THOR- Review

Looking at the scoreboard as Marvel Studios doggedly continues to ramp up next year's blockbuster event, The Avengers, it becomes clear that not every part of the puzzle is coming together. The Incredible Hulk will feel disparate because Mark Ruffalo is going to replace Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, and Iron Man 2 proved that you can't let Tony Stark be Tony Stark while SHIELD are pottering around and teasing summer 2012.

So it's surprising then, that the God of Thunder turns out to be the most grounded character yet established for the upcoming Marvel team-up extravaganza. Thor introduces its titular character as an arrogant and short-tempered warrior from another dimension, called Asgard. He's heir to his father Odin's throne, but when he recklessly breaks a truce with Asgard's old enemies, the Frost Giants, he's exiled to Earth and relieved of his powers. Thor must prove himself worthy of his heritage in time to stop a threat that could consume both Asgard and Earth.

If ever one of the Avengers was going to be a tough sell, it would be Thor. After the Iron Man films and The Incredible Hulk spent time establishing the hyper-reality of the science behind their outlandish protagonists, Thor as a character is a straight-up god. Many of his allies are also gods, and many of his foes are demons or monsters. Handily, Thor manages to rejig elements of the character in order to establish Asgard as another dimension, which is apparently easier to swallow than polytheism.

Put it this way- I don't know that I could immediately see him working alongside Tony Stark, but after seeing the film, that's Tony Stark's problem and not Thor's. Chris Hemsworth brings the character to life in an astonishingly endearing fashion, making him a hugely entertaining spectacle as he's all discombobulated on Earth but also making him a genuine, certified hard-arse. He's the central piece of the puzzle, but he can't claim all of the credit for why Thor works so well.

Kenneth Branagh might not seem the obvious choice to direct a film like this, until you allow the more dramatic elements to breathe. I'm not saying that the royal rumblings between "All-Father" Odin and his two sons Thor and Loki are Shakespearean in scale, but they do require that we treat them seriously. Branagh lends the material the gravitas that it needs, casting Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston in the supporting role. Hopkins is admirably restrained for a god who wears a golden eyepatch and Hiddleston masks his character's intentions behind benevolent and nebbish expressions while maintaining an air of inscrutability that makes him a really effective character.

Luckily, Branagh doesn't skimp on the funnies either. When it's meant to be, it's a very, very funny film. It's not to say that the gorgeous Kat Dennings, who serves as the designated comic relief character, is always on the mark, but then most of the comedy comes from the culture clash, which rings out all the way through. The comedy serves to temper the full-on fantasy elements, in which a beautifully designed Asgard neighbours other realms, with names you won't remember ten seconds after they're mentioned. The weakest segment of the film is the early stuff before Thor's banishment, which feels like expendable backstory more than epic storytelling.

I'm finding it difficult to nail what makes Thor so special, but unusually I think it's probably something to do with the romantic throughline. Having annoyed me for the last couple of films I've seen her in, Natalie Portman returns to form as the scientist who gets more than she bargained for when the God of Thunder topples out of the weather anomalies she's been chasing. Portman plays it klutzy, but there's a real sweetness to her character, and her chemistry with Hemsworth really helps to ground the most ungrounded character in the Avengers' ranks.

Thor confidently strides across a rainbow bridge between full-blooded sword and sorcery fantasy flick and genuinely hilarious fish-out-of-water comedy. Crucially, it feels more like a tee-up to The Avengers than anything else we've seen so far, without ever letting Agent Coulson and the SHIELD crew overwhelm our hero. It's smashing fun on an unexpectedly grand scale, and a triumph in direction from Kenneth Branagh. A bold, boisterous and brilliant opening to the summer blockbuster season.

Thor is showing in 2D and 3D at cinemas nationwide from tomorrow.
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If you've seen Thor, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

NO STRINGS ATTACHED- Review

Natalie Portman has Thor and Your Highness lined up this year, so it's a more promising slate than any Best Actress winner of recent years has had after picking up a little golden bloke. Charlize Theron was in Hancock, Halle Berry was in Catwoman, and Sandra Bullock appears to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. But in the same weekend as Portman won, we got No Strings Attached. Er, can you give that Oscar back, please?

Ashton Kutcher plays Adam, an all-round nice guy who's unfortunately discovered that his TV star dad is boning his ex-girlfriend. Portman serves as executive producer here, and also stars as Emma, an old friend who becomes Adam's friend with benefits after he goes on a self-destructive drunken bender to try and find himself a woman. The terms of their relationship are firmly set out- it's just about the sex and there should be no emotional attachment. But then...!

Yeah, you can probably see how this one's going to pan out from the scant synopsis provided. Hell, you can probably tell from the poster. Fuck, even the trailer has some pretty reliable pointers. The most annoying thing about repetitive romcoms, or repetitive horrors, or repetitive films of any genre, is that my subsequent reviews become repetitive as well. For generic and formulaic filmmaking, No Strings Attached isn't as bad as either The Rite or I Am Number Four, but it remains that all three of these films came out last Friday.

My main bugbear with the film is that it's masquerading as a more offbeat and grown-up romcom, but a 15 certificate for strong language and a prurient fixation does not make a grown-up romcom. And you could never really call it off-beat because ultimately, it doth protest too much. Yeah, sex exists in this, unlike in 12A rated, Katherine Heigl-starring, lowest common denominator tosh. Yeah, there's what you might call an unconventional attitude to romance for a film with these stars and of this type. Yeah, you have to look at Kutcher's bare arse at one point.

These are all things that you don't see in your garden-variety romcom, but at the same time, it's too safe, and too conventional. Even though the terms of a sex-only arrangement are perfectly clear, everyone still winds up adhering to social norms, like wanting to get married and find a soulmate. It's more cheeky than risqué, and not really sexy at all. But it's precisely because it's a film with these stars and a film of this type that it can't stray too far from the beaten path. It's weird, because Portman can only be seen as sort of miscast in this one. There are happy-go-lucky moments that seem so forced when she's acting them that they're destined for scary slo-mo edits in the future.

It's real nightmare fuel at times, and Emma's interactions with Adam gradually make her seem at least 70% as neurotic as Portman's character in Black Swan. Just don't expect her to pick up an Oscar for this one. Kutcher is entirely within his comfort zone, because he always plays the guy who's kind of a player, but not in a way that's threatening. In these films, he's always that guy who women want to screw and men don't mind hanging around with, him being so cool and whatnot. The only room for variation seems to be how annoying he is while doing that, and to his credit, that's dialled way down here, compared to something like Killers.

The rest of the casting is a little strange too. I spent quite a lot of time thinking that Emma's boss, a bearded and fuzzy looking doctor, reminded me of Cary Elwes. And then it turned out he was played by Cary Elwes. It's such a negligible role that you wonder what ever attracted him to it. Kevin Kline plays Adam's dad and just seems pretty happy to be back on the big screen being funny again- I like Kline, and don't begrudge him for making me chuckle in this one.

Ophelia Lovibond, so promising in 4.3.2.1, somehow sounds like an American actress doing a bad British accent when she is in fact British- it's almost like she was directed that way. Greta Gerwig and Olivia Thirlby are more interesting and more natural than the leading lady's character, and if this is beginning to sound like a big cast, that's because it is. So big, in fact, that we get the dreaded credits montage that shows what happened to everyone after Adam and Emma's thread was wrapped up. It's an excruciating footnote- from now on, let's end these films when the credits begin, eh?

No Strings Attached is a romcom that is more like than unlike, and it's too familiar to really distinguish it as its own beast. It made me laugh a couple of times, but not nearly enough. In the weekend of its release, its leads won awards- Portman got Best Actress at the Oscars of course, but Ashton Kutcher picked up Worst Actor at the Golden Raspberries. The former cannot elevate the latter, because she's completely out of her element in this territory. And in any case, it's a film that shows his nipples and not hers- Love and Other Drugs broke more taboos than this pretender.

No Strings Attached is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen No Strings Attached, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BLACK SWAN- Review

Let's get this out of the way, as I've already said it on Twitter and I'm tired of hearing it from people. To call Black Swan porn is pretty much the same as calling Brokeback Mountain porn. Both feature homosexual sex scenes as the minor part of the larger story, and you'd be wrong to call either pornographic. So shut the fuck up. Righto then!

In Black Swan, Nina Sayers is a dedicated ballerina who bags the lead role of the Swan Queen in her company's radical new take on Swan Lake. She seems the perfect embodiment of the White Swan, all lightness and fragility and innocence, but her role also comprises the dark twin, the Black Swan. As opening night draws closer, Nina finds that releasing her self control might be the only way to succeed. As her preparation transcends her performance, the Black Swan takes her into a psychological nightmare.

As mentioned above, there's more to Black Swan than what appears on the surface, at least as far as the trailers go. I'm eager to avoid building up anybody's expectations, because your best course of action in seeing this film, and you really should see it, is to do as Nina does and lose control, letting it take you for a ride. If you let it, this film will grab you by the brain and rattle you up, down, around and all over for a rock solid and visually beautiful 100 minutes of psychological terror.

Let's kid ourselves though- unlike Nina, there are no two ways about this. As much as it deserves all of the attention its received at awards ceremonies, whether for Natalie Portman's astonishing performance or for the dazzling visuals, this is not the usual kind of dry drama you get being nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. It's actually closer to Shutter Island, but with less self-restraint. In short, it is a massive, honking, flappy-armed melodrama.

It's not a film of any dense subtlety, and once you get into it, what you see is pretty much what you get, as far as what director Darren Aronofsky is "trying to say". The colour scheme deals largely in blacks and whites, mirrors can be found wall-to-wall, and the body horror that goes on throughout is decently visceral, without a lot of restraint. Aronofsky's restraint is in taking the story of Nina seriously despite using all of the tools of melodrama that he can lay his hands on. There's potential here for a film that could tip over into outrageous Evil Dead or Drag Me to Hell style histrionics, but while a Sam Raimi version of Black Swan would be a lot more fun, I struggle to imagine it being better.

However clear the subtext might be, the straightforward psychological horror is compensated for by a slack grasp on reality, which unseats just about every bit of security you have going in. Nina is the audience identification figure, fitting in with a recent trend of unreliable narrators in grown-up cinema of late. Her brain disintegrates more and more as we go on, and her delusion and hallucinations are all we have to go on for certain stretches of the film. Portman amazed me in this role, finally bursting out of the stigma of Star Wars to show everyone her true capabilities, and really just making a film that could have fell apart with a lesser performer in the leading role.

Mila Kunis and Barbara Hershey are just as impressive as Nina's rival and stage mother, respectively. Winona Ryder and Vincent Cassel make good but slightly OTT appearances that are paled into normalcy as the atmosphere of the film itself ramps up and overwhelms them. I hasten to say once again that this is an incredibly visceral film. I understand that some have went and found this film on the Internet, in their impatience with UK distribution. They should go and see this on a big screen, because there's just so much detail to take in.

Hell, I'd love to see this film on an IMAX screen. It's not merely the resplendent art direction or the sensational cinematography, but the way that Aronofsky turns that visual competency to serve the horrific elements of the film. In every frame, your focus is pulled towards something, but every now and then, just left of centre, something might happen that frightens you. A photo might move, or a reflection might alter. On a regular screen, this film had me transfixed. Transported, even. On an IMAX screen, it might just blow out my mind entirely.

Black Swan should be experienced. It's not to say that everyone will love it, but if you love film, and film is a visual medium, it follows that you're going to be consumed by Black Swan. The story is told through huge melodramatic devices, but it's all the better for the fact that the director and the lead actress take it seriously. It wields enormous and transcendent power over a willing audience, and it's as brilliant a horror film as we're likely to see for a long time.

Black Swan is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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If you've seen Black Swan, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.