Iron Man III

[james_davis_nicoll]

I guess DC wouldn't loan them Egg Fu.

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think I'm missing something.

("The Mandarin" is *the* classic Iron Man villain. And of course, being Hollywood, they had no problem with it. And, then, no issues casting a white dude as The Yellow Peril.)

[avram]

I expect they're avoiding the Yellow Peril aspect of it, and tying him to the Middle East. They already had the Ten Rings terrorist network in the first movie.

Don't know how they're going to justify the name, though.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Was it actually called "Ten Rings" in the first movie?

[avram]

I don't think they say "ten rings" out loud, but they have a banner with this logo:



Raza, the leader of the Afghan terrorist gang in the first film, wears a bulky ring on his the ring finger of his left hand, and refers at some point to "the man whose ring I wear". When Obediah Stane paralyzes Raza, he takes the ring.

Justin Hammer, the competitor who gets Whiplash freed from prison in the second movie, also wears a bulky ring on his left pinky.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Huh. Did not know that. Thank you.

Now I have a reason to rewatch them all :).

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

The "Ten Rings" name was mentioned very briefly in the first IM movie during the reporter's stand up during the destruction of Gulmira that got Tony motivated to go back to Afghanistan. Blink and you probably missed it.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Also, Yinsen named their group earlier on during his infodumps to Stark.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Do we know who designed this?

[avram]

Do you mean the real-world person who worked up the prop for the movie, or the fictional character who designed the fictional flag?

In either case, I certainly don't know who, but the former case should be theoretically discoverable.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Option one, definitely. I didn't see the Ten Rings flag in the Art of Iron Man book, and I've been tracking articles about production art connected to the Marvel Cinema'Verse movies for a while now.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Considering that Raza originally spoke of Genghis Khan as a role model of sorts for the Ten Rings organization, speaking of the Khanate's reach across much of Asia from the Middle East to China...definitely a more multi-ethnic face on this one.

Using the "Mandarin" alias as a way of playing mind games with various governments' leaders, particularly in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei as much as Washington and London, I've already commented on elsewhere in this thread.

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Ben Kingsley isn't a "white dude". Although to quote a comment from elsewhere on my reading list: "Chinese name, vaguely Japanese and Middle Eastern accoutrements, played by a half-Indian actor. It's like cram ALL the yellow peril into one baddie!"

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ben Kingsley isn't a "white dude".

Until this comment and looking up his wikipedia entry, I had no idea. My mistake, thank you.

That kind of does make me revise my objection to match, well, the other comment you're quoting.

I genuinely hope they do it well. It's just.... worrisome.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

From Wiki:

Egg Fu first debuted in Wonder Woman #157 (October 1965). He was a Chinese Communist agent, inexplicably shaped like an egg the size of a house, with a Charlie Chan-like speech pattern, who used his mustaches as whips against his enemies.

[seawasp]

Things like this are the reason I suspect that anyone associated with comics had to be doing heavy drugs in the 60s, especially in DC. This was also the era, IIRC, in which the Legion of Superheroes had its most... bizarre adventures (see The ISB's "Can Anything Stop Computo?")

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

You have to admire the careful thinking that went into depicting guys on ladders waxing the moustaches.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

But of course not -- Egg Fu is much too Young.

[invunche.livejournal.com]

Like I said elsewhere, at least the wachowskis are being strange on purpose.

Trigger, warning-type: I love you but you're strange:





and introducing

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

I saw the trailer for that a couple days ago and wondered who the lady who looked like Madonna was -- Halle Berry, apparently.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Bwuh?

[liviapenn.livejournal.com]

These are pics from the "Cloud Atlas" movie that's coming out. The story is about a group of 'souls' that get reincarnated over and over, so the Wachowskis decided to just cast the same actors each time around. So you have Halle Berry and Doona Bae playing white characters at some times, and whats-his-face there, the white guy, as a Korean character during the part that takes place in future-Korea. And I think Hugo Weaving plays a woman at one point too.

You would think that given the ugly history of brownface & yellowface in movies they would have told the actors not to say stupid things that would piss off people *already* justifiably skeptical that this could be anything but a train wreck... but whats-his-face there has already made some stupid tweets. So, not a good sign there.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Wait - those are each two pictures of the same person? That's impressive. I thought it was a recasting of something, but I couldn't figure out where the "strange" came in.

[invunche.livejournal.com]

I cheated, by not showing you Hugo Weaving as a Korean Romulan ????. It's a fiasco.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

(Googles) Yeah, that's less impressive.

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[james_davis_nicoll]

Which site?

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

(My comment from another blog.)

Augh. I have one complaint. One thing Marvel has managed to avoid in their ciniverse is the damned Damsel in Distress trope. Okay, there have been plenty of female civilians in danger (Pepper at the climax of both Iron Man films for one) but it's been collateral to the fact that they've been stuck dodging around without guns or armor while superpowered idiots throw cars at each other.

This one, it looks like not only is Pepper is a full blown DiD, she's in the clutches of the Mandarin, who is set up as a painfully traditional Yellow Peril stereotype, just like the old days of the comics. Facepalm.

I'm also not looking forward to JARVIS the Abusive Boyfriend, if they go that far in adapting the Extremis storyline.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Blame/praise Matt Fraction for taking JARVIS down that road with Pepper. Ellis was long gone by that point.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

My bad, sorry. I follow Iron Man through the movies and wikipedia. Stopped reading the comic after going through all of my b-in-law's ancient Tales of Suspense comics he still has.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

The problem with making The Mandarin like Egg Fu is that a mandarin is a tiny orange, so making someone a giant mandarin with a face wouldn't actually be as evocative of mandarins than it would be evocative of oranges, and I believe the Annoying Orange has the copyright/patent on "oranges with faces and the ability to talk" in the same way DC has the copyright on "giant egg villains" after Sega settled out of court with them. /missing the point

I'm less upset that they brought back silly yellow peril pulp villain #352, than that they seem to be using him to replace the white supremicist/libertarian villain from the extremis story.

Okay, that, and the notion that a pony tail is now "samurai hair".

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

And the mandarin orange (as known in the US) has nothing to do with China anyhow... It got that name because it was grown in Mandarin FL and shipped in crates marked with that name.

There hasn't been any orange groves in Mandarin for most of a century now... It was 'way out in the boonies' when I was a kid, now it's a suburb.

[seawasp]

The Mandarin has always been one of Tony's major adversaries, so I was expecting him for this movie -- especially with the mentions of the Ten Rings organization in the first movie and the ring symbolism elsewhere, and the fact that they already have done "Other Guys With Power Armor Stuff" twice already, so they needed one of his opponents that wasn't just another guy using his tech.

My suspicion is that he's no longer Chinese but a Middle-Eastern terrorist. Whether they can keep the Mandarin name and do that I don't know.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The script could just claim that "Mandarin" was a randomly-assigned codename assigned to the bad guy by an intelligence agency before they know anything about him, them move on with the explosions.

[seawasp]

And even say they got it from him shipping in Mandarin oranges as his favorite snack!

[pauldrye.livejournal.com]

Or maybe he's just that man, Darren.

[seawasp]

What a Bewitching idea.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read the one-shot Matt Fraction wrote after he was charged with making the Mandarin somewhat more acceptable to modern tastes? Fraction made it the rather cracked story of a prominent Asian movie director who was kidnapped by the Mandarin to shoot a biopic of his life, just like Kim Jong-Il did for his Godzilla movie. It does not go well. Fraction apparently worked in his own experiences co-directing a music video with Kanye West.

Anyhow. Fraction managed to create a more -- is acceptable the right word here? -- backstory for the Mandarin, while still keeping it plausibly deniable for later continuity, should Marvel wish to return to the days of pigtails and opium pipes.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

(Personally I love the idea of the Mandarin being a fusion of Kanye West and Kim Jong-Il who uses that name to piss off the PRC. Will it stick? Hey, you remember Mary Jane Watson-Parker?)

[dewline.livejournal.com]

I still remember her.

As for the idea of his using "Mandarin" as a "stage name" to annoy/frighten Beijing as much as the West?

I like that.

[seawasp]

I also like that idea. It keeps the name and makes sense without requiring a yellow peril character.

[(Anonymous)]

It might just be swamp gas, but I heard that the Radioactive Man will be in the movie, and will still be Chinese.

Bruce

[dewline.livejournal.com]

Betting on swamp gas re: this rumour, although the idea of Chen Lu being tapped by Beijing as a candidate for re-creating the circumstances that gave rise to the Hulk is interesting. Something for between Avengers 2 and Avengers 3 perhaps?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

My daughter insisted on dressing as Wonder Woman for Halloween. Of course, she hasn't read any Wonder Woman comics and is not terribly familiar with the character.

Yesterday she asked me who Wonder Woman's usual villains were... and the only one I actually remembered, I wasn't going to mention.

(I looked them up. Gee, Wonder Woman sure hasn't been lucky in the memorable-villain category. I pointed out that as a top-tier Justice League member, she'd gone toe-to-toe with most of the big DC villains at some time or another in that capacity.)

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

What, do you think Dr. Psycho and Hercules are somehow _inappropriate_ role models for a fine young lady?

--Dave, and wasn't Circe in there somewhere too?