I'm Thinking: Iron Man and Dark Knight and Joss Whedon

I'm really looking forward to seeing both Iron Man and The Dark Knight on dvd, and, in fact, I think I'll show them in my Cinema and Screenwriting class later this year because I'm the teacher and I say we're going to have a short superhero cinema unit in January. So there! But, honestly, I came out of The Dark Knight completely stunned by the brilliance of Heath Ledger's performance but with mixed feelings about the rest of the movie. On the other hand, I thought Iron Man was almost-pitch perfect from beginning to end. Nothing in that movie was as fascinating as Ledger's Joker, but it also wasn't as wildly inconsistent. Iron Man was a sleek, fun, thrilling exploration of that character's world, done better than any comic book incarnation of the character ever.

Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight, as excellent as it was, still had Christian Bale's terrible bat-voice (at least have a character in the movie comment upon how ridiculous he sounds, or something!), Nicky Katt (who I love, but who had a scene that was tonally out-of-place), and a lot of speechifyin' about justice.

Iron Man had evil Jeff Bridges in a giant suit of robot armor.

So, I'm tending to lean toward Iron Man as my favorite superhero movie, but that's why I'm looking forward to the dvd releases, because I want to watch them both again.

You know what, though? Even though they are surely the two best superhero movies ever made, no matter how you rank them (and I know everyone else in the world has TDK as number one, but maybe you will rethink that after the dvd releases. Or maybe I'm 100% completely and utterly wrong), I am kind of obsessed with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog these days, and now that I've downloaded the soundtrack and have been listening to it as I drive to work, I don't know what to think anymore.

My live-action superhero judgment has gone haywire.

Seriously, though. I love Dr. Horrible so, so much. I'm not a big Joss Whedon guy, although I like Firefly quite a bit. But Dr. Horrible is the best thing he's ever done. I'd rank it as my favorite movie of the year, if it were a movie. So take that, Iron Man and Dark Knight!