I saw Iron Man last night. It's a ton of fun, one of the truly solid comic-book movies ever made. Later on in the evening I got to shepherd a friend through the ER for a bruised kneecap (unrelated to me, it was from aikido earlier in the day), but these things happen. (She should be fine.)

I just watched The Day The Earth Stood Still for the first time. It's an excellent movie, despite some points from 1951 that haven't aged well. Things I found generally curious:

• Men talking down to women. While this happens in modern movies, it's done self-consciously and often to set up a conflict, while there's a matter-of-factness to it in old movies, as with smoking, that clearly indicates the audience should find nothing amiss.
• A mother talking down to her son. When Bobby describes his experience, she says "You didn't really go to the spaceship. You were just dreaming, weren't you." And goes on like that for a few lines. The kid is maybe 9 or 10, well into the range of credibility, and in any case, to me at least it seems pretty awful to prima facie assume your child is lying to you, and not bother to check out the story. Especially when you've already said earlier in the movie that you think he's a wonderful kid.
• The super-enlightened alien litters, ripping a tag off his suit and tossing it on the ground.
• And finally, the completely peaceful multi-planet civilization hasn't so much moved beyond violence, as agreed that it's so bad they will submit to the policing of independent omnipotent death-robots. While it's an impressive agreement to reach, it's ultimately no better than Shogunate-era Japan, where things were generally peaceful because of the absolute rule of a military dictator, and death was the one punishment for every crime. Klaatu does acknowledge it's imperfect, and that's probably part of the point.