Back on the thing

Feeling much better now than last week, though I won't tempt Fate by saying I'm back on the you-know-what again.  I could chalk it up to eccentric broodiness, but really I was just being lame.  It happens; we move on.  I was thinking about deleting the post, but I'm an information pack-rat.  My memory hole is boarded up and welded shut.

I finally wandered into the theatre last night and watched Iron Man 2, and it was awesome.  My jealousy of Tony Stark continues unabated.  I also liked how they stepped up Pepper Potts' skills too, or at least emphasized them more.  Something I noticed in the recent comics is that as Tony uses his crazy genius to create bleeding edge technology and secretly plan for every contingency, she somehow manages to keep up with him throughit all.  Even when he whips out one of those crazy contingency plans, she's usually the one who has to step up and implement it (or clean up after it).  Tony's got his downtime between global conspiracies and supervillains when he gets all angsty, but some of my favorite scenes have been those when Pepper stands up from a computer where she's been coordinating a team of super heroes fighting an army of zombies, takes off the headset through which she's been having a conference with the executive staff of a multinational corporation, and vaguely realizes that she hasn't slept more than a couple of hours a day in weeks.  Then she has to go find out why Tony is blowing things up outside.  Pepper doesn't have Tony's bottomless well of inspiration and creativity, and yet she does everything he does short of inventing crazy stuff.  Tony may have genius, but Pepper has skills.

My only complaint with the movie would be that it was pretty anti-climactic (after the massive robot battle, of course).  [spoiler warning] They spent even more time in this movie than the first one building up the whole thing with SHIELD and then at the end of it all, Fury gave Stark a "We're not hiring"?  What, did Robert Downy Jr. turn down a contract at the last minute?