What We Do In The Shadows (2014)

Director: Jermaine Clement, Taika Waititi

Cast: Taika Waititi, Jermaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Cori Conzalez-Macuer

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. I have yet to re-watch it since the sublime television show started. So many fans of the movie have completely dismissed the television show, that I worried re-visiting it wouldn’t hold the same charms.

Did I Like It: And it does hold the same charm—if not the surprising anarchy—of that original viewing. Clement and Waititi create a comedy that would pass—if it weren’t fictional, naturally—as a pretty good documentary in its own right. They create comic personas here that will serve them infinitely well in subsequent productions.

The plot is relatively similar to at least the set up for the movie, that there is a degree of repitition. To the television show’s credit, it took those seeds and began to form likely my favorite live-action comedy series currently on the air. So, there is, I hate to say, just a slightly smaller amount of enjoyment with the film this time around. It isn’t the film’s fault; it’s more a statement that the television series may have a chance at being the first adaptation of its kind to surpass its cinematic progenitor since M*A*S*H*.*

Does that mean you should avoid watching the movie in favor of the television series? No, of course not. I think comparing any film to Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H*** (1970) is probably a pretty sterling endorsement.

*One more asterisk there is, in fact, not a typo. I’m not sure I would die on the hill of the fact that the television M*A*S*H* is better than the film. Just more indelible in the cultural consciousness.

**The asterisks are all over the place in this review. But when I realized the word-count in my word processing app counts the titles as four words instead of one, I kind of couldn’t help myself. Whatever will I do when I eventually do, review that movie, instead of this one?

Lightyear (2022)

Director: Angus MacLane

Cast: Chris Evans, Keke Palmer, Peter Sohn, Taika Waititi

Have I Seen it Before: No.

Did I Like It: The movie’s pitch is an intriguing one. But can this movie really feel as if it came from 1995? Largely, no. For every moment where Lightyear blows on his autopilot cartridge to get it to reset, there are more than enough moments where the film is squarely in 2022. No, I’m not talking about Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) having a same-sex partner. That almost hints that the world of the 1990s in Toy Story (1995) is actually a better version of our world, one where that sort of thing wouldn’t matter*.

I’m more talking about the digital HUD displays and the films need to swing back and forth between IMAX and regular 2:35:1 aspect ratios. That was not a 1995 film thing to do. It has a tag scene—and an incredibly perfunctory one, at that—which doesn’t feel like something that happened before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). There is very little about the film that doesn’t loudly proclaim its status as a product of its true time.

And yet, there are moments where it reaches for that quality. It is almost as if that pitch was far more pure in some stage of the film’s development, and cooler, more conservative heads at both Disney and Pixar prevailed to make it more pedestrian. The film couldn’t exist in a world where it could be anything other than  a simple story with a convoluted time travel gimmick at its heart…

…which, in and of itself would have been the exact kind of movie I would have loved in 1995. Something more than I originally thought of that original promise may have survived to the final film.

* Although the implications that Andy never bothered to get a Hawthorne (either of them) action figure—or that the toy company never produced one—is kind of a bummer. The idea that talking Sox (Sohn) toys weren’t the single most popular toy of that world’s 1995 also beggars belief.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsowrth, Christian Bale, Tessa Thompson, Natalie Portman

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: The film is certainly less enjoyable than the sublime Thor: Ragnarok (2017). There are any number of reasons why. I think the fundamental listlessness of the Marvel Cinematic Universe post Avengers: Endgame (2019) (give or take a Spider-Man or three) is weighing down everything coming from Feige and Co.

That gives us a sense of the mentality that might have led to this, but doesn’t explain the anatomy of the disappointment. Whereas Ragnarok delightfully contorted itself into a cosmic Midnight Run (1988), this is content to be a benign and pedestrian romantic comedy.

Even that could have worked in a limited sort of way, so the real question becomes: why does (even two weeks after seeing the film) it leave a bad taste in my mouth?

It’s not the performances. Hemsworth is still pretty great, and manages to wring every laugh out of the proceedings any mortal man could. It also helps that for several moments he’s placed next to Chris Pratt for several scenes who has gotten blander and blander as time goes on, where Hemsworth continues to show an apt comic presence. While he and Portman don’t quite have the chemistry they possessed in the original Thor (2011), I’ve seen screen couples with far less chemistry, and many of those have had the Marvel vanity card in front of them. Christian Bale proves—not unlike Michael Keaton did in Beetlejuice (1988)—that all of the best Batmen could have credibly played the Joker if they absolutely needed to. Clooneys, Kilmers, and certainly Afflecks need not apply.

The thing that really irks me about the movie is the sharp left turns the story feels the need to take with the character. Some complain that Thor’s weight gain in the most recent Avengers films has been derided by some as a simplistic display of depression and trauma, but it was certainly an attempt to depict some kind of emotional arc for a movie superhero. If you didn’t like that choice, don’t worry. Hemsworth sheds the pounds—and, presumably, the emotions surrounding them—in the film’s opening minutes.

One might think that another left turn in the film’s closing minutes would set things right, but this isn’t missing your exit on the highway. It’s an attempt to hint—perhaps threaten—that Thor 5* will be a repackaged Three Men and a Little Lady (1990).

*Given why this film is called Love and Thunder, the title should have really been held for a next film, should it ever come.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Taika Waititi, Scarlet Johansson

Have I Seen It Before?: Never. Regretfully, painfully, I missed it in the theater. I desperately wanted to go, but the timing never worked out, and so I’m left with a Blu Ray.

Did I like it?: Oh, man…

For some, the precarious moral stretch to make a movie about a boy (Davis) and his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler (Waititi) is never going to work. Especially now, the business of anything even resembling moral equivalency within twenty miles of fascism gives one the ickiest of icky feelings.

A lesser filmmaker (myself included, although I would have probably chickened out at the funny Nazi movie, and you would have, too) would have been so wrapped up in the tone of the piece that they would have insisted on shying away from the horror and evil of the time, content in the fact that it will still appropriately loom over the smarter audience members.

Here, the horror of everything is real from the beginning, and in one of the best balancing acts in my cinema memory, the jokes are woven seamlessly into the tragedy.

All right, sure, one can easily make the argument that the need for a “good” Nazi—in the face of the Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell)—is not far enough removed from the ethical insanity that has so thoroughly mired our recent history, but I think that is the wrong read on the character. Klenzendorf isn’t the Nazi with a heart of gold. He’s just as much of a shit as the rest of them, and as all Nazis must eventually do, he is a broken shell of a man. Every idiotic thing he ever believed in has come crashing down around him as the allies approach the fatherland. With that, he does decide to do two decent things with his last acts on Earth. It doesn’t redeem him; it gives him a moment of comfort to realize that at least his death can be of use, even if his life wasn’t.

Oh, did I mention the movie’s also one of the funnier ones in years? Well, it is. I probably should have spent more of the review talking about that, but why dwell on that, when you should really be watching it right now for yourself.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Director: Taika Waititi

Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Mark Ruffalo

Have I Seen it Before: Absolutely.

Did I Like It: Man, there’s not really a weak entry in Marvel’s fabled phase three, is there?

There was a sense, immediately from the first scenes of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek (2009) that Chris Hemsworth is a movie star. That it took this long for Hollywood to get the fact that he’s a big goofball is a shame. We could have gotten a lot more movies like this. There’s bits of it in the original Thor (2011) has a little bit of this sensibility, but tragically Thor: The Dark World (2013) is content to be as dour as possible.

Such is not the case with this third—and let us not hope final—entry in the Thor series, the weight has been lifted and Hemsworth is allowed to be his most true screen persona. It’s a buddy comedy movie. Not only that, it is a triple-threat buddy comedy movie as Hemsworth easily pairs with no fewer than three straight people in the forms of Loki (Hiddleston), Hulk/Banner (Ruffalo), and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson). In more than a few of those cases, Hemsworth is able to switch gears and be the straight man himself in those pair offs.

It’s also a wildly imaginative Space Opera that feels fresh even when my intellect tells me there was a studio note to make the latest Thor movie more like those Guardians of the Galaxy movies. It may also be the most incisive documentary about the true nature of Jeff Goldblum that we’re likely to get.

One might be willing to complain that this doesn’t feel like the third part of Thor’s story as presented in the previous films. His romance with Jane Foster (Natalie Portman) is offered no more than a quick line of dialogue about how they broke up, but when the movie is this good, I’m relatively certain we shouldn’t care.

Odin is dead. Long live Thor. At least, I hope. After everything he’s been through, he deserves more breaks like this. Long live the Marvel movies, if they keep being this lively.