I have one vivid comic book related memory. When I was a kid, maybe eight or nine, there was a horrible, violent ice storm in my home town. The power was out for, I think, a week. We had to sleep in my dad's shop for most of the time. My dad took me and my brother to the Town Crier (Later, after I grew up a bit, my dad and I used to go to the very same Town Crier and laugh at all of the off brand porn magazine titles. My favorite: Shaved Snizz) to get some comic books to see us through the long power outage. I wish I could remember what the comic was that because I was pretty entranced by it. It was a sort of Conan the Barbarian type thing. It may have, in fact, actually been a Conan comic. I don't know. What I do know is that it had a whole bunch of cuss words and exposed boobs in it. And we had to eat all of the ice cream, nine year old awesome.
Fast forward through periodic bouts with X-Men comics until Marvel started putting movies out. I've seen all of them. And they've been almost all terrible. I suppose the X-Men movies are the best of the lot, perhaps if I didn't think Spider-Man was a complete wiener, then I might have liked those but I do so I didn't. I'm also not a huge fan of the Batman movies but I have to say that they are definitely raising the bar for future endeavors in the genre. Most are half good at best and that's where I was with Thor.
Thor was never, even in my amateur forays into comics, that intriguing to me. He's a Norse god with a big hammer that can fly around and nobody else can pick up? Um, OK, but why does he hang around with those lame Avengers? I could take or leave him. But I have to say, Chris Hemsworth, the actor playing Thor, is great in this one. It's one of the most likeable performances in a superhero movie to date. Unfortunately, he's playing opposite a completely flat, over matched, lost appearing, Oscar winning actress. What the fuck, Natalie Portman? Seriously, that was garbage, no it was worse, it was rubbish.
The best parts of the movie feature Thor and Odin yelling at each other. Odin is played by Anthony Hopkins and, as usual he's great but you're kind of left wondering what the hell he was doing in the movie. I can't remember the last role he was in where I though, yeah, this is perfect for Anthony Hopkins. The combination of Hemsworth and Hopkins make the movie worth seeing for simple summer fare. But the rest was pretty much in shambles. Asgard looked like the set of an 80's space porno and Thor's buddies are all pretty hammy. The plot is spotty and barely functional and I'm not sure why they went with all the comedy in the middle of the movie. Not that it was completely unfunny. Kat Dennings proved able in the wisecracking side kick role and Hemsworth got tons of laughs from me immediately after waking up in the hospital after crash landing on Earth.
Obviously, Thor has it's issues but I think it's a successful Marvel movie. I'd put it just above the Spider-Man and Hulk movies but below the X-Men (Not including Wolverine, gerf) films.
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