Line Reading Hall of Fame #5

"He'll see the big board!"

Review: Thor

A small part of me is worried that the Avengers franchise is going to spell the end of movies as we know it.

Most franchises have a natural lifespan, peaking and then fading, possibly to be reborn, revamped according to the current style. The Avengers seeks to bypass that cycle, becoming instead an unstoppable world-devouring, Voltron of a franchise constructed out of other, smaller franchises. The Avengers would be immune to flops. It would spread out until there is never a weekend without a Marvel product in theaters. The Summer movie season would last year round, and all the A-list talent will be too preoccupied fighting over the fate of humanity to make any movie budgeted under 200 million.

Another more reasonable part of me isn't nearly so alarmist. This part of me thinks that ambition is to be applauded, and Marvel's attempts to create the cinematic equivalent of the overlapping comic book universe is a fascinating concept, equal in ambition to what Peter Jackson and company pulled off with Tolkien. The difference being that Jackson's films located the heart of the material. Those stories resonated with themes of friendship, loyalty, and bravery. Kenneth Branagh's Thor, the latest entry in the Avengers franchise, resonates with nothing much. Thor, along with last Summer's Iron Man 2, feel scattershot in their attempts to touch all the bases they need to touch in order to sufficiently advance the franchise. Their stories are held back from going too far out creatively lest they stray out of their predetermined box in the series. Cheering these movies is beginning to feel like cheering a PowerPoint presentation at a meeting of Marvel stockholders.

And right away that feels way too harsh for what is honestly just a goofy Summer movie. On its own, Thor is a big, silly fantasy - often fun, never boring, but far too unexceptional to warrant strong opinions one way or the other. Writing a withering takedown of Thor is like panning a coloring book. It's hard to get too mad at something so eager to please.

Thor's main asset is Chris Hemsworth crowd-pleasing performance in the title role. He nails the fish-out-of-water comedy of a Norse god in small town New Mexico (I know, I know, he's not really a god), and acquits himself as well as the script will allow in all the palace intrigue back in his world. But therein lies the problem. If Hemsworth's performance as Thor is the film's biggest strength, then the character of Thor is the film's biggest flaw.

The main arc of the story is of Thor's progression from arrogant war monger to selfless hero, but he doesn't seem that different at the beginning than he does at the end. This is a big problem. Think about Tony Stark's transformation from egomaniacal prick into Iron Man and how much that popped and you'll see what's missing here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's backtrack. Thor is heir to the throne of Asgard, which is either in a dimension parallel to Earth or in a distant realm. Or both. I was never quite sure. Anyway, Thor is set to inherit the throne from Daddy Odin, over his brother Loki, a character so obviously villainous I expected Branagh to give him close-ups so he could do the classic shifty eyes routine. Before Thor can take over, his recklessness destroys the fragile peace that was established with the Frost Giants triggering a war. Upon hearing this news Odin throws an absolute hissy fit, strips Thor of his power, and banishes him to Earth to learned some goddamned humility. So there.

On Earth, Thor crosses paths with a plucky astrophysicist played by Natalie Portman. She, a brilliant scientist, finds him, a deranged loon, wandering the desert, declaring himself Thor, God of Thunder and using the words "Thee" and "Thou" a lot, so naturally she falls for him.

If the arc of Thor's character doesn't exactly pop, then the romance really doesn't pop. Portman smiles and acts generally Portman-ish around him, and Thor is surprisingly gentlemanly for a god/He-Man, even kissing her hand. If they didn't kiss at the end one could be forgiven for not realizing there was a romance taking place at all so meager are the sparks. It's understandable. The characters do, after all, have so much else on their minds.

Once again, all you have to do is think back to the first Iron Man and the great banter between Pepper and Tony Stark to know what's lacking here. Don't get me wrong - there are few people I'd rather see play themselves than Natalie Portman. But when the whole crux of the story is how the love of a mortal woman teaches the big lug humility than it won't do to have her relate to him like a polite chaperone guiding a strange visitor around a foreign country.

I could continue to describe the story in more detail but let's just stop there before I get comic fans any more annoyed with me than they already are. I'll just add that once Thor causes a war there is surprisingly little discussion of it considering it's a war and all, and there is some drama over who controls a powerful glowing blue brick, but search me for why that matters. Take it up with the comic fans.

The story spirals on from there, climaxing in a finalé that falls on the wrong side of ridiculous, but much more interesting than the plot is what's happening around the fringes of the production. It's possible for movies to be entirely nonsensical and still be good if they give you a lot of other stuff to occupy your attention (See the Hellboy films)

I was really hoping Anthony Hopkins would bring the goods as Odin - over-the-top Anthony Hopkins acting is the fine vintage wine of hammy acting - but I was mostly disappointed, save for the one scene where he strips Thor of his powers and shouts the phrase "Not worthy!" about a dozen times. As for Rene Russo as Thor's mother, if Natalie Portman was wasted in her role, what she gets is Lady MacBeth compared to the measly amount of screen time they give Russo. Mostly she gets to look worried when Odin lapses into his Great Magical Coma of Plot Convenience.

The Frost Giants make for lousy villains, they are totally underdeveloped as a threat. For that matter, all the Asgard stuff comes across as half-baked. If they weren't going to give that world some real dramatic heft, then the filmmakers would have been wiser to tilt the screen time in favor of the far more winning Earth sequences.

As for the action, which is the main event for any Avengers movies, Thor, I'm sorry to say, has to be filed under disappointment. It comes down to the basic rules of suspense. To care about what happens there has to be something at stake. There need to be consequences if a character loses. Unfortunately, when Thor starts swinging his hammer around it's Tom and Jerry time. No consistent logic, no gravity or weight to anything. All suspense goes right out the window when the lead character has no limitations. It doesn't even matter when one of his cohorts gets stabbed through the friggin' heart. The message to the audience is clear: Don't bother getting too involved in the action. None of it will end up mattering.

Verdict: Like I said, it's tough to be too rough on a film that is so harmless. Thor is likely going to help a lot of filmgoers pass a pleasant two hours at theaters this Summer and then pass quickly from memory. As for the Avengers series, Branagh's film lays the necessary ground work. When audiences turn up for the Avengers they will know who Thor is, although the details of this particular adventure will be pretty hazy by then. 4 out of 10 

Still Maverick After All These Years

Confession: Until this week I had never seen Top Gun. I knew the famous lines, the soundtrack, the Ray Bans, the maddening NES game, and, of course, the volleyball. I just never sat down and watched the actual film. Growing up in my house Schwarzenegger, Gibson and Willis were the action stars, not Cruise.

So I thought, "What better time than the 25th anniversary of Tony Scott's hugely successful fighter pilot opus to finally sit down and watch this landmark of 80's cheese?" Turns out :

A) Knowing the just famous moments and actually watching the film are not all that different, and 

B) Top Gun has not exactly aged like fine wine. 

I record my reactions at The Film Experience. Check it out.

The Edge of Defeat

With little fanfare the team behind 1993's Searching for Bobby Fischer pulled off an amazing filmmaking feat. They made chess cinematic. Anybody can make a boxing match visceral, or a car chase, but a chess match? That's impressive. My tribute to the wonderful Stephen Zallian movie is this week's Unsung Heroes column. Check it out at The Film Experience.

Catching Up With Pedro

I was pleased to see that Nat over at The Film Experience chose Pedro Almodóvar's early film Matador (1986) for this week's entry in his Hit Me With Your Best Shot series. I've written before how excited I am to see his new film The Skin That I Inhabit, and with word of that film's world premiere at Cannes coming any day now, I was eager to brush up on some of the lesser known titles in the master's catalogue.

On first viewing of his Matador I was struck once again just what a confident director he is. Matador is a truly bonkers movie, but Pedro launches into like his tale of a death-obsessed bullfighter, the murderer who stalks him and the psychic student caught in their web as if it's nothing too out of the ordinary. There were times when I wondered if there was something wrong with me since no one on screen was as gobsmacked as I was at the strangeness of it all.

Matador is far from the level of quality he would reach with the incredible run of films that kicked off with 1999's Oscar winning All About My Mother, but it still increased my awe of his skill, especially since he was this good this early in his career. 

Take the sequence where Eva is hiding upstairs after overhearing her lover confess to murder. Pedro unleashes this shot:

showing the note she left on the blackboard - evidence of her presence in the house - unnoticed, in the foreground. Pedro lets the scene wear on with the note unnoticed as the suspense grows and grows. Hitchcock himself would have beamed with pride at directing such a sequence.

There are countless more examples of his control over the audience that I could trot out, but ultimately it's shots like this - my favorite in the film - that make Pedro, Pedro.

More than a few of directors have produced sequences that earn comparison with Hitchcock, but none have done them with the same unmistakable dramatic flair as Alodóvar. He creates shots and scenes that can be mistaken for the work of nobody else, and he can turn stories like Matador, laughably tawdry stuff in lesser hands, into essential viewing. 

Now to go catch up with his other films. 

Nose to the Grindstone

Let the joyous news be spread that Paul Thomas Anderson's next project is officially set to roll cameras this June, fully funded and with subject matter, as far as anyone can tell, in tact. Just last September, I was on here wringing my hands  wondering if we had just seen a potential masterpiece slip through our fingers. A world in which the guy who made There Will Be Blood doesn't have carte blanche to do whatever the Hell he wants is no world that I want to live in, and now, thanks to the Weinsteins, it looks like I don't have to.

And yet, as thrilled as I am that moneyed interests couldn't silence PT's hot button story of a man forming his own religion, honestly, I'm equally thrilled that he's working at all. It seems to be so easy for major filmmakers to lapse into these extended periods of not working that once begun can stretch on into the better part of a decade. It happened to Anderson once before when he took five years to follow up Punch-Drunk Love, and although it was more than worth the wait, it worries me to see such an important filmmaker settling into such a Kubrickian pace of productivity.

I much prefer the Robert Altman/Martin Scorsese school of knocking out a film every two year or so - three tops. Sure that makes them more vulnerable to the occasional dud, but it also opens them up to all the interesting follies and surprise discoveries that wind up being as treasured as their major masterpieces. Marty would never had produced anything as odd and discomfiting as King of Comedy if he has been moving at the glacial pace of a Terrence Malick, and the cinematic landscape would have been poorer for it.

And that goes for Quentin Tarantino's recent announcement that he had finished his new script, a western about an escaped slave called, "Django Unchained". 

The news has been greeted with a flurry of sniping and wailing from those questioning whether Tarantino should be handling such racially loaded material, to those wondering whether Tarantino had anything left in him beside genre riffs. Meanwhile, all I can think is thank God he's working. I'd love another project as mature as Jackie Brown too, but let us just be glad he's not falling into another six year period of dithering like the one that preceded Kill Bill. (And for the record, if it's a genre riff as goddamned awesome as Basterds, I say bring it on.)

And everything I said goes double - triple - for Alexander Payne who is finally releasing The Descendants this year after an excruciating seven year hiatus. Payne was on course to be this generation's answer to Preston Sturges, directing masterworks at a terrific rate -  Election, About Schmidt and Sideways all in a five year period. No one was making adult comedies within a mile of him and then - poof - gone. He up and left us high and dry for the length of a presidential administration.

Never again, sir. Please, never again.

Of course the flip side of that coin are the Woody Allen's of the world, mechanically turning out product like and assembly line worker, even if the muse hasn't visited since Clinton was in office. But ya know what, I'll still take Allen's way of doing things - Jade Scorpions and all - since it meant that when Allen was in his prime he was cranking out enough beloved films to make up for the late career slumps of himself and two other filmmakers just like him.

Hurdy Gurdy Man

This week's Unsung Hero column is up at The Film Experience. Do click on the link immediately and check it out. This episode is a tribute to the casting in a film everyone can get behind: David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), still his absolute best film. No arguments!

And while we're on the subject how brilliant is the above shot? One of the best silent moments of realization ever filmed. Or does anyone think there's room for ambiguity in that expression?

Green Lantern vs. the Laugh Test

I'm not a comic book guy. I can count the number of comic books I've read in my life on my fingers. I still get confused over which heroes are DC and which are Marvel.

This does not make me a bad audience member for comic book adaptations. On the contrary, since I'm coming to these stories fresh I try to leave the skepticism at the door and have some fun. No spending the whole movie questioning why all the X-Men's mutations are super cool instead of horribly debilitating. No nagging curiosity about Hulk's amazing elastic pants, or wondering how Danny DeVito was raised by penguins.

After all, aren't these movies going out of the way for viewers like me? They didn't change Wolverine's outfit from yellow Spandex to molded rubber to please the superfans. They did it because they knew guys like me would roll their eyes into the next theater if Hugh Jackman was running around done up like a contortionist from Cirque du Soleil. The least I can do is drop the nitpicking and roll with it.

Up to a point.

Take the new Green Lantern trailer. I know jack squat about Green Lantern the character or his mythos so I try to keep an open mind. Which means when this guy shows up early in the trailer ...

...I don't let it phase me. So. Green Lantern has aliens. I did not know that. Same goes for this fella:

When my brain protests that aliens can either be purple or have neatly trimmed mustaches, but that both is really pushing it, I tell myself to drop it. Big forehead purple aliens in jumpsuits. Let's do this. And when this happens...

... somehow I manage not to judge, even though for the life of me all I can think of is this:

So I'm still on board. I'm ready to strap in for the whole leave-your-brain-at-the-door, Summer blockbuster, "If you only see one movie this year...blah, blah, blah", All-American good time at the movies.

And then for some reason this:

is a deal breaker.

I know Peter Sarsgaard is a brilliant actor. I know the Lantern fans could school me on who he's playing, and why he looks like that, and the original cultural context in which this wouldn't make me chuckle uncontrollably, but it's too late. There is no way I can take this seriously. Sometimes you have to say "screw fidelity to the source material" and ask the basic question, "Is this ridiculous?" and for me angry Peter Sarsgaard with a Giant Forehead of Evil and a sex offender mustache is a bridge too far. Sorry.

Heart Stopper

No Path to Victory?

 

This stunner showing Julianne Moore's total Alaska makeover made the rounds this week to much ooh-ing and ahh-ing. Her channeling of the madly committed "grin and point" of a politician in full campaign mode appears uncanny (it makes me shudder in advance to see Ed Harris given the full McCain).

Still, I worry Moore has taken on a no-win situation here. Simply put Palin the public figure is not a three-dimensional character. Moore is too skilled an actress to leave it at that, but is a deeper Palin still Palin?

Now, I have no doubt that in private the former governor is a real, complex person like everybody else. But that Sarah is a secret carefully shielded from the media. I don't doubt Julianne's abilities to master every tic and wink and "You betcha" by the time the camera's roll, but when Game Change heads behind the scenes Moore is either going to have to conjure up a so far nonexistent depth or settle for a shallow imitation of Palin's public persona.

It doesn't help that - let's be honest - Palin behind the scenes is probably not a pretty sight. I'm sure Moore didn't sign on to do a hit job on the former governor, but somehow I doubt that Game Change's accounts of her backstage behavior are tales of grace and professionalism. Ms. Moore has her work cut out for her.

On a side note, how strange is it that Moore's Palin pics surfaced so soon after the test pics from her almost-happened Hillary Clinton performance? It makes me want to see Moore pull a Peter Sellers in Strangelove and play multiple roles in this. I don't see her as Elizabeth Edwards, but I think she could pull off a great Rielle Hunter, no?