Yeah, the accent was kind of part of it. I don't know what Hemsworth's real accent is (I was very surprised to discover that Damien Lewis' real accent is super-upper-crusty-Brit), but he's doing a sort of pseudo-Scottish accent. Heath's real accent was Aussie, but most of his best known movies he's trying to do a generic USian accent with moderate success (his accent in 10 Things I Hate About You was seriously WTF all over the place). I would really like to have seen how much his accent improved after TDK. He'd steadily improved over his career, and seemed to have some kind of breakthrough around his Brokeback/TDK period. I loved the Joker voice.

Serial: Which is all to say that I don't think the accents were *too* similar, but there was something about the accent that's kind of part of it. It probably adds to the creep factor that it's so hard to put your finger on.

And I think Snow White and the Huntsman would be a better movie if they replaced K-Stew with a stick with her cue cards taped to it.

Maybe they could have had Andy Serkis do it in a mocap suit.

"This stick with a tennis ball on the end of it...is life itself!!"

Beau and I saw IM3 yesterday on a lark. I didn't love it, but I found the movie entertaining and I liked it more than IM1 (I did not see IM2 because I heard it was terrible). I am a bit disappointed in the film because the trailer seemed like a more interesting, engaging movie than what I saw. Around 20 minutes before the end of the movie, my mind wandered - which is usually an indication that a movie isn't working for me. No mind wandering with "Avengers", for example. My mind wandered because I was thinking about a scene that had no purpose in the movie, the scene where IM rescues the 11 people. The scene made more ridiculous because dozens more were ON THE PLANE and the plane blew up. I didn't mind that some plot twists were easy to predict, the Mandarin was an "actor"/not the mastermind, but I thought the involvement of the Vice President was ridiculous.

Beau was deeply offended that the suits were operable without a person inside. It's like this violated a principle with him. I am mostly amused by his reaction. I haven't read the IM comics and only have a passing knowledge of the character's history, but I think it is an interesting notion for the suit to be operated by Stark as well as have some IM robots. My favorite part in the movie was two: 1) when he was looking at a 3-D model of the Chinese theater crime scene. I just loved the possibilities of this and how his mind worked to solve a mystery/problem, figure out what was going on. I wished there was a bit more of this. Which connects to my 2nd favorite thing: When he went to a hardware store to build crude weapons. However, if Tony Stark really was at Home Depot, I think he probably could have come up with harder core things with more lethality, but maybe he was under a time crunch.

The big thing that I'm excited about as a result of seeing IM3, was Thor in November. That looks like it might be a pretty good movie. I am more excited about Star Trek. The trailer was better than the previous trailers I saw - the previous trailers have made me worried this movie was going to be terrible.

Thor in November.

Man, seeing the trailer on a big screen REALLY made Loki's outfit look like a hoodie.

Personally, I loved the idea that the suits could be remote-controlled. I mean, why not? If the guys on Top Gear can remote-control a full-size car, Stark can remote-control an IM suit through a virtual interface. Plus, all the memory Jarvis had been using to control the Malibu house and all those robots was now available; why not have him* control a small fleet of suits? It's cool.

*Yes, to me Jarvis is a him, not an it.

Yeah, Beau's response is that lessening IM's role in the suits means that anyone theoretically could control the suits. Why is IM necessary? He felt that Stark's persona as being a brilliant inventor should have been more on display than just the function of the suits.

Warren Ellis was in the credits--I'm pretty sure I saw his name there, and I hadn't been prepped by discussion here.

My assumption was that Maya's motive was to kidnap Pepper and use her as leverage to persuade Tony to do what she wanted. Did I misread the explanation to Killian entirely?

I quite enjoyed it, but I do feel they could have shortened the final fight scene and not skimmed over what he narrated afterwards instead. In terms of things happening, and things of import, I felt the it was imbalanced.

LeN--I did drift away during Avengers too, thinking, wow, they're still fighting, and I'm not learning anything new about anyone here.

I just watched Contraband and accept that Mark Wahlberg is a much better actor than I was giving him credit for--the inane guy on talk shows is well-hidden when he dons the garb of working class or lower roughneck.

I give the movie a thumbs up for the Jackson Pollock--I can't not. But, Jesus, talk about erasing all the tension with zero consequence. Yikes. It could have been a kinda dark movie, but it punks out something awful.