"THOR" PUN ARTICLE TITLE!

An example of the CGI rendering in THOR.

I saw Thor! In 3-D! It made no difference seeing it in 3-D, except for when I started getting a headache from looking through glasses! I also heard it in 3-D, as the the person sitting next to me was eating a bag of what I can only assume was a bag of cellophane wrapped cellophane!
I actually wasn't super hot on seeing Thor, but then I found out Kenneth "Bam-Bam" Branagh was directing it, and I decided to see what the old Shakespeare fetishist would bring to the table.

By the hammer of the guy this movie is about, let's get into the plot!

Thor begins on the home planet of the gods, Asgard. (Branagh's first week of rehearsals with the cast was just an intensive workshop of not to pronounce it "Ass-guard") Asgard looks like you combined every Rush, Kansas, and Yes album cover into one huge gated community, and then you made everyone live in a pipe organ.
Anthony Hopkins plays Odin, the head god, who is super-powerful, but not quite powerful enough to replace his missing eye. He has two sons, named Thor and Loki. They look just like their names sound! Thor is as big as two barns (or eighteen of me), blond, and struts around in full George W mode, grinning and thumbs-up-ing and spoiling for war. Loki looks like he's going to a Alan Cumming lookalike contest and enjoys pouting.

In his big introduction scene, Thor is going to be made "King God" (or something), and Thor is plenty excited! His grin almost comes off his face, he is grinning so hard! However, on his commencement day, the kingdom is attacked by the Asgardians worst enemy: The Frost Giants. If I was writing this screenplay, I might have searched for a more legit-sounding name for a villainous race than the "Frost Giants". Yes, it sounds like a brand of anti-freeze, but it also just sounds like a racist term that the gods came up with. Surely the Frost Giants don't call themselves that! ("Nothing is made in Asgard anymore, you got them Frost Giants down south makin' everything, 'cause they work cheap, stealin' jobs from you and me." - Thor, being a total racist) The Frost Giants look like cold Freddy Kruegers, and were almost wiped out by Odin when he was a young god. Now they are back for revenge, in the form of stealing back their powerful glowing box from the palace. (I realize this is a vague way to describe what the box is. The movie is just about as good as me at explaining what the box is.)

This makes Thor mad! Roarrrrr! Thor smash! Thor takes his BFF soldiers over the "rainbow bridge" (trippppyyyyyyyy!!!) into Frost Giant country to battle the giants. This sparks a war, and Odin Lector is VERY disappointed in Thor, casting his son to Earth, where he meets the prettiest scientist in the universe: Natalie Portman. Portman is in every movie this year, right? Is there a contest between her and James Franco? Portman is a astronomer or physicist or something. If you thought the Frost Giants box was vague, wait until you hear about Natalie's scientific research. It seems to consist mostly of her pointing at brightly colored photos. More funding, please! Whatever she's doing gets put on the backburner when she discovers the heavenly body of Thor (har!) and together they have to figure out how to put the colliding worlds of the gods and humans back to rights.

This movie is made of a lot of loud, ridiculous plot points, but they're no more ridiculous or outlandish than any comic book (or Norse legend). I also hope Chris Hemsworth gets a lot more leading action movie roles (I bet I will get my wish, this movie is making a ton of money!). Is anyone else mystified at the Shia LaBeoufs and Jake Gyllenhaals of the world, getting cast as slammin' action stars? They got soft city hands, says I!

Of course, this is all just a pre-cursor to next years Avengers movie, where all the Marvel movie heroes team up to battle evil. All proceeds from the movies go towards the ultimate goal: Creating an indestructible clone of Stan Lee, where the walrus-mustached old salt can lead us into an new era of endless hero origin stories! Hooray for Hollywood!

PICK THE WORST POSTER!

Here in New York, there is no shortage of advertising.

Sometimes this is great, like when you are handed free bags of M&M's on the street corner by "street teams", who are paid by corporations to make sure that you don't forget about M&M's.

But other times, it's just endless parades of posters, logos, and branding. This is especially true when a new movie is coming out. Believe me, if you were a baby born in November of 2010, you could identify a poster for Tron Legacy before you could pinpoint who "mama" was.

Movie posters have tended to be on the very tasteful, graphic-design end of things as of late. Even the Saw sequels of the world have afforded the dignity of a campaign you could hang alongside your IKEA Bjoorg couch. Unless, however, you are making a big-name comedy. Then you get the first-year photoshop intern to hash out some piece of advertising poop.

Here are three inescapable posters that I have to stare at while waiting for my train to come. All I want to do is go home, you guys! Not look at eye-poop! Which is the worst offender? I will let you, the gentle reader decide. (click on images to enlarge, if you wish)

Look. I am a reasonable man, with reasonable expectations in life. I don't think that the latest Adam Sandler ad is going to be the next Obama "HOPE" poster. But COME ON. THE FIST BUMP BELOW THE BUTT? And just look at the two stars, lounging in the luxurious pre-installed MacBook Pro wallpaper. I can almost feel the warm glow of the setting screensaver. (This is a little off-topic, but the poster copy reads that it is "based on a French stage play". A fantasy for any playwright, I am sure. "Sacre Bleu, eef only I could zomday hav' Adam Zandlar een my play. But of course, theeze eez just a beautiful dream!")

While this is isn't some hideous design, and whatever, just two be-oo-ti-full people with perfect skin and teeth and a million dollar apartment (and a nice, oddly stacked book shelf) grinning their faces off at each other. Typical movie stuff, that. But that tagline? COME ON. Some movie exec read a blurb on Huffington Post that the kids are having "friends with benefits" sex, what with the skinny pants and the rock music today. Next thing you know, one fresh, steaming pile of script was ordered up.

As I was searching online for the poster image, I found out there is an alternate tagline that reads "Friendship has its benefits". A little more more subtle than the hilariously on-the-nose text I get to see everyday. I'm sure that they changed it for all those backwoods, gator-eating "red state" theaters,who would have heart attacks if they saw S-E-X on the marquee. Having said all that, the original title of this movie was, no joke, F*ckbuddies. I don't know how they would have handled that. Renamed it "Snugglepals" for Iowa markets?

Good god. Look at this. Again, it's just two movie stars, who cares? But seriously, REALLY LOOK AT IT. This thing is so lovingly blurred, softened, and touched up it might as well be airbrushed on the back of a denim jacket. Vince Vaughn does not look like this anymore. He looks like someone painted a face on a bruised sausage and pushed it through a striped shirt. But here he is, doing the MySpace photo trick where you tilt your forehead waaaaaaay forward so you look thin and brooding and neck-cramp-y.

Again, there is an alternate tagline on the posters in NY, and I wish to high heaven I could've found it to show you. Instead of "The truth hurts", we get: "Two best friends...nothing could come between them...or could it?"

Ha, wow. Poster, there is a saying in business: stop selling when you've already sold. I would bank any money that nothing could come between these two friends. And yet, there they stand! "How am I going to tell this guy?" wonders Vince. "Tell me what, Vince?" says Kevin. "Oh brother! What a dilemma I am in!!!!!" exclaims Vince inside his head but not out loud.

WHO IS THE WORST OFFENDER? WHO CARES, I AM ALREADY BORED WITH THIS!

BLACK SWAN!

I saw Black Swan yesterday, the latest Natalie Portman movie. Although I know she has her share of haters, I've liked Portman ever since The Professional, and still had little hearts popping around my head watching her in the Star Wars prequels. (Everything else in the Star Wars prequels had the opposite of hearts popping around my head. Turds, I guess? That's the opposite, right? Also, I would like to point out that I was a child when I was watching this fellow child actor in movies, just so I don't sound like a pedo-nightmare.) Also, Darren Aronofsky! I have enjoyed his other entertainingly-presented nightmare rides of the human condition in the past! And when it's released in December, you know they are baiting the Acadamy award rod and reel with a big old wiggly worm of SERIOUS CINEMA.

So first off, let me ask you a question: would you take your mom to this movie? I ask because this movie theater was 25% sons and mothers. Now I get that you may have a totally "cool mom" who likes Vampire Weekend ever since she heard them in a car commercial. But would you sit in a theater, shoveling popcorn in your face while Natalie Portman gets repeatedly finger banged by everyone under the sun? Uh, did anyone read a summery of this movie before they just jumped on Fandango? I guess they could have only read the first sentence. "Black Swan is the story of a ballerina...OK GREAT, MOM WE'RE GONNA SEE THE BALLERINA MOVIE, OKAY?"

Portman starts off the movie as a ballet company dancer living with her mother in New York. They are ballet fanciers, to put it mildly. Have you ever been in a person's house who say, likes elephants? The rug is embroidered with elephants, and there are a million porcelain elephants on every level surface, and a giant Babar doll on the couch? Imagine that, but with toe shoes. "You sure seem to love the ballet!" You would say, inching towards the door.

Portmans mom is basically the stepmother from any Disney animated movie, who is cold and controlling and crazy. I've heard people say that they didn't like Portman's character, that she was too cold and bitchy. Uh, well, if you lived with a hell-beast stage mom who made you eat tutus for dinner (before you threw them up!), you might be a little icy too. Regardless, we see that Portman is a real work horse, and that her feet are disgusting, and what she wants most: to play the duel White Swan/Black Swan role in Swan Lake.

As luck would have it, Winona Ryder, the star of everything in the ballet, gets fired for being in her late 30's (and therefore gross). Now it's our girl Natalie in the leading role! But while her director thinks she can dance the precise, stick-up-the-butt moves of the white swan, he doubts her ability to pull off the wild, untamed dance of the black swan. (White Swans be dancin' like this: dee-dee-dee-dee! But Black Swans, they be all dancing like this: bah-bah-boom-boom!) Thus begins the pattern of the movie: people are unbelievably mean to Portman, Portman freaks out in a manner that may or may not be in her own imagination. Her mom literally locks her in the house when she isn't at rehearsal, her fellow dancers are the brat brigade, and the director of the ballet is not hesitant to employ the Don Draper method of sticking his fingers in women until his gets professional results. She also has a competitor, in the form of a hot rebel dancer. In the form of a hot rebel dancer who WEARS BLACK AND NATALIE PORTMAN WEARS WHITE NUDGE NUDGE!

Honestly, this movie is over dramatic and the symbolism is overt, but in the best way possible. Like a Japanese horror comic, with the same kind of haunted house jolts, and pretty girls with blood on them. Cool! I am never sending my daughter to ballet lessons, as ballet is apparently a kind of nightmarish body self-hatred camp for future and present psychopaths. If I wanted that, I would just have her watch (INSERT UNDER-FIRE TELEVISION SHOW POPULAR WITH TWEENS FOR SOCIAL COMMENTARY PURPOSES)!