Love and Blunder

So Thor: Love and Thunder is a bit weak. It's been thoroughly covered at this point and the box office drop in its second weekend tells an accurate story. It's disappointing because Thor: Ragnarok was so good and because Love and Thunder has some good qualities. One of those good qualities is not how much its humour resembles Monty Python.

I love Monty Python but the Python movies and Flying Circus are not works of fiction that encourage you to care about the protagonists and their achievements, they're not stories in which we're truly concerned about the welfare of the characters. Life of Brian ends on a joke about everyone suffering slow, painful death. That's not the right tone for a Thor film. At least not an MCU Thor film.

In a Monty Python movie, it wouldn't matter that the plot doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't matter that Thor and his friends have to disguise themselves to enter a convention of the gods even though Thor is a god himself. It wouldn't matter that Jane seems like a completely different character to how she was established in the first film. It wouldn't matter that the characters continue cracking jokes and focusing on their personal lives after all the children in Asgard have been abducted by an army of shadow demons. In a movie where we're supposed to care about the stakes, though, these things are deadly.

So in retrospect it seems even more miraculous that Taika Waititi hit just the right balance in Ragnarok. It's been reported that actors improvised a lot on Love and Thunder and that's how it got such a jokey tone. Improvisation is one of the things that made the first Iron Man work so well but maybe Jon Favreau is just better at harnessing that storm than Waititi is. Possibly Waititi just doesn't have the accrued instincts to sense what's right for more dramatic material. It's a shame because Christian Bale, as the villain, Gor the God Killer, is actually pretty effective. His makeup and performance make him a pretty impressive villain.

And there are some real thought provoking ideas introduced. In an odd moment of serendipity, I'd been talking with my friend, Rizu, with whom I saw Love and Thunder, about Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov and how he refused to believe in a benevolent god because innocent children are exposed to cruelty and suffering. And Love and Thunder begins with the death of Gor's child followed by Gor finding his deity lounging in an oasis, gorging himself on fruit. The theme of imperiled children comes back when Gor kidnaps all the children in Asgard.

I'm starting to wonder if Disney has some kind of mission plan about showing children being warriors since this movie features something like that following on the heels of Leia getting a blaster holster at the end of Obi-Wan Kenobi. It seems an unfortunate choice given the epidemic of school shootings in the U.S. What is Disney thinking? Does someone at Disney think kids need to be encouraged to fight their attackers? It just seems like poor taste. Now, if you had something like Jim Hawkins fighting Israel Hands in Treasure Island, it would make sense. Here's a kid backed into a corner, forced to kill. It's exciting but also terrible and frightening. The kids in Love and Thunder and Obi-Wan Kenobi never seem especially frightened. So it's not really an exploration of a traumatic and violent situation, it's just like they're stroking kids' egos.

Natalie Portman is also a big problem in the film. This isn't quite the worst example of a female character taking over from an established male character. The fact that she assumes the name of "Thor" in the movie is never explained nor does it make any sense. But the role requires Portman to step well outside her limited skillset as an actress. She certainly gives it her best shot and I commend her for putting on some muscle. But the actress who formerly distinguished herself with her beauty and a sort of ethereal aloofness just can't act with . . . I guess I'd call it personality. She just doesn't seem to know what it's like to have a personality.

There were some funny jokes. The stuff with the Guardians of the Galaxy at the beginning was good. I liked the use of Guns N Roses music. But Love and Thunder is one of the weakest MCU films to date.

The Mathematics of Cinema

I didn't have a lot of time last night so I just watched Guillermo del Toro's 1987 short film Geometry. What a perfect blend of horror and comedy. And you can see Del Toro's distinctive style already in place with the saturated red and blue coloured lighting, the camera angles, and a kind of pitiless editing.

I don't know why I've been so in the mood for horror movies lately.

Yesterday I also saw the new trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder.

I still want to see it but the trailer isn't nearly as good as the teaser. Christian Bale looks great as the villain but I'm afraid Natalie Portman is going to drag the movie down. The concept of a woman taking over a famous male character's identity is so overdone now and doesn't even seem to be truly feminist. But I have to hand it to Portman for bulking up. She still doesn't look like anyone I'd call Thor but I respect the work she put into it. I might even like this storyline if I saw in isolation.

Twitter Sonnet #1584

A cape interred these eighty years returns.
A bidden shape approached our humble home.
A simple ape incurred what God discerns.
Forbid escape, or must in tempests roam.
A hungry shadow never leaves the house.
Revenge abides between the walls of stone.
A dreamy field conceals the panicked mouse.
The morning hides the ancient mummy bones.
The coffee speaks when tea could scarcely sleep.
Arriving home, the footless boots were wet.
The time to take the stairs was greater deep.
The horses dashed to beat the idle bet.
The running mountain slams athwart its twin.
The antsy sky was ever picked to win.

Rabbit Courage

Not all the things we liked as kids look so good when we're older, whether it's He-Man or Good Luck Trolls or, like the protagonist of 2019's Jojo Rabbit, Adolf Hitler. True, being a Nazi fanboy has direr connotations than being an avid Pog collector, but filmmaker Taika Waititi wisely sees the same rules of youthful foolishness likely applied. Employing a tone frequently reminiscent of Wes Anderson, Waititi made a good comedy about the innocent absurdity that can exist concurrently with malicious horror.

As Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, "As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too." As young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) takes to Hitler Youth training with gusto, he meets silly adult Nazis played by Sam Rockwell, Alfie Allen, and Rebel Wilson. Wilson's character, Fraulein Rahm, never breaks stride in her devotion to the cause, even later in the film when she's packing kids off with explosives. She maintains the manner of a secretary whose mind is never entirely on her boring job yet her devotion to the concept is beyond question.

The film's most interesting character is Sam Rockwell's Captain Klenzendorf whose fervour for the National Socialist Party has worn out with age and experience along with assorted other kinds of youthful idealism and slavishness. He designs his own uniform at one point with ridiculous crimson fringe and a plumed helmet that doesn't so much proclaim his loyalties as much as it says, "Fuck this noise, I'm doing what I want."

Jojo's mother, played by an especially sharp and charming Scarlett Johansson, is a more straight forward, secret anti-Nazi, and Jojo discovers one day a Jewish girl his mother's been hiding in the wall. Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) threatens and mocks the boy and he, of course, is horrified by her. But like most kids who spend a lot of time together on the playground, no taunts or factionalism can quite outlast the influence of shared experience and hormones.

Waititi himself plays Jojo's imaginary friend in the film, a version of Adolf Hitler, whose childlike recriminations and articulations of moral support seem much more like a kid's construct than the bloody dictator, though there's understandably some overlap between the two. Waititi's performance is very funny.

It's a very sweet film that says some rather dangerously innocent and insightful things about human nature.