they build like Doozers
HAHAHAHA AWESOME.

it has apparently been overrun by mainland Chinese. I'm not kidding when I say I'm going to pretend to be a tourist as much as possible to be treated better (and so nobody tries to speak to me in Mandarin)
HAHAHA okay, last time I was in Hong Kong, my mother's friends who live for half the year in Hong Kong and the other half of the year in Singapore were complaining about the same thing in both places, so that made me laugh.

Enjoy your trip! :D :D :D

I remember even when I was a kid, there would always be a few new shopping centers every year, along with new housing estates after the government "reclaimed land" (i.e. bought dirt from Indonesia and dumped it into the ocean) or cleared out some pig farms. I get the impression construction has accelerated even more and... oh yeah, there are 1 million more people, when it was already overcrowded at 3.5 million.

I don't keep up with Singapore news at all, but I've read several articles recently about the growing resentment of "foreigners", which apparently no longer refers to white people but to mainland Chinese. :P

Thank you!!! It will be good to see my sisters again and meet my 8-year-old niece for the first time!

I love the dynamic that there is a Team A and Team B though because while Team A is super and fantastic and really good at wrecking things, they need Team B to cover the blind spots and be like the human side.

If you want Marvel movie recs...I suggest Thor first. It's beautiful and the plot is just awesome, less flashy superhero stuff, more family ties. Captain America is okay, story wasn't quite as good. Iron Man movies are both awesome.

I have not watched any of the Hulk movies but from what I can tell, they don't really tie in with the others anyway (plus Eric Bana was a terrible Hulk and the scripts/directing of the movies seem generally bad). I'd wait for the Hulk movie with Mark Ruffalo.

Dunno if you've watched the Spider-Man movies, but they don't tie into Avengers either and also, they were pretty bad. The new one coming up should be much better, both actor-wise and story-wise. Less emo-loser-Spider-Man and more geeky-funny-gritty-Spider-Man.

I thought Team B was really ineffective in comparison, but I liked other aspects of the movie so much I decided to overlook that. ;)

I believe that Alex bought Thor with his iTunes account, so I can just download it. I thought Iron Man 1 was just okay and heard that Iron Man 2 wasn't as good so I haven't felt motivated to watch, although knowing that Black Widow was in it it gives me some incentive. :P

I do have the Hulk movie on my DVR so that might be the one I've watched first.

I was referring specifically to the Marvel movies that directly related to the Avengers. Spider-Man (with Tobey Maguire) was pretty good, 2 was REALLY good, but I've heard 3 was terrible. It's also languishing on my DVR. The new one looks fairly interesting, but it seems too soon for a reboot.

Not trying to be totally argumentative (but okay maybe a little) but just, they did need Captain America to corral the civilians (and balance Iron Man who can be too thinky), Widow came up with how to close the portal and Hawkeye coordinated the flying heroes so they could fight effectively. Although I know in the movie this isn't stressed, and you only really absorb it after watching the movie a few times and possibly immersing in fandom (as I've clearly done, haha).

Iron Man 2 isn't as good (I'm not a huge fan of Don Cheadle) but it does give a lot of insight into Tony Stark's character. The movie felt too long and needlessly convoluted, but Tony Stark makes it.

Was Spider-Man 2 actually good? I saw bits and pieces of it and just couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing. The first one was okay...but I don't like Kirsten Dunst so that probably clouded my judgment a bit. I'm excited for the new one because I love Emma Stone and I think it's much more true to the original comics. And this is coming from someone who didn't even like Spider-Man in comics because he was kind of this mopey loser who shot spooge out of his wrists.

....sorry this is what happens to me when Avengers get involved. XD

But that is exactly my point. None of the contributions you mentioned for Team B come from their heroic abilities. Captain America basically did disaster management, which there are plenty of regular people who are trained in doing, Black Widow came up with an idea that anyone else could have come up with, and Hawkeye's role was a bit more effective, but still not comparable to Team A.

The fact that in the movie they played important roles at all is a good reflection on the screenwriter or director or whoever it was that came up with that stuff and that they made it so that Team B weren't complete chumps in comparison. Put it this way, if you had JUST Team A in action, they could conceivably have handled the threat by themselves without Team B. Team B flat out wouldn't have been able to deal with it.

I'm kind of meh about Kirsten Dunst. However I do hate most of the major male movie actors like Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, etc. but love some of their movies so I can overlook actors I don't like for the most part.

While I think Avengers is flawless, it could've been seven hours long and still not been able to develop all the depths of the characters fully- which is the beauty of comics, because we have decades of relationship development/dynamic. They have to try to convey that in less than three hours, so I think they did a fantastic job with what they had, and really maintaining Loki as this villain who perhaps is not so much a villain as a mischievous, angry, misunderstood outcast brother who got in too far over his head with the kids from the wrong side of the train tracks while he was being pissy at his dad.

But they also only had time to touch on the complexity of Cap and Tony's friendship/partnership, whereas that's HUGE in the books (I'm reading the Civil War universe where though Cap and Tony are fighting against each other which destroys them both because of their friendship and love for each other). There's that one second where they show Cap and Tony fighting together and Cap bounces Tony's repulsor blasts off his shield... I wish they could've had more on Cap/Tony. But then, you could make a movie out of the Cap/Tony relationship.

I'm (not so secretly) hoping that one day they'll make a movie out of the Civil War series that's super dark and washed out and angsty cause those books are amaaaazing. Like Batman Begins meets Jarhead meets Bourne. I'm also desperate for a Hawkeye/Widow movie, because I love spy shit and they intrigue me so much with the "I've been compromised, I've got red in my ledger" and "you and I remember Budapest very differently."

Also, for the record, CHEADLE RUINED IRONMAN 2. As did Marvel, because they used the whole movie to plant Avengers easter eggs and ruined the plot in the process. Also Favreau let his actors run way too ad-libbed and the whole thing was choppy and poorly executed. And Terrance Howard had been such a perfect Rhodey. Sigh.

What was impressive to me is that it's so easy to fall down with a movie like this that has so many characters and they could have just made it a sequence of linked action scenes with zero character development, or maybe just give one or two of the characters personalities. But instead they actually made everyone very interesting with the possible exception of Hawkeye, but only because he spent like half of the movie being a Loki zombie.

Stark and Captain America were obviously the heart of the movie and that's a good thing because you do want someone to be a focus, but everyone else wasn't relegated to a background role, which I think comes from Whedon's extensive experience with ensemble casts.

It would be great if there was an Avengers TV series, but I don't think there's any way they could come up with a budget for that. I too really like the spy stuff which is why I was thinking of watching Iron Man 2 first! I will try to lower my expectations for the movie so I can enjoy it, haha.

enjoy the trip! we watched a stream of the game and I was most annoyed at LA for not burying the series, oh well next game they can have it in the bag.

Thank you! It will be good to see my sisters. :) And the Kings have yet to lose a road game, so it's looking pretty positive.

I'm most interested in Iron Man 2 I think, because I really like Black Widow. And then probably Thor after that, which I heard was good. I hope they get Joss Whedon back to direct Avengers 2. With the success of this movie, they have to ask him back right? And I hope he gets more input on the overall plot/story as that was the only are of improvement I can see for this movie.

Thanks! It'll be really great to see all of my sisters, two of whom I haven't seen in over 10 years!