Oh well. At least it wasn’t awful. Two words spring imme­di­ately to mind: formulaic and shallow. Not that there’s anything wrong with being formulaic and shallow — indeed many formulaic and shallow pictures nonetheless rake in the big bucks — but formulas become predictable, and predictability kills immersion unless the char­acters are inter­esting enough. Here, they weren’t. They just weren’t developed enough to make me care. Batman Begins follows much the same formula, but in that film, we had real character depth and conflict. We dig into Bruce Wayne’s moti­va­tions. We don’t do that with Tony Stark, so we don’t care [ . . . ]

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Gus Van Horn mentions the diffi­culty of arguing against the government’s use of behavior-​​​​modifying tech­niques in mixed-​​​​government contexts: Unfortunately, everyone is so used to the government owning the roads ... that few so much as bat an eye when they hear of the government looking for ways to psycho­log­i­cally manip­ulate people into doing its bidding. Indeed, in this limited context, it is hard to argue produc­tively against the government taking advantage of such knowledge about human perception. As a law student, this topic has caused me a great deal of concern over the past few months. I have wanted to write something about [ . . . ]

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And candy for cuties! They were right about the cantilever heels, pants, and mobile phones, at least. My favorite is the headlight.