Movie Review: THOR/雷神奇俠

“雷神奇俠” translates as ‘Raytheon Fairy.’ Whatever the f@#$that means.

Do not attempt to adjust your computers.

You read the subject line correctly, and I am indeed Sean Tierney and not some angry young Chinese hacker making me pay for my insolence.

I am really going to review Thor.

Some of you may be asking yourselves a question right about now.

Well, I don’t know why the f@#$ I would watch this movieeither .

But I do know whyI went to see it, as thin a split hair as thatmay be.

I rarely watch Hollywood movies.

And I don’t like comic book movies.

Oh, I’m sorry, graphic novels.

Except that Thorwas a comic book for a long frigging time and I have no idea if it ever became a graphic novel.

Maybe I don’t know because I grew up, lost my virginity, and moved out of my mother’s house, but now I’m just being pissy.

I haven’t read Thor(or any other comic book) since, oh, 1973.

Even as a child, Vietnam, Watergate and a suburban heroin scourge were just a lot more interesting.

And they were on TV.

Jesus, where’s my focus???

There are a million reasons why I would never watch Thor.

There are a few reasons why I did.

Wednesday afternoon I got a call from Desmond So, who told me he had an extra ticket to a film.

I was grateful for the invitation. Shocking as this may seem, I spend a lot of time alone.

So the chance to be around other humans (that I tolerate and even like) was very welcome.

And since this was to be an AnD-sponsored event, I would actually get to see a lot of people I knew.

Which would project to strangers around us in a public space the idea that I am a socially viable human.

I love deceiving strangers.

I had their Japan-only live album. On vinyl.

I asked about the title of the movie, and while what I heard rhymed with Thor, it wasn’t Thor.

It started with the same sound thatHulk does.

For those still confused, I ask you: What does Andy Lau do for tea? And watches?

I thought maybe Hollywood was remaking Golden Chicken.

Enough of that. Let’s move on.

I was looking forward to seeing lots of people I knew.

That, dear reader, was my solemotivation for going to see this film.

Frankly, I was a little worried. As much as I could tell myself that anyone dumb enough to watch a movie like Thor deserved to have their experience ruined by some jackass running his mouth about it the whole time, I also knew that it was patently unfair.

That’s why I will go to the Dynasty whenever I know the film I will watch is very likely to suck chicken salad from a dead mongoose’s @ss.

With a straw.

That way my Cinematically Induced Tourette’s won’t offend many people, and those it does are talking on the phone and smoking any Godd@mn way.

I knew that I shouldn’t blab my way through Thor. But I also knew that the film was going to make me want to say something. Not afterwards, I mean immediately.

I find it very cleansing and healthy to reflect that kind of irritation right back instantly.

My state-designated mental healthcare professional and my parole officer do too.

My idea, then, was to try and find out who among the group was most likely to want to take this film at least slightly seriously, and to sit as far away from them as possible. I intended to embed myself among like-minded miscreants at the other end of the row and thereby maintain a veneer of social nicety.

I was ruminating on this plan in the Outback Steakhouse next to the cinema. I had arrived in Causeway Bay early, and since this part of Hong Kong is not one in which I spend a lot of time, I found myself rather bored.

Although one interesting activity was finding a publicly available rest room. Most of the ‘malls’ have bathrooms whose security is, in this post-911 world, admirable to say the least.

Give me Kowloon any day; that place is crawling with public bathrooms, even if they themselves are often crawling with crotch crickets, cockroaches and junkies. Scum seeks its own level, what can I say?

But I had decided, in a fit of Westernized weirdness, to eat dinner at Outback. I’ve lived in Hong Kong since 2005, and had been visiting since 2001, and yet this was the first time I ever set foot in this Outback. I wanted a salad, and I figured this was the place for it. Besides, it was close to the cinema.

During dinner, I spotted Scottie Hui and his wife eating nearby. I went over to say hello, and we ended up chatting until it was time to go see the movie; turns out he was part of the group.

So too were Desmond, his brother Dennis, Simon Yin, Derrick Fong, Chung Tsang, Phoebe To, Etchy, Spencer Douglass, Andrew Ng (looking very dapper in a suit), Gloriana Wong (looking fabulous as usual), Yuki Maryrose, Anton Wong and his wife Patty, and other people whose names I typically cannot remember until I publish this entry at which time I will recollect them and feel quite Irish Catholically guilty about not mentioning them.

So there was a large AnD contingent, and I set about taking the… temperamenture(!)  of the various people, trying to find those for whom my inevitable outbursts would be least annoying.

I ended up in literally the front row, between Dennis and Desmond. In fact, I was more or less surrounded by AnD people.

Except for two guys behind me who talked through the film, and so f@#$ them anyway.

We got to see trailers for several films before the feature.

Captain America looks to be as ideologically problematic as it does tedious and awful.

I told Derrick and Simon that we need to get on the ball and make a film calledMajor China , about a Communist superhero who, like Thor, wields a hammer, but also a sickle. He lives in a place that looks a lot like the Birds Nest. He rids China of dissidents, artists and other irredeemable scum. Tag line: Major China brooks no insolence!

The trailer for Super 8(which at first sounds like a Nic Cage vehicle about a superhero who busts up a snuff film ring) was, I felt, utterly useless at enticing me to watch the film. Derrick disagreed, but to me the trailer didn’t provide any substantive indication of whats going on in the film such that I am motivated to go find out.

And while, as Derrick pointed out and I concede, this can be a very effective strategy for trailers, M. Night Shimmynuts has f@#$ed us so many times with movies that turn out to be aboutabsolutely motherf@#$ing nothing that I refuse to watch Super 8 until I find out something more about it.

Who am I kidding, I won’t even watch it then.

The trailer for Cowboys and Aliens looks fun. I’ll watch it, given the right company.

We may as well enjoy these movies now, because in 100 years, when aliens have their own lobby and start protesting their demonization in film, we won’t have this genre to kick around any more.

The best and most disappointing trailer was… well, let me tease you the way it teased me.

First, it indicates that its a Michael Bay film.

I howled derisively.

But the 3-D looked reallygood. I mean it. It was the best 3-D I was going to see that night, though at the time I didn’t know it.

And the premise laid out by the trailer was interesting; the 1969 moon landing was a cover for investigating an alien spacecraft that had crashed there.

I started thinking Alien 5 and my blood pressure dropped, so to speak.

Sadly, it was not to be. It instead will be Transformers 3.

Dammit.

And no, I wouldn’t know that the new Alien film wasn’t directed by Michael Bay, just like I didn’t know that there was going to be a 3rd Transformersmovie.You think I should feel bad about not knowing that?

Ignorance is bliss, F*cko.

Which is a useful sentiment here, because if we can say anything good about Thor, we can say that it will make people smile profoundly, at least according to the above prescrīption.

I have rarely seen a film so devoid of reason, texture, worth, or substance.

How f@#$ing broke must Anthony Hopkins be to make this kind of trash? I hope they paid him enough money to buy his own island nation, because its the only place he’ll be able to walk down the street in public on the entire frigging planet without people pointing and laughing at him as if he has an extra penis growing out of his forehead.

If I gave a rat’s @ss about Natalie Portman in any way, I’d probably feel bad for her too, but I don’t. Besides, she got paid for this movie, so she’ll just have to deal with this little zit on the face of her filmography.

The action scenes are terrible, shot with so much shaky-cam and 3-D grain that most of the time the screen was literally unintelligible. This is done by directors whose actors can’t perform action scenes. It gave me a headache.

But then so did the acting, the story, and the whole f@#$ing film.

The film’s only redeeming facet was a humorous theme that was flogged incessantly for about about 5 minutes, then abandoned completely.

Which makes sense only in terms of it being yet another way this film spasmed about like a chronic masturbator with epilepsy; even though you can’t look away, you know you’re going to get…besmirched , sooner or later.

What bothers me most about movies like this is that they play into my creeping paranoia.  In Demolition Man, a not-very-good film (Sylvester Stallone stars) about a dystopian future in which, for example, Taco Bell becomes the only restaurant, people listen to commercials on the radio as songs. The triumph of the (dollar) bill, so to speak.

You want paranoia? According to my computer, ‘dystopian’ is not a word. Oh Winston, you were right.

Lots of sci-fi movies show people watching media that is utterly devoid of content, and relies solely on form, to engage and distract the viewer; hi-tech bread and circuses, as it were.

That, dear reader, is what I saw in Thor. Digitized distraction. Lowest common de-numb-inator. This movie was an utterly naked emperor, and yet no one seemed to notice.

There is no moviehere. There is no story. There is 90 minutes of aural and visual anesthesia that left me feeling empty and frightened, because obviously, for the studio and what they assume will be several million people, this was good enough.

It would be easy to dismiss this as more empty Hollywood garbage, but there are, naturally, a few things more deserving of a critical eye.

Let me stop for a moment and remind you that while I often revel in the role of a foul-mouthed iconoclast, I am nevertheless a PhD holder in critical intercultural communications, and what little research I did manage to publish as an academic won awards. So when I take the occasional left turn down Serious St., I hope you will follow me.

Hollywood likes to tell us that it makes movies for the world.

I say bullshit. Hollywood makes movies for a White American audience, and if others pony up the cost of the ticket, so much the better.

There are two non-white people in Thor.

Admittedly, we’re dealing with a character based on Norse mythology; to paraphrase an old friend, it’s a rare brother you’ll find in Sweden.

One of those characters is Japanese, or at least the actor is; Tadanobu Asano, one of the biggest stars in Japan. What exactly he is doing in this frosty Realm of Asgard (ass guard?) is never explained with even so much as a line of dialogue. He sticks out like a sore Japanese thumb, yet I can hear the loud patter of Hollywood’s minions patting themselves on the back for their diversity and inclusiveness.

Still and all, he makes out better than Idris Elba, the sole Black person in Asgard (and apparently New Mexico). He plays Heimdall, the keeper of the gateway out of and into Asguard.

He guards the ass guard.

Isn’t that special? The only Black man in this place is also THE ONLY ONE WHO HAS TO WORK. All the motherf@#$ing WHITE PEOPLE just toddle around all day eating grapes and chatting, while the lone brother spends ALL HIS TIME protecting their cracker asses.

And he doesn’t even do his job correctly.

Because you can’t trust those people.

Who directed this piece of sh*t? DW Griffith???

No, it was actually Kenneth Branagh.

I’m not joking. Even that is a problem.

I mean, beyond the racist bullsh*t, which is problem enough.

Comic books are simple. They are fun. That’s their appeal.

Films about comic books, however, often seem to want to make some kind of existentialist point. Every over-muscled man (or woman) in tights on the silver screen somehow has latent Daddy issues or struggles with a Messiah complex.

Oh, b*tch please.

If I want to watch weighty character dramas, I don’t want the f@#$ing characters wearing Spandex.

Where’s the problem with superheroes breaking stuff and kicking @ss and then doing it again? I don’t need a life lesson. I just want to watch violence.

Why all the extraneous bullsh*t?

Maybe because that’s all Thoris.