Michael*

Not that Italy weren't utterly rubbish on the night of course, but repercussions perhaps from the Northern Ireland fiasco there. It was very evident that the ref had resolved not to give a penalty for anything less than first degree murder in the box.

Also, while I'm here.

All the elements seem to be there for it to live up to expectations. Looking forward to Jordan and Nyong'o eating up the screentime.

Apropos of nothing much, I just realised that we had forum threads for the first and third Iron Mans (Iron Men?) but not the second, hence the somewhat belated creation of this one.

Honestly, I'm not too sure. We do still seem to live in a world where men are routinely allowed (depending on the severity of the misconduct, of course) to say something to the effect of "I'm sorry, I couldn’t resist" and leave it at that. The attention being focused on these allegations will likely drift away to other subjects eventually, but when it does, I hope a change for the better, in what should be considered acceptable behaviour, will have occurred and that it sticks.

Honestly, if the movie is even half as cool as the character posters, people are going to be chanting by the time the credits roll.

So, I couldn't help noticing that the recently-announced release date for this (November 17) just so happens to coincide with the opening of a certain DC/Warners project in the US and UK.

If Rosario Dawson is on my TV, I'll never complain. I guess Castle will just have to find someone else to tend to his wounds.

With all that said of course, there's still good stuff out there. It’s just spread out a lot more, although perhaps a little too thinly. A visionary director might be just as likely these days to work in TV, or to make an Amazon exclusive as they are to head to, say, Universal. There's simply more content and more avenues to get it to an audience.

No doubt Keys and Gray will be thrilled with the Chosen One's appointments of Pearce, Irvine and McKinlay as coaches. I still think West Ham are too good to go down, although they mightn't be in January when Jagielka, Pienaar, Osman, Gibson and Howard arrive.

I think it's one of those things where although we'd all prefer these matters to be settled in a court of law, it doesn't always need to happen for a certain degree of justice to be done. As far as I know, Bill Cosby has yet to be found guilty of anything, but most people accept that his reputation is deserved because the accusations are so numerous. One of the weird complexities of the Spacey thing is that his response to Rapp's accusation appeared to suggest that more such accusations could be forthcoming. Obviously, we all read things in different ways, but I think he’s pretty much invited a higher level of public suspicion now, and done so in a manner that makes it hard to have any sympathy for him.

I did something terrible in a previous life.

Yeah, it's a bit sad that we're not getting 'bad ass' Reign. I suppose to be fair, it was probably never really on the cards for an actress of Odette's standing to end up hidden under a mountain of make-up or CGI. I do like what they're doing with Samantha at the moment, though. Since they're positioning Kara as being a bit spikier these days, pitting her against a villain who, at her core, is sincere and sympathetic should be a total slam dunk. It's such a neat twist on the usual dynamic and potentially just so full of tragedy.

Ah, that must have been what threw me. I'm guessing that they dropped the 'secret identity' plotline for him in pretty short order then, because I can only vaguely remember it now. If I'm honest, I grew to not mind Mon El after a while, although his reappearance would probably mean the show shifting back into some of the more soap opera-ish stuff from last season, which would be a pity because I'm really enjoying the tone of S3 so far.

I think partly, that's to do with box office numbers, but it's also to do with a distribution model that increasingly means that only large scale 'event' movies with massive marketing budgets can drag people away from their streaming services and 60-inch TVs. Hollywood is selling time these days, as much as anything else – see it now, while it’s hot and people are talking about it. It’s not a model likely to generate many Chinatowns or 2001s, but a lot of it is down to the studios simply going where the market takes them.

I think perhaps they tried a little too hard to make it like the original Iron Man, so it doesn't find a groove as easily as the first one did. Don Cheadle did a good job of replacing Terrence Howard, though. I actually liked Howard's version of Rhodey a lot, but much like Ruffalo's Hulk it's since become quite hard to imagine anyone except Cheadle in the role.

Thread cleaned. Personal issues don't belong here.

Just recently rewatched IM2 and honestly, I didn't think it was as bad as it was made out to be at the time. It's certainly the weakest of the Iron Man trilogy and perhaps the MCU, but taken in isolation it's still a decent watch. Would have benefited a lot from stronger development of Whiplash and a hell of a lot more Sam Rockwell.

International trailer.

Iron Man 2 Release Date: May 7, 2010 Director: Jon Favreau Synopsis With the world now aware of his identity as Iron Man, Tony Stark must contend with both his declining health and a vengeful mad man with ties to his father's legacy. Cast Robert Downey Jr. - Tony Stark Gwyneth Paltrow - Pepper Potts Don Cheadle - James 'Rhodey' Rhodes Scarlett Johansson - Natalie Rushman / Natasha Romanoff Sam Rockwell - Justin Hammer Mickey Rourke - Ivan Vanko Samuel L. Jackson - Nick Fury Clark Gregg - Agent Coulson John Slattery - Howard Stark Garry Shandling - Senator Stern Paul Bettany - JARVIS Kate Mara - U.S. Marshal Leslie Bibb - Christine Everhart Jon Favreau - Happy Hogan

I don't know what's worse, how unrelentingly bleak the stream of allegations is, or how little the whole situation shocks me.

If it's genuinely a blank canvas for Rian Johnson within the world of Star Wars, that’s amazing. The studio must be super confident in The Last Jedi.

I'm downloading the expansion as we speak, 31 minutes and counting.

I thought that too, but for some reason I was struggling to remember if the others knew him as Mon El or by another name.

You can certainly set your watch to the kind of rinse and repeat cycle that middle order Premier League clubs get stuck in. They really love an 'exotic' flair manager, until they have a bit of a wobble and replace him with a dreary, result-grinding British manager. Of course, the problem West Ham now have is that the Moyesiah's ability to grind out results, regardless of what the likes of Leon Osman, Joleon Lescott and Danny Murphy would have us all believe, clearly deserted him after he left Everton.