In Revue: Thank Gods It’s Thors-Day!

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

The god of thunder will put asunder bad guys who like to loot and plunder. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

Polish your pauldrons and affix the Valkyrie wings to your Jays cap, Asgardians, it’s Thors-day! That’s right, third-string Marvel Comics hero Thor hits the big screen today, and the results are, well, not altogether terrible. What is terrible is the new Ginnifer Goodwin/Kate Hudson/Some New Guy rom-com love triangle Something Borrowed, but you probably didn’t need us to tell you that. And somewhere between “not altogether terrible” and something a bit better than “not altogether terrible” is the new Icíar Bollaín. So go see something, no matter where it rates on the terrible-o-meter. Because with Hot Docs packing up its gear for another year, it might be fun to see some fiction, n’est-ce pas?

The problem with Thor—like Iron Man 2 and, by all initial appearances, the forthcoming Captain America picture—is that it seems to be just laying track for Marvel Studios’ approaching superhero epic, The Avengers. Thor spins its wheel for too long, obliged to introduce us to a whole other realm of Marvel superheroes: the Norse gods of Asgard, distinct from the various mutants and iron men overrunning Marvel’s version of Earth proper.
Thor opens by establishing a tense truce between Asgard’s stout leader, Odin (Anthony Hopkins) and the Frost Giants, a race of icy…well, they’re exactly what they sound like. For generations Odin kept the peace, until the Frost Giants slipped unnoticed into Asgard, leading the haughty heir-to-the-throne, Thor (Chris Hemsworth, back to his Perfect Getaway bulk) to initiate an ill-conceived war that breaks the brittle armistice. For his insolence, Thor is stripped of his powers and banished to Earth until he can redeem himself. There he meets a plucky astrophysicist (the Only Actress Ever, Natalie Portman) searching for a wormhole between two dimensions, to which the newly-mortal Thor may be the key. The two establish a convincingly sweet romance, while Thor’s mischievous brother Loki (an excellent Tom Hiddleston) consolidates his power over Asgard, and the Marvel Universe’s men in black, SHIELD, get up to their usual meddling (cue a cameo by Jeremy Renner, the once-and-future Avenger Hawkeye).
If Thor isn’t as strong as some of Marvel’s better outings it’s because Asgard’s arrogant boy-king has always seemed a little out of place in the Marvel Universe. After all, who needs the old gods in a superhero-populated world that’s full of shiny new ones who can swing around like spiders or bend like rubber bands? In spending too much time in Asgard, Thor plays out more like a run-of-the-mill roleplaying scenario than a full-on fantasy extravaganza, though the bobs, weaves, and fluid swirls of Branagh’s camera invest it all with much more dynamism. For all its fish-out-of-water fabling, there’s nothing in Thor as fun as watching Robert Downey, Jr. work out the kinks of his jet-powered armour in the first Iron Man.
But what Thor possesses is a good measure of tenderness. There’s a Starman-ish sweetness in the rapport between Portman and Hemsworth, their characters brought together less by romance than their shared fascination with the other’s world. It’s this welcome touch that leavens all the asinine mythological stuff (giant snowmen, rainbow bridges, powerful hammers with unpronounceable names), and which lingers as the most pointed proof not only that Branagh thought he was making something like a real movie, but that Thor is something other than an origin-story Avengers prequel.
Thor opens Friday, May 6 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

If a helicopter-ferrying-crucifix in a nod to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (natch) in the opening scenes doesn’t tip you off, Even the Rain has got plenty of meta-narrative tricks ups its puffy conquistador-cut sleeves. Gael García Bernal plays Sebastián, a director working on a film about Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World. At the suggestion of his producer (Luis Tosar), he begins location shooting in Bolivia, hoping to take advantage of the nation’s economic impoverishment and the scores of indigenous extras willing to work for next-to-nothing.
With a disingenuously bleeding heart, Sebastián focuses his story on two missionaries who opposed the Spanish treatment of the natives. He casts Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), a fiery Bolivian local, to play the native leader who mounted an uprising against the Spaniards. Art imitating life (or vice-versa), Daniel spends his time off-set politicizing penniless citizens whose government denies them the right to their land, their water supply and, yes, even the rain.
As tensions surge on- and off-screen, the lines between colonial narrative and active colonial mentality begin to blur, and Sebastián devolves from well-meaning liberal to Aguirre-as-filmmaker. And like that Herzog film (as well as his other colonialist opera, Fitzcarraldo, with shades of Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story), Even the Rain works diligently to show the many layers of its nesting-narrative’s onion. But peeling away at them proves more problematic, with Bollaín reaching only the more obvious conclusions: a case of conceit overshadowing implementation.
Even the Rain opens Friday, May 6 for a limited engagement at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland Street). for showtimes.

About mid-way through Something Borrowed, put-upon good girl Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) is tasked by her soon-to-be-hitched BFF, Darcy (Kate Hudson, who has emerged from the other side of the rom-com gauntlet looking like a busted Xanax mom) to check out a ’90s cover band she wants to play her wedding. There Greenfield treats us to shots of a band of dorky minstrels working through their version of Third Eye Blind’s “How’s It Going to Be.” It’s an apt image for the whole film’s relation to its chick-flick genealogy. An ersatz facsimile of something we didn’t even care about in the first place, Something Borrowed is the Third Eye Blind cover band to The Notebook’s Nirvana.
Like other movies that are inherently cynical and duplicitous, and get off on lying to their audience, Borrowed plops the gorgeous, perky Goodwin into the role of mousy frump, the kind of unnoticeable anygirl who could never draw the affections of the handsome, WASP-y Dex (relative newcomer Colin Egglesfield, looking like a young Tom Cruise, deprived of the manic spark that made a young Tom Cruise watchable). Except she does earn his affections. And except he’s engaged to her best friend. Cue sub–late series Frasier scenes of revolving door comic mishap, strained emotional cues, and lots of tepidly wry observations by John Krasinski (playing Rachel’s other BFF, and basically shrugging his way through the entire film).
That Something Borrowed is a lie, and that love is a notion forged by romantic poets a few hundred years ago, isn’t really its fault. Almost every Hollywood film tells this lie. Some are just able to do it with more finesse (see: this week’s Thor, even). Something Borrowed feels like it’s being made up as it goes along, its plotting ordained by a chorus of pinched tear ducts, tugged heartstrings, and fluttering clitorises. And maybe, if you’re willing to indulge its rosy-cheeked masturbatory whimsy, Borrowed may play out like something other than saggy ballet of bleached geometric shapes resembling people fitting across a two-dimensional plane for 90 minutes. Otherwise? Not so much.
Something Borrowed opens Friday, May 6 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.