Movies with Chris Hemsworth in

You guys, I think I'm becoming an old lady. I went, on a whim, with some friends to a movie this evening, which started at 9:10, and by halfway through I was already totally ready to curl up in bed. Looks like even though I've ended up sitting up in bed writing blog posts at midnight the last few days, my secretly-elderly circadian rhythms are not fooled: they know (it knows? I feel like circadian rhythms should be plural, even though I know it's really just that one rhythm, but maybe I'm syncopated dnough to count it as two) that I ought to be at least making tokenistic bedwards motion by 10ish.

I mean, in fairness, I'd seen the movie before (twice) but it was the Avengers, which is pretty watchable. Not vastly surprising on the third viewing in as many months, but definitely still pretty good, still enough that a proper 26 year old wouldn't find themselves distracted by idle dreams of bed.

It's funny, actually, how much the movie lost by watching it in a cinema with only about 10 people in it. When I saw it on the opening weekend, it was in packed cinemas full of geeks who obligingly laughed en masse at every joke, which made the nuances and the little slivers of humour, for which Whedon is so beloved, easier to appreciate, easier to notice. I suppose this is what the people who came up with canned "studio audience" laughter were going for, but could never capture.

Maybe it's the spontaneity? Maybe it sounds audibly nothing like genuine laughter? Maybe it's the fact that there's a big difference between someone telling you a joke, and the person next to you going "That's pretty funny!" versus the person who's doing the telling nudging you and going "Eh? Geddit, geddit? I'm pretty funny, huh?". Maybe it's just that if you know you can simply add manufactured laughter, you don't actually need to try so hard to earn it. Which is maybe why it always seemed to devolve into characters making an entrance and then standing there like idiots waiting for the laugh to finish, as if the very act of entering a room was in itself inherently humourous, and even hilarious, reliably so, no matter how often you did it.

The problem with blogging about movies themselves, of course (yes, that's what we're talking about now, suddenly, try to keep up) is that everyone does so. Not that I'm too much of a unique and beautiful snowflake to do what the 'common people' are doing, you understand, but more that Australia tends to get movies last, it seems, and I never really go on opening nights, generally. So after I watch a movie, assuming I'm in the mood to dissect it (and frankly, I often feel like even trying to decide how to answer "did you like that movie?" is too much overthinking for many movies to sustain, so blogging would definitely dent my ability to rewatch and enjoy mindlessly) then generally most of the things worth saying have been said, more concisely and articulately (not to say accurately) by people whose actual job it is, let alone just the hordes of highly dedicated bloggers with a particular interest in movies. Light entertainment is serious business to a lot of people, and there's not what you'd call a lot of scope for the dilettante.

So, for instance, in Snow White & the Huntsman the other day, I kept wanting to take notes to remind me of what I wanted to write about it (which doesn't speak well for it's being a terribly absorbing movie), and indeed, having left my notebook at home by accident, I scribbled all over the inside of a paper wrapper in my handbag.

Problem is, it turns out that there've already been countless articles about how impressively derivative the movie was (seriously, you could basically do a version by just copy-pasting the scenes they'd stolen from earlier movies into order and uploading it to youtube (in fact do that, I want to watch THAT instead. You'll want bits of the 1930s Disney Snow White, Artax's death in the Neverending Story, the weird sibling vibe from Game of Thrones, and the sudden aging from that movie with Cabbage Patch dolls which I watched as a small child and by which I was TOTALLY TERRIFIED for reasons which now absolutely escape me. (Still don't like cabbage patch dolls, in fact, but this is partly because they're just dreaful.) Also Lord of the Rings, the fireswamp scene from the Princess Bride, and maybe the scenes of childhood from Ever After?)) (Three sets of nested parentheses?! I personal best?). People had also wriiten, with entirely called-for outrage about the casting of non-short-statured people in one of the few roles those poor short-statured actors could actually rely on getting. It was a bit like the scandal after Willy Wonka, except that not only did they hire full-height actors to play dwarves, they also gave them stupid haircuts and 1 dimensional characters (yes I know that was in the Disney version, but so was a lot of stuff, like narrative continuity, and there was no truck with that here)(well, less. Certainly they changed the story enough that they could happily have fixed the dwarves) and generally made them caricatures.

One of the short statured actors I heard quoted compared it to casting white actors doing black-face, and it seriously was pretty much exactly like that. I mean, it's not as if these people have managed to get far enough past discrimination that they can look back on this crap and laugh, just yet. I mean, it hasn't been a full year since the last time a short statured person was badly injured when some idiot decided to pick them up and throw them because dwarf tossing sounds hilarious and "midgets" don't matter. (The fact that they cast a dude who's over 6 foot to play Gimli wasn't great either, but at least that was only one dude. And at least he wasn't wearing a stick stuck in his ear and being creepy but childlike at Kristen Stewart). Plus the director was all "but we wanted well known people!" Which fools no-one, since the dwarves weren't in the ads, and how will short-statured actors ever GET well known if you never cast them, even as the seven bloody dwarves?

So those bits of review are out, which just leaves: I don't know if anyone has already written about the impressively terible haircuts on some of the dudes, but I suspect so, they must've, surely. The Beautiful Wicked Queen carries on about how she's got to be beautiful as a woman, because that's her power, and hangs out with a brother who's creepy and predatory and sort of rapey, and also has bad acne scarring and seriously the worst haircut ever.

Is this some kind of incredibly handfisted message about how beauty is only important in women in our society but less so for men? Because if so, casting 2 beautiful girls who are having a fight about who is "fairest" and also a few dudes who can barely act but are decorative does rather detract from that. I mean, it's all very well to try to credit them with being hamfisted in trying to underline the iniquity of the culture of beauty, but frankly, it's a bunch more believable to read it as a hamfisted attempt to perpetrate just that sort of thing which we might imagine them to be criticising.

Plus: why does he have such a terrible haircut (I wish I could find a picture, I do), when no-one could ever deliberately have that haircut in the first place, let alone if they were hanging out with someone that style conscious all the time. Mum suggested that maybe he's supposed to be stuck with that hair because that's what he had in the flashback to him as a kid, but Charlize Theron changes her hair, and he wouldn't've had the acne scarring as a kid. No, I'm afraid there's no point in overthinking it at all, this was just a choice made by idiots to make Charlize Theron look more glamourous by comparison (as if that were necessary) and him look creepier (as if that were necessary, what with the aforementioned rapiness), or at best to distract all our follicular attention away from the fact that Chris Hemsworth and Kristen Stewart seem to be perpetually damp for no plot-based reason.

In one scene, we see the Huntsman dive into water early in the morning, then we cut to them in the forest saying "we've been running for ages!", apparently like 6 hours later, since it's now late afternoon, and there's still water literally dripping out of his hair and beard. It's like someone read that bit in Bridget Jones where she keeps going on about how great wet-shirt-Darcy is and just really really took that to heart, and therefore doused Thor superfluously between every take. Either that or we're meant to think he has like a really serious sweating problem, I guess? I feel like that sort of thing would make it hard to hunt effectively, though, what with animals having a keen sense of smell. Mind you, no reference is ever made to him in any way hunting anything at any time, perhaps Huntsman is just his name? Like Smith!

The moral of this story, obviously, is that actually I can write a ridiculous amount about even the tiniest detail in an otherwise largely sort of pleasantly meh movie, so maybe it really is for the best that I don't do so very often? I mean, all this from a couple of weird stylist choices. Imagine what'd happen if I watched Schindler's List!

PS Alex was the only person to request a topic of blog, and he requested "unedited stream of consciousness" so this is his fault, and also yours for not suggesting something better yourself, like "Bear vs Tiger vs Shark: who would win?" or "can conflict in the middle east ever be resolved?" or even, like, "blankets" or something.