thor: the hammer is so much more than his penis

*uh, this review contains a couple spoilers. consider yourselves warned, chumps!*

thor: starring natalie portman as the god of thunder


...no, wait, she was something else. and was she ever!

i really liked this movie. really, really, really. here's the thing: i feel like i liked it a lot because kenneth branagh directed--but hopefully i didn't like it because kenneth branagh directed, if you see what i'm getting at. in the best-case scenario (which is how i remember it happening, but i might not be remembering accurately), i was thinking to myself at the end, "hunh. this movie was not super-original, and sometimes the dialogue wasn't great. why did i like it so much? the acting? the directing?" and then kenneth branagh's name popped up on the screen and i was like "OH!"

the above sounds pretty harsh, or damning with faint praise, or what have you.  but i think that plot and even dialogue are often just window-dressing.  see previous entries to do with thoughts about a well done cliche being much better than a weak original idea (how to train your dragon is the main entry on this subject--there are also plenty of entries where i'm really mean about badly-done cliches.  hey, i don't have to be consistent; i'm a woman!).

i liked it so much because it really was all about the characters. perhaps unfairly, i am attributing that to branagh.  it reminded me of iron man (1), but a little more basic, though not in a bad way--the same sort of, like, "focused more on character development than originality" fight scenes (not that i've ever in my life attempted to write a fight scene, here), and the same sort of focus on expressing who the people in the film were as opposed to what they were up to (indicative detail of both sides of this point: thor fighting the frost giants with a grin on his face, completely despite the fact that the "action" of the fight was happening elsewhere). and so it was awesome, because no matter how semi-fleshed the plotline was (and it did occasionally have that hopping-from-sequence-to-sequence feel about it, which is, you know, pretty common to most movies that have a crapload of plot to cover in not a ton of time), there was always something you cared about watching to watch, and that something was always being done very well.

of kat dennings (playing the ipod owner) i've never had enough, obviously--she's always great. natalie portman (playing the assorted clothes wearer) was awesome--really great vulnerable-eager-quasi-unafraid thing going on. chris hemsworth (god of haircut) was really fabulous--both ripply AND emotionally on-point, straightforward without being stupid (i'm guessing not a simple balance to strike, but he did so real well). shout-out also to stellan skarsgard (furrowed brow), who didn't have a ton of things to do but did them all (including an evacuation scene made somewhat fatuous by lack of time) with an awesomely complete character, and tom hiddleston (sulky steve valentine), who played his gay satan role with its unbalance lingering very skillfully below the surface. everyone was good. i didn't like anthony hopkins as much in this as i did in the wolfman. i think he does bad daddy better than he does good daddy, but i still liked him.

half the time i thought the aesthetic of the movie was beautiful, and half the time i thought it was olivia newton john's xanadu meets bart station. but that stuff doesn't really matter. i'm just getting my digs in because i like to dig. because somebody (that would be me) is just a rude gus.

OH!! and the man of color DOESN'T DIE! heimdall, excellently played by idris elba, comes close-ish, but he doesn't!

and plenty of the time, the dialogue is quite good, by the way.  thor's elevated diction and nordic god habits are confronted really well with the not-overdone disbelief of the human realm--and he doesn't just talk fancy without meaning anything (which in my opinion does sometimes happen, and i notice it, because i am stupid-picky).

the only thing i really violently protest is the tagline. "the god of thunder" isn't a tagline, it's too basic a description of the thing itself (would dub-cee* williams approve?  food for thought...or not). maybe it's trying to capture the straightforwardness of the nature of thor-the-character's aesthetic? i just know it didn't work for me. i thought maybe they could have gone with "the hammer is my penis" as the tagline, but according to my movie friend, that would have been just as much a description.


*still william carlos williams' '90's emcee name.  i am just too proud of it to give it up.

sucker punch: EXTREMELY alien she

sucker punch: movie starring emily browning, vanessa hudgens, jamie chung, some other people, and jon hamm for about five seconds total

things that were awesome about this movie:
1. girl singer cover of "search and destroy."  raw power is one of my favorite albums ever--and the cover featured in sucker punch was awesome.  the "white rabbit" cover struck me as overproduced, but i remember really enjoying the "search and destroy" one, maybe just because it's a song we haven't heard covered like six thousand times in a movie context.  apparently the band is called skunk anansie.  it's possible i will be purchasing that album.

2. the ladies were quite good looking.

things that were not awesome at all about this movie:
1. i could talk about the acting (not given a chance) and the dialogue and the inception-lite plot, but what's the point?  no real point.  the movie wasn't good, but i forgive bad movies all the time (loved burlesque.  saw it twice.  thought it was crap, but i couldn't get enough of christina's wide open eyes and cher's sense of humor--and i wasn't even wild about the songs).

2. the real thing, for me, was what i've mentioned before in connection with percy jackson, and, much more recently, tron: the decline and fall of the strong pretty girl.  there's always something exploitative about depicting shiny women in what basically amounts to underwear, but that exploitation itself can't be entirely bad all the time, right?  just based on the principle that next to nothing is fundamentally bad?  like, in mr. and mrs. smith (the pitt/jolie remake) when angelina had on that OUTFIT at the beginning--i saw that movie a long time ago, and it was a sexy shiny outfit, don't get me wrong, but the movie was playing around with ideas of surface identity versus connection and what it meant to exploit one's own possibilities for exploitation.  i mean, in a way.  and it certainly exploited brad pitt in a similar way (again, as far as i remember).  there are arguments that context is just the excuse for experience, there are arguments that "bad" and "good" are childish qualifiers, and these things are possibly true, but i need my excuses and my qualifiers.

the best/worst part is that sucker punch seems to have no awareness of the fact that its ideological platform is CRAP (we can call this the boogeyman syndrome.  but we don't have to). 

or does it???  according to a small part of some dude's review that i just read on wikipedia, the "pseudo-feminist fantasies of escape and revenge" are an ideological platform that lead to the sucker-punch of getting stabbed through the eyeball (dude was Andrew O'Hehir).  gotttta think about this one--was the sexism intentional?

oh, wait, i don't care.  do i?  no, no i do not.  i didn't read the entirety of mr. o'hehir's review, and i know that magazine writers seem to have less leeway in their reviews than newspapers (and irate bloggers), so i won't turn his statement into some kind of bete noir, but if i were to accept that the crappitude of this film were accounted for by the director giving us "what we want (or what we think we want, or what he thinks we think we want)..." it's asking too much.  the fact that both women of color die for literally no reason--sure, because there has to be a (meaningless, pointless) sacrifice--okay, it's a cliche, which i suppose in some very very scary way could be conflated with the things we want to see (insofar as we want to see what we know, as the mildest construction of the continuing reoccurance of this meme in "post-racial" america [seriously, i joke about this stuff in a mildly exasperated tone, but it's gross]).  the tiny skirts and bustiers and what have you...do we want to see that?  hell yes, councillor!  do we want to see girls kick ass while wearing next to nothing?  of course we do!  so what's the issue?  these aspects of the film are executed so idiotically that it's got to be pseudo-ideology, right? 

right?

aha.  the problem with this argument is that the movie offers us literally nothing with the necessary amount of substance to put in the place of the "pseudo-"ideological tenets of the world in which these "pseudo-feminist" fantasies take place*.  in the absence of alternatives, we have to assume that the movie doesn't realize said fantasies are pseudo-feminist, and thinks that they are actually feminist.  because shiny ladies with makeup on looking doe-eyed at a coruplent chef and wielding machine guns with pouty mouths to a grindy-poundy soundtrack is not feminist.  my personal opinion is that mr. o'hehir's review is being nice on purpose--but if it's not, then i respectfully disagree with him.

i don't count a bunch of psychobabble about making the fantasy your own as a fair exchange for pseudo-feminism.  and i don't mean psychobabble as in "much talk in a psychological vein."  i mean psychobabble as in "WHAT???  HUNH?????"  i mean psychobabble as in "DAMNIT, GOVERNMENTAL ALGORITHMS, YOU'RE GENERATING LINES AGAIN!!!"  because someone plugged "feminist fantasy justification" into the machine, and look what they came up with!  all they needed to get said lines totally ready for production was to type them into bing english-german translator, hit translate, have a chimp in a bowtie edit, translat back from german into english, and bam!, as emeril would say.  delicious script-ness.  half the words of an actual script, and with none of the fatty content!

and why was the asian one the one who ran the technologies?? (i was actually excited to see jamie chung because i enjoyed her immensely in dragonball [dragonball--another crappy movie that i liked--see? i'm not an unreasonable person], but she certainly didn't get enough character development to justify killing her [which is typical--it happened to jazz in transformers]).  COME ON, MOVIE.

i had a stressful semester.  this is my unwinding.  sucker punch was bad enough that its badness probably spoke for itself.  i should be more sympathetic.  and would be, if these fools didn't keep coming in and messing around with the lady power.  i'm not even an uber-feminist.  the movies are just making me one.  yeah, yeah, i shouldn't go to see them in the first place.

the soundtrack--full of cast-sung covers--has two songs on it** that were originally performed by women.  this may not be a very good point on my part...maybe music transcends gender.  but this film sure as hell does not.


*sorry so convoluted!
**it's three songs.  i don't know what i'm talking about hardly ever.