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Thor (2011) poster reproduced under Fair Use, via Wikipedia

I don’t care much for superhero movies.  The concept is boring to me.  I also don’t much care for Norse mythology, so Thor was pretty far down on the list of superhero movies I would want to see.  But Natalie Portman is my favorite actress, and she plays the eponymous hero’s love interest, so when it came on TV the other night, I figured I’d check it out.

The first thing that struck me was how bad the digital special effects were.  The city of Asgard, where Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and the rest of the Norse Gods live looks like the City from  The Wizard of Oz, only less believable.  The enemy creatures that Thor and his comrades fight early on looked pretty fake, and of course, the color palette was the standard blue and orange that I’ve blogged about before.

The first half hour of the movie was pretty tedious, with lots of comic-book fights and bad special effects. The essence of it was this: Thor is persuaded by his brother Loki to attack the enemy “Frost giants”, but it turns out to be a huge mistake, and Thor is banished and deemed unworthy to wield his hammer. He is forcibly cast out of Asgard and crashes in the New Mexico desert, his hammer landing not far away.

At this point, we leave the hokey special effects behind for the most part, and the movie turns into an enjoyable romance between Thor and Dr. Jane Foster, (Portman) an astrophysicist who observes him crashing to Earth after his banishment.

Against the advice of her colleague, Dr. Selvig, Jane takes Thor to the site where his hammer has crashed.  Meanwhile, Thor’s brother Loki is busy taking over Asgard while Odin is in a coma. (Or something. I had trouble following this part.) Loki, it becomes clear, has been orchestrating the whole thing to gain power.

Back on Earth, Thor tries but fails to pull the hammer out of the crater in which it is embedded.  It becomes clear that, per Odin’s command, he is not worthy to wield the hammer.  When this happens, Thor despairs and is taken into custody by government agents, who earlier had confiscated Jane’s scientific notes and equipment in order to study them.

Thor is rescued from them by Selvig, and is able to take back Jane’s notebook.  He and Jane then share a romantic interlude, after which Thor’s friends from Asgard return to let him know of Loki’s treachery.  Then Loki sends this big metal robot-soldier thing down to Earth to kill everyone.

Thor walks up to the robot and addresses Loki, asking him to spare the lives of Jane and her friends.  In exchange, he tells Loki to take his life.  The robot does so, and strikes Thor, knocking him to the ground.  But, as Jane kneels over the apparently dying Thor, the hammer comes soaring out of the ground and flies into his hand, transfiguring him into the God of Thunder.

I won’t lie; it’s a powerful moment.  Thor has become worthy, through sacrificing his life for his loved ones, to wield the hammer.  Of course, he revives and is able to fight off the robot.  He shares a passionate kiss with Jane before returning to Asgard to fight his treacherous brother.

Unfortunately, in the course of defeating Loki and waking Odin, Thor destroys the bridge between Asgard and Earth, meaning he and Jane are separated at the film’s end.  But it ends on a hopeful note, with a shot of Jane and her friends making progress in their research into the portals between realms, and Jane smiling as Thor does the same across the Universe.

As I said, I don’t like superhero movies, but this isn’t a typical superhero movie.  It was directed by the Shakespearean actor/director Sir Kenneth Branagh, and the Bard’s influence is quite clear.  You have a Prince struggling to be worthy of the throne, a usurper taking the throne from the rightful King, and intrigues that lead to wars between kingdoms.  It’s a strong, character-driven adventure story.  The chemistry between Portman and Hemsworth is spectacular, and the supporting characters all hit just the right notes.  The mood is light and adventurous, while still having some very powerful scenes. If you can get past the weak special effects, it’s a very enjoyable romp.

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This is probably one of my favorite optical illusions in cinema.  It’s totally unintentional, but it shows how much context matters when interpreting a scene.

It’s a scene from the 1966 movie A Man for All Seasons, adapted from the play of the same name.  It’s about Sir Thomas More and his defiance of King Henry VIII.  It’s a great movie–well worth watching, though not for the cinematography.

Anyway, here’s the scene that I’m talking about. Look at More (the guy in the center of the shot). More specifically, look at what is on the table in front of him.

There’s always room for Jello–even in the 16th century! (Screenshot used under fair use for purpose of criticism)

When I first saw it, I thought “why does Thomas More have a green  “Jello” mold”? I was fairly confident they didn’t have those in the 16th century.

I’m pretty sure it’s actually some sort of bowl, though why he has an upside-down bowl in front of him is another question.

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I expected “The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu” to be unwatchable.  Anytime you see a DVD for $2.00, you can’t have high hopes.  But, Lovecraft movies aren’t super-common, so I thought I’d give it a try, fully expecting to stop watching after five minutes.

I was very pleasantly surprised.

The movie stars Kyle Davis as Jeff Phillips, the last living relative of horror-writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Jeff and his friend Charlie (Devin McGinn, also the film’s writer) are entrusted by a secret society to protect an ancient relic that the Cult of Cthulhu is trying to steal to awaken the infamous Sea-Monster-God.  Only Jeff has Lovecraft’s genetic ability to resist the telepathic powers of the Cultists, which drive all others who meet them insane.

If this premise sounds a little silly, well, it is.  That’s because the movie is a horror/comedy, but I’d say it’s about 80% comedy, and 20% horror.  And it works.  It’s a very amusing little adventure, while still being reasonably faithful to the principles of Lovecraftian-ism.

The monster special effects are horribly cheap and hokey-looking, but it all works because (a) it’s a comedy and (b) Lovecraftian horror isn’t really about the monsters you see; it’s about the monsters you don’t see. Granted “Lovecraft” and “comedy” are two words you don’t often see together, but in this case, the two blend pretty well.

Is it a great movie? No, but it’s a lot of a fun for anybody who enjoys Lovecraft’s “Yog-Sothothery” but doesn’t take the “Mythos” too seriously.  It’s the most successful blend of cosmic horror and  comedy I’ve seen since the great “Fishmen” musical adaptation of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

The only other thing I’d add is that if you are offended by coarse language, you might want to steer clear.  There is a lot of swearing, although it never felt forced or like “swearing for the sake of swearing”. There is also a fair amount of violence, what with the monsters eating people etc., but frankly, the effects are so silly it barely qualifies as violence in my book.  Your mileage may vary.

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Good article on Felicia Day’s Geek and Sundry site by Kendall Ashley, on the good points of the Star Wars prequels.  Ashley writes:

You could argue that Lucas’ attempts to make lightning strike twice with the exact same formula on an audience who had only grown more jaded and cynical since their first viewing of the original trilogy doomed the project from the start. I think if we had come to Star Wars for the first time as kids with Phantom Menace, we’d feel a bit more fondly towards the prequels.

Having just watched all six Star Wars movies again, after not seeing them (except Phantom Menace, which I saw in 2012) for about 8 years, I would say that my impression was still that the prequel trilogy, while flawed, was far better than the original trilogy, which is entertaining but a mess. A New Hope was frankly rather silly. I’ve always felt this way, but this time the feeling was actually more pronounced.  The Phantom Menace may have some of the best scenes of the entire saga–each time I see it, I’m impressed by how good it is.

I’ve written at length about why each of the Star Wars prequels are actually good here, here and here.  I think people are gradually coming to appreciate them more.

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As I promised when I reviewed the movie, I finally read Stephen King’s  novel. Interestingly, I’d say I have about the same overall opinion of it as I had of the movie: it was interesting, but very flawed.

That’s not to say, though, that they are similar–there are huge differences between the book and the movie.  Let me start with the ways I though the book was better than the movie:

  • Wendy seems like less of a shrieking idiot, and more of a fully-realized three dimensional character.
  • Mr. Halloran has more of a role to play than just “show up and die” so that Wendy and Danny can escape at the end.  The scariest part of the book was the moment when the malign influence of the Overlook briefly tries to take hold of his mind, just as they are about to escape. (However, there are also problems with Halloran’s survival–I’ll get to that.)
  • The suspense of whether or not Halloran will reach the hotel in time is very, very well done.

But then are the things the movie gets right:

  • Getting rid of the stupid attacking hedge animals–that would have been even worse on screen than on the page.
  • Also, getting rid of the wasps.  Actually, most of the hotel’s early attempts at harming the characters are pretty laughable in the book.
  • In my review of the movie, I complained that Jack Torrance seemed “like a blundering, angry buffoon”.  This is lessened in the book, but there is an even bigger problem–a problem so big I’m going to drop the bullet point format to discuss it.

The problem is that instead of Jack seeming like a buffoon, the hotel itself seems like a buffoon.  At the end, when the Overlook has almost fully possessed Jack, it forgets about its own boiler, causing it to explode.

If you accept the strong suggestion that the Overlook is a conscious entity, then this is equivalent to someone forgetting to make his heart beat. This makes the hotel seem less scary and more of an obnoxious idiot.  Which is even worse than Torrance seeming like an obnoxious idiot.

Then there was the problem of Mr. Halloran’s survival.  I was sort of conflicted about this, because I really liked the character; but in the movie the fact that he is killed by the possessed Jack makes the supernatural forces seem like a more credible threat. In the book his survival cheapens the haunted hotel’s powers even more.

Finally, the other thing that annoyed me were the repeated references to Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. I felt like it was suffering the same problem I noted in the movie Prometheus and its references to Lawrence of Arabia: “this story isn’t so great–maybe inserting a few bits from something better will spruce it up.”

Both the book and the movie had interesting concepts in them, but neither one quite works. I read that King apparently disliked the Kubrick movie so much he backed a miniseries that was more faithful to the book.  I’ve yet to see it–I’d be curious to see how it handles the hedge animals.

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I happened to see a bit of the first Harry Potter movie on TV the other day.  It was about as I had remembered: too faithful to the book, to the point where it got dull.  (An explanation of the rules of Quidditch is funny and entertaining on the page.  On the screen, it is boring.)

For whatever reason, I decided to also watch the last Harry Potter film as well afterwards–mostly just to see how the cast aged.  But what I noticed, due to the discussion of color in my last post, was how different everything looked from the first film to the last.  I’m not talking the actors here–I’m talking about everything.

Apparently, Voldemort’s rise resulted in a change in how light is reflected.  The colors in the first movie–while still relying heavily on orange and  blue–were nonetheless fairly vibrant and distinct from one another.  By the last movie, everything looked completely washed-out and greyish brown.  It appeared that someone had applied a desaturation filter to everything except the magic spells.

I’m guessing they think they were doing a good job matching the darker tone of the story in the last movie by doing this.

They were wrong.

The movie was so visually uninteresting that it physically hurt to watch.  That’s not good film-making, and it’s not a good way of matching the tone of the story with the scenery.  It can be, sure; but it is not automatic.

The first Harry Potter film was by no means a triumph of cinema, but it was fairly decent visually. The last one was borderline unwatchable because of how uninteresting it looked. I might not have thought too much more about this though, except that I then happened to watch a couple scenes from the movie Apocalypse Now a few days later.  Now, I don’t think it’s an especially good movie, because the story doesn’t make any sense, but it does have awesome cinematography. If you couldn’t tell from the title, it is a rather thematically “dark” film as well, and yet the ending scenes where Martin Sheen goes to assassinate Marlon Brando have plenty of vibrant color.

Here is a still from the climax of Apocalypse Now:

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Here is a still from the climax of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

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How is it that a picture of a camouflaged man standing in a muddy lake at night is more visually compelling than a wizards’ duel?

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Great article by Rosie Cima about why Hollywood movies tend to have an orange and blue color palette: http://priceonomics.com/why-every-movie-looks-sort-of-orange-and-blue/

I first noticed this with video games, when Shamus Young pointed out how Mass Effect 3 overused this palette.  Once you notice it, you realize it’s everywhere and it makes it hard to watch modern movies. 

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They’d been advertising this movie “The Interview” constantly during the football games–otherwise I’d never have heard of it.  But now that Sony caved to pressure from threats of hacker attacks, it’s going to get a lot more publicity.  Personally, I wasn’t planning to see it before, and even if they do figure out some way to release it, I won’t see it then. I don’t go see many movies.

My first question on hearing about this was: since when does North Korea have hackers? I honestly didn’t realize they did cyber-warfare–I thought they spent all their money on bombs.

My second question was: why are they all upset about this, and not about that one movie with the marionettes that came out about ten years ago mocking Kim Jong-il?  Is it just because this is live action?

And now even the President has said Sony made a mistake, saying “I wish they (Sony) had spoken to me first”–and I guess he is in a better position than anyone to assess the level of the threat. Still, even that in itself smacks of censorship in a way–are all movies now going to have be run by the government to see if they pose a security risk every time hackers threaten them?

All in all, I think this is kind of a bad omen–it’s just going to embolden every hacker to threaten every movie to see if he can get it banned.  The trolls are running the show now.  That said, I was getting sick of seeing the ads for the movie, so I guess I can’t complain that they’ve been pulled.

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I watched the movie Prometheus before I saw this, which was a huge mistake; since Prometheus spoils the best things in the movie Alien. The mystery of the ‘space jockey’ was ruined; the surprise twist where one of the characters turns out to be an evil android was semi-spoiled,  and the method by which the aliens attack their victims was spoiled.  (I already knew about what happens to John Hurt’s character even before seeing Prometheus.)

Even so, Alien was still a far better movie.  At least there were plot points to be spoiled, as opposed to an incoherent mess of nonsense that was the plot of Prometheus.  Alien is a good, solid, workman-like horror picture.  The one thing that surprised me was how badly the special effects had aged. Compared with Star Wars of two years earlier, some of the spaceship exteriors and the “space” backgrounds looked quite fake, and the alien itself was, in some scenes, pretty clearly a guy in a costume.  (The lack of light in a lot of these scenes worked very much in the movie’s favor; not only being scarier, but also masking the fake costume.)

There was an extended scene with flashing blue and yellow lights at the end that nearly made me sick–I had to look away from the screen for a few moments.  As a rule, you don’t want your movie to be too hard for your audience to watch.  Moreover, I don’t really know what purpose these flashing lights served in the movie. It seemed like a steady, red light would have done as well.

Also, there was one scene that made no sense to me. At one point, while crew is hunting for the alien, Tom Skerritt’s character goes into some sort of maze of tunnels looking for it, armed with a flamethrower.  The rest of the crew is monitoring him on a display that shows his position and the aliens as dots on the screen.  When they see the dot representing the alien moving towards him, they tell him to get out of there.  Spoiler: he doesn’t. It ends badly for him. My question was, why didn’t the crew instead just tell him “the alien is coming from your left–turn that way and fire”?  Since the whole point of him being there was to kill the alien, why did they give up at what was really their best opportunity?

While some things haven’t aged well–the hilarious green-on-black text interface of the ship’s onboard computer being a good example–it’s still a very effective horror movie. And it must have been quite novel at the time to have a strong female lead, instead of her just being a helpless victim. Sigourney Weaver’s performance is terrific, although for as tough as Ellen Ripley is, I wondered why she let Ash keep giving everyone bad advice for so long before forcing a showdown with him.

So, given what a solid picture Alien was, how could Director Ridley Scott have subsequently thought “Ah, this Prometheus is a worthy prequel”? I know he didn’t write the script, but he must have had some creative control over it.  Enough to say “rewrite this so it makes some sort of sense”.

Ah, well.  Back to Alien. It wasn’t a great horror movie; if only because its remote setting makes the feeling of danger hard to personalize.  As long as I don’t go on any deep space mining expeditions, I’m safe from the aliens. But it was a good movie nonetheless, with its foreboding atmosphere and slowly building tension.  Although there are definitely some “gross-out” scenes, what I liked was the extent to which it relied on atmosphere; and quiet, dark scenes to convey the mood.

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I don’t know about you, but I find stupid protagonists in stories to be annoying.  And there’s nothing more irritating than seeing an obvious plot twist coming down the pike, and having the hero not realize it. This happens in several of Lovecraft’s stories, and I find it to be a real mood-killer.

I assumed for a long time that everyone was like this.  But then it occurred to me that maybe some readers enjoy that.  There is a certain satisfaction, I guess, in seeing what is going to happen before the characters do.  You can feel like you are smarter than somebody else, even if they are only a fictional character.  (Having never experienced that first-hand, I wouldn’t know if it’s much fun.)

Personally, I like to be surprised by a story. Which do you prefer: the comfort and satisfaction of knowing what’s coming, or the fun of being surprised by plot twists?