A Pillar of Iron

(With apologies to Taylor Caldwell for the title.  We read that book in Latin class in high school.)

My best friend asked if I wanted to go see Iron Man 3 on Friday afternoon.  I wasn't sure, as I was not expecting a lot more than a bunch of explosions from it, but agreed.

To be honest, I'm not sure what I want to say about it.  It was definitely better than I was worried about it being.  They came up with some clever ways to make life difficult for Mr Stark.  And the way the terrorism angle was put in made a lot of sense (and was well executed).  The twist related to Ben Kingsley's character was fantastic.

I also liked the ways they used the... remote control, for lack of a better term... suit of armor.

I also liked that the 3D was much better done than in Avengers.  Nothing really jumped out at me as not fitting in (there were much fewer totally-CGI pieces, which certainly helped.  The ones that were there were mostly only shown in low light, which doubtless also helped).

About the only thing I didn't like were all the explosions to which people were subjected, without injury, although I suppose that's becoming de rigeur for action movies these days, so I should probably ignore it.  Well, there's also the issue of heating the armor up to the point of it glowing in the visible spectrum without hurting the person inside or destroying the armor.  Not a big deal, but it does seem a bit unlikely.

I thought they also did a good job with Tony and Pepper's relationship.

My friend wasn't thrilled with what they did with Mandarin, but it didn't bug me (to be clear, though, I never read any comics where he appeared.  I knew what he looked like, but had no idea of his powers or tendencies).

So I definitely liked the movie overall.  A different friend asked me earlier today, though, how I liked it compared to the first two, and I wasn't sure of the answer to that.  Mostly, I think, because there was so much time between viewings (I've seen each one as it came out, and not since), but also because very little has really jumped out at me as being either really great or really bad.  Not sure what to make of that.

I still think Robert Downey Jr was an excellent casting choice, and the rest of the cast has been good as well.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what to say.  I enjoyed it, and wouldn't mind seeing it again (maybe with the first two, as better points of comparison).

Oh yeah, and I was greatly amused by the small tie-in with Downton Abbey.  I've recently watched the first three seasons of that, and greatly enjoyed it.  I still need to write up my thoughts on it, but I think that's a fabulous show.

Plumbing more depths

Now that we've talked about a frightfully shallow movie and a fantasy novel investigating the depths of the planet, let's talk about some different depths.

As I mentioned earlier, I changed FiOS plans recently, and one of the added channels is ESPN 3D. I was curious to see how that would look, but it generally doesn't have a lot of current material.

But I was thrilled to hear that the NBA Finals would be showing there, as that's certainly current material. As I think I alluded earlier, I'm not a bit NBA fan. These days, I don't watch complete games, and rarely even watch more than a couple of minutes of games. This season, I watched some of the season-opening Heat/Celtics game, and I think that was it for the regular season. I watched pieces of a few playoff games (oddly, the Heat dominated the chunks of the games I watched with them, even if they didn't really dominate that series, or even that game, outside of the piece I saw).

But, to see it in 3D? Now, that I was curious about. I still haven't watched a full game, but I saw pretty good pieces of the second and third games.

What do I think about the channel? It's kind of interesting, in a way, but because they don't have a whole lot of audience (it's more a proof-of-concept thing, I think, than something looking to generate immediate revenue) there isn't a whole lot of advertising. So the announcers need to be better, because they have more time to fill. But since they aren't the big-audience announcers, they aren't better. But since I mostly ignore them, I guess it isn't too bad.

But what I find interesting is that you can see a lot more of the arena during timeouts and such than normally. It's games that haven't been ruined by commercials (well, mostly). At least, it seems that way.

Another piece that's interesting is that there are only a few commercials. Somewhat ironically, one of them is for Sony 3D TVs where they're selling 3D. Hello, you're sending this commercial to people who already have a 3D TV, so you don't need to sell them on the concept.

Getting to the game itself, it's a bit weird. The perspective seems off, in a way, but I haven't really been able to quantify how. The players seem smaller, somehow, and the scale just seems ... off, I guess. But the depth of the whole thing is still pretty cool. I think it'll do very well if they can figure out the perspective issue (they should especially look at cameras close to the crowd; things really look wonky if someone in the crowd sticks their arm up into the frame).

I'm definitely curious to see how things look when there's a bit more material. And is there any chance of an NHL 3D channel? I'd like to see it.

Depth of Field

When I got my new TV, I mentioned that I hadn't yet found the console buttons, and wasn't able to test the 3D features.

Well, the buttons are there, they're just capacitance switches that are only visible in bright light or when the button backlights are on. It does make them very subtle, which is, I suppose, a good thing.

And the blu-ray player finally did arrive a couple of days ago. Fortunately, we already had the cables to hook it up, so I took care of that immediately.

How does it look? Well, in a word, fantastic. I got the new Sound of Music box set for Christmas, and popped it in when some relatives were over. Once again, my daughter was absolutely rapt for the puppet sequence. But it was absolutely amazing how good it looked.

It used to be possible to tell, within five to ten years, how old a movie was by seeing it on TV and looking at the transfer quality. Well, Sound of Music looked so clear, it could have been made yesterday. (Oddly, Wizard of Oz came on TV, and I compared that to my (previously unwatched) blu-ray. The odd part was that the version on TV looked way, way better. I still don't have any idea why. Like SoM, the version from TV looked like it could have been made yesterday.)

After looking at that, I finally wanted to look at the 3D performance. The only 3D movies I have are the Shrek titles that came with it, so I popped in the first one. How did it look? In a word, fabulous.

It actually looked better than Avatar did in the theater, although I have to wonder if that was because of the 3D technology (active glasses vs circular polarization), or because of differences between computer animation and "real" life. I guess I'll find out once I can actually buy Avatar in 3D; hopefully, that'll be soon. As much as I enjoyed the movie, it ain't worth what it would cost me to get today. I'll get some other ones soon, as well (likely Alice in Wonderland, if nothing else).

One unrelated note about the blu-ray player. Turning that on will turn on the TV at the same time. While this is generally good, it'll also switch the source over to the player, which might not be, if I'm watching something on TV. It'll also automagically switch the TV into 3D mode upon insertion of a 3D disk. In any event, it looks like some control signals are passing over the HDMI cable, and that's cool to see.

So the TV improves from conditionally excellent to all-around fantastic.