotional vulnerability and still be a kick-ass hero is a cool and rather unexpected Hollywood twist. I hope this can open the path to more male characters having roles with more emotional range and depth. I like to see Tony Stark in inner emotional turmoil at having met and fought with and against aliens, gods and mutants, and how that affects him as being just a regular (albeit super smart and super rich) human, and his dilemmas about what he actually can do within the range of his own powers.

"Hey Jarvis, think I could get a hug?"

Apart from that, they fast-tracked some things a bit too much. Now that I think back, some things just plain didn't make much sense or had a feeling of being rushed, and the female characters were as always kinda bland, but the action was good and it was a really good-looking movie, so all in all I'd totally recommend it if you're looking for some cool action where there's not a lot of thought process involved. Robert Downey Jr is awesome as always, I'm beginning to think he was born to play Tony Stark. Then again, arrogant but loveable assholes seem to be Robert Downey Jr's thing, so I probably shouldn't be surprised. Well worth checking out anyway.

Because fuck yeah.