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I still don't think you're the god of thunder, but you ought to be
Norwich tomorrow, Wednesday. Come if you're in the area. I am still very happy about A Mayse-Bikhl.
In the meantime—
Allowing for the fact that it makes a blended crack pretzel of Norse mythology, Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is a surprisingly enjoyable movie. Its major fault is how quickly all the pieces spin by, the feeling that there should be more of it—which I suppose is going to be The Avengers (2012), but I would happily have watched Chris Hemsworth culture-shock his way around New Mexico for another half-hour, or Tom Hiddleston do pretty much anything. He's the element I should analyze when I have not had a terrible day (which I have, I resent it, I don't need any more karmic counterbalancing), because he bears almost no resemblance to his mythological prototype and he is a plausible and compelling Loki. Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don't have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he's a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child's desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.
(I am shortchanging Hemsworth, who in some ways has a much trickier role than Hiddleston. It's not just that he looks like a Viking god—and it looks good on him, not musclebound, simply built to a bigger than mortal scale—but he convinces with the archaic warrior's directness that needs not to come off as stupidity, the courtliness that can't be staged; he commits to being all in the open as fully as Hiddleston to being inscrutable. You can go wrong with charismatic villainy and still be fun to watch, but go wrong with true-hearted heroism and you don't even get camp, just cardboard. That doesn't happen here. I just still gravitate toward the outsider, the solitary, the loving and hungry brother who is always, even when it saves your life, doing something behind your back.)
It's not a tonally consistent film, which works oddly in its favor. The Æsir with their complex bindings of love and blood and betrayal are the stuff of grand tragedy, while the scenes on Earth are handled with a geeky, breezy humor: stripped of his godhood, Thor crashes to earth in a completely different genre, where he's the MacGuffin of a fast-unraveling day-in-the-life of a research astrophysicist that just happens to include wormholes and men in black. Natalie Portman's Jane Foster isn't Tony Stark or even Bruce Banner; she's a slightly fringe scientist, chasing geomagnetic storms in the desert, which means she's built most of her own equipment and can't afford a real lab assistant, making do instead with a Pop-Tart-munching PoliSci major who really shouldn't be allowed to handle the Taser. (The film does pass the Bechdel test. And while I would have liked to see Jane doing more research, I appreciate that she conforms to neither of the prevailing stereotypes of female scientists onscreen, sexy with her glasses off or just one of the boys. She's a science fiction fan without being a manic pixie dreamgirl, she's not the skeptic whose cold equations are blown away by Thor's demonstrable powers; she's a passionate believer in the awesomeness of the universe that only becomes more awesome the more we find out there is to learn. You can imagine her in Asgard with her research notebook, quizzing Heimdall about the mechanics of the Einstein-Rosen Bifröst. And just for that fact, I'll probably give the silly line about star alignments and quadrants a pass.) There is inevitable fish-out-of-water comedy, but some of it is as funny to the human characters as it is to us. There are throwaway, intelligent things in the script: I approve of Erik Selvig, for example, not just because I'll watch Stellan Skarsgård in anything that isn't Lars von Trier, but because there is a tendency in movies that make use of myth and folklore to keep a character of the appropriate ethnicity around to serve as an infodump—Erik hears "Thor Odinsson," snorts, dismisses the guy as a nutbar, and never explains anything to Jane beyond tossing her the film's equivalent of a copy of the D'Aulaires. The most romantic moment between Thor and Jane is not really their kiss, but their bonding over her research, as he draws for her the Nine Worlds and the branches of Yggdrasil that she is beginning to be able to see in the filaments of galaxies across the void. And then something changes among the Æsir, and the worlds begin uneasily to merge, and we end in a strange inversion of where we started: not with a human woman gazing up at the sky, but a god looking out fruitlessly for Earth.
I could have done with fewer battles. I would have liked more soliloquies. The main characters were so interestingly drawn, I wanted them to talk more—I keep forgetting how much more time an action sequence takes up onscreen than on the page, and every now and then I had the disquieting sense that some bit of connective tissue had been left on the cutting room floor. I'm told there are deleted scenes. As to the post-credits teaser: I'm sure in practice it would have gone all genderfaily, but I'm a little sorry that if Loki is going to be whispering in someone's ear all through The Avengers, it isn't going to be Jane's; she's certainly presented as a more than capable physicist, and he did threaten to pay her a visit. And that could have gotten complicated with Thor. The fact that I am talking about seeing the sequel at all is more than I expected. My summer blockbuster of choice this year is still, I think, Captain America—which I need to write up—but I avoided this one in theaters because I knew Marvel Comics wasn't the Poetic Edda, and it is possible I made a mistake. Either that, or I'm under somebody's malign influence. It's a chaotic system.
I hope I can get some sleep.
In the meantime—
Allowing for the fact that it makes a blended crack pretzel of Norse mythology, Kenneth Branagh's Thor (2011) is a surprisingly enjoyable movie. Its major fault is how quickly all the pieces spin by, the feeling that there should be more of it—which I suppose is going to be The Avengers (2012), but I would happily have watched Chris Hemsworth culture-shock his way around New Mexico for another half-hour, or Tom Hiddleston do pretty much anything. He's the element I should analyze when I have not had a terrible day (which I have, I resent it, I don't need any more karmic counterbalancing), because he bears almost no resemblance to his mythological prototype and he is a plausible and compelling Loki. Marvel can do whatever it likes with gods I don't have a personal stake in, but I expected to be bleeding from the ears from the reconfigured family relationships alone. Instead I wanted much, much more of him. I love how he has a habit of appearing in mirrors, how you can almost never tell what is calculation and what he really feels; how, black-haired, blue-eyed, feverishly pale, he's a callback to the icy dark of Jötunheim, but the dusk-blue that burns up through his skin at its touch, hel-blár, is the one mask he never knew he was wearing. He has a thin-skinned, transparent look about him, a raw edge under glass. It makes him an effective deceiver: he looks as though you should be able to read him with one level stare, which will only show you what you want to see. And it makes him vulnerable: the incredible, child's desolation in his face as he lets go of everything that has been his life and falls into Ginnungagap like a collapsing star. Like a good trickster, he is never a single, quantifiable thing. All of his scenes are exactly as they should be.
(I am shortchanging Hemsworth, who in some ways has a much trickier role than Hiddleston. It's not just that he looks like a Viking god—and it looks good on him, not musclebound, simply built to a bigger than mortal scale—but he convinces with the archaic warrior's directness that needs not to come off as stupidity, the courtliness that can't be staged; he commits to being all in the open as fully as Hiddleston to being inscrutable. You can go wrong with charismatic villainy and still be fun to watch, but go wrong with true-hearted heroism and you don't even get camp, just cardboard. That doesn't happen here. I just still gravitate toward the outsider, the solitary, the loving and hungry brother who is always, even when it saves your life, doing something behind your back.)
It's not a tonally consistent film, which works oddly in its favor. The Æsir with their complex bindings of love and blood and betrayal are the stuff of grand tragedy, while the scenes on Earth are handled with a geeky, breezy humor: stripped of his godhood, Thor crashes to earth in a completely different genre, where he's the MacGuffin of a fast-unraveling day-in-the-life of a research astrophysicist that just happens to include wormholes and men in black. Natalie Portman's Jane Foster isn't Tony Stark or even Bruce Banner; she's a slightly fringe scientist, chasing geomagnetic storms in the desert, which means she's built most of her own equipment and can't afford a real lab assistant, making do instead with a Pop-Tart-munching PoliSci major who really shouldn't be allowed to handle the Taser. (The film does pass the Bechdel test. And while I would have liked to see Jane doing more research, I appreciate that she conforms to neither of the prevailing stereotypes of female scientists onscreen, sexy with her glasses off or just one of the boys. She's a science fiction fan without being a manic pixie dreamgirl, she's not the skeptic whose cold equations are blown away by Thor's demonstrable powers; she's a passionate believer in the awesomeness of the universe that only becomes more awesome the more we find out there is to learn. You can imagine her in Asgard with her research notebook, quizzing Heimdall about the mechanics of the Einstein-Rosen Bifröst. And just for that fact, I'll probably give the silly line about star alignments and quadrants a pass.) There is inevitable fish-out-of-water comedy, but some of it is as funny to the human characters as it is to us. There are throwaway, intelligent things in the script: I approve of Erik Selvig, for example, not just because I'll watch Stellan Skarsgård in anything that isn't Lars von Trier, but because there is a tendency in movies that make use of myth and folklore to keep a character of the appropriate ethnicity around to serve as an infodump—Erik hears "Thor Odinsson," snorts, dismisses the guy as a nutbar, and never explains anything to Jane beyond tossing her the film's equivalent of a copy of the D'Aulaires. The most romantic moment between Thor and Jane is not really their kiss, but their bonding over her research, as he draws for her the Nine Worlds and the branches of Yggdrasil that she is beginning to be able to see in the filaments of galaxies across the void. And then something changes among the Æsir, and the worlds begin uneasily to merge, and we end in a strange inversion of where we started: not with a human woman gazing up at the sky, but a god looking out fruitlessly for Earth.
I could have done with fewer battles. I would have liked more soliloquies. The main characters were so interestingly drawn, I wanted them to talk more—I keep forgetting how much more time an action sequence takes up onscreen than on the page, and every now and then I had the disquieting sense that some bit of connective tissue had been left on the cutting room floor. I'm told there are deleted scenes. As to the post-credits teaser: I'm sure in practice it would have gone all genderfaily, but I'm a little sorry that if Loki is going to be whispering in someone's ear all through The Avengers, it isn't going to be Jane's; she's certainly presented as a more than capable physicist, and he did threaten to pay her a visit. And that could have gotten complicated with Thor. The fact that I am talking about seeing the sequel at all is more than I expected. My summer blockbuster of choice this year is still, I think, Captain America—which I need to write up—but I avoided this one in theaters because I knew Marvel Comics wasn't the Poetic Edda, and it is possible I made a mistake. Either that, or I'm under somebody's malign influence. It's a chaotic system.
I hope I can get some sleep.
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I really wasn't expecting it to be. I don't watch a lot of blockbusters, superhero or otherwise; I like Kenneth Branagh (and I love his Much Ado About Nothing), but with Shakespeare you have a lot more to work with; I couldn't see how there was any way to avoid the fatal combination of big, dumb, and flagrantly unfaithful to the stories. I think he did it with the actors. If he'd done it with the actors and no budget, I'd have liked it better still. But while I can't see myself picking up the comics any time soon, I did not want to stab Branagh once during the movie, and I'm now actively interested in following Tom Hiddleston; that's so much more than I thought I'd get, I'll take it.
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Argh. I like J. Michael Straczynski. Hm.
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Speaking of things I would very much like to see, the way is open, and I shall be at your reading!
I hope today is a better day.
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There was a single shot in the first third of the movie that made me realize why I didn't hate it as I had expected to: Heimdall on Bifröst, looking out into deep space. On his right hand, a glacier-blue nebula. On his left, a cinder-red stellar nursery. Between them, a rift of black without stars. Niflheim, Muspelheim, Ginnungagap. No one ever says the names. Whoever composed that shot knew them. Whatever the script was doing with Marvel continuity and its own retellings, it wasn't as though no one involved in the project knew thing one about Norse mythology. (There is a similarly anonymous cameo from Sleipnir, a brief eerie image. His eight legs flickering as he rears have a spiderlike look, but also like a certain kind of slow-motion photography: of course he's the fastest of horses. He doesn't move the ordinary way through time.) It's also the first presentation of Loki I've seen draw more on the frost side of his nature than the fire, which interests me. He's still a shape-changer, still polytropos and full of unpredictable shifts in direction, but he's consistently associated with reflecting surfaces, with a watchful stillness, with impenetrability and sudden, volcanic upheaval. Magma underneath the ice.
Speaking of things I would very much like to see, the way is open, and I shall be at your reading!
Yay!
I hope today is a better day.
Thank you. So far, it's mostly sleep-deprived. But in a couple of hours, I get on a train.
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It's right there in the D'Aulaire illustration. Clearly a kitty.
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I have now this incontestable image of Sleipnir pulling Freyja's chariot, which may cause me to go to Hel.
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"Cat Bast" (the indefinite cat is always a kitty, but a cat with a name is a cat X) we're all bound for Niflheim?
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If not for that, then because I hear A.L. Lloyd's voice in We're all bound for Niflheim and think there should be chanteys for the Naglfar.
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Not Norse myth by a long shot, but fun, and did a decent job of playing with the system it put in place instead.
---L.
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I liked her romantic state: she has an ex-boyfriend recent enough that his clothes and old hospital ID are still lying around her place, she's not angsting over him, there's no love triangle, it's not any kind of surprise that she's had other partners.
My biggest gripe with the movie was the whitewashing: in that part of New Mexico, and this would be true of most of the state, at least half the people in the background in the town and at the pickup-tractor pull would have been hispanic, and I saw exactly no one who was.
That is an entirely justifiable problem.
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---L.
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I think Branagh has a surpassingly good understanding of the way Marvel's Asgard hovers between the grandiosely magnificent and the faintly silly, and keeps a very difficult balance very well there.
I'd agree totally on your take on Hiddlestone and Hemsworth, with the added observation that Hemsworth gave me the impression that Christopher Reeve's Superman was an influence he was building on, and that was a goodly part of why he worked so well.
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I'd have liked more of Asgard, actually. Frigg is present, but barely interacts; I couldn't tell if Thor and Sif were meant to have (had) a relationship; their three-man band of friends have histories with him that are alluded to, but otherwise I had very little sense of them as people. Heimdall was very clearly badass and very clearly mistrusted Loki, so I don't have any complaints about him, really. He's about like that in the sagas.
I'd agree totally on your take on Hiddlestone and Hemsworth, with the added observation that Hemsworth gave me the impression that Christopher Reeve's Superman was an influence he was building on, and that was a goodly part of why he worked so well.
Interesting. He did not at any point remind me of Christopher Reeve.
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Agreed. I wish they had left in that pre-coronation scene you described; we don't actually see enough of Loki's magic before he starts using it as a weapon.
all the other Aesir respect/vaguely fear Heimdall, who seems at once the most powerful and unknowable of them all, restrained only by his loyalty to whoever holds Asgard's throne.
I liked that as a touch: it is not myth-canonical, but it worked for a guardian of the gate that can be used to bridge worlds or destroy them (and Loki knows other ways).
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I think I might have liked to see it in theaters, but the DVD worked fine.
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Nine
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I take the likeness as a compliment. Thank you. You won't fall in love with it, I think, but you won't want to destroy anyone with a spork. You will probably want to see Hiddleston as Edmund in King Lear, the role to which his Loki is being compared. Perversely, it looks as though he's just been cast as Henry V.
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Oh, yeah. That's wonderful.
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I try . . .