If there is an award for the movie trailer that served its movie the least at next year’s Tuesdees, Thor’s trailer is definitely going to win. When I watched it during the Superbowl, I immediately thought “There’s a movie I can skip.” And I love comic books. Love them. Granted, I was never a big Thor fan, but the end of Iron Man 2 and knowing that Joss Whedon is directing the upcoming Avengers movie had me interested in seeing Thor. Until that trailer was released. The trailer for Thor makes it look as cheesy as a Kraft factory.
But then a week before Thor was released, people who saw sneak previews of it started talking about how good it is. People whose opinion I respected were telling me to go see this movie. And all I could think was, “Really? This movie? No, clearly you mean some other Thor movie.”
Finally the praise that just kept getting stacked on top of more praise got to me and I grabbed a bunch of friends to go see it the Saturday night of opening weekend.
Quick math problem: A group of seven people are seeing Thor, a major summer blockbuster, at 9 PM on the Saturday night of its opening weekend. How early do you show up to the theater? Note: This is New York City; there aren’t any Arclights here where you can reserve your seats in advance. So, how early do you show up? 45 minutes early? An hour? We stopped for pizza on the way to the theater and showed up a little less than 30 minutes early.
I know. We were screwed. There was no way we were all sitting together, or if we were it was going to be in the first two rows.
Except, when we walked into the theater, there were four people in the theater. Four people! Four people! Is the recession that bad?
Some of you are thinking, “What? Four people? Impossible, I say!” A few of you though are thinking, “Oh, so you saw it at the Battery Park Regal?”
You guys, the Battery Park Regal is my new favorite theater. It’s clean. It’s empty. It’s really, really empty. No joke, all the Foursquare tips for the place are “Don’t tell people about how empty this movie theater is.” But I have to say something. Because I don’t want this movie theater to fail. So please go see a movie there. It’s the anti-Court. St.
Thor was great. I loved it. I’m not a huge Thor fan and I wondered how they would make him interesting. But they did. How? Slapstick. I was very surprised by how much slapstick comedy made its way into Thor, but I’m all for it. Maybe the Asgard scenes would have been more enjoyable if they had the level of slapstick that the Earth scenes did.
