Movies

Reasons to love Thor: Ragnarok

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Thor: RagnarokOK, before we get into discussing why you should see Thor: Ragnarok, we’re going to ignore for a moment that the title of this post misspells “ragnarök” as “ragnarok.” I’m sure if it were a section of Taika Watiti’s Thor movie, there would be a “devil’s anus” joke to riff on here. And I’m a bit disappointed that a movie willing to use Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” not once, but twice, didn’t get an umlaut in its title.

But such petty concerns are beside the point. I loved this movie. It was exactly as fun as I hoped it would be.

And, in its many departures from Norse mythology, it actually uses them to make a point. Unlike the first two Thor movies (which I enjoyed in their own right), Taika Watiti’s Thor: Ragnarok finds a way to make the Marvel superhero Thor both epic and funny. (In Thor, he was funny, but not epic. In Thor: The Dark World, he was epic, but not exactly funny.)

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The top five other werewolf movies you should see

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brotherhood-wolf-header

While there are many movies with werewolves in them, there are relatively few good ones in which the werewolf is the main character. Of those, the debate over which is best usually comes down to An American Werewolf in London or The Howling. (Traditionalists may also argue the case for 1941’s The Wolf Man.) Fine.  But what about the other werewolf movies out there? Here are my favourite five.

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WolfCop movie howls right to the top

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WolfCop
The hardworking team behind WolfCop. (Photo courtesy of http://wolfcop.com)

Great news: WolfCop is now a reality. Writer/director Lowell Dean and his filmmaking team managed to advance through multiple fan-voted rounds of CineCoup’s development-spurring competition.  When they made it into the Top 5 finalists in the inaugural CineCoup Film Accelerator, I had hope they might make it all the way — and on June 10, they did.

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Werewolf in uniform: WolfCop seeks fan support

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WOLF COP_OnlineNo, it’s not a new officer of the Saskatoon Police Service’s canine unit, but you could be forgiven for thinking that at first glance of Lou Garou, the main character in Canadian werewolf movie WolfCop.

A werewolf in cop’s clothing, Garou (played by Leo Fafard) is the brainchild of filmmaker Lowell Dean. Garou hits the bottle a bit too hard occasionally, so he’s used to not remembering where he’s spent his nights. But now, instead of just waking up with a hangover, he finds himself investigating crime scenes that seem a little too familiar.

The tagline for WolfCop, which currently only exists as a trailer (see below), is “Dirty Hairy… only hairier.”

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Adaptation

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The_Hobbit-_An_Unexpected_Journey.jpegLike many fantasy fans out there, I was eager to see Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I had some misgivings, though, since he had had to condense the weighty Lord of the Rings in many ways to make it fit into three still-epic movies (which I enjoyed), and seemed to be doing the opposite with The Hobbit — a slight volume aimed at children — by expanding it into, well… three epic movies.

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Feature Friday: Jón Gustafsson’s Wrath of Gods

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Wrath of Gods

 Filmmaking is never easy. But when a perfect storm of financial and weather trouble hit Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel, the production took on a heroic scale that rivalled the plot of the movie itself. Jón Gustafsson brought it to life in his documentary Wrath of Gods.

 

Terry Gilliam once attempted to film an adaptation of Don Quixote. It was a notoriously difficult shoot. Lead actor Jean Rochefort suffered an injury that removed him from the production and floods destroyed sets and equipment, among other problems. The film was never finished — though it became the subject of a famous documentary, Lost in La Mancha.

Sturla Gunnarsson may know how Gilliam felt.

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