Thor: Ragnarok (4/5 Stars)

For those that felt Thor would be more entertaining if his tragic flaw was stupidity as opposed to pride (see my review of “Thor”) and did not bother seeing the second movie because it looked more stilted and oppressive than the first, the third movie in the “Thor” saga is exactly the course-correction the character and story sorely needed.

One half of the story is business-as-usual. There is a political crisis in Asgaard. Odin has finally died (or has he?) and his long-lost daughter, Hella, played by none other than Cate Blanchett, has come back from the throne. As she is Odin’s eldest issue and apparently was his right-hand person in establishing Odin’s empire, she has a pretty good argument for being Queen. Thor, played by Chris Hemsworth, and his brother Loki, Tom Hiddleston, aren’t going for it though and try to start a fight. She defeats them handily and even crushes Thor’s mighty hammer.

Thor lost his hammer in the first movie, but whereas in that movie the event inspired soul-searching and just a little bit of crying, in this movie Thor’s loss of his hammer merely serves to knock a few power notches off the characters ability points so the fights he undertakes afterwards are fairer and funnier. Thor finds himself on a garbage dump planet ruled by the Grandmaster, Jeff Goldblum, who specializes in providing gladiatorial contests. The whole scene feels like the color scheme and outgoing nature of “Guardians of the Galaxy” has been injected into the Thor universe (or that Thor has taken a vacation in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” universe for a spell.) This works much better than one would perhaps think. Thor has never been especially funny, but becomes quite useful for initiating and returning jokes in this movie. It helps that Chris Hemsworth is an underrated comic actor and is particularly good at being a dumb blonde hunk (see the recent “Ghostbusters” reboot).

Surrounding Thor in the trash world are other routinely funny characters. Jeff Goldblum, an inspired piece of casting if there ever was, is essentially playing a meme-version of himself. Given that he is technically the bad guy, his weirdly punctual way of stilted speaking deprives any sense of foreboding in the story. He enters Thor in a non-consensual gladiatorial contest. There Thor meets a rock giant named Korg whose accent and style of speaking is reminiscent of the “The Flight of the Conchords.” That is no mistake. He is voiced by a director of that series, Taika Watiti, who also is the director of this movie. Thor also meets the reigning champion, none other than the Incredible Hulk, who has eschewed his Dr. Jekkyl-Bruce Banner persona for a running two years because this garbage planet actually likes the other guy. Thor without his hammer is a bit like Superman consistently surrounded by Kryptonite. It brings him down to earth where Hemsworth comic abilities allow the rest of us to laugh at him. It also helps that they shaved off his pretentious long hair.

The battle scenes in Thor: Ragnarok are spectacular and not so cringe-inducing as most other blockbuster movies. I’ve complained ad infinitum about nameless and countless humans being destroyed in great movie spectacles of violence without anyone in the story particularly caring. This is less of a concern when the characters are gods and cannot actually die or get all that much hurt. The gladiatorial contest between Thor and The Hulk is especially pleasurable.

Given that one-half of the movie is consistently funny and fun to be around, the other half seems to lull in parts. This has got to be the first time that I have written that Cate Blanchett does not inhabit the most interesting part of a movie. Here it is true, but it is mainly because the Thor-Hulk story-line is so entertaining. I got a great kick out of it and look forward to the next Thor movie.

p.s. If Thor is the God of Thunder and he can summon thunderbolts, why would he not be immune to tasers that use electric shocks.

NOAH (4/5 Stars)

The time for mercy has past. The time of punishment has begun.

You want faith? How about the faith of the producers behind writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s new film, “Noah.” They have reportedly spent $125 million dollars to make and market it. Sure, Aronofsky is a great filmmaker. But he is not a proven blockbuster filmmaker. His hits have always been these low budget character studies (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan). The one time he did command a large budget for the time travelling obscufated odyssey The Fountain it became a critical and box office failure, a sure poster child for ambitious folly. “Noah,” on paper at least, seem adept at capturing the audiences that filled the theaters for Darren Aronofsky’s previous films but also the people that showed up for Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” and other money making religious films. But “Noah” was not made by a religious filmmaker at least not one recognized by any church groups as being especially religious and “Noah” is a demonstrably different type of movie than Aronofsky’s earlier work. The producers are hoping to capture both audiences but there is also an outside chance it might not get either. And what will be left is the artwork itself, another ambitious folly or at least the most unique blockbuster (i.e. a movie with an over $100 million dollar budget) I’ve ever seen.

The strangness of “Noah” is born from its dark and primitive source material and the baffling sincerity of its modern makers in telling it exactly as it should be told. The original story can be found in the book of “Genesis” in the Old Testament of the Bible. It is a short story and can be summed up like this. God became dismayed at the wickedness of his creation and wished to eliminate all of it via a huge flood. He ordered Noah to build an ark and save two of each animal to survive. Noah builds the ark and God does exactly what he said he would do. He covers the world in a huge flood and kills every single human and every single animal on earth except the Noah and his family and the animals they have collected on the ark.

Now a modern audience would perhaps object to God’s malevolence in this story. Surely not every person on earth is wicked and even if they were, how is it okay to kill them all without warning or due process? Where is the justice in that? And by the way how is collecting two of each animal saving the species? Won’t they all become degenerate and hopelessly inbred in a few generations after the flood? Really the only way this story would make moral sense is if you were living in prehistoric times and continually witnessed the wrath of Mother Nature without knowing the science behind it. Surely, if you do not understand how the storms work, you may imagine that a deity was creating the weather in response to the behavior of humans. Or if you did not know the world was round and had not the slightest idea how big it was and thought the rain came from holes in the ceiling of the sky like the Bible describes (and not say the evaporation of existing water) you may have no trouble believing a flood could raise the ocean level for 40 days above all the existing land in the world and then sink to its original level after the rain stopped falling. These concerns are generally so prevalent in modern society that any Old Testament tales are generally eviscerated beyond all recognition from the original worldview of the author. Take for example the movie, “Evan Almighty” that starred Steve Carell as a U.S. Congressman who is told by God (Morgan Freeman) to build an ARK. Turns out in that movie, ARK, represents ‘Acts of Random Kindness.’ Oh the original Noah was rolling in his grave.

But Darren Aronofsky is telling this tale as it should be told: that is dark and weird and catastrophic. And he is using computer generated visual effects for all the animals. And he is creating incredible storms bashing up entire landscapes, and he went and built a huge ark out of gopher pitch and wood. In essence he poured the money only possible in modern society with a completely developed economy into a tale that only people in a primitive society with no scientific knowledge could take seriously. Who is the primary audience for this movie? Nobody? That is why I think the producers committed a great act of faith in this movie. I would not have done it. And I liked it.

The casting for this movie is pitch perfect. Russell Crowe plays Noah. Anthony Hopkins plays Methusala, Noah’s grandfather. Jennifer Connelly plays Naameh, Noah’s wife, and Emma Watson plays Ila, an adopted daughter. Finally Ray Winstone plays Tubal Cain, descendant of the original Cain and self-proclaimed king of this prediluvain Earth. Biblical acting is not your normal kind of acting. It is reminiscent of Shakespearean acting but with less humor. I think there is but one and only one joke in this movie. (But of course who could joke when the apocalypse is at hand.)  They all pull it off very well. Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins both seem more at home in movies that take place a long time ago than they are in modern settings. We are reminded of their roman gladiator movies for good reason. I could praise the acting of Jennifer Connelly but I would prefer merely to dwell for some time on how beautiful she is in this movie. She is of that group of few women like Jodie Foster and Sandra Bullock that seem to have hit their peak of physical perfection in their mid-forties, not an easy thing to do. Emma Watson is cute too but we all already know that. Stealing the show though is Ray Winstone as Tubal Cain. The character is completed invented and a definite improvement from the original tale. Tubal Cain questions his Creator. Did you not cast my ancestors out of the Garden of Eden to live in hardship in the desolate wilderness? And is it so wicked for me to survive as best I can with what you have given me? Why does you not speak to me? Am I not made in your own image? I think he has a good point.

Other interesting things to dwell on: The production design of Noah’s Earth suggests a world that has been untouched. That is the landscape is flat and spare. It does not look like Earth as we know it but an Earth just formed. Creationists are of this view and that the great flood is what formed everything like the Grand Canyon. However when Noah tells the story of creation to his children, when he speaks of the seven days, we instead see several billions of years starting with the Big Bang in very fast forward. That’s not quite right I thought. Also the wickedness of man is linked to environmental degradation. This too is not quite right. I would bet anything that the original author’s did not give a hoot about the squandering of Earth’s resources and was far more concerned with sodomy and other like things. I know it is sort of better this way, but if you are going to go so far to be faithful with the source material, might as well go whole hog huh.

Thor (2/5 Stars)

I find it amazing sometimes just how much faith a movie will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular visuals but how little faith it will have in the audience’s ability to accept spectacular audio. “Thor” takes place in three different interstellar realms. One is Earth. It looks like New Mexico. One is a name I can’t remember how to pronounce or spell. It is where a bunch of surly frost giants live. It looks like a craggly icecube. The last is Asgard, which is where all the Norse gods of mythology live. Asgard is what the earth would look like if it were flat, made entirely of a city on a mountain, and contained the most extravagant and impractical architecture ever. The inhabitants of Asgard are Norse gods. There is King Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and his two sons Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Then there is a crew of other Norsemen that aren’t very memorable. Finally there is the great Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from “The Wire”) who plays the dutiful gatekeeper that guards the realm from evil threats. Guess what? The conversations of these immortals never rise past the level of present day high school English. The sentences are short and clipped. The vocabulary is limited. The phrases are unimaginative and totally underwhelming. If the gods could speak, I would be hugely disappointed if they sounded like this. I’m making a huge point about this mostly because the movie was directed by Kenneth Branagh, a man best known for his Oscar nominated movie adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. If anyone is capable of punching up a script to include more exalted dialogue it would be this guy. The fact that this wasn’t done suggests that the makers thought the audience wouldn’t accept it. Because I guess larger-than-life steroid-toking Norse gods that hang out in gargantuan palaces and wear over-elaborate warrior costumes is one thing, but if they had intelligent conversations, well that would just be snobbish.

The plot works really well in the form of a one-paragraph pitch. Earth is a battleground between two realms of gods. One contains the frost giants and the other contains the Norse gods of Asgard. Somehow a couple of frost giants trespass into Asgard. Thor wants to escalate the mere trespass into a war. This is something Odin forbids Thor to do. Thor goes into the frost giant realm anyway and starts a big fight with his hammer. Odin, angered by such arrogance, banishes Thor to Earth. He also banishes Thor’s hammer to Earth but not before putting a curse on it. Only those worthy of the hammer will be able to pick it up and receive its power. That includes Thor at this point, who is now stranded on earth without any of his powers. The first people Thor meets on Earth is a astrophysicist played by Natalie Portman, her mentor played by Stellan Skarsgard, and a college intern played by Kat Dennings. Meanwhile in Asgard, Thor’s half brother Loki connives to usurp the throne.

This could make a really good movie I bet. Let me explain what the movie should have done. Here we have Natalie Portman playing what is said to be a brilliant scientist with social problems. It wouldn’t hurt if she acted like the description. The way she is in the movie is abnormally normal. Then there is the Stellan Skarsgard whose character basically consists of unbelieving skepticism of the existence of Norse gods in the face of increasingly obvious evidence. Almost every conversation he has with Natalie goes something like this:

Stellan: This is silly Natalie, there is no such thing as Norse gods.

Natalie: But what about the elaborate computer generated effects we saw and the man that fell from the sky that looks like Thor and even calls himself Thor.

Stellan: Oh Natalie, you silly person.

That’s paraphrased somewhat but you get the gist. There should have been only one of these exchanges. After awhile Stellan starts sounding really dumb. Finally there is Kat Dennings who is this movie’s attempt at comic relief. If the movie followed my advice in allowing Thor to speak in exalted prose and allowing Natalie to be a total nerd, then this character would have a lot more material to make jokes from. But as it is, she is just another normal person in a town of normal people. She tries, bless her heart, but there is very little to work with. It is hard to make sly wisecracks about people who act just like you.  

I am now going to suggest something that will essentially rewrite the story. How about instead of being banished for his arrogance, Thor was instead banished for being a big dumb idiot. Imagine that his foray into the Ice World was not merely macho zeal, but incredibly stupid. That instead of him going in and easily beating the frost giants (as what happens here), he instead goes in against much larger odds and has to have his ass saved by his dad. Then Odin banishes for his stupidity, sends down his hammer and curses it with hex that Thor can only lift it if he proves that he can use his brains in battle as well as his biceps. Now that he is on Earth without any powers, he will have to do just that.

This would accomplish a couple of things. One, it would make the bad guys much more formidable. Right now, the Frost Giants are kind of pushovers. Two, it would help the movie avoid melodrama and slow motion; the absence of which would have made the movie move faster and be much funnier. Three, it would make the Natalie Portman character much more useful. Here, she helps Thor overcome his arrogance by teaching him table manners. How about instead she taught him the basics of working your brain to accomplish things. Natalie Portman would then be perfectly cast. Did you know that in real life she is brilliant? She's a Harvard graduate and a bona fide scientist. Add to that the fact that she is small and weak. Portman and Thor technically complement each other very well, if only the characters could be developed in a way that allowed them to do so. Thor could help the socially inept scientist in return. For example he could improve her social standing by being a hunk that talks to her in public or perhaps he could help her move a large piece of furniture.

The way it is in the movie, Thor’s problem with arrogance can only be cured with being a more polite person. That’s great I guess but it hardly helps a summer blockbuster. You may be surprised by how many slow scenes of touchy-feely soul searching there is in this movie. Just take the climatic battle sequence. To win, the mighty Norse god Thor pulls a “Jesus.” He “turns the other cheek.” Now I do hesitate to suggest that a character shouldn’t act like Jesus, but I think something must be said about staying true to the source material. Would the Norse god of Thunder really be into self-sacrifice? Come on.

One more thing, I really have to complain about Branagh’s decision to film so much of the movie in weird tilted camera angles. The point I would think of using those angles would be to confuse perception and unsettle the audience. Sometimes that is called for in a movie like “12 Monkeys.” But in this movie? I don’t think so. This movie should be presented in a straightforward manner with confidence. This is a blockbuster about an immortal after all.

The Wolfman (2/5 Stars) February 17, 2010

Sheeple linin’ up for the slaughter

There are primarily two wrong things with The Wolfman. One – it isn’t scary. And Two – it isn’t funny. The story starts with the brutal murder of a man on the Moors of England by an unseen beast. His brother (Benicio Del Toro) is summoned home to his family’s ancient estate. There he finds his father (Sir Anthony Hopkins) and plenty of townspeople full of the requisite idiocy needed to not figure out the very obvious fact that there is a werewolf on the prowl. The smartest of the sheeple (not a compliment) is a sheriff played by Hugo Weaving (Mr. Smith from The Matrix). Del Toro, Hopkins, and Weaving: These are some of the best dramatists in the business and they fit perfectly into this type of movie. Unfortunately there are not as many good writer as there are good actors. The most creative part of this movie happens when the werewolf is hunting down one of the sheeple. The sheeple gets cornered and tries shooting at the beast. When he notices he can’t kill it (supposedly because he forgot to load silver bullets into his gun) he tries to shoot himself in the head. He fails. To his terror the gun is out of bullets. Then the werewolf decapitates him with a flick of its wrist. There, you no longer have to see this movie. I just spoiled the best part.

It’s sad that the great actors in this movie are wasted. But what is really deplorable is why they were wasted and that's because this movie makes a series of false assumptions of how audiences fundamentally work. In doing so it omits several easy techniques that would easily scare the wits out of us and uses other techniques rather badly. But first let’s go back to the beginning and ask a very pressing important question: What do truly scary movies do and why does that scare us?

One of the scariest movies I've ever seen is Steven Spielberg's Jaws. After I saw that movie I was afraid of swimming alone in a pool. People make a huge deal out of John Williams haunting score and the fact that you can’t see the shark for so long. They say things like, “It’s so scary because it invites you to use your imagination to make the monster real.” Bullshit I say. If that were true than The Wolfman would be scary. That movie has a very good haunting score and for the longest time you don't see the werewolf. No, what makes the shark in Jaws so scary is that it is so thoroughly explained. You have the sheriff reading aloud from books on great whites. You have a scientist that speaks professionally about bite radiuses, feeding habits, and latin genus names. He explains it all very precisely, “It’s amazing. This thing is really a miracle of evolution. All it does is sleep and eat and make little sharks.” Now some of this is bad science but it doesn’t matter because there is so much credible sounding detail that the myth of the great white eating machine feels very real to us. Add in the historical anecdote about the worst shark attack ever, The USS Indianapolis, and your completely set. I am now afraid of my swimming pool. 

The thing about The Wolfman is that it apparently thought werewolves are boring. They are never explained. Where did they come from? What do they want? Why does the moon make them crazy? Why would only silver bullets hurt them? Can true love really tame them and how the hell does that work? The writer doesn’t have to make these answers up. I assume they are part of werewolf lore. All he had to do was plagiarize from all those other werewolf movies in the past. But someone somewhere thought that even if we had great talkers like Del Toro, Hopkins, and Weaving explaining things, people would grow restless and become bored. That kind of lowest denominator thinking is really kind of insulting to the audience. May I remind those people that Jaws was a huge success. A person talking doesn’t inherently slow a movie down. 

But let’s just assume that we don’t want to explain the monster at all in a movie. Can it still be scary? Yes, of course it can. I point to a great film from South Korea named The Host. In that movie a kind of mutated giant lizard terrorizes a city in South Korea. Nobody knows what the monster is or where it came from but is it still scary. Why? Because when they showed the monster it moved in a rational way as if it was beholden to such things as the law of physics. There is an incredibly good monster “terrorizing a crowd” scene where the giant lizard rampages over many people, killing several. It is especially effective because it is very skillfully shown in long shots. You can see the monster galloping over to a person and eating them in about as much time as it should take for said imaginary monster to do so. This gives a sense of reality to the entire thing. It allows the audience to be able to predict just how much time a man has to run away from it to safety. That creates suspense and is especially scary when we understand that the man won’t make it and see that he doesn’t. 

In contrast, the werewolf in this movie sometimes follows the laws of physics and sometimes it doesn’t. A lot of the time he just pops into the frame to give the viewer a jolt. This may scare in the short term but it doesn’t provide suspense and it isn’t going to leave a lasting impression. Why? Because the thing triggers all those nerves in our head that says, "Hey it's okay, this is just special effects."

This movie omits much of the needed dialogue to explain the beast or develop the story or characters. It skips to special effects scenes that don’t make sense and thus aren’t exciting. This gives the viewer the sense that they are watching a movie both in fast-forward and in slow motion at the same time. Everything is hurried through and nothing is happening. The one saving grace a horror movie that isn't scary can have is if it is funny. But this movie wasn’t funny. In fact the only laughs it got were bad laughs. They took place when the only woman in the story stopped the sheriff from killing the beast so she could try to tame it by pure love. After a nice run through the woods and a lot of weeping and pleading, the beast stalls just as he is about to kill her. At this moment of truth she kills the beast herself. A guy in front of me yelled, “Weak!” and everyone laughed. I didn't care about the interruption because I didn't care about the story (although I do wonder what exactly her plan had been all along.)

Beowulf 11/18/07

I don't know what Robert Zemeckis is doing here. His last two movies have been entirely motion picture capture CGI Animation. He takes actors, covers them with dots and then digitally restores them in a fantasy land. Which would be cool if the actors looked like people in the final project. Most of the people in Beowulf looks like Sims. They have all the corresponding body parts but they have more in common with robots with rubber skin than people. The technology is not yet ripe, hopefully if Zemeckis hopes to do this sort of thing again, he can finally get it right. If he can't then he should resort to the good example of 'Sin City' and just film real people in front of a green screen. Then he can have his fantasy land populated with real people not androids. I never thought a naked Angelina Jolie could be so unsexy. 
As far as action and spectacle are concerned the movie succeeds. We have a cool Grendel, Sea Monsters, and Fire Breathing Dragon. (Then again, I could say that action and spectacle succeed in any movie nowadays can't I.) I saw this in an IMAX screen although I'm not sure it was in 3-D. I don't think it was, although a few scenes hinted at it. 
They also did a good job I felt adapting the movie from the book, or ancient manuscript as it was. There was a huge makeover with Grendel's mother that draws the two sides of the story together. Most people won't like the very liberal way they fooled with the source material. Personally I didn't much like the story when they made me read it in high school. I didn't much care that they made up half of it. 
It's almost impossible to talk about performances in this movie. The technology they use to bring this movie to life can't make real people. We have a tremendous actor in Sir Anthony Hopkins, but his movements are artificial and his face can't convey true emotion. It's like the guy is wearing a full body suit, not something even the most talented can act through. 
Then we have Ray Winstone in the title role. Here the technology can get creepy. Winstone is a bit chubby in real life. In the movie he has the body of a Greek God. He's got a sick pack of abs and huge defined muscles. Apparently the only body part Ray contributed was his face. Everything else is made up. There is one exception when this stuff actually works, and that's when a charachter is doing something physically impossible. When Beowulf battles sea monsters the effects work. This I think is because we are watching fake people doing fake stuff. When Beowulf has emotional closeups the technology falters horribly. I can't take the robot seriously! I don't feel his humanity.
This too happened with Angelina Jolie. Seeing her in this movie with nothing on really didn't have the impression on me it should of had. 
And I saw John Malkovich's name in the credits but I haven't the slightest idea who he played. Where was he? I have the suspicion it was but a voiceover. I don't know.
Robert Zemeckis is one of my favorite directors and I would gladly pay to see any of his films. This one doesn't change that. I respect that he's on the cutting edge of visual effects but I sincerely hope, for his sake, that he perfects whatever he's trying to do soon. I really don't care too much about all the cool camera angles or effects this type of film provides. I just want to watch a Zemeckis film with people again.

All the King's Men 01/09/07

Boy they really screwed up with this one. I've never seen a two and a half hour movie that really should have been longer. It seemed to me that they got scared people would be bored so they went out and took thirty minutes out of the movie. Unfortunately what they took out were all the moments that would make anyone care about the movie. Moments that explained who Willie Stark was, who he was fighting against, why we care about the girl, why we care about the guy. What exactly was corrupt about the governnor, why does Law care whether Winslett slept with Penn or not. Who the hell is the Ruffalo character. There's no backstory on this story. There isn't even a bad guy or antagonist. It's as if the director assumed we had read the book and only wanted to see the good scenes. This movie is like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. It should have been good. It was great on paper, but it isn't a complete movie and at two and a half hours that's pretty shameful.

By the way, this movie claimed to be about the Sean Penn character Willie Stark. It isn't. It's about a sad sack reporter who's name I can't remember played by Jude Law. He doesn't like Willie because Willie once went to a strip club. My God the horror. This movie probably made sense to anyone who thought Clinton really deserved to be impeached. It didn't make much sense to me.