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As a matter of fact, every problem DOES look like a nail.

Marvel seems to have hit its stride when it comes to comic book movies. While DC is busy rebooting Superman and wrapping up the Dark Knight trilogy, Marvel has been gleefully churning out one superhero flick after another, gradually building a connected narrative between the films that seemed like a pipe dream only ten years ago. Best of all, they seemed to have learned their lessons from the pretentious failure that was Ang Lee’s Hulk and the plodding introspection of DC’s aimless, self-indulgent Superman Returns. Witness Thor, a movie devoid of political commentary or heavy thematic ambitions: it’s a movie about a Norse God who has a hammer, flies, and hits people. Really hard.

The movie opens with some Anthony Hopkins narration, detailing the war between the mythical realm of Asgard and the frozen plane of Jotunheim. Jotunheim is inhabited by the frost giants, an evil race of craggy blue guys who just won’t turn off the air conditioning. A fragile peace exists between Asgard and the frost giants, until impetuous heir to the Asgardian throne Thor (Chris Hemsworth), being something of a nitwit, gets hoodwinked by his clever-ambitious-and-therefore-a-villain brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) into jaunting over to Jotunheim and slaughtering frost giants until they change their minds about the whole peace thing. Odin (Hopkins) gets irritated and so banishes Thor to Earth, where he will become a mortal man and learn of this thing humans call love, and also boilermakers. That dastardly Loki takes the throne of Asgard, and we’re off to a good old-fashioned comic book adventure.

When this scene came up, my wife said "Oh, MY, hello!" Five minutes later, she said "We should really own this movie."

Most of Thor‘s appeal comes straight from the casting, most notably Chris Hemsworth, who charms the socks right off this movie. Hemsworth briefly played George Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek reboot (“we’ll call our baby James T. Kirk-AAAARGH!”), and he plays his role with an infectious, affable glee. The always-winsome Natalie Portman plays Jane Foster, an astrophysicist who cautiously falls for the Norse god, and miraculously manages to go the entire runtime of the film without being captured or even meaningfully threatened. Hopkins does a decent job of roaring, mumbling, then falling dutifully into a coma for the last half of the film. (And his performance isn’t bad either! Rimshot!) Bonus points for including Ray Stevenson (Rome’s Titus Pullo) and Idris Elba as Heimdall, whose basso profundo voice is rivaled only by that of Laufey (Colm Feore).

Natalie Portman as Jane Foster. Still mostly a love interest, but at least she's not screaming non-stop for the last thirty minutes of the movie.

Like its Marvel movie cousins, the plot of Thor is refreshingly straightforward. Loki’s jealous of Thor, and so orchestrates Thor’s banning from Asgard. Thor falls to earth, learns the delight of diner coffee, and Stellan Skarsgård teaches him baseball and how to laugh. Jane is warned not to fall for Thor, and so does precisely that. Stinky old Loki wants to make sure he doesn’t lose his grip on the throne, and so sends a town-stomping monster to take care of business and mash Thor into paste. Meanwhile, there’s an Excalibur-esque subplot with Thor coming to grips with his own flaws and learning to be worthy of his own weapon. It’s pretty obvious how that will turn out, but it’s fun to watch anyway.

By the way, if you want to make a drinking game out of Thor, it’s easy. Just take a drink every time you see a Dutch angle. Branagh apparently loves the Dutch angle. Loves it.

Thor is not a complicated film. The title character’s transformation from brash, reckless warrior to brash, reckless warrior with a slightly more coherent moral center isn’t profound or revelatory, but it’s enough to get by while Thor whales on some frost giants and hops between dimensions. There’s no heavy-handed political satire or shoegazing meditation on the nature of heroism — just a guy in a cape and his hammer. Much as its predecessors, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, traded in thematic resonance for high-octane action, Thor makes do with being a brightly-colored blast of adventure — and that’s enough.

"My son, we've really got to work on your impulse control issues."

Watching the 2011 Conan, I came to the glum realization that Robert E. Howard’s grim barbarian might not be all that adaptable to film. The Conan of Howard’s stories “lives, loves, slays, and is content,” but that sort of aimless wandering doesn’t make for good film — or at least not the kind of film Hollywood will actually produce. The temptation to squeeze in some sort of world-saving or paternal revenge plot (or, in this case, both at the same time) is simply too great.

Hey, this looks awesome! Is this in the movie? No. No, it isn't.

Let me start off by saying that I am not an impartial audience. I went into Conan 2011 with the feeling that it would not hold a candle to the 1982 Milius film. I felt the same way coming out of it. Conan 2011 would have worked better if they’d just called it The Scorpion King III.

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Revenge movies tend to fascinate me — not because I find them satisfying, which is rarely the case. More often than not, a curious sort of caution sets in during the latter half of your typical revenge flick. The main character experiences some doubt, or maybe some preemptive remorse. The ending is often neutered; though the villain has earned a spectacular death throughout (usually throwing in a little something extra to cement his guilt in the final moments, just so the audience’s sense of justification never slips), the protagonist often delivers a quick and painless and, perhaps with a snappy one-liner. Generally speaking, the villains in revenge flicks get much cleaner, quicker deaths than the victims that inspired the revenge in the first place.

The reasons for this seem clear: the protagonist backs away from the vengeful abyss because, on some level, the audience wants to cheer for that revenge, not recoil in horror from it. We want to believe that the avenger remains fundamentally human and redeemable; that after vigilante justice is served up, he or she can go on with life, secure in the knowledge that even they answered murder with murder, they did so in the service of a greater good. And so many revenge films end up being curiously squeamish, backing cautiously away from their own subject matter.

Two recent horror remakes fly into the face of this cinematic norm: The Last House on the Left and, more recently, I Spit on Your Grave, both remakes of 70s shock-horror classics of the same name. Now, whether or not said films should have been remade is not something I’m going to debate here. I will say that I’ve seen both versions of each film, and both remakes succeed in bringing something new to the table — and not just in terms of ramped-up gore, although that’s certainly true. (Last House, in particular, has a slightly more robust story and removes Wes Craven’s absurdist predilections.) I won’t make the case that they’re necessarily great, good, or even enjoyable films — but they do present a raw, unblinking look at revenge and challenge the way the subject matters is dealt with in film.

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It's like The Matrix without all that Chosen One crap! Wait... no, it's not like The Matrix at all.

Inception does what any good science fiction movie that isn’t focused on the “science” should do — it gets the central conceit out of the way with a minimum of explanation and moves on. Thanks to a futuristic chemical concoction, human beings can now enter one another’s dreams, experiencing them as a shared reality and manipulating it to their own ends. Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief for hire, tasked with the nearly-impossible task of “inception” — planting an idea in another person’s subconscious without them realizing it’s been planted.

One of the greatest pitfalls of any movie like this is the descent into pseudo-scientific technoblather, a pitfall Inception dodges by creating a very simple internal mythology and sticking to it. There’s the “architect” who creates the dream setting within the subconscious mind; the “dreamer,” who populates it with subconscious projections, and a set of simple rules: pain hurts in a dream, but killing someone will wake them up — unless, of course, they’re sedated, in which case they can fall into a limbo where dream and reality can no longer be distinguished.

If you die in a dream, you die in real life! Wait... no you don't.

No effort is made in justifying these mechanics to the audience; they’re set up, accepted, and get out of the way of the story. The lack of emphasis on the sci-fi conceits gives Inception room to explore its real themes: information as a virus, the nature of reality, and the meaning of choices. The central plot revolves around a single, binary choice by Fischer (Cillian Murphy), a corporate heir whose rivals want to break up his empire. Cobb and his associates invade his dreams, Ocean’s Eleven-style, and take him on an emotional journey that, in testament to Nolan’s directorial skills, manages to be compelling despite the cynical motivations behind it.

Along the way, Inception runs into the kind of story problems that any movie of this sort runs into: how to raise the stakes in a world where nothing is real, how to immerse the characters (and audience) in an imaginary reality without confusing the viewer, and how to play on the question of “but is it only a dream?” without falling into hoary old cliche.

Inception somehow manages to leap deftly over these obstacles — replacing the “if you die in a dream, you die in real life” cheat used in similar but far inferior films with a more plausible alternative, and unapologetically leaving the “real” world behind for the majority of the film.

Though Inception contains plenty of spectacle — freight trains appearing out of nowhere, entire cityscapes bending like rubber or disintegrating like sand castles at high tide — the real meat of the movie is in the characters: Cobb; who’s pursued by a past that literally comes back to haunt him; Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), whose understated humor and competence keep the film from sinking into angst; Eames (Tom Hardy), who nearly runs away the entire show, and Ariadne (Ellen Page), whom the viewer will probably come to think of as “the sensible one.”

Perhaps the biggest strength of Inception is that it is, ultimately, not about the dizzying, flexible landscapes of the dream world that the characters inhabit, nor the inevitable questions about whether or not the characters are really experiencing the events of the film or dreaming (perhaps second only to “what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?” as one of the most overused movie questions of all time). Inception is a movie about the choices we make, the regrets we carry with us, and how even the smallest idea can grow to define a person’s entire life. Cobb is a character haunted by regrets that are worth regretting, and dwells in a place where even happy dreams of bygone times provide pain instead of comfort.

Like the medium of film itself; Inception is about artifice that can provide genuine emotion and even self-realization, even if those moments have been carefully crafted from without. Inception seems to ask not whether its characters are experiencing dream or reality, but rather what they choose to do with the reality they experience.  “You keep telling yourself what you know,” says a character from Cobb’s dark past.  “But what do you believe?” In the end, Inception seems to tell us, it’s the second question that matters most.

You will believe an angel can suck.

Legion is the movie that dares to ask the question, “What if we remade The Prophecy without all that troublesome plot and characterization?” Loud, incoherent, and notably lacking in Viggo Mortensen taking a turn as Satan, Legion could be used as promotional material in the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement! Ha! Internet hyperbole! Seriously, though, it isn’t very good.

Ostensibly, the plot of Legion has something to do with God getting sick of humanity’s bullshit. That isn’t me being crass, that’s cribbed directly from the opening monololgue by the female lead, whose bored delivery sets the tone for the entire film.  God has grown weary of our shenanigans, what with genocide and famine and Jersey Shore, and dispatches a buttload of angels down to destroy humanity, apparently by turning everyone into zombies with melting faces and limbs like Stretch Armstrong. Keeping to his covenant, God will never again destroy the earth by water, opting instead to bore us to death.

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