Iron Man Week: A Brief History of Time

Though he doesn't fight the forces of evil, Stephen Hawking does share some qualities with Tony Stark.  They are both billionaire playboys who drink too much and jet around the world making trouble.  OK, so maybe that's not true.  Hawking isn't a billionaire.  But somehow the world's most famous physicist does come to mind when I think of Marvel's brilliant inventor-turned-adventurer.  Stark has his suit, Hawking has his chair--it kind of works, right?

Besides, any excuse to throw an Errol Morris film into a list is good enough for me, and A Brief History of Time is one of Morris' most entertaining documentaries.  Hawking's book takes some pretty heady concepts and illustrates them in clever ways for those of us who didn't study quantum mechanics in any depth.  Morris does a fantastic job of making Hawking's analogies seem whimsical, and he focuses enough on Hawking himself that the movie has a central character unlike so many science films on TV.