Downey!

It's cool again, thank god; cool and rainy and green. I'm wandering about the house in a snuggly knee-length white scottish wool sweater and a pair of dark green tights: I feel like an extra in The Animals of Farthing Wood, coffee in one hand, parrot preening on my shoulder.

Let me tell you about Iron Man. The movie, not the other stuff. I was bewitched by this movie. Its political intuitions are of course daft, and its special effects, of course, glorious. And Robert Downey Jr is perfect, perfect, perfect. What made me most happy wasn't the screwball dialogue between him and Gwyneth Paltrow, nor the cut-out cartoon fundamentalists, nor even the dogfight between two F-22s and a man in a supersonic gold-titanium exoskeleton with a HUD. Though — dude! Both great.

What I loved most of all were the scenes where Downey, as Tony Stark, was working. Building. Soldering. Tinkering with metal and wires and irons and components and 3-D cadcam displays. You've all seen movies where actors have to paint? Like Kirk in the Van Gogh movie? And it always looks fake and forced? Downey manages to articulate with his fingers the concentrated addicted brilliance of the genius engineer, and I have to stifle a giggle thinking that perhaps part of his facility with this kind of thing might be due to his long experience with the paraphernalia involved in taking an absolute shed-load of drugs.

There's a sweet Suicide Girls interview with him and Paltrow here