The actor:	Chris Hemsworth
The character:	Thor
The film:	Thor: Ragnarok
The line:	“We know each other! He’s a friend from work!”

This is an incredible line. Chris Hemsworth delivers it with so much joy; it’s probably the closest Thor gets to the himbo secretary he plays in Ghostbusters. The “friend from work” framing is so funny, too, in part because saving the world the way the Avengers are so often bound to do is no walk in the park. It’s unexpected and silly and accurate in the way that good jokes are. These are the last positive words I’m going to use in this post, so feel free to take the next exit if you don’t want your vibes harshed.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing this movie-watching thing all wrong. I know a lot of people who basically stick to what they like. If they’re into genre films, they stick with genre films; the same goes for series and sequels. If they want to feel the connection of watching things that just came out because it’s fun to be able to talk about them with others, then they keep with the new pictures. I, on the other hand, will watch basically anything, and because I’ll watch basically anything since you never know when you’ll need it, I get a fair amount of stuff I don’t like all that much.

Here’s an example. I’ve seen fourteen Sidney Lumet movies. I don’t like Sidney Lumet as a director. In my experience there are few directors who you can rely on to get less from the sum of his parts than Lumet. I’m getting tired of Network, and after that his best film is…Long Day’s Journey into Night? The Fugitive Kind? I’ve seen fifteen George Cukor movies, and while there are a couple I really like (everyone should have the pleasure of It Should Happen to You, for example), for the most part I find his work so beige. But here I am, a big stupid who not only watches but searches for Lumet and Cukor films I don’t expect I’ll enjoy or be moved by.

Of course, better to watch the entire filmographies of Lumet or Cukor multiple times over than to keep up with the MCU, even at home. And yet that’s exactly what I’ve done (for the movies, not the television, I have some standards) since one fated night in September 2020 when I popped on Captain America: The First Avenger. That’s why I’ve seen all the MCU movies except for Guardians 3, which I’ll catch up to when it hits Disney Plus. And more specifically, that’s how I’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok, a movie I don’t think has very much going for it, and directed by the person who might truly be my least favorite director.

Taika Waititi rubs me the wrong way. Part of it is the man, because unlike so many directors I don’t think he actually likes movies all that much. He is not literate in the form, nor does he have much curiosity for it. A couple posts ago I talked about Damien Chazelle, who by my reckoning has made a single good movie, and it’s probably not the one you think it is. I don’t think much of Chazelle, but there is no doubt in my mind that he loves movies, the history of the medium, the form movies take and the way they are created. It was clear from his work even before Babylon (and that unforgivably moronic ending) that he loved movies. There’s no evidence in Waititi’s work that he has that same passion, and there’s even less in a string of interviews. If the movies were better, I doubt this would matter to me very much, but the movies are not good! Jojo Rabbit does something which it’s incredibly difficult to do with a movie short of like, killing children and Vic Morrow, which is to make a movie which is immoral. Films aren’t often immoral. Waititi manages it.

This line is still funny. Broken clocks and all.