Tag: Tom Hiddleston

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Loki Enters The Marvel Multiverse

Tom Hiddleston as Loki

Every culture needs a god of mischief. For many Native Americans, it was Coyote. In West Africa, it was Anansi. For the Norse, it was Loki. 

Most trickster gods have no motivation beyond spreading chaos. They are, as they say on the internet, in it for the lulz. Loki was a little different. He had an agenda. To prevent him from seizing power, the gods of Valhalla imprisoned him — order symbolically controlling chaos. But one day, he will escape his bounds, and bring about ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, and the destruction of creation. Chaos, in other words, will ultimately win. 

When Stan Lee introduced a superhero based on the Norse god Thor, making a version of Loki to be his arch-enemy was a no-brainer. Played by Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the version most people know. And now, to feed the gaping maw of streaming content of Disney+, Loki the villain has his own series. 

Loki begins, as all things must, with Avengers: Endgame. During the hopelessly convoluted time travel plot/MCU clip show the Avengers concocted to reverse Thanos’ snap heard ‘round the universe, they traveled back to the events of the first Avengers film, where a chaotic mix-up briefly left Loki in possession of the MacGuffin de jour, the cosmically powerful Tesseract. But when he tries to teleport away from the fracas to use his new magical artifact to take over Asgard, he finds himself instead in the clutches of a mysteriously powerful organization called the Time Variance Authority (TVA). Instead of producing plentiful, cheap, low-carbon power from nuclear, hydroelectric, and solar, like the TVA we all know and tolerate should be doing, this TVA is tasked with keeping the multiverse simple and understandable by stamping out variations from the One Sacred Timeline. Putting a powerful magic item in the hands of a trickster god certainly qualifies as a disruptive event. 

Loki is used to throwing his magical weight around, but the TVA’s privileged place in the multiverse means it makes its own rules. Magic doesn’t work, but time travel sure does, and they weaponize it to neutralize Loki. Existing outside of time, they’ve seen it all before, and will see it all again. 

In the pilot, much is made of the TVA’s ’70s retro aesthetic. Instead of charismatic gods and heroes, they’re a bunch of bureaucrats doing a job. When Loki appears before Judge Ravona Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), she is on the road to sentencing him to whatever the multiverse equivalent of the death penalty is until Special Agent Mobius (Owen Wilson) intervenes. He’s hunting a powerful variant force threatening to tear the multiverse a new charged vacuum emboitment, and it takes a trickster to catch a trickster. 

Hiddleston’s Loki has always been one of the best actors in the MCU, providing a little lightness to Thor’s ponderous proceedings, until Taika Waititi let Chris Hemsworth’s comic hair down in Raganarok. Under the direction of Kate Heron, he is predictably charismatic. Wilson unexpectedly turns out to be a great deadpan foil to Hiddleston, and the pair’s chemistry promises to propel Loki to series length. 

Written by Rick and Morty alum Michael Waldron, Loki looks to take the MCU squarely into Doctor Who territory of multidimensional madness. If the team can sustain the energy of the pilot, it might be a time trip worth taking. 

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Avengers: Infinity War

Doctor Who premiered November 22, 1963. It was an immediate hit, and over the years the hokey show about a time-traveling weirdo became a cultural touchstone. By 1983, the production team was at the height of its powers. The lead role was in the hands of the young and charismatic Peter Davidson, and the budgets were bigger than ever. In the post-Star Wars afterglow, the show finally made the jump to America. The BBC decided to celebrate the 20th anniversary with the greatest crossover event in television history: They would bring together all the actors who had ever played the Doctor for one universe-shattering adventure. After months of hype, “The Five Doctors” premiered on November 23, 1983. It was a disaster.

Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), newly minted beardo Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and supersoldier in perpetual distress Bucky Barns (Sebastian Sam) defend Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity Wars.

Getting the giant cast together was a nightmare of bruised egos and diva behavior. The most important actor, Tom Baker, pulled out late in the process, so writer Terrance Dicks had to rewrite around some clips of Baker salvaged from a scrapped episode. The ratings were good, but not significantly better than a normal week’s viewership.

Worst of all, “The Five Doctors” exposed the weaknesses that the show’s fanbase had learned to overlook. There were still great moments to come—in 1984, the series produced “The Caves of Androzani”, now regarded as an all time high—but viewership faltered, and before the decade was out, Doctor Who was cancelled. In the internet comment board fever swamps, this is what’s known as “jumping the shark.”

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) get lost in space.

Picking up where Thor: Ragnarok left off, Avengers: Infinity Wars gets off to a strong start. Spaceships full of refugees from destroyed Asgard are intercepted by Thanos (Josh Brolin), who slaughters them and extracts the Infinity Stone from the Tesseract held by Loki (Tom Hiddleston). Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) narrowly escapes the destruction and rides the Rainbow Bridge, opened by Heimdal (Idris Elba) to Earth, where he warns Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Tony Stark (Robert Downy, Jr.) of Thanos’ plan to collect all six Infinity Stones, artifacts of immense power that control Mind, Soul, Space, Time, Power, and Reality, and use them to destroy half of all life in the universe.

One thing Infinity War has going for it that other superhero movies have struggled with is a compelling villain. Brolin’s Thanos, until now a barely glimpsed, purple skinned mound of muscle, turns out to be surprisingly complex. He gets some fine scenes with his two adoptive daughters, Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gilian, who has emerged as one of the best Marvel actors). Directors Anthony and Joe Russo are at their strongest when they take time to concentrate on pairs of characters, such as the doomed romance between Vision (Paul Bettany) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), or the science/magic rivalry between Stark and Strange. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor gets paired off with Rocket (Bradley Cooper) and teenaged Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel), which makes for some pleasantly goofy comedy beats. But everything else seems rushed, thin, and worst of all, calculated for maximum fan service, such as when the Guardians of the Galaxy are introduced singing along to The Spinners’ “Rubberband Man”. Our heroes make a stand in Wakanda, but the snap Ryan Coogler brought to Black Panther is missing. The potentially touching reunion of Banner and Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) is completely botched.

Thanos (James Brolin) seeks radical glove improvement. Also, genocide.

What ultimately sinks Infinity War is the unsolvable problem that sank “The Five Doctors”—the need to fit in references to 19 other Marvel movies. This is a film designed for superfans, and it could please many. But there inevitably comes a moment in long, episodic serials when the audience realizes that the catharsis they seek will never come. The demands of capitalism means there can never be a satisfying ending, and each installment of the story is reduced to a commercial for the next one. One way to read the ending of Infinity War is as a bold departure from formula. Another, more accurate way to read the ending is the plot equivalent of the moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie uses his new Little Orphan Annie decoder ring to discover that the secret message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine”. It’s the moment when all of the superheroes team up to collectively jump the biggest, most expensive shark of all time.

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Film Features Film/TV

Thor: Ragnarok

Since superheroes first ventured onto screens, one name rises above all others. He was the single most influential figure in the development of the tone and character of the genre, and his name was not Thor — it was Adam West.

From 1966 to 1968, West played Batman on ABC. He was a hero to millions of children all over the world, and he was still remembered fondly and respected throughout Hollywood at the time of his death last summer at age 88. The real genius in West’s portrayal of the Caped Crusader was that he realized exactly how ridiculous the premise of Batman was. A millionaire dresses up as a bat to fight crime because his parents were killed? Not only that, but there are a bunch of other people whose life experiences have led them to obsessively play themed dress-up and try to take over the world, from whom this Batman must protect us? It’s ludicrous.

West managed to look like he was taking the whole thing seriously on the surface, and yet still wink at the audience. Okay, yeah. A bubble with the word “POW!” appears every time I punch this guy wearing a “HENCHMAN” shirt. Just go with it and have fun. West was magnetic on screen and was zealous about making sure the Batman he portrayed was a good guy, even if that sometimes meant making fun of how square that made him.

The 1960s Batman series was a product of its time. The comic book industry had been creatively neutered after the Seduction of the Innocent Congressional hearings decided violent comics were the cause of juvenile crime and the Comics Code Authority was established. West’s Batman, as wildly popular as it was, cemented the image of the comic book superhero as a joke for kids. It wasn’t until Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s work in the 1980s that costumed vigilantes began to be scary again. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman cast Michael Keaton as a brooding PTSD case in an attempt to get as far as possible from West’s vision of the World’s Greatest Detective. But that’s exactly what makes an artist influential — all subsequent people working in the same field or genre have to respond to him or her. In the influence game, total negation is just as powerful as embrace and emulation.

Over the years, Batman got grittier and grittier. His darkness infected even Superman, replacing Christopher Reeve’s charismatic blue Boy Scout with Henry Cavill’s charisma-free brood-a-thon. On the Marvel side, the X-Men traded their yellow spandex for Burton-esque black leather. The grimdark trend crested with Christopher Nolan’s insanely paranoid The Dark Knight Rises. In 2014, the worm finally turned with Guardians of the Galaxy, which made the argument that saving the universe in tights should be fun again.

Cate Blanchett plays Hela, Thor’s estranged older sister in Taika Waititi’s heroically funny Thor: Ragnarok.

Which brings us to Thor: Ragnarok. Despite the hunky presence of Chris Hemsworth, the Thor films have easily been the weakest link in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But last year’s Ghostbusters reboot proved that Hemsworth has comedic chops to spare, so Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige hired Taika Waititi, a New Zealander whose What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople are two of the decade’s sharpest comedies, to take the franchise in a new direction.

In Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi lets Hemsworth go full Adam West. That’s not to say Hemsworth has adopted West’s glorious deadpan, but he has perfected the art of convincing the audience that we’re all in on the same joke. No longer a glowering tower of muscle, Thor now cracks wise and flashes lopsided smiles at the slightest provocation. When he and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) do schtick together, you believe they’re brothers.

Thor’s main job is to protect his home Asgard from Hela (Cate Blanchett), his estranged older sister who helped their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins) conquer the realm with violence before being banished as a threat to peace, but a pleasing subplot takes him to Sakkar, a garbage dump ruled by the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum, in fine form) where he is forced into battle against his fellow Avenger the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).

As usual for these $100-million Marvel monstrosities, Thor: Ragnarok is busy and overstuffed, both visually and with characters. But it’s at its best when it’s being irreverent and meta — Waititi’s speciality. He recognized that the best thing that could happen to Thor is for the pendulum to swing back toward West.

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Film Features Film/TV

Kong: Skull Island

I’m just gonna go ahead and say it: Kong: Skull Island is a bad movie.

That doesn’t really tell you much, because movies can be bad for many different reasons. Unlike the cynical cash grab of Independence Day: Resurgence, I got the impression that director Jordan Vogt-Roberts was attempting to make an enjoyable film. So rather than just lambasting everyone involved, I’ve decided to use this as a teachable moment. Here are five lessons to take home from Skull Island.

1. There’s a difference between a screenplay and a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. Granted, a screenplay is, on some level, a list of things that would be cool to put in a movie. But a good screenplay must put the cool things in the correct order, something that does not seem to have been a priority here. Effect should follow cause, and then each effect should become a cause for another effect, and so on. Emotions should ebb and flow, and the screenplay’s job is to map out those beats. A lot of stuff happens on Skull Island, but none of it makes much sense, so there’s no emotional movement. It’s 1973, and as the Vietnam War winds down and Nixon’s grip on power is failing, Bill Randa (John Goodman), director of a shadowy group called Monarch, is eager to get to Skull Island. He sees his chance in the chaos (“There will never be a more screwed-up time in Washington,” he says in the film’s only real laugh line.) to piggyback on an expedition to the South Pacific mounted by Landsat. Which brings us to …

2. Suspension of disbelief is a gift from the audience. Don’t abuse it. King Kong is a giant monster, but monsters don’t really exist. (Insert your own Trump joke here.) People going to see a King Kong movie know this, but they are willing to accept the existence of cryptids for a couple of hours in exchange for some entertainment. But just because they’ve accepted one impossible thing doesn’t imply permission to just throw a bunch of other unbelievable stuff at them without some background work. Take the Landsat expedition, for example. Why are a bunch of space scientists humping it halfway across the planet to look at an island? Why introduce them at all when you’ve got a perfectly serviceable secret government agency to mount the expedition — led by national treasure John Goodman, no less! Which leads to …

3. Good casting will not save you. Kong: Skull Island has a great cast. There’s Goodman, 2015’s Best Actress winner Brie Larson as a photographer, the legendary Samuel L. Jackson as an Air Cavalry officer who is none too thrilled about losing ‘Nam, comedic genius John C. Reilly as a World War II aviator whose been stuck on the island for 28 years, and Loki himself, Tom Hiddleston, looking buff as a jungle guide. Dozens of people of questionable utility tag along on the expedition to deliver a couple of quips before being eaten by Skull Island’s spectacular collection of megafauna. Not that you’ll care about any of them, because they’re not characters, just loose assemblies of traits pulled out of a hat marked “Hollywood cliches.” Even the marquee star, King Kong, lacks depth, having somehow overcome his two greatest weaknesses — pretty girls and military aircraft.

4. Movie references are harder than they look. Quentin Tarantino has made an entire career out of stringing together borrowed scenes from other movies, so why not Kong? But here’s the thing: QT isn’t just throwing stuff in there to look cool (see #1). He knows the emotional beats he wants to hit and chooses a scene to reference that evokes the desired emotions. Thus, his references work on two levels at once. Kong: Skull Island throws out references left and right, most notably to Apocalypse Now. But director Vogt-Roberts does not seem to understand that. For example, the scene where Robert Duvall’s air cav cowboys attack a village to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” is meant to evoke horror at kids with guns treating battle as a lark. Nor does he understand that when Kubrick used the song “We’ll Meet Again” over images of detonating atomic bombs at the end of Dr. Strangelove, it was the blackest irony — nobody is meeting anybody again, because we’re all dead in a nuclear holocaust. When Vogt-Roberts uses the song as our surviving heroes ride to safety, the movie’s not even over yet.

5. It’s probably not the director’s fault. According to Hollywood Reporter, Kong: Skull Island will have to make $500 million just to break even. With half a billion bucks on the line, why did Warner Bros. choose an unprepared director whose only credits are a cheap Sundance comedy and Nick Offerman’s stand-up concert? Was it because he had a unique vision? No. It’s because he’s a rookie with no power whom the producers know they can steamroll, and he’ll make a good scapegoat if and when the whole thing blows up in a giant ball of red flame. I suspect Vogt-Roberts is about to learn that lesson.

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Film Features Film/TV

I Saw The Light

The Hank Williams biopic I Saw the Light looks and feels like a movie that was scrapped halfway through shooting but cobbled together anyway, awkwardly, with many key and climactic moments left out. To patch all the disparate bits together, director Marc Abraham inserts aged, black-and-white footage of Bradley Whitford as the enormous and all-knowing head of music publisher Fred Rose, who appears on screen anytime somebody needs to explain what the hell’s going on or why anybody might care.

Instead of creating a sense of authenticity, indiscriminate use of documentary-style interviews makes the whole enterprise seem that much more insincere. One wonders if Whitford will eventually lead the cast in a rousing chorus of the “Time Warp.”

Tom Hiddleston as Hank Williams in I Saw the Light

The Hank Williams story is one part Amadeus and two parts Sid and Nancy. Here was a young, uncontrollable brat with a touch of genius whose genre-defying songs threatened a carefully maintained hierarchy in country and pop that ruffled more feathers from Nashville to New York than all the troubled hillbilly’s missed tour dates combined. There’s the obsessive, endlessly destructive marriage to his wife Audrey (Elizabeth Olsen), who was determined to become a celebrity in her own right. All of that potential drama is left on the table in favor of softer, more sympathetic characterizations, and a complete rejection of the idea that, in order for the light to matter, things need to get pretty damn dark.

I Saw the Light chooses to turn Hank Williams’ life story into an old fashioned disease-of-the-week movie, with loving shots of Cherry Jones as Hank’s ma giving Scarlet Witch some stinky side-eye.

The saddest part of all this is that Tom Hiddleston’s acting chops are considerable. Loki may be a little stiff when he’s singing and swinging, but he’s an impressive shape-shifter and a fair vocal mimic.

For all of its landscape shots, I Saw the Light has no sense of place, and even less sense of purpose. Alabama could be Shreveport, could be Nashville, it’s all the same. But what’s most fascinating about the way I Saw the Light fails, is the way it decisively treats Williams’ music — from process to performance — as a tertiary concern. Musicians like Ray Price (Von Lewis) and Faron Young (Fred Parker Jr.) are introduced to the story line but never explained, and, aside from a handful of Hiddleston performances, no attention is paid to the changing sounds of postwar country music, the people who listened to it, or the people who profited from it. The guy had some hits, but what about all of the terrible back pain he suffered? And the drinking problem! Those ill-defined mommy/wifey issues? Without the music, no amount of talking head inserts can explain why we should care.

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Film Review: Crimson Peak

My dearest Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston),

It is with heavy heart that I must inform you that I, your wife, am leaving your ancestral home of Allerdale Hall, aka Crimson Peak, and filing for divorce. This may come as a shock to you, but I now think the dissolution of our relationship was inevitable from the start. Maybe when my mother came back from the grave as a hideous ghost and hissed “Beware of Crimson Peak!”, I should have listened to her. Maybe I should have noticed that you look and act just like the evil Norse trickster god Loki. Maybe I missed another opportunity to avert relationship disaster when my rich father Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver) tried to bribe you into leaving the country. But he was such a terrible actor that I was almost relieved when he died under mysterious circumstances. And besides, you needed his considerable fortune to finish the construction of your steampunk machine that will bring the red clay mines underneath your estate back to profitability.

Mia Wasikowska in Crimson Peak

Come to think of it, the weird scheme to create an automated clay-mining machine should have been another red flag. Is there really a huge market for gooey red clay that looks like fake blood? Maybe you could have put that money into fixing up the house instead. I mean, come on. There’s a giant hole in the roof where the rain and snow come in and cascade down into the central stairwell. Sure, it makes for a dramatic scene, and the soft snowdrift did save my life when your sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain) tried to kill me, but it’s way past time to put a tarp on it. Between that, the walls that drip blood all the time, and the small army of ghosts that roam the halls (but never have much of an effect on the plot), my lawyer is going to have no trouble convincing the judge that you are forcing me to live in unacceptable conditions.

And then there’s your sister. Lucille is always smiling and courteous to my face, but I get the sense that she’s plotting against me. Perhaps it’s because of the similarities between our relationship and the one between Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains’ mother in the 1946 Alfred Hitchcock film Notorious, what with the poison in the tea and the purloined key and the basement full of secrets and whatnot. But the year is 1901, which means Hitch is just 2 years old and films with actual plots are only now being invented, so you can understand how I would have missed those particular red flags. I guess you live and learn.

I admit I share some of the blame for this fiasco. I guess I was blinded by the splendor of all those puffy-sleeved silk organza nightgowns and crushed velvet top hats. But frankly, my dear Thomas, there are so many holes in our story, I just don’t think it’s salvageable. So we must go our separate ways and hope that next time, director Guillermo del Toro can conjure up a more coherent world for us to live in.

Yours,

Edith Cushing Sharpe (Mia Wasikowska)

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Only Lovers Left Alive

Tilda Swinton’s vampire movie is worth seeing.

“Self-obsession is a waste of living,” says the suicidally beautiful vampire wife to her suicidally beautiful vampire husband. She knows what she’s talking about; she’s obviously seen her man this way before. She’s come to his house to rescue him. He has crawled too far into his own head for his own good, and he’s even gotten someone to make him a wooden bullet for those dark nights of the soulless when he can’t take it any more. But she won’t let him pull the trigger. She loves him. And she’s going to try to revive him by reintroducing him to the manifold miracles of the cosmos he may have forgotten: classic soul songs, mushrooms growing in mysterious places, diamonds as big as planets.

Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive is the best film of the year so far in part because it is so wondrously strange. How odd that something from the horror genre says more about everlasting love than most romances. How odd that a film about the undead has so much to say about what it means to be alive.

The film begins dizzyingly, as vampire couple Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are introduced and linked through a series of slowly rotating overhead shots that resemble the movement of a 45 spinning around on a turntable platter. This lovely, disorienting opening also foreshadows the characters’ interests in ritual and transcendence. But something has gone wrong along the way; the old repetitions don’t pack the same punch. As a result, Adam spends his long, long and lonely nights in beaten-down Detroit. Halfway across the globe, Eve and her friend Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who hid behind the name “Shakespeare” to get his writing out into the open, lurk in the streets of Tangier.

Adam and Eve are linked by their deep affection for the arts. You can’t blame them: After centuries on earth, wouldn’t you turn to aesthetic appreciation, too? There’s a rapturous montage of Eve packing books for her trip and stopping frequently, hands gliding up and down pages written in every language, to speed-reread the ones that interest her. Adam prefers to stay indoors, crafting guitar-heavy drones that combine Tuareg desert blues with late-psychedelic noise-rock. Music fascinates them both because they’ve been alive forever, and as Robert Christgau once wrote, the illusion of eternity has been music’s sacred mission for a good long time.

Into their relatively tranquil lives comes Ava (Mia Wasikowska), Eve’s self-destructive sister. Ava is a badly scratched-up vintage single of a girl who’s always playing at the wrong speed. Her impulse control is poor, her love of blood is strong, and her talent for irritating Adam is limitless. She causes problems.

That’s the plot. There’s more in the margins, of course, about American ruins and the sacrament of blood and the reinvigorating powers of culture. Trust me, the movie is a masterpiece. Yet these days, Jarmusch is not as famous as indie heroes like Wes Anderson or the Coens. Which is fine; he’s too good for that.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Opens Friday, May 16th

Studio on the Square