Thor

[intertribal]

This was entertaining, much more so than most superhero or pseudo-superhero movies.  It's not particularly subversive, and the humor is kind of slapstick, but oh well.  The bad guys (to the extent that there even are bad guys...) are all aliens, so at least there's no demonization of human cultures going on.  The parts that take place on Earth are way more fun than the parts that take place on, uh, Thor's home planet.  Overall, alternated between funny and campy!dramatic, but in a very non-annoying way - and we all know how easy it is to annoy me.

I thought they actually did a really nice job with the everyday folk in this one - Natalie Portman's character was very likable and relatable and cute (and everything about Thor was filtered through her perspective, which was awesome, because it almost felt more like he was the love interest, not her - which is really fucking rare in action movies, to allow women to show desire - usually it's just like, Exasperated Love Interest Suddenly Becomes Willing To Make Out With Hero, How Did That Happen? Don't Ask), with her main adjective probably being "clever."  Her assistant, Darcy - the political science student - was the comic relief, and was a riot.  Then their beleaguered scientist mentor dude was Stellan Skarsgard, and he did a good job; I generally like Skarsgard anyway.  It all takes place in a very desertified New Mexico.

The aliens - Thor's people, and their enemies the Frost Giants - are a little headscratchy.  They have a nice-looking planet, sure, with the cosmos as their sky and a long psychedelic crystal highway that leads out to the rainbow bifrost bridge - kind of like something off a sketchy "space art" web site.  And their attire reminded more of Saint Seiya than anything else, did anybody watch that show?  Disturbing anime, that.  Anyway, they're all completely identical to humans aside from their ridiculous armor, which was played for some laughs when they eventually came to Earth.  The Frost Giants are corpse-gray with red eyes and live in a desolate ice world.  Character development in this "realm," as Thor would say, was a little weak, but I think is a good example of what I was saying the other day - heroic heroes are more interesting than antiheroes. 

Thor comes straight out of Hero Mold, you see.  He is a total stupid dumbfuck when he first becomes an adult, but his flaws are hero flaws - wants to go after the enemy and teach them a lesson, doesn't want to wait for diplomacy, must defend honor, blah blah blah - a lot of sound and fury and prideful bombast, but he doesn't angst or consider switching sides or even behave all that reprehensibly.  There was one part where I thought he might suffer A Very Painful Lesson (TM) because he's smashing all these Frost Giants with his whack-a-mole hammer while miles away his friends are about to get eaten by a gigantic ice Balrog/Troll, but no, he sees that they're in danger and saves them.  He has some character defects, but they're heroic defects.  And he becomes much less of a dumbfuck as the movie progresses.  But thank God, you know, thank God that he wasn't "I'm just a loser and I'm sad about my average life but holy shit look I have superpowers now I am uber cool woohoo."  I am so done with that kind of superhero.  With Thor, at least we've moved beyond the standard "what does this power mean?" conversations, because you know, Thor knows he has power.  He's been groomed to be a leader all his life.  So instead of "you too can be a leader" claptrap you can actually concentrate on what good leadership is (not that this movie is very deep, but eh).  And if that means that fewer boys in the audience can "relate" to Thor, too damn bad for them.  Captain America looks right up their alley.

Loki, his brother, the "bad guy," is a whole bucket of crazy.  He's kind of sympathetic, and he's certainly Thor's shadow-self, and he doesn't seem to be motivated by Unrepenting Evil or whatever, but neither his motives nor his personality are consistent.  I don't mean that he develops as a character like Thor does - he's just wildly inconsistent.  I accept that he's keeping his true motives and plan to himself, but towards the end I kept going like "Loki, why are you doing that?  I thought that's what you wanted!" and "Loki, what the fuck?"  Unlike Thor, you never really figure out what Loki believes or values - we get that he values himself, yeah, but he seems to have literally no opinions or belief system beyond that - which is just as bad as the villain that is evil Just Because.  

But, oh well.  The movie ultimately comes down not on the side of genocide, which for an action blockbuster, is pretty good.

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Well, that's hard to say. I guess that's why there's value in looking at... other reviewers' reviews?

...market research? cultural anthropology? I dunno, I just figure you've got to study the actual people at some point and not just what movies they're watching to figure out anything terribly concrete there.

Well, what I think about things pretty much determines how I would write things differently, so I'd say yeah.

But the ultimate goal is to write something that doesn't just show what you think but rather makes the reader think, no? That's what I mean about a step removed. Otherwise it just seems like reacting and deciding what you think is like deciding this movie's target audience and how you would differently construct your own target audience.


First off, none of this is impersonal to me, at all. It's very personal - I was just trying to explain why heroes are more interesting to me than antiheroes, but even that stuff is all personal preference.

By personal, I mean personal like or dislike of hero-types (not whether or not they're intellectually interesting). Actual attraction or disinterest, like in real life (e.g. to war heroes, or sports 'heroes', or other kinds of leaders people look up to). I don't mean 'personal' as in 'we all have our own subjective opinions.' Not sure if that's what you mean.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying in the rest of your comment starting with The only kind of legitimacy I'm really interested in seeing exerted is legitimacy based on honesty, respect, love, and dedication.

I'm just explaining why I'm personally put-off by (most) heroes people approve of. And then I make an exception for my own sort of suspension of disbelief about certain idealistic worlds in which idealistic heroes make sense. But I recognize that in the real world they don't make sense, and in more serious works, I don't really like heroes. But I also think it's possible to have 'real legitimacy'--say, a leader who honestly cares about people and honestly wants to improve the world and honestly dedicates his life to that endeavor out of sheer love and drive and probably insanity. Not that such people are perfect, either, or have no problems in their personal lives, and so on. But I think it's possible, if very, very rare. And I wouldn't mind hearing about such people, sometimes.

But the typical hero is just such an outright fraud that I have no interest in them. I just feel this profound apathy about it, like it makes me feel that not only the movie is meaningless, but its creation means that my life and the world at large are meaningless. It decreases the nobility of mankind, or something. I have a feeling that even if I saw it presented in a critical light, I wouldn't come away feeling any more hopeful, or impassioned, or interested in living.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

But who knows, right, most work nowadays is critical. The hipsters have made an art of it. Criticism is a guaranteed way to feel good about yourself without having to have any positive ideas of your own. So maybe I'd feel good too.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's a fair assessment of my novel at all, and it actually really sucks if that's all you think I'm trying to do in my writing. I hope I'm just not explaining myself well. There are "things" I criticize, in the sense that Heart of Darkness is a criticism of colonialism, but it's not like the whole thing is an exercise in snark, and I think that I certainly do present ideas (and ideals) of my own. I have always tried to do that, regardless of whether the execution or the ideas are up to par. I'm not sure to what extent a novel can even be purely criticism - are hipsters producing critical novels of some kind? I don't know what that would look like (James Franco's stuff?), but I can't imagine it would have much of a soul. Even your typical grimdark fantasy that's a critical response to traditional heroic fantasy is saying something besides criticism, even if it may not be intentional.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Dude, I have no idea what you're doing in your novel. I'm just talking about reviews, not even all that much about yours in particular.

But I do think that I mean something a good deal more, and a good deal more difficult, than "something besides criticism." Which is partly why I use the word 'positive'--as in actual, positive ideals, actual morals, actual transcendence that hasn't just become trite and cliche and unthinking. It's difficult for me to create something genuinely new in that department myself at this point, but it's something I strive for.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, you were saying that not even a movie that looked at it critically would be anything inspirational or whatever, and then you say that about critical work, and this after I say that my novel is critical of certain tropes or whatever it is I said. That's why I responded that way.

Yeah, for sure I don't think every novel achieves what you're talking about. I'm just saying that I don't think it's possible for a novel to be all response, no creation - it's still putting forth something, and that something might be totally trite and unthinking, and a good deal of what's created is exactly that, but something is still being produced. It might not transcend a factory level of "production," but... I guess you could debate what's more useful, putting forth something trite and cliched or being critical of something someone else has put out.

This is a line of argument that often goes along with fiction and criticism in the LJ community - writers are always going "instead of criticizing my work, why don't you write something yourself."

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Uhh. I was just talking about what would interest me or not about heroes, but okay, I guess I see the connection. And well, I can't really control it if you think what you're doing fits what I say I don't like. I wouldn't know if it fits, though, so I'm just talking about heroes and not your novel.

I do think criticism has a use, don't get me wrong. And I enjoy some criticism. I just think...it's a lot easier to be against something than for something, and to attract like-minded people that way, and to distinguish oneself as different and special that way.

I'm not trying to say everybody should write something themselves, or that no one should criticize. But seriously, like, we've got a whole academy united in the publishing potential of criticism. We've got newspapers of criticism. We've got atheism and sexual revolution and anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-gun, anti-mainstream... We think everything is going downhill--the economy, the culture, the education system, politics... But who are we and what are we for?

It gets to a point where even the novelty and seeming individuality of a critical voice just begins to sound like all the rest.

Shit, I'm late.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Maybe I started talking about something else in that comment (the trend of grimdark fantasy, and what I'm doing in the context of that trend) and you weren't responding to it, and I assumed that you were. I don't think that what I'm doing fits with what you don't like - not in the respect of it being hipster criticism, anyway, although I don't know about the "hero" thing.

You mean who are we as Americans or who are we as people? And I get what you're saying, but I don't think that's true everywhere - in sf/f/h, for example, criticism is generally frowned upon as elitist and useless - though that doesn't mean there isn't dispute over what sf/f/h is "supposed" to be, and I suspect that would always be true. I get that it's easier to be against something than for something, especially in politics, and maybe that's indicative of a certain cultural depression or something - negative internal thought processes and the like.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I see. Well, I'm glad we sorted that out. I'm just really exhausted, and I'm kind of plodding along a train of thought.

I'm not really saying it right, I don't think. Especially because it's not criticism, per se. Like I said, I still think criticism can be good/useful, on the one hand, and on the other, not everything I'm trying to encapsulate really fits the descriptor 'criticism.' It's neither necessary nor sufficient. :P Really, I'm just copying DFW subconsciously. And Nietzsche. Unrelatedly. And they were both quite good critics, right, but they also say stuff like this that I posted about before:

"It's actually not true that our literary culture is nihilistic, at least not in the radical sense of Turgenev's Bazarov. For there are certain tendencies we believe are bad, qualities we hate and fear. Among these are sentimentality, naïveté, archaism, fanaticism. It would probably be better to call our own art's culture now one of congenital skepticism. Our intelligentsia30 distrust strong belief, open conviction. Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level."

...

"So he--we, fiction writers--won't (can't) dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies.^31 The project would be like Menard's Quixote. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers?"

...

"31 We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies--but this is very different."


I guess I'm picking at the criticizing ideologies part, when what's at issue is the deep skepticism an apathy part? Something like that.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

*and

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

So I guess it's hard for me to see heroes and their legitimacy as a model of much except for strong belief, open conviction, moral ideals and so on. And so I see criticizing them as kind of another statement of how that's something we should distrust, or mock, or hate. Which is sort of already the state of a good deal of culture, this attitude of skepticism. On the other hand, most positive portrayals of heroes are this kind of blind "naïveté" and "fanaticism" that isn't interesting, either. So I just don't know what to do with heroes. The subject puts me off. Unless it's going to show me some "ideology" really worth believing in.

But like, I'm not talking about anything specific. It's possible someone could turn that concept into something I would find interesting. But what I'm describing, I probably wouldn't.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm not trying to figure out "anything concrete"? It's not like this is something I'm studying intensely, for God's sake. And you can say that I'm just wasting my time, sure, I suppose I waste my time with a lot of things. I'm okay with that. It's just recreation for me, recreation whose subject matter is generally related to themes I write about.

Yeah, that is what I mean.

I wish there was some example that we could talk about so I would know what kinds of movies you mean that make you feel like your life and the world at large are meaningless, like something we've both seen or whatever.

So basically in a less realistic, less "serious," more idealistic world, it's okay because then we're dealing with ideals - but as soon as it becomes more realistic, it doesn't work because heroes don't work in the real world? Because that's an interesting sort of split you've got there. Seriously, I would love to hear examples of the two different kinds of movies here.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Not saying you have to study it intensely. Reviews are just something I've never 'gotten', have never much held my interest recreationally or otherwise, and I'm trying to explain why, and/or get why it's so interesting to you.

I dunno, man, pretty much everything lately makes me feel like my life and the world at large are meaningless. You could probably pick anything. Okay, okay, serious answer... seriously, I have a hard time finding deep, artistic meaning in movies. They tend to make me feel more sentimental, and I tend to appreciate them more if they simply offer me a world at odds with my own (at least so it seems lately), such that it reminds me that there is more to life than work and food and rest. Again, ending with me feeling burnt out. Think normal. Er...examples, right. Maybe this would be better when I'm awake. Requires too much thought, sorry.

As for the latter thing...I mean I consciously think of them as junk food movies or whatever, but for the moment I am immersed in them, I can buy the idealistic world. Like some comic book movie, like, I dunno, Sin City, or Batman, or whatever. Maybe. Or something equally fantastical, though sometimes comic-like stuff can be more 'real' or comment on real society more than an idealized portrait of real life. So I dunno. I'm not much good for examples right now. I'm about to get my 3 hrs of sleep, then back to work.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I guess I've always liked writing movie reviews, although I don't like reviewing books so much, because usually it's either just "this is a good book, read this" or "this is what I have to say about a famous work" like LOTR. I think what really got me into it was the film class I took in Melbourne, because it was part of what we had to do for class was "respond" to movies. To some extent I think it is an exercise in narcissism - like, yes, I'm sure the world so cares what I think about Popular Movie X. But I actually spend a lot of zone-out time during movies thinking about my own stuff, so I feel like the juxtaposition to "how I would do it" is always there. I don't know if I can say much more than that.