Pfaugh on the critics, Thor is great!

I’m rattling around in a big house alone while my wife and kids finish out the school year in North Dakota before joining me. So on lonely weekends I’m sure glad there’s a six screen movie theater in town.

Last weekend I saw Thor in spite of some bad reviews. For one, I was a Marvel comics fan in my youth. For another – I find it hard to believe that Kenneth Branagh could make a bad movie. It’s one of my minor life ambitions to own every one of his Shakespeare movies. (I’ve seen “Henry V” in three different countries – and it’s interesting to watch how an audience in Eastern Europe reacts to the line, “I love France so much I will not part with a village of it.”)

So I went, not expecting any more than a rolicking good time, like the “Iron Man” movies.

It was great! They found the perfect actor to play the God of Thunder in the Marvel mode. (In Norse myth, Thor was called “the Redbeard,” not “The Hunk with flowing gold locks.”)

Natalie Portman made up for playing in the no-class vulgar piece of crap “Your Highness.” Jane Foster is much better as a strong-willed scientist than a wimpy nurse. The former secret identity “Dr. Donald Blake” was thankfully done away with.

The CGI Asgaard and Bifrost Bridge are great, and the euhemerization of the myths is well done. The character development proceeds a little to rapidly to be realistic, but hey it’s a movie.

So why the bad reviews?

Well, for one mainstream reviewers just don’t understand genre pics. For another, this is the Age of the Wimp, which makes artsy-fartsy reviewers of movies about strong, lusty, heroic archtypical characters uneasy.

And why did Kenneth Branagh, the world’s greatest interpreter of Shakespeare make a movie based on a comic book?

Well, maybe that’s where you find the spirit of Shakespeare in this day and age.