November Entertainments

[scarlettina]

I've attended many an entertainment this month and haven't mentioned a number of them (though I did cover Ender's Game and Music's Darkest Harvest). I'm falling behind on my LJ duties as cultural (and personal) chronicler. What have I seen lately?

Sugar Daddies at ACT: Sasha, a rather socially innocent college-age woman attending culinary school,

Comments

[djonn]

As regards Thor: The Dark World: what struck me afterward is that the first movie -- as directed by Kenneth Branagh, and with rather more screen time for Odin-and-Thor character building -- was decidedly viewable as a distinctly Shakespearean treatment of the mythology, as well as being a modern comic-book film. The new movie? Not so much; this is pretty purely an action/adventure yarn in which only Loki really has a strong character arc. (Well, and Frigga, but she and Odin are both way shorted on screen time. Especially when you consider "Odin"'s last scene...which raises interesting questions about just how early in the movie that particular twist was actually executed.)

Mind, I very much enjoyed the movie. But now I'm left to speculate about the film they could have made if they'd given this one a Shakespearean overlay as well. (The Henry IV/V history plays would have been the primary structural model, but one could've pulled in elements of Lear to help shape Odin, and the Loki arc could have drawn on Falstaff, Richard III, and Iago all at once, plus various of the great Fools in the canon....)

[mimerki]

Thank you: This expresses a lot of my previously unformulated disappointment with the film. I had identified that lack of Brannagh was a part of the problem with this film, but no further.

That said, I certainly enjoyed this film. Its failings are more in the first one having set my expectations too high than in this one being itself bad.

[scarlettina]

Its failings are more in the first one having set my expectations too high than in this one being itself bad.

That's a pretty good way to put it, although I wouldn't say too high. Why shouldn't we have high expectations of our entertainment, especially when a bar was set that created a precedent?

Interesting; I watched Captain America and Thor 1 back-to-back over two days in preparation for this film, for The Winter Soldier, and for the next Avengers film, and was chagrined about liking Thor better, but I do think you're right about Brannagh making a difference. He understands story very well. For me, watching Captain America, I felt like the movie didn't end; it just sort of stopped. Thor had a real arc, and his sense of loss and sacrifice at the end really worked for me.