Shorts from a break week movie binge

Thor: So much eye-candy. Quite ridiculous displays of chiseled abs and Tom Hiddleston, who is my new Hollywood crush, playing Loki like Lear's Edmund (although with far fewer sexual politics this time around... maybe he'll get a little more action in the Avengers movie). Oh and lots of rainbow bridges and bad-ass Aesiraciousness that wasn't necessarily total state of the art perfection (they blew that on Thor's abs) but still worked. 

Sure it's not really entirely clear why Thor had a complete change of character from landing on earth and hanging out with Natalie Portman, but whatever. Pretty movie that didn't take itself too seriously despite the heavy Shakespearean undertones.

Now, gods, stand up for bastards (and uh orphan ice giants)!

Bridesmaids: As funny as I'd been told to expect, but actually not really "a female The Hangover" as had been reported. Yeah there were some pretty great gross out gags and profanity based humor, but it had a lot of resonating substance about hitting a stall in one's life and that weird and sadly familiar sensation of finding your once closest friendships evolving apart (it may have made me cry a little bit - god I'm such a girl these days), etc. etc.

Kung Fu Panda 2: I just saw the first one on tv about a week ago and wasn't paying that much attention so I would enthusiastically say that I thought this was even better than the first without too much to back that up. The art was insane: the movie looked like a Zhang Yimou epic in a lot of placesn - with some great stylistic variances for the flashbacks and credit sequences - and the fights scenes were impressively choreographed. But what was nice is that they never let that or the archetypal kung-fu story-lines (well done as well) get in the way of being a pretty cute, sweet and congenial little film with a not-overwhelming emphasis on familial love and self-identity. Which gave it a nice mix of grandeur and intimacy for my tastes.I may have sniffled a bit at this one too.

Pirates of The Caribbean - part 500: Had a lot of the right ingredients and was decently executed, but struck me as a smidge, well... vacuously mechanical, and lacking in the whimsy and adventure of the first one. I haven't seen the third one and barely remember the second (other than thinking it was fun, but far too long), so I definitely wouldn't say it was the worst of the series. My main objection was just that I feel like they had some great ideas in mind, but weren't quite sure how to get to them and didn't put too much effort into making that into a smooth story-line. Few of the characters' motivations are particularly plausible or developed, and while I mostly can accept these at face value for a summer blockbuster, the plot relies quite heavily on a romance between a mermaid and a priest that is so incredibly undeveloped that it feels a bit like a rush job after the writers wrote themselves into a corner and needed something to push the plot to the next vignette. Too bad, because the predatory mermaid scenes and the potential old sea-lore feel of mermaid-priest love had some potential. Oh and we watched it in closed caption (an appropriately surreal experience as my brain is programmed to stop listening to speech when there are what I perceive to be subtitles), so I can tell you authoritatively that pirates and other men-folk grunt a lot and mermaids and Penelope Cruz pants a lot.

I am so much hotter than Knightly