Tag: Tessa Thompson

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Thor: Love and Thunder

Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth are both Thor in Thor: Love and Thunder.

There are two schools of thought on how to make a movie about comic book superheroes. The first is to try and make it realistic and grounded in the real world. That’s what Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy did for Batman and The Joker. Those films are grim and violent, long on visceral thrills, short on humor.  

The second school of thought is to make comic book superhero movies more comic book-y. Outlandish plots, self-aware asides, and jaunty humor are the order of the day. The best example of this school of thought is the wacky Batman TV series from 1966. Richard Donner’s earnest 1978 Superman is a less extreme version. 

Students of the gritty school accuse the other side of not taking the source material seriously, while the comic book-y school believes that the grittys fundamentally misunderstand the source material. Since films about superpowered people wearing tights punching each other in space are ubiquitous to the point of being mandatory, the question “Is Batman a good-natured altruist like Adam West or a glowering neo-fascist like Robert Pattison?“ has outsized impact on the culture. 

The two philosophies collide violently in Thor: Love and Thunder. Chris Hemsworth has now appeared in nine films as Thor, but he didn’t find his footing until 2017’s Thor: Raganork, when director Taika Waititi empowered him to go for laughs. Since then, the himbo from Asgard has been a breath of fresh air when things get a little too self-serious  in the MCU. 

The gritty side is represented by Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher. As Nolan’s gravelly voiced Batman, he wrenched the gravitas out of a rich boy who dresses like a bat to play cops and robbers. Making the DC hero into a Marvel antagonist is a admittedly stunt casting, but Bale is a phenomenally talented actor who played one of the greatest villains in cinematic history in American Psycho. 

Christian Bale as Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder.

Gorr is the first person we see in Love and Thunder, wandering through the desert of his home planet on a pilgrimage to the shrine of his god Rapu (Jonny Brugh) in an effort to save his daughter, Love (India Rose Hemsworth, who is actually Chris Hemsworth’s daughter) from the blight that has consumed their world. But Love dies anyway, and when Gorr meets the real Rapu, he makes it clear that he doesn’t care about the sufferings of the little people who worship him. So Gorr grabs the nearest weapon, which happens to be the god-killing Necrosword, and vows to wage a campaign of deicide, beginning with Rapu.  

Meanwhile, Thor is hanging out with the Guardians of the Galaxy, saving planets and — having sculpted his Avengers: Endgame dad bod into a chiseled god bod — looking good doing it. Thor’s intro sequence epitomizes why I prefer the comic-booky approach to comic-book movies. I can get detectives chasing serial killers and corrupt cops anywhere, but only Waititi can give me a space Viking fighting an army of owl bears on hover bikes. 

Thor gets wind of Gorr’s anti-god crusade, and returns to Earth to check on New Asgard, where the refugees from his destroyed home planet are now running a tourist trap. Sure enough, Gorr and his shadow monsters have come calling. But the Asgardians are putting up a fight, led by Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and The Mighty Thor (Natalie Portman). 

Hold up — there’s another Thor? And he’s a she? And she’s Thor’s ex-girlfriend, Dr. Jane Foster, who, for budgetary reasons was unceremoniously written out of the story after Thor: The Dark World? Yes, yes, and yes. Since the breakup, Jane’s had her ups and downs, first becoming a famous physicist and then contracting terminal cancer. She heeded a psychic call to New Asgard, where the reassembled pieces of Thor’s broken hammer Mjolnir prolonged her life and granted her the powers of the thunder god. As we’ll see, facing an ex who also has his old job is just the beginning of Thor’s problems. 

Love and Thunder is a deeply divided movie. On the one hand, you’ve got a hero dying of cancer and a villain whose motivation is literally the Greek philosopher Epicurius’ Problem of Evil. On the other hand, you’ve got Hemsworth mugging for the camera and the director himself (as Thor’s sidekick Korg) narrating as a “once upon a time” story.  Bale tries valiantly to fit in, but he’s got one gear: “intense.” Portman is professional who understands the assignment, and is able to at least fake having fun. Ultimately, the film collapses under the weight of its contradictions. Love and Thunder can’t decide if it wants to laugh at itself or soar into Valhalla, and ends up doing neither well. 

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Film Features Film/TV

Creed II

In this age of sequels, prequels, reboots, sequels to prequels, and reboots of the prequel sequel, film criticism can wander into the realm of sports writing. Is Shazam 14: The Shazaminator Returns better than Shazam 12: The Dark Zam Rises? Does Robert Downey Jr. still have what it takes? Which do you like better, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, or a kick to the head?

Spoiler alert: All the Shazam movies are going to be the same, Bobby Jr. checked out two Avengers movies ago, and I’ll take the kick to the head. Which brings us to Creed II: At Least He’s Not a Superhero.

Sylvester Stallone (left) and Michael B. Jordan star in Creed II, the new Rocky movie.

I made that last bit up. The Rocky movies, beginning with the 1976 Best Picture Winner and continuing for five iterations over 14 years, never used subtitles. In a way, that’s a more honest approach than Thor: The Dark World. Yes, this is the same movie, but this time, Rocky fights Mr. T.!

After a false start in 2005 with Rocky Balboa, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone (“Sly didn’t have what it takes for a comeback!” says the sportswriter), the franchise (there’s another sports term) was rebooted in 2015 by Ryan Coogler with Creed. Coogler cast Michael B. Jordan, who starred in the director’s debut Fruitvale Station, as Adonis “Donny” Johnson, son of Rocky’s frenemy Apollo Creed. Like his father, Donny wants to be the heavyweight boxing champion of the world, so he recruits Rocky to be his trainer, effectively casting Sylvester Stallone as Burgess Meredith. Maybe it took fresh eyes and a fresh ethnicity to breathe new life into the Rocky formula, but it clearly worked. Coogler subsequently got called up to the Big Show, directing Black Panther, where he cast Jordan as Killmonger, who is probably the best villain the MCU ever had.

With Coogler too expensive (industry rumors have him rebooting Space Jam with LeBron James) and Stallone reasserting his position as producer and writer, the team hired a new coach: Steven Caple Jr. As a result, Creed II is like the best parts of Rocky II-V hot glued together.

Donny, now going by Adonis, has achieved his dream of living up to his absent father by winning the heavyweight boxing championship with Rocky as his corner man. But there are a pair of visitors to the statue of Rocky Balboa on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art who are inspired in a different way than most tourists: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) and his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu). If you will recall, in 1985’s Rocky IV, Soviet superman Ivan Drago killed Apollo Creed in the ring, so Rocky had to undertake the mother of all training montages to seek revenge and win the Cold War. Ivan was so disgraced that his wife (played by Stallone’s real-life ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen) left him. So now, he seeks revenge by pitting his son against Rocky’s son-figure.

The Rocky formula goes something like this: 50 percent soapy family drama, 20 percent training montages, 10 percent Zulu sequences (the anticipation of the fight, in which tension is ramped up slowly, named for Michael Caine’s 1964 film debut), and 20 percent men pummeling each other. To its credit, Creed II does vary from the formula by ramping up the training montage content to at least 30 percent. That’s really what the audience is hungry for, right? Rocky‘s training montage, set to the No. 1 hit “Gonna Fly Now,” was so compelling Philadelphia erected a statue to it.

The thing Rocky II-V were about was Stallone’s star power. In the 1980s, people just couldn’t get enough of the guy, whether he was training to defeat the Soviets in Rambo II-III, or training to defeat arm wrestlers in Over the Top. Stallone’s still staggering around like a drunk in Creed II, but it’s Jordan who is flexing. From his superhuman physique, I assume Jordan is doing crunches on a pile of money right now. He can hold the screen as well as any man alive in 2018, and when he gets a chance — such as when he’s in a hospital bed after getting the crap knocked out of him on national television — he can act, too. Tessa Thompson is back as his love interest, the deaf musician Bianca, even though she has little to do but moon after him.

But that’s okay, because this is a man’s story about a man proving his manhood by beating another man into submission. This is a movie unafraid to use the Eiffel Tower as a phallic symbol. The Rocky ur-narrative is patriarchal capitalism propaganda par excellence, and obviously it still works for some people, even if Creed II struggles to go the distance.

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Film Features Film/TV

Dear White People

If you assumed the intended audience for Dear White People is white people, you are forgiven.

Director Justin Simien’s debut film is less finger wagging at white folks than comedic commiseration with black people who must exist in mostly white spaces. It’s for every black student at top-tier universities and every black professional who doesn’t work for BET. If in the process, white people learn about the ways they create and maintain systems that disadvantage people of color, that’s cool too.

The satire follows the travails of four black students at Winchester University, a fictional Ivy League campus complete with ornate buildings, oak paneled halls, and micro aggressions galore.

The movie’s title is the sign-on Samantha White (Tessa Thompson) uses for her campus radio show. “Dear White People,” Samantha says, “the minimum requirement of black friends needed not to seem racist has just been raised to two. Sorry, but your weed man, Tyrone, does not count.”

Samantha’s activist worldview butts up against the on-campus political ambitions of racially palatable Troy Fairbanks (Brandon P. Bell) and irks classmate Colandrea “Coco” Conners (Teyonah Parris), whose blue contacts and long weave testify to her attempts to assimilate.

The film’s most intriguing character is the gay, socially awkward Lionel Higgins (Tyler James Williams of Everybody Hates Chris). With cultural tastes too white to find a home with black classmates and skin too brown to assimilate, he and his irregularly shaped Afro (“a black hole for white people’s fingers,” he laments) are batted around campus like a hacky sack.

With humor and edge, Dear White People, a darling at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, deftly navigates the minefield of racial identity.

What makes you black? Is it culture? Dating within your race? Rejecting European standards of beauty? Unquestioning solidarity with other black people? Disrupting discriminatory systems? Burying one part of your identity – sexuality, for example – to emphasize another? The intraracial tensions invoke the memory of the epic Jiggaboos vs. Wannabes warfare in Spike Lee’s 1988 School Daze.

Simien also lays bare the persistent aping of black culture by white students who are ignorant of how offensive the reductive mimicry is.

And if you think all the angst about being black in a white space is just hand wringing by hypersensitive colored folks, be sure to stay until the credits roll.

The film’s pacing lags occasionally, but for a debut film that relies in part on crowd-sourced funding, the production is polished. So much is packed into this movie that it can’t all be digested in one sitting. The themes it raises around interracial dating, self-segregation, and sexuality merit discussion and dissection. What Dear White People does not deserve is the burden of being all things to all people. It touches on sexuality (the director Simien came out as gay following the Sundance screening), but won’t satisfy those who want a prolonged exploration of where sexual orientation and race intersect. It repeats patriarchal messages, but don’t expect Simien to linger on women’s agency in romantic relationships.

Expect to laugh because it’s funny, but be prepared to wince because it’s all so true.