Chopping a franchise off at the knees

Warning: This post contains major spoilers about Avengers: Infinity War.

I'll even include a line or two more of wasted space so that those of you who came here without having seen this movie can get out.

So ... get out.

Now!

Okay?

Did you ever wonder if the rollicking good time known as Thor: Ragnarok would mean that they’d consider a fourth film in the Thor franchise?

Well you can forget about that. Avengers: Infinity War has seen to that right quick.

The opening of Marvel’s latest behemoth success story is all about stopping the Thor bloodline dead in its tracks. Not only does it kill off basically any remaining character from the Thor world – quite a sad outcome after they escaped as refugees at the end of Ragnarok – but for maybe 20 minutes, the movie tries to convince you it killed Thor, too.

What a way for the laughter we enjoyed in Thor: Ragnarok to die in our throats.

As you know if you keep up with the blog, my wife and I tried to watch this on our recent holiday, but the rental from iTunes was caught in some kind of no man’s land between iTunes stores from different countries. It’ll finally expire in a few days, at which point we can wipe the whole chapter from our memories.

But if we did somehow get a chance to watch it before the rental period expired, I don’t know how I’d be able to watch it with the same sense of unbridled joy it gave me the first time, knowing that the Asgardians were marching toward their deaths at the hands of Thanos and his minions.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have cared.

A year ago, I had only seen one Thor movie and found it a middling entertainment at best. I had not deigned to watch Thor: The Dark World because I considered it a probable waste of my time. I did eventually watch it as a precursor to the release of Thor: Ragnarok, which did excite me, just in case there was some important information I’d need to glean from the second movie in the trilogy. Didn’t want my anticipated viewing of Taika Waititi’s first MCU film to be compromised by a failure to grasp the nuances of the story.

I liked The Dark World better than I would have ever expected to, but it was Ragnarok that made me fall in love with the Asgardians, their place in the MCU and their heretofore unexplored great senses of humor. Having initial rejected Thor as “that Marvel series set in outer space,” I had found a deliriously fun spectacle that just missed my top ten of last year.

And now? Well, now they’re all dead.

Okay, not all of them. Although I’d thought that Thor and his people were all on one ship when they left the wreckage of Asgard, apparently, in a line of dialogue from the man himself, only “half his people” were killed by Thanos in the opening of Infinity War. The others? I guess they’re somewhere else. In another ship? We didn’t see Sif or Valkyrie, after all. Smart to keep Valkyrie around, as she was one of the best parts of Ragnarok.

But Loki? Heimdall? All your other rank-and-file Asgardians?

Dead, dead and dead.

Of course, the body count of characters we know and care about in Infinity War is in the double digits by the end. Everyone knows that the ones who turned into dust aren’t gone for good. But the ones who died deaths earlier in the film – like Loki, Heimdall, Gamora and Vision – could be irretrievably dead.

Then again, Thanos has an infinity stone that allows him to control time, so that will allow the writers to do pretty much anything they want.

But the death of Loki hit me particularly hard, in part because I feel that one, for sure, will not be reversed. Thor even prepares us for the possibility he'll come back by saying Loki’s been dead before, but I don’t think so. Tom Hiddleston is probably ready to do other things after playing Loki in five different movies, considering that he was always more of a thespian type and never figured to build his career on the backs of comic books.

But a year ago, I wouldn’t have given two shits. Loki? Thor? Their dad? The other characters, whose names I did not know at the time? You could have thrown them in the fire for all I cared.

This movie did throw them in the fire, and it made me sad.

But it also made me love this movie. Or it was one of the things, anyway.

I know there’s nothing that occurs here that’s truly irreversible, when you’ve got infinity stones that allow both time and reality to be warped, and when Dr. Strange can look forward to 14 million different outcomes for a battle that has yet to occur. These people are so powerful – too powerful, some would say – that death is not a permanent impediment to their character arcs.

But Avengers: Infinity War did as much as it could do, within the overall requirements of keeping these characters around to make money off them for years to come, to give us something we hadn’t seen before – stakes that really resulted in the real deaths of at least some of them.

And that opening, in which Thanos uses his oversized hand to squeeze the life out of Loki by the neck, perfectly set the tone for future tragedies to come. Finally, this was a Marvel movie unafraid to make the stakes important.

That’s an odd thing to say when nearly every movie involves the possible end of the world. But none of them involve the possible end of one of the characters. Seriously, in 18 (or whatever) Marvel movies, has an important character, with any type of long history in the comic books, died, ever?

Marvel has at last woken up to the core mentality of peak TV, in which unexpected deaths keep us on our toes, and are in fact the very things that make us love the TV shows we watch. There are certain shows where we are worried that truly no one is safe, and that’s both an enthralling and chilling feeling to have while watching something whose characters you care about. Now, we can have that feeling when watching a Marvel movie, which is pretty great.

No matter what deaths are reversed in the sequel to Infinity War, Marvel has delivered at least one fatal blow, and that’s to the Thor franchise. It can’t come back from this. It just can’t.

And though I’ll miss it – I’m surprised to say – I’m grateful to Marvel for having the guts.

Thor: Ragna-broke

I thought I was going to blog every day in Indonesia. Fortunately, that hasn't been the case. You don't really want to blog every day on your vacation, do you?

There's been some stuff to blog about, though.

I could have told you about watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi for a second time on the plane, and liking it much better this time. That probably deserves more consideration at some point.

I could have told you about deciding not to go see a movie while I'm here. I could have told you about checking the local listings and seeing that A Quiet Place and Rampage both seemed to be some of the only movies playing in the two accessible locations, and deciding that A Quiet Place would be dub-proof, if it were dubbed rather than subtitled, because almost the whole movie is silent (or so I'm told), though it probably wouldn't have been as most people speak English here anyway (tourism). I could have then told you about learning that the theater was not actually very accessible, requiring either a 30-minute drive or a 90-minute walk, and being easily dissuaded out of doing it by my wife, which I agreed was the best course of action.

I could have told you about my movie-per-day pace nonetheless, and the movies I watched for the first time (Game Over, Man!, Murder on the Orient Express, I, Tonya and Colonia) or the movies I revisited (Grimsby and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets).

Instead I'll tell you about the movie we have not watched, despite considerable efforts to do so.

But first I need to give you some background.

I've been up to some shenanigans with my iTunes. It isn't something I've wanted to do. I've been happy being a loyal customer of the American iTunes store with the American account I've had for years. It gets new releases faster, much faster, and the rentals are generally less expensive (though the exchange rate is not 1-to-1).

But in the past six months I've received not one, but two iTunes gift cards, purchased in Australia and valid only in the Australian iTunes store. When I first got one of these years ago, sent by Australian relatives when I did not yet live in Australian, Apple had a different policy toward them. With some effort, I was able to convert them to be valid in American iTunes. Well, no more. They've decided to become isolationist. No more international cooperation between various branches of the same company.

So I reluctantly, with great angst and concern, connected to the iTunes store with an email address my wife uses in the Australian store. I was worried that I'd flag myself with Apple as someone who was trying to circumvent their rules, and it might do anything from disabling one of my accounts to deleting my whole iTunes library, music and all. But I had $80 to spend at the Australian iTunes store, and dammit, I wanted to spend it.

At first there were no issues. I could go back and forth between the two stores just fine. All I had to do was log in with a different email address. It would tell me that this account was only valid in a particular country's iTunes store, and it would just switch me to that store. No deleting of iTunes libraries to be seen. I purchased songs and rented movies with no apparent consequences. All seemed right.

But as I was loading up on rentals for this trip, something broke.

I'd rented Mom and Dad (which I actually ended up watching before the trip), I, Tonya and Murder on the Orient Express from the American store, because none of them was yet available for rent in Australia. Thor: Ragnarok was available, so I decided to deplete some of my gift card balance rather than shelling out more U.S. dollars on it. That's when the trouble began.

It processed the rental fine, reducing my balance by the $5.99 rental fee, but then it told me that this computer was already registered to a different iTunes account, and that if I wanted to switch authorizations, I could not switch back for 90 days. This froze me dead in my tracks.

Suddenly the movies I'd rented seemed vulnerable to deletion, and who knew what else. I also had a 99 cent rental of The Florida Project from the U.S. store, not particularly for the trip, but just because the movie was in my top ten of last year, I wanted to see it again, and it's only 99 cents for one week, so I had to act.

The poster for Thor never filled in on my rented movies on iTunes, leaving just a blank square with the title underneath, but I decided I'd deal with that later. We'd go on the trip, watch the other movies first, and then I would commit myself to 90 days exclusively in the Australian store. During which I would eat up all my remaining balance and not worry about that account again. If they needed to delete the movies I'd rented from the U.S., that wouldn't matter because we'd have already watched them.

But then funny things started to happen.

I watched Mom and Dad fine, but noticed some curious behavior with it. When I paused and tried to play again, it crashed iTunes. In fact, I had to restart my whole computer on that one, which is no short commitment as my computer seems to labor on startup, running through a variety of startup tasks. I could probably disable them -- I'm an IT professional, after all -- but with my own devices, sometimes I act more like a user than an IT guy.

I finished that movie without any more pauses, but then noticed another funny thing. The clock never started ticking. It told me that I'd have 48 hours to watch it once I started watching it, but when I finished, I noticed that it still said I had 27 days remaining to watch it, or whatever the actual day count was at the time.

This wasn't bothersome, of course, as it was only a benefit to me. I liked the movie enough that I might actually watch it again before the month was up, if I had such an easy opportunity to do so. We might even watch it on the trip. It did mean that I might have to actively delete it if I were running out of space -- I'm operating within a few gigs of my total allotment at any given time -- but that was a minor issue.

But it did concern me as an indication of something being wrong. And that continued in Indonesia.

Pauses during Orient Express and Tonya both also required restarting iTunes, though not restarting the computer at least. And when it was time to finally watch Thor, which was to have happened on Saturday night, and which was by far the movie my wife was most interested in, it wasn't possible to do so.

iTunes showed it was downloading Thor, but it said only that it was downloading it, not an estimated time remaining or a total bytes downloaded.

Well, downloading isn't the only option for viewing content on iTunes these days. You can also stream it. And when I was logged into the Australian account, it did show a poster for Thor. Concerning, however, was that it also showed the blank poster. So there were two Thors appearing in my rented movies, both at various stages of availability.

And neither of them actually available. When I clicked the play button on one to stream it, it showed only a black screen, one that never progressed forward. I could see the total time bar at the bottom, with 0:00 to 2:10 on either side, but it wouldn't move from 0:00 to 0:01 and onward. No errors, just not moving.

When I clicked the other one, without a poster, it showed only a time bar at the top of iTunes, like it was one very long song. Which also would not start.

I fidgeted with it for an hour, switching stores and trying whatever I could think of. If I at least got that message advising to switch stores for 90 days, that would be something. But that would not come. I thought about downloading it again from the American store, which would give me three Thors, and also about contacting customer support. But I decided either approach would draw undue attention to my situation, which might only make it worse.

So I watched Colonia that night and my wife watched a couple episodes of Jessica Jones.

It's too bad because Thor would have made the perfect "vacation movie." We tried to scratch that itch with Valerian, and it was partially scratched, as my wife commented that it made for a good "vacation movie." At the end, though, she also commented that she'd "liked parts of it," which is a fair assessment of Valerian.

Who knows what I have to look forward to in terms of future iTunes shenanigans. My next attempt to purchase something will give me some indication.

I don't think Apple wants to freeze me out as a customer. If I do need to contact customer support, I'll just plead ignorance and they'll help me right the ship. Their customer support has always been great in the past.

I just wish they'd drop all these restrictions on what can be used where, and by whom. The thing all the stores have in common is that they are getting my hard-earned dollar, or at least the hard-earned dollar of one of my relatives. That should be all that matters to them.

How to keep your voice in a Marvel movie

After the infamous episode with Edgar Wright and Ant-Man, fans, critics and other related observers rightly wondered if any director of any Marvel movie would ever be able to let his (or her) freak flag fly, or whether they would all just be neutered down to some version of whatever the studio wanted.

Well, Taika Waititi has kept his voice in Thor: Ragnarok alright -- in part by doing that literally.

Waititi voices a rock-like creature called Korg in one of the funniest aspects of an incredibly funny movie, which had me not only snickering, but bursting out in gales of joyous laughter. In this one character, Waititi has encapsulated everything you could want to encapsulate about the clipped and humorous line deliveries that are unique to people from New Zealand, as well as everything that illustrates his own perspective as a director.

Say "Hi," Korg.

Waititi has done it with Thor: Ragnarok, however you want to define "it." He has made the best comic book movie set in space. He has given a jolt of life to probably the most disappointing Marvel franchise. And most of all, he has let his freak flag fly up, down, and all over this movie.

Eccentricity oozes from every pore of Thor: Ragnarok, all within the recognizable parameters of a Marvel movie. The idea behind hiring someone like Waititi is to do exactly what's been done in this movie. You want a director to freshen up material that has inevitably started to bear a resemblance to earlier incarnations of itself, and Waititi has done that and then some. In certain very real ways, and without more than a small amount of hyperbole, this movie doesn't resemble anything that has come before it.

Simply put, I loved it. It's wild and woolly and shaggy and hilarious and joyous. It doesn't play by the rules. Of course, that sometimes means it's all over the place, and there are certain things we just didn't need (Dr. Strange, anyone?). But the amount we need the totality of Thor: Ragnarok overrides any of the smaller aspects we don't need.

It's not just funny. It's also an awesome spectacle, a triumph of special effects, a dazzling display of filmmaking techniques and imagination, and a damn fine usage of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" -- not once but twice.

The purpose of this post should not and will not be to enumerate the film's wonderful surprises, dear American reader, if that's who you are. When I saw it Thursday night, I knew I had at least a day on you -- turns out I've got more than a week. You won't get to see it until next Friday, and you deserve to be surprised by whatever parts of this film you haven't seen in the trailers.

Just know: It's a helluva good time.

And the way Waititi brings it home, with a good share (if not all) of his personal directorial style intact, will hopefully be a model for future such weird variations on our all-too-familiar blockbusters.

All hail Thor, and all hail Waititi.

Looks like I'm seeing Thor: The Dark World

If there was any Marvel movie I was pretty sure I never needed to see, it would have been Thor: The Dark World.

I didn't much care for the first Thor movie -- it was fine, but nothing more. The second never became a priority, and it landed with Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 as the only MCU movies I (so far) haven't seen.

I'll probably watch Guardians before the end of the year, and now it looks like Iron Man 3 may be hanging out by its lonesome in this group. Because Thor: Ragnarok looks so damn awesome that I think I'll need to do it the courtesy of watching its predecessor before I see it.

Truth is, the involvement of Taika Waititi probably meant I'd be seeing Ragnarok anyway, but watching the trailer last night just amped up my excitement level for it from, well, basically non-existent to almost uncontrollable.

And sure, you could just say that any trailer cut to Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" is going to be awesome almost no matter what the accompanying images are. But in this case, the accompanying images are fantastic. The very outer-spacey Ragnarok looks exactly like what I've wanted the Guardians movies to be, and which at least half of them haven't been -- an outer space-set comic book movie that is actually pretty badass. (Sorry, Green Lantern, you don't qualify.)

I'm not sure I even remember half of what I thought was so great about this trailer, but that's probably better, as it'll remain fresh for me when the movie releases in November. And of course, now that I've seen the trailer once, I won't watch it again.

My normal trailer rules are that I don't watch trailers for movies I already know I want to see. As soon as I realize what trailer it is, I stop watching it. But movies I'm not that excited about get a pass. Instead of worrying about ruining the movie by seeing some of its best imagery in advance, I use the advanced imagery to possibly fuel my excitement about it.

I suppose there's a middle ground where I could go from not wanting to see a movie, to wanting to see it, to having some of its best images ruined for me, all in the space of one trailer. But I'm willing to take the risk, in part because seeing trailers was something that I always used to look forward to until I decided that not seeing them was truer to the experience I want to have with the movies. (It all goes back to that one year where I realized that I hadn't seen a trailer for nine of my top the movies of the year.)

Anyway, Thor: Ragnarok's trailer fucking ruled. Nice job.

And as a validation of my standard trailer-watching policy, the movie I subsequently saw was Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, whose trailers I had been steadfastly avoiding. I ended up liking the movie a fair bit, and I think I can chalk that up in no small part to not having glimpsed any of the images of the movie's opening 20 minutes or so, which are by far its best parts. "That's some Avatar shit right there," I may have even said out loud as I watched the beginning set on the planet Mul, which is an immersive environment on the scale of Pandora.

If Ragnarok immerses me that much and has a good story to boot? Watch out.