Cinema 2011 #43: Thor

Thor’s a homo.

That’s pretty much the entire referencing point I had when it came to this, the latest installment in Marvel’s efforts to pull off the ultimate spectacle in superheroics and 3D derring-do. A 1987 Elisabeth Shue starring teen-flick favoured by my sister, Adventures in Babysitting. Well, that and a loose recollection of Norse mythology and its mead-chugging Viking warrior frat-boys after-living it up in Valhalla. Perhaps that is why I viewed Thor as the big gamble in Marvel’s mix, as convincing an audience, much grounded in pseudo-scientific superhero lore and post Dark Knight gritty realism, that a magical God from a non-Christian heaven could end up on Earth, fighting off baddies with a bewitched hammer named Mjolnir, is a pretty big feat. Throw into the mix a lead actor best known in these islands for playing the buff fella with a girl's name on Home & Away, a director famed for his Shakespearian roots and a film languishing in developmental Niflheim for years, and you get Thor. And by Odin’s beard, this god of thunder arrives with a bang.

The film tells the story of Thor, the Norse deity and crown prince of Asgard, whose father Odin is none too pleased with his offspring’s devil-may-care brawling and foolhardy antics. When Thor and his sidekicks go one step too far, causing an intracosmos war with the Jack Frost giants of Jotunheim, Odin, played with voiciferous gusto by Anthony Hopkins, banishes him to Earth. Separated from his godlike goodies (hammer and powers) until he can learn the humility to be a just and righteous leader, Thor becomes a bumbling, and genuinely funny, fish out of water when slumming it with us mere mortals. Luckily, he catches up with Natalie Portman’s Jane, an astrophysicist whose research has caught the eyes of secretive organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (the glue holding this sprawling superhero scrapbook together), who aims to help him out. And help he needs, as up in the heavens, brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) starts to sow seeds of dissent in an effort to bag the thrown.

Cinema 2011 #30: The Rite

In 1973 a demonic figure by the name of Pazuzu turned the satanic possession of a young girl into the permanent possession of a horror subgenre. Nothing, neither jerky camera jitters nor flashy 3d behemoth, can compare to the institution that is The Exorcist, the most iconic horror film of all time. With a backstory as creepy as its plot, a gross of over half a billion dollars, and a tantalising blacklisting by the Irish film censors till 1990, it has occupied a reference point in every occult film, and irrevocably damaged the sales of pea soup, for nearly 40 years. And so, when it comes to The Rite, Swedish director Mikael Håfström’s exorcising thriller, it’s hard not to think that the spectre of the 70s shocker looms heavily over proceedings.

And like so many other exorcism horrors, The Rite aims to seize the audience’s interests by claiming to be based on true events, even going so far as to assert papal and literary credentials in its opening credits. The story revolves around rising Drogheda star Colin O’Donoghue as Michael Kovak, an American seminarian whose chilly upbringing in his father’s mortuary makes the Six Feet Under family seem positively wholesome. Escaping to religious life, Michael excels in his studies, yet his faith is never quite so certain. In order to win him back to the flock, his teacher, a game Toby Jones, sends him off to Rome, to learn how to be an exorcist, with the hope that casting out demons in others will help free Kovak of his own.