Movie Reaction: Thor: Love & Thunder

Formula: Thor: Ragnarök / Thor: The Dark World

 

There’s a thing about the MCU that we all intuitively know but forget whenever a new film comes out: the MCU is a series. We’ve never seen anything quite like it, so our attempts to make sense out of it really mucks up our ability to judge it. With most franchises, there’s a movie then a sequel. You judge the sequel by how it compares to the first movie and the success of the sequel tends to dictate if there will be another sequel. The MCU throws all those metrics off. What do I compare Thor: Love & Thunder to? You’d think it’s the last Thor movie but that came out 5 years ago with about a dozen MCU movies in between. In a normal franchise, I’d look to the last movie, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, but that’s not exactly comparable. Or there’s the larger question of the phases. Should I rate a movie by how it sets up the conclusion of some phase? And that’s where I realize it might be best to look at MCU movies as episodes in a series.

 

Think of a show like Community. Some episodes stand on their own. Others link different episodes to another. Parts of each lead to pay off in later episodes. When I think of Community, I think of it in terms of seasons or the entire series, not individual episodes. I remember watching Community week-to-week. Some episodes I wouldn’t like as much and I’d pick at the individual episode for a week because that was the new content I had to look at. However, when I go back and watch the show now, it’s just a single episode. I barely even think of it on its own anymore. It has little impact on my overall feelings of the series. Sometimes, that episode I didn’t care for even gets better when I look at the season as a whole, because I can appreciate it as a touch of variety.

 

Thor: Love & Thunder appeals to me more as the movie between Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever than as a film taken on its own. I largely stay out of the “Is the MCU cinema?” discussion. First, because it’s a tedious, underdefined question. Second, because when I say that I look at it much more like a multi-billion-dollar TV series, I don’t mean that in any way as a bad thing. This post is a reaction of Love & Thunder though, so I should talk about it some specifically.

 

Love & Thunder is one of the best 29^th installments of a movie series you will find.

 

I’m being glib of course, but it’s also a nice reminder of what we are talking about. It’s the 2^nd Taika Waititi movie. It’s the 4^th Thor movie. It’s the 8 credited time Chris Hemsworth has appeared as Thor. Saying Love & Thunder is a little stale is like criticizing a James Bond movie for being formulaic (which I’ve done): true but not insightful. With Waititi at the helm, the Thor movies have moved into a less serious place in the MCU. I disagree with calling this an outright comedy due to several plot points, but Waititi has always been about puncturing a story structure without abandoning it. What We Do in the Shadows has fun with vampire stories without ever feeling like he dislikes them. Jojo Rabbit is about rejecting the Nazi ideology while recognizing their destructiveness. One can certainly argue about his effectiveness at doing this. He does the same thing with the Thor movies. He attempts to laugh at the premise of the movie while serious things are happening*.

 

*Little side rant here: All MCU movies are jokey, but the Waititi style isn’t the dominant style. It’s mostly him and James Gunn choosing this method. The rest of the MCU movies are more about the characters having fun for jokes. When the Avengers joke, it’s because they aren’t taking a particular mission or moment seriously. With Waititi and Gunn, they tend to poke fun at the entire concept of the movie. That’s playing with dynamite, because it risks negating the entire movie.

 

This movie picks up a while after Endgame. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) gets back in shape and works with the Guardians of the Galaxy for a while. Thor is getting bored of the god life, as there’s little challenge and it’s quite lonely. Eventually he leaves the Guardians to check on New Asgard, which is run by King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who is similarly bored by her administrative duties. The one person having a good time, it turns out, is Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). She actually has Thor powers now due to flimsy but plausible within the MCU reasons, although this new role is masking severe personal problems in her life. It turns out the trouble in New Asgard is tied to a guy called Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) who has come to kill Thor because, well, as the name implies, Gorr kills gods. There’s some further mythology that leads them to meet some other gods, including Zeus (Russell Crowe), but ultimately it’s about Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane (aka The Mighty Thor) killing Gorr, who has taken Asgardian children as hostages.

 

I understand that Ragnarök has been a bigger critical and audience hit so far. It’s a more successful funny movie. It had more characters with history like Loki and Hulk who could be mined for jokes and had Jeff Goldblum, who simply is funny. I’m among the many who preferred Ragnarök, because it didn’t try to take on too much. Love & Thunder has higher ambitions yet it’s not as successful. Simply put, the jokes have more trouble landing. If you aren’t a big fan of Taika Waititi’s Korg, then his narration can get tedious. Thor, Valkyrie, and Jane are the other main returning characters and it’s harder to mine jokes out of their dynamic. Thor needs more of a straight man to play off. Unfortunately, he’s friends with Valkyrie now who is used to him and Jane is jokier than he is. It’s a weird balance, even though I do like seeing Natalie Portman in a more playful mood than I normally get to see her. Love & Thunder touches on more topics of death and loss this time. It makes sense, given Waititi’s success with Jojo Rabbit, but I didn’t find the mix of the comedy and serious that successful. Instead of complimenting each other, they tended to step on each other.

 

While I thought the movie had issues on a story and interpersonal dynamics level, I have few complaints about the cast individually. Hemsworth has really mastered the himbo appeal of Thor. Tessa Thompson is a walking sight gag as a peace-time leader. Natalie Portman, as I said, is a lot of fun as the Mighty Thor. I don’t know the truth to if there was any drama between her and the MCU before this, but I get why she would return for this movie. She gets a fun hero role and doesn’t have to show up in more if she doesn’t want to. I love “experimental prestige cinema Natalie”, but it’s nice to have “blockbuster Natalie” back for a minute. Bale’s Gorr is a villain who works best leaving you wanting more. Similar to Blanchett’s character in Ragnarök, he looks really cool in his few scenes but doesn’t really have the depth to show up much more than he does. He’s better than the role needs, and I’m happy that they didn’t get fooled into thinking that meant the movie needed more of him.

 

As I ranted about in the beginning though, more than anything, Thor: Love & Thunder feels like a MCU installment. It takes a stab at evolving the longest tenured Avenger. It took some swings with how it mixed the light and the dark elements of the story. It didn’t totally work for me, but it wasn’t an egregious failure. From a larger series perspective, I appreciated the step away from multiverses after the last two films leaned heavily on them. Perhaps the reason why I’ve been seeing people push to call this a comedy movie first is because Waititi isn’t the best director of action sequences out there, so don’t expect Russo Brothers quality there. Given that this is one of four MCU movies that will come out in a 12-month span, Love and Thunder is a fine holdover until I get my next fix.

 

Side Rant: OK, this may be very specific to my Twitter feed, but what’s up with this mini-social media trend of attacking how bad Thor: Love & Thunder looks? It’s not the most gorgeous movie I’ve ever seen, but it looks fine. I really don’t get people comparing budgets and quality with RRR. I liked RRR, but the CGI is not what you should be pointing to as the selling point on that one. Besides, CGI quality isn’t linear. You can get 90% of the way there a lot cheaper than that last 10%. That said, VFX crews all around have to work under crazy conditions (pay cuts and arbitrary time constraints), so I’m normally happy as long as any film looks better than The Mummy Returns.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: 25th Hour

Premise: A man make the rounds 24 hours before beginning a 7-year prison sentence for dealing drugs.

 

I have a lot of movie obsessions like “quantifying what makes a favorite movie” or “rhetorically disproving the existence of guilty pleasure”. A newer one I’ve found is when tuning out during a movie is on me vs. when it’s on the movie. Not every movie deserves 100% attention. Some don’t even work best with 100% attention. I would’ve liked Jackass Forever a lot less in a theater. When a bit has gone on too long or is too severe, I need to be able to check out for a moment to not spoil the mood. I watch most movies from home, and I’m also often dicking around on my computer or phone at the same time. This is fine with me because good movies will draw me in. For bad movies, the option to turn my attention away is often why I can finish them. There are some casualties in this. The Power of the Dog didn’t make a huge impact for me the first time I saw it. I had a nagging feeling about it, decided to rewatch, and loved it. But mostly this system works for me.

 

This brings me back to my original point though. How can I determine where the fault lies when a movie does little for me? I didn’t dislike 25^th Hour. It’s not one of the Spike Lee modes that I find exhausting by the end. It’s clearly a Spike Lee joint but it doesn’t beat me over the head to remind me that he made it. I like the performances. I like when Ed Norton goes skuzzy without going full American History X. And it’s another Philip Seymour Hoffman role to check off the list. The movie never did suck me in though. Well, not until the end. That Brian Cox monologue at the end, outlining a fictional future for Norton’s character is pretty great. It’s the kind of high note that makes me think I was missing something the first 2 hours. A great ending can gaslight even the most vigilant movie fan. In this case, I think it does crystalize a lot of the film’s mission statement. If nothing else, it pushed it into that ever-growing category of “films I didn’t like enough to want to watch them again but if I ever did find myself rewatching it, I’m sure I’d like it more”.

So, I don’t know what to do with 25^th hour. I was hoping to like it much more. I’m glad I did watch it though. Perhaps I may even rewatch someday if I commit to the Spike Lee filmography more. But, at the end of the day, it was a movie that I kept finding myself tuning out. Is that my fault for not giving it enough attention or the movie’s fault for not drawing me in better? 

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Genius

Premise: The relationship between author Thomas Wolf and his editor, Maxwell Perkins…That’s it. That’s the premise.

 

As I’ve learned from the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast, there are many stages or levels of Oscar buzz.

·         There’s successful buzz: i.e., films that do in fact earn Oscar nominations.

·         There are snubs: films that expected to have Oscar nominations all the way until nomination morning where they were left out.

·         There are critical champions: films that wouldn’t typically have Oscar attention at all but get championed to see if they can earn an unlikely nod.

·         There are festival favorites: films that play wonderfully at the festival they premier at before fizzling out when introduced to the larger population (People often talk about the mountain air at Sundance blinding audiences).

·         Finally, there’s sight-unseen buzz. These are films that you hear who is involved and assume they are Oscar players even though you know nothing else. There are so many of these movies. More than any of us realize. Most actors, these days in particular, with shrinking paydays and shorter attention spans, stay busy with projects even if it isn’t clear they will work.

 

Because, really, how does anyone ever know if a movie is going to work? Even Scorsese and Spielberg have whiffs. Directors can come from anywhere. Who is to say whether a music video director, a TV director, a short director, or a theater director is the best bet? Or even a first-time director with no experience? I don’t think many actors go into a project with an explicit Oscar calculus attached. More often a role seems fun, they like some of the people tied to the project, and/or they’d like to put an addition on the house.

 

Genius is a movie that sounds like it was made as an Oscar play. It’s a period movie; a somewhat tragic biopic. The cast is full of Oscar winners (Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman), Oscar nominees (Laura Linney, Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby), and Oscar flirts (Guy Pearce, Dominic West). It competed in the Berlin Film Festival. I hear all that, realize that I never heard anything about the movie when it came out, and immediately wonder what went wrong. Rotate its fortunes just a little and this movie is Kinsey. Rotate a little more and it’s The King’s Speech. It’s the odd fate of a movie like this where the cast is both the reason it gets made and the reason it’s looked at as a disappointment.

 

I did see the movie for the cast. And I’m fascinated by this mini-genre of films about 20^th century authors along with Rebel in the Rye, Kill Your Darlings, and Tolkien. Sadly, I am rather tired of stories about erratic geniuses who torture those around them because their genius makes it worth it. Jude Law goes to town with his Thomas Wolfe performance. Colin Firth tamps down every bit of charisma he has to play up the contrast between him and Wolfe. The biggest success of the movie is how it validates the role of an editor. Having something to say is great, but’s it’s meaningless if no one can read it. With it being two men at the center of the movie and the women ranging from crazy (Nicole Kidman) to put upon (Laura Linney) this doesn’t play particularly well from a gender perspective. I also question the decision to bring in actors playing Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In both cases, I wanted to leave this movie and follow them. Both Hemmingway and Fitzgerald are rightfully exhausted by Wolfe’s lack of discipline, which only make him more annoying and makes it less clear why he’s worth the effort.

 

It’s not an awful movie. It’s competently made. The cast is too talented to make it unwatchable. It is pretty apparent that the director comes from a theater background, because he never finds much to do with the camera. There’s nothing to make this cinematic as opposed to a play with a lot of locations.

 

Also, it feels a bit like the movie is gaslighting me. Thomas Wolfe is a famous author. I know his name. I struggle to recall the titles of his books. Meanwhile, the film features other authors who I know well. I can name their books easily. I was definitely taught them in school and seen their works adapted in numerous forms. Yet, the way this movie carries itself, I’d assume that Wolfe was the best-known author to modern day audiences. It has all the “misunderstood genius” tropes of films about artists who met their greatest fame after their death. Basically, they make the movie like he’s Van Gogh, when in actuality, he was more of a Picasso, if we actually didn’t remember Picasso very well anymore. It’s a strange decision by the film.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Jerry & Marge Go Large

Premise: A couple find a loophole in the lottery and use it to make millions and revitalize their small town.

 

Jerry Selbee was a bored retiree who noticed a mathematic flaw in a lottery game that gave him an edge if he played often enough. So, he made a company, got a bunch of friends to invest, then spent entire days printing and reviewing lottery tickets every few weeks to build a small fortune. Eventually, other people caught on and the game went away. It’s a pretty boring story when you really think about it. It’s like when you actually understand how card counting works. It’s a lot of math to get a marginal edge that with a large enough sample size, returns a profit. Still, I understand how someone hears “a small-town couple found a way to beat the lottery” and thinks there’s a movie there. I immediately imagine some coordinated scheme, shady dealings, and threat of prison. It turns out, it’s all legal and very dull. Like, cutting coupons on a massive scale.

 

That’s the fundamental problem that Jerry and Marge Go Large the movie never solves. As a HuffPost article, it’s pretty good. An article can get into all the technicalities over a few pages, peppering in side-stories for flavor, then be over. It’s not a particularly cinematic story. They try to find a way to liven it up though. They cast the massively overqualified Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening in the lead roles. The supporting cast is filled with reflexively funny people like Rainn Wilson, Larry Wilmore, and Michael McKean. They put these small city folks against some entitled Harvard kids. There’s a Boston Globe reporter slowly catching on too. It’s all so clean though. As I said, nothing about this is illegal. Well, nothing about what Jerry is doing is illegal. The Harvard kids break the law, because they’re the villains. The Massachusetts lottery is being shady but not breaking the law from what I understand. Jerry and Marge are just nice people spreading the wealth so their friends can get rich and their town can throw a Jazz Festival, featuring – checks notes – Tori Kelly.

 

This is a nice movie. It’s very pleasant. It feels a tad patronizing to small town people but never enough to turn me off. It’s tough to make any movie where the real enemy is math and sample size compelling. I didn’t like the movie however I couldn’t find any reason to hate it.

 

Side Rant: They really should’ve made this more clearly a period piece. In the early 2000s, when this actually happened, I fully believe 1) that the lottery could make this kind of mathematical mistake, 2) that some bored retiree would notice it first, and 3) that only one group of Harvard kids would notice the loophole after that. That period wasn’t that far removed from the McDonald’s Monopoly game being rigged and unnoticed for over a decade. In the 2020s, the age of crypto and data mining, there is no way dozens of people aren’t tracking exactly this kind of mathematic mistake with the lottery. We’re all too online for it to happen. Or maybe I’m naïve.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend

Delayed Reaction: This Changes Everything

Premise: A thorough presentation about how women are underserved in Hollywood.

 

Is this a cinematic documentary? No. It comes from the school of “If I use enough clips of things people recognize, the rest can be as dry as I want”. To be fair, I don’t think the point of this is to make a compelling documentary. It’s not an exploration of women’s place in Hollywood history that organically reaches the conclusion that Hollywood has failed them. It’s more like a mission statement. It has the feeling of a short film I’d see at an exhibit in a museum or amusement part. Very polished. Very structured. It serves the same purpose as the Geena Davis Institute’s reports on representation of women in Hollywood. If someone ever questions it, they can point to this movie instead of having to explain it every time.

 

In that sense, This Changes Everything is quite good. It’s a really really thorough argument about all the ways women in Hollywood have been failed consciously and unconsciously. Statistic after statistic it covers all sides of the argument. It traces the source of the different problems and the assorted attempts to correct them. It addresses the challenges from representation in children’s programming to the complex production structure that gives everyone else a scapegoat to blame other than themselves.

 

This is more of an intro-level course than an advanced seminar. I was surprised by how much I already know just from how much I follow trades like Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Like, I’ve heard about Mo Ryan’s study on female TV directors and John Landgraf’s response at FX so many times now that I could’ve nearly quoted it going in. I didn’t know as much about some of the history though. I’m a big fan of how much numbers are the hero of the story. I can get tired of estimations and guesses. For this topic, the numbers and baseline are easy. Half the population vs. whatever puny numbers they find. It’s immediate and striking.

 

It’s nice too that the movie ends on a pretty hopeful note. We’ve heard of all the times a movie was supposed to change everything and it doesn’t. This ends up being as much a call to action as an account of past wrongs.

 

I’m probably in a minority here, but I wish they would’ve just left Trump out. Throwing him in as a villain and the reason for change felt too clean and undermined the many efforts before him. Sure, he’s a part of the Time’s Up and Me Too movements but he’s not really the cause of the many ills the movie focuses on. He’s a symptom. It really wasn’t a large part of the movie, but it stuck out for whatever reason.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend

Delayed Reaction: Father of the Bride (2022)

Premise: A father is resistant to his daughter getting married.

 

There are some premises that should be left alone. There’s no remaking Casablanca. The Graduate was too specific to its era. There are others that could be remade every year and it would never feel too soon. Father of the Bride is one of these. So far, there have only been three version of this (and one sequel) and that feels like restraint. As long as enough has changed in the formula, I’m fine with making so many more of them.

 

So, while I love the Steve Martin version from – hold on, is that right? – 30 years ago, I fully embraced this version with a Latin American spin. Frankly, I appreciated nearly every tweak to the formula. Andy Garcia isn’t an obvious choice for the titular father. While he’s been in comedies before, I don’t recall him ever leading one. He works though, because the role is more about being able to take punches and still look good than being able to deliver a joke. And he definitely has “middle-aged man I still want to root for” energy. I love that in addition to the wealthy meets super wealthy conflict between the two families coming together, there’s also Cuba vs. Mexico. I’ve certainly lazily rolled the entire Latin American community into a single identity before, so it was nice to see something that examines the similarities and differences. That alone is enough reason to remake this movie. The film also has to change the premise with the times. A father’s role in a wedding has diminished over the years, and this version recognizes that. A lot of Garcia’s conflict in the movie is with realizing that he has little power in it. And he manages to come away from it not looking like an asshole, which is tougher than it sounds.

 

I also appreciated some of the fringe changes. Chloe Fineman is a worthy successor to Martin Short’s wedding planner in the 1991 movie. That role really should feel like an SNL character released into the real world, and that’s how Fineman treats it. Isabela Merced gets more to do as the child not getting married. I’m in favor of this because Isabela Merced is usually pretty great*.

 

*Since age is apparently a thing I get hung up on in movies, I’ll note that I was surprised by Merced’s role. She was only 19-20 while shooting this film. She’s struck me as the kind of actress who would end up with high school roles for a while. It’s interesting that this movie actually lets her play her actual age if not someone who reads as slightly older.

 

This is a very traditional RomCom with a familiar story and jokes that make me chuckle more than laugh. And that’s something I enjoy watching a lot. The film with well-made. Miami didn’t look too much like Atlanta (to me, at least). Almost all the changes were for the better to make the movie work in 2022. It’s not going to be my favorite movie of the year. In fact, I’ll forget about most of it in a couple months, but I really enjoyed it for what it is.

 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend