"Iron Man 3" and "Kiss of the Damned"

I was­n’t all that crazy about Iron Man 3, but my friend Tom Carson really liked it. I point this out not because it’s so rare that Tom and I disagree—we dis­agree, at times avidly, about a lot of stuff. What I did find inter­est­ing is that, if you look at both reviews (of which Tom’s is the bet­ter and more tightly writ­ten),  you don’t get that “did those two even see the same movie?” sense of dis­con­nect. It’s pretty clear we did see the same movie, and came to some of the same con­clu­sions about it. It’s more that for Tom the inter­est­ing stuff was­n’t over­whelmed by the bom­bast, while for me the bom­bast wiped all the inter­est­ing stuff away. Tom’s response to the movie remained enthu­si­ast­ic through the bom­bast, to the extent that he was bet­ter able to take in what it was sig­ni­fy­ing, where­as my uncon­scious inclin­a­tion was to stop giv­ing the movie the bene­fit of a doubt at every turn that pissed me off. I don’t know if see­ing it in a dif­fer­ent frame of mind, or maybe from a dif­fer­ent seat, would have made a difference. 

Also, I was maybe a little kinder to Xan Cassavetes’ Jean Rollin rip Kiss of the Damned than I might have been, had I not been a Rollin fan to begin with myself. I sup­pose maybe I ought to be cranki­er about the fact that a taste for Rollin was once regarded as a psy­cho­lo­gic­al anom­aly, and is now appar­ently an emblem of exquis­ite hip­ster con­nois­seur­ship. I might take it up with my ther­ap­ist, except she’ll have no idea what the fuck I’m talk­ing about.