I'm having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around what people see in Thor, as it is in fact pretty terrible. I grapple with this conundrum in my review of the film for MSN Movies. Also awful: the new romantic comedy Something Borrowed. As I mused to New York Times film critic A.O. Scott as we waited through the end credits of the superhero film for a promised glimpse of Samuel L. Jackson in an eyepatch, "When will our suffering end?"
Contributing even less than I usually do to the conversation, I’ve just got to say, Glenn: that’s some really funny stuff.
With my midnight Thor tickets in hand, my heart fills with despair reading your review.
The fanboys over at Rotten Tomatoes are really letting you feel their “wrath”. I wonder how many of them have watched the movie.
Yeah, I pretty much expected that. I suppose I could have avoided the whole thing by lying, maybe. Oh well.
What’s funny is the complaint that I don’t cite anything specific about precisely why it’s dumb. Like they need it in list form or something.
Could not agree more on Thor, Glenn. It came out last week in the UK, and has been getting similarly glowing reviews from all corners, but I sniggered my way through it. Just terrible. I think I’d sooner watch Ghost Rider again, which is saying something – at least that’s got a nutso Cage turn to its name.
“Maxfield Parrish-on-meth” sounds groovy, but I suspect it won’t live up to that almost enticing description. What makes me really sad is knowing that the inevitable Dr. Strange movie will not even try to live up to Ditko’s scratchy surrealism.
In my own review, I discuss how THOR exceeded expectations for me. I didn’t love it, but I loved elements of it. The Asgardian sequences are wonderful, full of the kind of Shakespearean palace intrigue in Branagh’s wheelhouse. Hemsworth has the larger-than-life charm one would expect from the god of thunder, which I likened to Reeve’s twinkle in his debut as Superman.
However, many fanboy critics think that just because the movie was better than expected it is a good movie. And unfortunately, THOR is still lacking. It’s burdened by the same tropes which afflict many superhero films: unending exposition to establish the protagonist’s world, and an inordinate amount of time spent focusing on the sequels to come instead of the movie at hand.
I so wish a superhero movie would follow the example of the comics and not start with the origin. Start by taking it for granted that the world has these awesome people who do rad stuff, and you’ll make us believe it. Then, if things go well, you can explain it to us. But explaining it to us first is putting a big heavy overloaded cart in front of a not-really-all-that-burly horse.
Which is of course why the origins-eschewing ‘The Incredibles’ remains one of the greatest superhero movies.
Interestingly, the exact point of the movie that lost me…it wasn’t even “tell me you’re not dead,” or the Chris Jericho/Peter Murphy matchup…no, it was during the coronation scene, in which The Mighty Thor winks, yes, WINKS, at his mom, poor Renee Russo. Even when the comic was at its corniest, Thor NEVER frigging WINKED.
Hi Glenn,
Great review, and I really love how your disgust with the film arises not only from your tastes, skills and perceptions as a film critic, but from your experience as a Marvel reader: I suspect the reason some of those Rotten Tomatoes folks are angry at you is because your references to Simonson, Kirby and Joe Sinnott mean you can’t just be dismissed as some “snob who doesn’t get it.” I’m still curious to see the film, but really liked your piece.
One thing– the second link doesn’t take me to the SOMETHING BORROWED review. I don’t know if it’s my browser or what, but both links go to the THOR review.
I could see how the film might have lost you at that point. I actually found it endearing of both Hemsworth and Branagh to go with the choice of the wink. I felt they were both acknowledging that the usual fanboy nitpickers should lighten up. And as long as we were dealing with all things Asgardian I was all in.
But the Jeremy Renner cameo you mention in your review… yeesh! I’m a fan of both Renner and the unnamed character he plays in his cameo, but boy did that scene seem out of sync with the rest of THOR. It just seemed random if one looks at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint. And from a fan perspective I’m not sure it’s as “neat-o” as they would like it to be. The time would have been better spent establishing the relationships between Thor and his flunkies.
As Fuzzy Bastard says, there’s gotta be some better way to start these franchises than with a rehash of the hero’s origin. Worse still, I’m convinced that the superhero movie’s need to tell the origin is behind the recent obsession with prequels and reboots. All due respect to CASINO ROYALE and STAR TREK ’09, both quite enjoyable, I’m not sure we need to see how every protagonist becomes motivated to go down the road of extraordinary heroism.
@ Brian: Link fixed, I think. The MSN pages can be a little wonky when they first go up, hopefully this will hold steady.
I really liked the SOMETHING BORROWED review, too, btw– as much as I enjoy Krasinski on THE OFFICE, that movie looks awful, and I liked your critique.
Weird that ads for Metacritic figure so prominently into the MSN Movies page, yet Metacritic itself doesn’t include your review. Or AO Scott’s. What’s happening there, Glenn?
I am still in amazement that Kenneth Branagh was even considered to direct THOR. Was it because of the scene in MARY SHELLY’S FRANKENSTEIN, where Branagh enters with a giant, flowing cape to bring life to his experiment to life, played more like a scene from Burton’s BATMAN than anything from a Universal or Hammer film on the same subject? Or was it once again due to the fear of Hollywood producers and studios that unless they attached some type of “culture” or “importance” to the film, no one would take it seriously? Is Anthony Hopkins filling in for Marlon Brando?
Now that the great Alex Thomson has passed away, is cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos stuck with Branagh’s penchant for sloppy 360 camera moves using a Steadicam? (I swear you can see the actors trying to hit their marks in Branagh’s HAMLET as the camera spins needlessly around them.)
As Mr. Roarke says to Tattoo in the SCTV version of FANTASY ISLAND: “Questions! Questions!”
I actually enjoyed Thor. I wouldn’t call it a great film or anything to that effect, but I did like it more than I expected (and more than a certain Mr. Kenny).
I do agree with Fuzzy Bastard’s annoyance at the whole origin thing. When I first started reading comics (around 1977 if memory serves – at the tender age of 9) I just dove into the stories already running. I needed no origin story and we do not need them in our movies either.
Anyway, I stop ranting now. Just wanted to share that some of us actually liked the movie – even with its flaws.
Kevyn,
Your post was hardly a rant. My post on the other hand…let’s just say my dislike of Branagh’s filmmaking talents(?) have been festering since 1989 with HENRY V. Who knows, maybe Branagh will surprise me this time and lay off the gratuitous camera movements.
“I am still in amazement that Kenneth Branagh was even considered to direct THOR. ”
He was as perfect a choice as Raimi. Branagh loved THOR as a kid and who better to translate the pop purple biblical Shakespearean prose?
I am going to preface this by admitting that I did enjoy this film. It was not the most thrilling film I’ve ever seen, nor was it one of the poorest. It was a decent pop corn flick.
I have read great reviews, both negative and positive about this film. Yours, is not one of these. Reading it was insulting to both the reader and your profession. It annoyed me so much that, for the first time, I felt the need to track down the author of the review to share my disgust.
Sir, your review was unprofessional, dreadfully written and childish.
First off, the first two paragraphs are utterly childish. There is the unnecessary contempt which you lather upon the “virgin fanboy” (“And then I had sex for the first time”, “unless you’re a Comic Con regular, in which case you might spontaneously orgasm at it”) as you assure the reader that you have read a Thor books before, dropping a few big names, convincing them that you are therefore connoisseur and really just like the peasants (fanboys). It read like a slightly more sophisticated version of “I have read some comics, so there!” as you stuck out your tongue at the reader.
Secondly, your review is simply unprofessional. It barely qualifies as a critique. As you’ve pointed out, others have been scathing as you practically do nothing but summarize the film and call it dumb. Shockingly, actually telling the reader why you believe a film to be dumb is part of a proper movie critique. Imagine having to explain why you felt a certain way about a film. Why bother writing a long critique about films you’ve enjoyed? Simply write “it was good”, and the work is done. Your readers will doubtlessly thank you for your succinctness and run to the theaters without so much as a short list of reasons the film was good.
And thirdly, the simple manner in which you express yourself in your review is dreadful. The language used may as well have been found on a 16 year old’s Myspace page(“No, really, it is.”) Many sentences were jarring to read (“OK, OK, Aussie hunk Chris Hemsworth as Thor and other dude Tom Hiddleston as Loki, dude of mischief”) while others were borderline offensive (“Soon some of Thor’s multiracial warrior playmates”. After all the heat this movie took for including a black man, you decide it’s a good idea to make a snide comment about race?). I’m not saying you should write in a robotic fashion, but you could at least try to not add to the disintegration of the English language.
I’m not a professional critic. Heck, the only thing I write that is published is socio-political theory. That being said, I know a good review when I see one, and yours was belittling, egotistical, poorly written, and “a lot of crap”.
Patrick Imbeau demands satisfaction!
“I’m not a professional critic. Heck, the only thing I write that is published is socio-political theory.”
?!?!?
Yes, so many questions. And I’m still so fucking busy!
Let’s start with Michael Worrall: Not a whole helluva lot of swirling camera movement in this one. I’m not sure if this picture was designed for 3D or retrofitted (I know, very “unprofessional” of me) but the shooting/editing style largely hews to the whole Things-You-Want-To-Be-Careful-With-In-3D ethos, e.g., not a whole lot of swirling and/or fast camera movement or ultra-quick cutting. It does not, however, avoid the whole All-This-Stuff-Looks-Kind-Of-Underlit problem you have with a lot of 3D films often enough.
A lot of the film’s supporters have yoked Branagh to this Shakespeare-in-Asgard idea. This would hold more water if the dialogue didn’t, you’ll excuse the phrase, suck. “You’re nothing but a boy trying to prove himself a man.” “Is it madness? Is it? Is it?” And so on. About a third of the way through I was thinking, “I bet Branagh knows Tom Stoppard or someone like that, couldn’t he have had Paramount throw a bag of money in his lap to spruce up some of this?” Apparently, no.
I knew the whole sex thing might hit some folks where they didn’t live, but I wasn’t bragging, honest; merely relating my own actual direct experience of comic book consumption. (And since this is the Golden Age of reprints, I have taken up the habit again in a different way, collecting the first two volumes of that amazing “Fantastic Four” omnibus—when the third comes out, completing the Galactus/SIlver Surfer/Inhumans saga, I’ll be done—and QUITE A LOT of Kirby and Ditko and bunches of Caniff and Gould, and yes, those are strips not books, just sayin’.) As it happens, a friend who used to own a comic book store (I still have ties to the “community” believe it or not) and who wasn’t offended by my review corrected me with respect to the SImonson “Thor” run, saying it began in the ’80s, and sure enough WIkipedia says his first issue in late 1983! I seem to recall losing my virginity somewhat earlier than that. I shall have to check with the other individual involved, who’s now my Facebook friend. (Isn’t social media grand?) In any case, while I didn’t intend to bait anyone (much), I’m sorry that I’ve compelled Mr. Imbeau to rise to it. Good for him that he liked the film. It’s still not any good, in my book.
‘[…]while others were borderline offensive (“Soon some of Thor’s multiracial warrior playmates”. After all the heat this movie took for including a black man, you decide it’s a good idea to make a snide comment about race?)’
It is a good idea. Offensive for whom? For non-whites, or for so-called ‘liberal’ PC white guys who feel their moral sensibilities stroked when a studio movie cynically includes token Black or Asian or Latino characters in a proportion decided by a comittee only to deflect acussations of racism and otherwise would feel nervous watching a Samuel Fuller film?
And… right, the review doesn’t explain a lot, avoids the whys and hows, and it definitely does have a derisive tone. I can’t attest to Mr. Kenny’s true intentions in choosing such approach, but my guess is… we-ell, it is another “decent pop corn flick”, that is, decent for you and others. For me (and I haven’t seen it) and others, is The Same Old Crap. Trouble with The Same Old Crap is, I’ve seen enough, I can smell it from a long distance, and life is too short to do a through analysis with any new TSOC movie, because 1) I’ve done it before, in my mind, with one, two, hundreds of TSOCs, and the gist of it remains pretty much the same, so it’s not worth doing it again just to confront the particulars of the new TSOC, and I’m talking about thinking, let alone the effort of putting it down on paper, and 2) even if I accidentally catch up with the thing and discover it’s a little better than the common TSOC and thus disagree with Mr. Kenny’s opinion, it’s going to be more “pshew, I didn’t fall asleep, it’s sort of OK” than “DUDE, THAT WAS SO UNFAIR, HOW COULD YOU BE SO WRONG”. ‘Cause even you admit it’s just a “decent pop corn flick”. You’ll get another one next week, I’ve got a lot of other and better things to watch. This is not like eviscerating ‘The Scarlett Empress’, for God’s sake.
Anyway, FUCK superheroes. For trashy entertainment, there’s right now a homeless man blasting creeps with a fucking shotgun, as simple as that, not with some superpowers you need more than thirty minutes of film to justify how the guy got’em and why they won’t run in Linux and why they are more psychologically stressing than a minimum wage monday-to-saturday job even though said superpowers DON’T FUCKING EXIST AND WE WANT THEM IN THE MOVIE TO BLOW SHIT UP NOT TO FORCE PHONY DRAMA and why… Why.
Why?
WHY?
Your review was horrible and appears like something out of an 8th grade remedial English class. If the movie is bad – OK. I will see it and judge it for myself. But do you actually get paid to do what you do?
Seriously and non-sarcastically, I’d pay to go see a superhero movie that cast Dwayne Johnson as Buford ‘Razorback’ Hollis.
I read your review on how Thor was bad, but went to see the movie despite your low score.
After watching the movie I can honestly say that Thor was pretty good and your review gets 1/5 stars.
Glenn,
Finally saw the movie last night. I had a good time, but I could see where your review was coming for.
But I have to say, I think you’re normally more forgiving with light, unpretentious entertainments (e.g. Prom) and save the hate for the pompous ones (I Am Number Four, for example). I definitely thinks Thor belongs in the former, so I have to ask, were you on a bad mood that day?
@ Rotch: I was DISAPPOINTED! The whole point of my review was, I thought, that I was conversant enough with the original material that I could see a halfway decent movie in it. This was not that. Also, I didn’t see this film as being ALL THAT light in its approach.
Hey Glenn,
I may disagree with your assessment of Thor but your review is well-written. See, everyone is not dissing you. Still say the movie is good though – even if Branagh is not that great of a director.
Thanks Kevyn. But to tell you the truth, I’m not all that bothered, and in cases such as this a “When Fans Attack” episode is not unexpected. My default style for 1,000-word-and-under reviews, when I’m permitted to use it (which my editors at MSN do) is what it is, and it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I do understand the difference between actual bad usage and “wrong” from the draconian-copy-editor perspective, and yeah, I do tend to push that. As for providing specific details, in the “Thor” review I tended to do that via implication within wisecracks; if formally asked to defend myself, I’d cite the Chris Jericho/Peter Murphy joke as Exhibit A. My main beef with “Thor” is my perhaps naive belief that a much better film that would have still satisfied the note-making suits could have been made from the comic.
Frankenstein is not KB’s only earlier foray into genres. Dead Again is an absolutely delightful Hitchcock/Welles noir tribute.
As a fan of Glenn’s work (and a loyal reader of this blog), I was also thrown off a bit by the review. I got to the end and had a sense that you had noticed things you didn’t mind, but you hadn’t been hooked in a positive way by anything in particular. This actually puts you in fairly close proximity to a lot of the positive reviews you position yourself in opposition to (pretty much all of which say it’s a good film because it’s technically competent and consistently entertaining). The slim difference is that a lot of the other reviewers were suckers for the heightened melodrama, the superficial charm of the archetypal characters, and the movie’s particular synthesis of over-seriousness and subversive levity.
Or at least, those were the things I liked about it — the reasons I thought of it as a grade-B worth-my-money-to-see movie, rather than a grade-C wish-I’d-stayed-home movie.
Now, my biggest qualm about Thor is that the fight scenes were handled clumsily, completely failing to respect the sensibilities of the comic book audience. Run-and-gun shooting, fast, discontinuous editing… covering up for expensive CGI work? Ugh. For a film that’s so intent on covering Thor’s warrior prowess, we really don’t get to see, like, ANY convincing footage of the guy laying any smack-down. Of course, this is a chronic problem with CGI-era action movies… especially by non-action directors. So I had to ignore that and focus on the Olympian posturing (two thumbs up) and the fish-out-of-water antics of the Earthbound cast (grade A-). And the epic fabricated-plus-CGI set-pieces (three stars out of four).
I could entirely understand a review that shrugged the movie off as irrelevant, but when you start to actively claim a movie is crap, and that you don’t understand why people liked it, then you start to take on a slightly larger burden of proof. A movie this full of pandering and conventions and cliches can’t be relevant, but it can certainly be endearing and worth a trip to the multiplex.
Well, kids, it’s not as if I can recraft my review and resubmit it to MSN. Sorry.
You may note that A.O. Scott’s review puts him on the same page, more or less, as myself, and he’s even more ticked off than I am. I wonder if Dan Kois will catch the implicit (albeit jocular) rejoinder to his “Cultural Vegetables” manifesto in Scott’s lede.
I say, old chaps, writing about pop culture needn’t be dry and academic. Glenn’s erudition comes through loud and clear when he wants it to, here and elsewhere. Even in the offending review, he correctly uses “pedigree” and “Byzantine,” and name-checks Maxfield Parrish. His slangier constructions are just that, not inept manglings of proper usage, and contribute not one iota to the “disintegration of the English language.”
For the record, though I am one of Glenn’s Facebook friends, I am not “the other individual involved.”
Jesus, even the film’s supporters here sound pretty blase. “I read your stupid negative review, and after seeing the film, I would like to say that, in fact, the movie is actually LESS THAN HORRIBLE.”
Yeah, a lot of shit-taking going on simply for having the nerve to write a colloquial review of a picture that’s lucky to get it.
Christian wrote: “Branagh loved THOR as a kid and who better to translate the pop purple biblical Shakespearean prose?”
I can think of far more deserving, talented, and scandalously out of work directors who have a lot more to offer then just: “He loved the comic since he was a kind and besides, he’s done Shakespeare!!” (Hell, Joe Dante cannot even get a distributor for his last film!) All of which, if I may point out, does not necessarily translate that Branagh has any sensitivity or understanding of the material in terms of filmmaking.
Reading Tony Davoub’s review on THOR in which he points out Branagh’s excessive use of dutch angels, and Jessie M’s comments about the fight scenes makes me suspect that Branagh is relying –as did he in FRAKENSTEIN–on mechanical effects that substitue for any real expressive style. I find such a reliance to be the signs of a bankrupt filmmaker; which I consider to Branagh be.
Glen: your citations of the dialogue of THOR reminds of Branagh’s nostril flaring and heaving breathing, errr…Elizabethan emoting, of “LIVE! LIVE! LIVE!” in FRANKENSTEIN.
correction:
I can think of far more deserving, talented, and scandalously out of work directors who have a lot more to offer then just: “He loved the comic since he was a kid and besides, he’s done Shakespeare!!”
Michael Worrall, more than kin and less than kind, eh?
John M’s really right—the piling on in defense of a movie they don’t actually seem that excited about is one more chapter in the endless saga of superhero fans’ completely unjustified persecution complex, which no amount of multimillion dollar entertainments will ever assuage. Only fundamentalist Christians can rival them when it comes to being so powerful and so self-pitying.
But a more SCR-worth question is: What happened to Kenneth Branaugh? HENRY V wasn’t nearly as clever as Olivier’s film, but it’s solidly entertaining. DEAD AGAIN is a delightfully goofy pastiche, MUCH ADO is marvelous piffle (just like the play)… and then it all went wrong. Was Emma Thompson really the brains of the outfit ?
Marvelites, were you this outraged when Spider-Man made a deal with Satan Himself to annul his marriage? When Joe Quesada decreed it was preferable for kids to see Wolverine murdering people with his claws than smoking a cigar? Or when (because this trend is nothing new, alas) Professor X turned out to have been a shape-shifting imposter, and so wasn’t dead at all?
James: when your filmography is so “full of sound and fury” like Branagh’s, then yes.
Perhaps I should not write in such haste and figure out how to use the edit function on Glenn’s blog. Let me give this post one more clean up and I’ll let go of my wrath on Branagh as a filmmaker:
Reading Tony Davoub’s review on THOR in which he points out Branagh’s excessive use of dutch angels, and Jessie M’s comments about the fight scenes, makes me suspect that Branagh is relying –as did he in FRANKENSTEIN–on mechanical effects that substitute for any real expressive style. I find such a reliance to be the sign of a bankrupt filmmaker; which I consider Branagh to be.
Oliver: I think from reading various comic book comments threads the answers are “yes”, “yes”, and “yes”, though I think in the middle case Mr. Quesada had a leg to stand on.
Violence and death resulting therefrom– even the sort of extreme violence which, frankly, has always turned me off w/r/t Wolverine– is part and parcel of the genre, while “looking cool while smoking” is not, and the restriction was only w/r/t titles that kids could get their hands on; their mature line would remain rife with carcinogens. If you ask me, that’s eminently reasonable.
And it’s not like Mr. Quesada was doing it just to be PC or delicate or some shit: IIRC, his grandfather had died the year previous of smoking-related illnesses and his father’s lung had just collapsed. Personally, I would’ve done the same thing in his position.
Will anyone remember this film in 2 months?
>DEAD AGAIN is a delightfully goofy pastiche, MUCH ADO is marvelous piffle (just like the play)… and then it all went wrong.
It didn’t all go wrong that quickly in my opinion — his Hamlet, for all its flaws (including some godawful editing in the play-within-a-play sequence), is wonderful, if only for Branagh’s own performance (which, dare I say it, exceeds Olivier’s in range and breadth and the cracking-open of the title character beyond his brooding mantle) and for the lovely work of Derek Jacobi, Kate Winselt, and Richard Briers in supporting roles. I haven’t seen stage Hamlets, and no doubt the best of those offer the deepest readings of this character, but among cinematic Hamlets I’ve encountered, only Branagh’s gets close to capturing the tremendous mercurial intelligence and emotional volatility embedded within the melancholy prince’s words.
Olivier’s Hamlet is visually stronger with its gloomy noir echoes, but Branagh’s keeps me more in thrall with its performances, and absolutely stomps Zeffirelli’s into the ground, to the point where I find the latter (which was my first exposure to “Hamlet” in any medium) nigh-unwatchable. The moment where Claudius strikes Hamlet in the face screaming “where is Polonius?,” all the way up to the closeup of Ophelia’s screaming face as she learns her father’s fate, amounts to one of the most thrilling and propulsive chunks of cinema I’ve ever encountered. And when I recite “how all occasions do inform against me” to myself — it’s by far the best motivational speech I’ve ever heard — it’s with Branagh’s exasperated inflections. (“I DO NOT KNOW why yet I live to say ‘this thing’s to do’…”)
Just want to throw my meager hat in against what appears to be a burgeoning Branagh pile-on.
And yes, in its finer moments, Much Ado is bliss — the original screwball romance as batted wonderfully back-and-forth by Branagh and then-squeeze Emma Thompson.
I haven’t seen Thor and I can’t comment on it, but I do find it amusing that a negative review of a comic book adaptation is causing so much consternation, when it was Glenn’s glowing review of The Crow for Entertainment Weekly 17 years ago that turned me on to his work.
Mr. Kenny,
How dare you make a case for your negative assessment of this film? Though I think Branagh’s THOR is utter garbage, your failure to make a 20-page PowerPoint presentation for each nitpick is proof positive that you lack the expertise to critique any comic book movie.
Can’t wait for James Ivory’s CONAN.
Sincerely,
That Guy
It was pretty bad yet quite entertaining, I thought.
Agent Coulson’s line, “Donald, you haven’t been completely honest with me” made me laugh so it wasn’t a total washout.
Ho hum!
Glenn Kenny, I am named Thor and I have soared amidst the stars far from the planet of my birth after displeasing my father, Odin. Yet you have displeased me more with your unfair and unkind review of my movie, and I will soon by descending upon your Brooklyn apartment to smote you upon the noggin with my mighty hammer Mjolnir. At the hour of my choosing, you and Your Lovely Wife will bow before the Thunder God and feel his Wrath!
I question whether the above post comes from the actual Thor. Surely he wouldn’t use “smote” when he means “smite,” and “noggin” seems rather colloquial for a Norse god. 🙂
Didn’t know about the Wolverine/smoking controversy. Was this before or after Branagh filmed Andy Garcia smoking through a hole in his throat in DEAD AGAIN?
Jbryant, you dare question the grammatical powers of the mighty Thor? I had not yet imbibed my morning goblet of Metamucil before typing my post. But come smite or smote, I shall rain vengeance on the earthling called Kenny.
@ The Mighty Thor: Sounds like fun! I’ll make a quiche!
Count me as OUTRAGED about Wolverine giving up cigars. He has a goddamn healing factor!!!!!!111!!111!!!111!!! The whole, like, point of the character is that he does all kinds of self-destructive things because he has healing powers! The claws work because he has a healing power! The skeleton is ‘cauze of the healing powerz! Goddammit this is not okay goddammit!!111!!!11!!11!!! It’s like the Onion headline, “Fun Toy Banned Because of One Stupid Kid”
I think it was after his greatest triumph (HAMLET), that Branagh’s career went into the crapper. I think all three of his earlier Shakespeare films are very good. Here’s what I wrote last year upon reseeing HENRY V
HENRY V (Kenneth Branagh, Britain, 1989, 8) – First re-viewing since seeing it in its theatrical run and it stood up very well, particularly since Branagh hasn’t made a really good film since his 1996 masterpiece HAMLET. Fold in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING from the early 90s, and it looked like Branagh could make a whole career out of great Shakespeare films. (It hasn’t worked out that way, obviously, but seeing this film rekindles the hope.) Branagh’s gimmick casting, which hurt both his other two Shakespeare films some, is kept in check here. Robbie Coltrane isn’t a great Falstaff IMHO, but he’s at least competent (unlike Keanu Reeves or Jack Lemmon). And Derek Jacobi is a marvelous narrator/chorus and Judi Densch gets past the “spot the star in the small role” bit. I also don’t get why people think this movie is anti-war, unless the argument is that any portrayal of war as bloody and messy is thereby “anti” … in which case, “duh” … but “duh.”
But what matters in the end, and which makes HENRY V work overall, I think better than Olivier’s 1944 film, is Branagh’s greater commitment to realism and making the Shakespearean dialogue come across as naturalistic. His personal performance is great and lusty and virile, and therefore the film grabs you right away because Branagh sells with a straight face all the court intrigue over his claim to the French throne (but with a gentle mocking “so, it’s clearly the case” from his courtier at the end). The opening scenes don’t sound the least bit stylized, and so we’re off to the races. This makes the tennis balls from the Dauphin come across as both funny and horribly, terribly misguided — “you don’t tug on Superman’s cape … you don’t pull the mask off that ol’ Lone Ranger” is how Jim Croce expressed roughly the same thought I had. And when we get to the big speeches — “once more into the breach” and “we band of brothers” — you’re just in the presence of Branagh’s greatness as an actor. Part of it, essential to the rousing, loin-girding grandiosity of the St. Crispin’s Day speech, is Branagh’s supreme confidence, which becomes Henry’s. Branagh encourages us to go along with him as Henry rallies his outnumbered men, both men knowing how good he is and how he’s gonna nail for posterity his defining moment, whether it’s Agincourt or one of the most famous speeches ever written in English.
Hey Thor! Look what Herschell Gordon Lewis had someone say in 1967 about your father!:
Every year, on Odin’s birthday, I take the soup bones from the school kitchen.
I bury the soup bones, and Odin digs them up.
That way we have birthday party for Odin.
– Mr. Svenson
THE GRUESOME TWOSOME
Although I like Branagh’s Henry V, I feel like Olivier’s commitment to exploring the audience/player relationship in Shakespeare’s own day (seen in the early Globe-theater scenes), as well as the creative visual design of a sort of twilight zone between theater and cinema, are in their own ways as interesting and authentic as Branagh’s realism. In the early scenes of Olivier’s Henry V I feel you can feel very palpably a theatrical tradition stretching back centuries, and I haven’t seen anything quite like it in other Shakespeare movies.
Just came back from seeing Hamlet (1996) at the Aero, by the way, projected in glorious 70mm. Branagh spoke for a while afterwards. What a raconteur! As charming and full of entertaining stories as you’d expect him to be.
I’m a comic book fan and I cut my teeth on the Roy Thomas/John Buscema Thor as well as a person who considers the Walt Simonson run as the definitive run of the character. That said, I’m no movie aficionado but I loved Thor and can’t wait to see it again.
How does a “thoroughly…mediocre” movie earn one star? Shouldn’t a moderate quality film earn a moderate number of stars? But three stars at the top of a review won’t entice as many people to read it as one star.
I’m with Gordon on this. Branaugh’s HENRY V is tremendously entertaining, not least because of the realism Victor notes. But the interesting thing about Shakespeare’s play is that it’s not at all realistic; it’s emphatically theatrical, even openly self-conscious (I don’t think any of the other major plays have a figure named “Chorus”).
One of the most striking thematic elements of the play is the notion of war as a form of theater, revolving less around battles than performances (not only the famous rousing-the-troops speeches, but also the intimidating speech outside the French walls which convinces the larger army to surrender to the smaller). Olivier’s film adds another meta element by being itself so explicitly a work of wartime propaganda, connecting the wartime England of the 1940s, the wartime England of the fifteenth century, and the wartime England of Elizabeth’s era. It’s especially striking that on the big speeches (particularly the Agincourt speech), Olivier avoids close-ups of Henry, instead pulling out to take in the on-screen audience which is thus explicitly connected with the Blitz-era audience watching the movie.
Like all of Olivier’s Shakespeare films, it’s growing out of an acting tradition that seems, to American eyes, more alien than even Kurosawa’s Kabuki-influenced Shakespeare films. But I definitely found that although I had a better immediate response to Branaugh’s, it’s Olivier’s that’s really rewarded repeat viewings and heavy thinking.
I just like that Branagh wants to bring Shakespeare to the masses.
>it’s emphatically theatrical, even openly self-conscious
I’ll take this opportunity to mention that I’ve always felt the wonderful prologue to Henry V (“O for a muse of fire”), in which Shakespeare laments the practical and visual limitations of the theater in recreating epic events, suggests he might have been pretty thrilled at the possibilities inherent in cinema. What sort of screenwriter would he have made, I wonder…
“in which Shakespeare laments the practical and visual limitations of the theater in recreating epic events, suggests he might have been pretty thrilled at the possibilities inherent in cinema.”
And see, that’s EXACTLY why I prefer Branagh’s HENRY V and (especially) his HAMLET to Olivier’s. Shakespeare was a supremely cinematic writer, for a 16th-century playwright (far more than, say, Shaw or Sophocles). So if you’re going to make a film of (most of) Shakespeare, you CAN go whole hog with the medium you are already in and make a rousing epic out of it.
Olivier, I think, made a mistake with the theater-film hybrid he tried to make in HENRY V. I think it’s neither fish nor fowl and when he presents the Agincourt battle (relatively, for this film) realistically, he is playing on a field with half-a-team (and an unprepared one at that) and inviting judgment accordingly. I’d rather he simply presented the play per se rather than “breaking out.”
I got the meta-cinematic points TFB points out. I don’t think they’re either terribly profound or true. I mean … of course, war is a form of theater if you’re on a 16th-century live stage and can’t make stuff blowed up real good. But it’s not actually true … or rather the extent to which it is true is not specific to theatrical-theatrical (i.e., “presentation” or “appearance” in the specific form of theater), but about “presentation” and “appearance,” which can be just as credibly rendered cinematically. (Apologies for that sentence.) The Harfleur speech and Agincourt speech are, in their substance and content, both about impressing an audience with an appearance of substance (the enemy in the first instance, one’s comrades in the second). The how is really very secondary, as Branagh shows.
Further, the more true they are, the more the film fails as wartime flag-waving. That extra level of self-consciousness, however much it may reward heavy thinking, blunts the bellicose quality. I didn’t say this in the capsule I re-posted above, but I was shocked by having the thought that Branagh’s peacetime film was far more testosterone-rousing than Olivier’s wartime one.
Gordon, Shakespeare would have made an exceptional screenwriter, especially with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.
Reposting (apologies if this turns out to be a duplicate; hoping such a spam-guard reflex):
Reading that in the third person, it’s a little harsher on Olivier than I intended. I do like his HENRY V quite a lot (and his RICHARD III even more).
So for balance … while it’s true that I think Olivier blunts the play’s bellicosity, I can’t pretend not to have felt a spine shiver and a tear in my British-born eye (my mother was born four days before D-Day and I on its anniversary) when the camera did its pullout and it goes from Henry addressing his men to Olivier addressing his audience/country.
Well, regarding Hamlet, I actually feel that Olivier’s is in some ways *more* cinematic than Branagh’s — which is to say the brooding black-and-white cinematography with its Gothic overtones seems to me to have a particularly distinctive look and to inform the text with echoes of Hollywood genres. I think Olivier knew how to direct Shakespeare films in different ways. I prefer Branagh’s take on Hamlet mainly because a) it is uncut, making other versions seem rather like “Hamlet’s greatest hits,” and b) I just like the acting in it more, particularly Branagh and Jacobi. For all the opulent production design and 70mm bigness, Branagh’s version seems to me more dominated by the performances and less by look and style, though I’m sure his colorful/sunny palette was in part meant as a reaction against Olivier.
Re: Henry V, I would simply say there are many roads to Rome. I love Olivier’s evocation of a theatrical tradition — whatever Shakespeare *would* have been had he lived nowadays, is still the water in which he swam and the milieu for which he wrote — and the way Olivier stages the Globe theater scenes, with the groundlings actively participating in the comic action, is something I have never seen in another Shakespeare movie, whereas Branagh’s ostensible realism is somewhat more conventional (we see it to varying degrees, for instance, in Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet, and Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar).
In one sense, yes, the opening-up from the Globe theater is “neither fish nor fowl,” but in another sense it’s a hybrid transformation that could not have been achieved in any other medium, flaws in execution notwithstanding. It’s unique, playful, and inspired, leading us out of “this wooden O” to show us, as best he could, “the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt.”
Again, I like them both, but in the case of Henry V I have seen nothing quite like Olivier’s witty, self-aware experiment.
But anyway, everybody knows Kurosawa is the greatest director of Shakespeare.
Maybe I’m engaging in Bardolotry here, but… I hate the idea that Shakespeare’s plays are somehow waiting for cinema to make them what they were really supposed to be. On the contrary, I think Shakespeare’s plays, like any masterpiece, are intensely bound up in their medium of choice, and adapters ignore at their peril the fundamental betrayal that adaption involves.
Much of what makes Shakespeare’s plays so endlessly rich and fun is their metatheatricality, and the way theater’s unique mixture of the abstract and the realer-than-real allows you to be in multiple places at once. See, for example, Peter Brooks’ excellent writings on the difficulty of adapting the “suicide” scene in KING LEAR, where Edgar and Gloucester must be simultaneously and equally on a mountain, on a beach, and on the stage—it’s the kind of thing that theater does almost effortlessly and film kinda can’t do at all. Similarly, a lot of the humor in Shakespeare involves self-conscious winks to the audience that were quite common in the Elizabethian era and are foolishly branded “postmodern” today. When Cleopatra mourns, moments before her suicide, that someday “I shall see some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness”, she’s calling the audience’s attention to the boy who would have been cast in the role in a Shakespearean production. It’s Brechtian in its eagerness to draw the audience’s raised eyebrows, but the miracle of Shakespeare’s writing (and his audience) is that you could include such a metatheatrical nod without compromising the sadness of the scene. I think it’s quite sophisticated and adult to be able to emotionally commit to a story while being constantly aware that it is a constructed story; Shakespeare’s double-consciousness pulls that off while making it all look easy, but modern realistic film collapses like a weak-spined bully if anyone dares acknowledge the presence of the makeup department.
As for whether these are profound points about war, well, I guess profundity is where you find it, but in an era where terrorist groups are referred to (accurately) as “armed propaganda operations” and countries routinely slaughter thousands in order to “avenge humiliation”, Shakespeare’s notion of war as preening tail-displays with a body count seems more relevant than ever. It’s also a great relief to have a form where you can stage war while acknowledging the fundamental obscenity of comfortable actors pretending to be dying veterans—the cheerful unreality of Shakespeare’s theater end-runs around those Adornoesque dilemmas, while film can never quite evade the charge of glamourization.
The Chorus’ “if only we could really deliver” speech in HENRY V is, I think, the kind of faux-humility that Shakespeare always had great fun writing, whether it was coming from Marc Antony or Richard III (“I’m not made of stone”). As for bellicosity: It’s worth noting that the Olivier HENRY V was a huge, huge wartime hit, and a favorite of Churchill’s. I think its self-conscious, slightly embarrassed flag-waving is the only sort the English could unapologetically embrace, and if we’re going to evaluate which film was more effectively bellicose, it’s worth acknowledging the vast disparity in popular success between the two versions.
Gordon: I actually agree that the greatest advantage Branagh’s HAMLET has over Olivier’s is the performance. As outright awful as Lemmon or Williams or Depardieu are for Branagh, even they become tolerable — like the unavoidable strikeouts between a great slugger’s home runs. Most of Branagh’s casting gambles pay off handsomely (Heston, Crystal (yes), Christie, Blessed), and that’s in addition to the principle roles that we knew were in good hands of Jacobi, Winslet, Briers and Branagh. At least if you accept Branagh’s interpretation of the lead role as the tragedy of a mercurial man of too much action.
But I’d say the same about Branagh’s wack directorial flourishes — if you find the gathering army before the intermission campy (I didn’t, but I understand how one could), that’s the price of reciting To Be or Not To Be to a hall of mirrors or the visceral power of Hamlet’s Sr. ghost (one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen, because it’s so literal and I was so unprepared for it). I don’t exaggerate when I say Branagh’s HAMLET probably has more mistakes than any other masterpiece (IMHO) in film history.
Olivier’s HAMLET isn’t really memorable at all. All the performances other than his own (in my memory at least, I last saw the film ca., 1993) are rather stiffly theatrical, in the stuffy Quality Tradition. As for the black-and-white, I thought it was ill mixture with the drastically-impoverished sets, making the whole thing look like it was something the Taliban might have shot in their finest Afghan caves, rather the courts and palaces of a royal family.
Would you call Blessed a gamble? I thought he was right there in the Shakespearean Actors’ Club?
I have to confess I enjoy Williams as Osric. He’s absurd, but then, so is Osric, which Hamlet is at pains to point out. Rewatching the movie last night, in light of audience reactions, I noticed there seemed to be an awful lot of gay-minstrelsy in it, though.
TFB: It’s not so much that Shakespeare needs movies to fully be himself. Heck, I think simply reading him off the page may be the most deeply rewarding way to experience him, or at least to experience his more serious and introspective passages. (The high dramatic dudgeon and the broad comedy play better on the stage on in film.) It’s just that I always found it interesting that Shakespeare (viz Muse of Fire speech) was intensely aware of his medium’s limitations, and I think that — not unlike Richard Wagner, who also seemed to be straining at the seams of his chosen art form — he would have been fascinated by the possibilities of movies had he been able to see them. Granted, it’s a bit absurd for Random Schmoe (me) to presume to know how one of the greatest artistic minds in history would have reacted to anything. But what’s the internet for, if not baseless speculation?
>I noticed there seemed to be an awful lot of gay-minstrelsy in it, though.
In Williams’s performance, I mean, not in the movie as a whole.
Kurosawa’s good, but without knowing Japanese, I feel like I can’t evaluate how he deals with the text. I do love Baz Luhrmann’s ROMEO & JULIET, but it has the unfair advantage of working with one of Shakespeare’s least dense texts. My personal favorite is Peter Brook’s New Wave-influenced KING LEAR (the 1971 version with Paul Scofield, not the made-for-TV versions). One more great movie not on Region 1 DVD!
Gordon:
You’re right — Blessed isn’t really a casting gamble per se, it’s Branagh conception of the ghost that really is. Still, perhaps more than any other minor role, the wrong actor could REALLY eff the film up.
TFB:
I was wondering how to respond to your excellent post rebutting something I didn’t quite say. But then Gordon largely said it for me. I did not mean Shakespeare needed cinema and I apologize for coming across as if I did. Obviously, his plays have playness baked into them. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t also proven more hospitable to cinema than any playwright of remotely comparable stature.
Actually, I just looked at the ghost scene again …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HfT634yxmI
… and maybe THIS was what led the money-men to think Branagh might be the ideal THOR-director.
I wonder if it also had anything to do with Jon Favreau’s success with Iron Man — i.e., get a more actor-y, dialogue-friendly director in there, and the action will practically take care of itself what with VFX coordinators and whatnot.
Maybe way off, but I could see that thought process going on in certain corridors. Which, in turn, might explain why my least favorite scenes in Iron Man are generally the ones where Downey Jr. puts on the suit. (And I have comic geek creds! Honest! I used to room with a guy who stacked them 5 feet high in his apartment and forced me to read pages of silver-age Superman books)
I guess my point is not that Shakespeare’s doesn’t need cinema to be fully himself, it’s that Shakespeare needs theatricality to be fully himself. I enjoy Branaugh’s HENRY a lot, but it’s really not the play Shakespeare wrote—that play is an intensely metatheatrical piece where the audience is constantly made aware that they’re watching a play. It’s a really weird play, even within the Shakespeare canon, and what bugs me about the Branaugh version is that it makes it seem much more conventional than it is.
Gordon:
What did you think of Branagh’s THE MAGIC FLUTE — the film where I thought “OK, now he’s lost it”?
I never even knew he did a Magic Flute! Which goes to show how completely I’d been disregarding his career prior to his current mini-renaissance. I think after Love’s Labours Lost (which I never saw all of, but was disincentivized by critical drubbing), I just sort of put Branagh in the “British character actor” box until further notice.
Like LOVE’S LABOURS LOST and AS YOU LIKE IT, it tries to make a trifle more “relevant” by transplanting to an exotic/noncanonical setting. It’s also sung in English, which I found annoying because (apart from the translation’s inevitable inferiority) Mozart’s music is still too stylized to allow for intelligibility as English words to these poor ears. A chore.
I confess that since my first exposure to Magic Flute was as a kid watching “Amadeus,” I still hear “Ein Madchen oder Weibchen” in my head with English lyrics as sung by Simon Callow:
A sweetheart or a pretty little wife
Is Papageno’s wish
A willing, billing, lovey-dovey
Would be my most tasty little dish
Be my most tasty little dish
>Most of Branagh’s casting gambles pay off handsomely (Heston, Crystal (yes), Christie, Blessed)
Oh, one other thing I noticed about Crystal: he gives a straight Catskills/Borscht Belt line reading to one of Shakespeare’s punchlines (“the gravemaker: the houses that he makes last till doomsday!”). An interesting intersection of two comic traditions…
Just thought I should point out: Ebert’s negative review of Thor got a whole dump-truck of audience resentment dumped into the comments. I think it’s more than just comic book nerd defensiveness that causes this phenomenon — for some reason, people who enjoyed Thor feel that the intensely negative reviews are being unfair to it, for some reason. Like they’re bullying a dim but good-natured kid who just wanted to make people happy.
(I’m one of the people who keeps posting these mild but still defensive comments, by the way — and I’m not even sure why I’ve been doing it. It truly is a gut reaction.)
Finally caught up with THOR last night. I enjoyed it as a piece of over-the-top, cheesy fun. When that Destroyer thing was stalking through a small New Mexico town, zapping cars and storefronts, I flashed back to some of those great 50s sci-fi pics. The wavering between heated earnestness and light “comedy” also fits the template. It seems to me they skewed it kinda young, with an emphasis on wow effects, simple emotions and one-note characters, and made it work on those terms.
If this exact same script had been shot on a shoestring with comparable performances, cheap costumes, flimsy props and unconvincing but amusing f/x, we’d probably get a guilty pleasure kick out of it (I suspect many of us have fond nostalgia for less accomplished genre films of yesteryear).