Thor!

1. I'm guessing I should probably do a review of Thor as I am the resident northern comic book geek. I've never been the biggest fan of the character in the world, with the exception of Walt Simonson's run on the series back in the 80s (Now collected in this bad boy which I will own soon enough). A norse God of Thunder is perhaps not the most likely candidate for a movie, but hey, Marvel seems to have a formula down with their movies. Take a basically good guy with lots of power and potential, but basically an dick with daddy issues, throw him into the deep end, watch him become a Man and then a good guy. The end.

So Thor is a fun enough movie. It's probably in my Top 10 all-time comic book movies, but definitely clinging to the bottom of the list as opposed to being near the top with films like X-Men 2, Spider Man 2, Iron Man and the Dark Knight. The acting is fun enough, the story does a decent job of making sense of a norse god walking the earth, Odin is a prick (Odin is a prick in the comics as well), Loki steals scenes like he's supposed to do, Natalie Portman slums along as nice eye candy and Kenneth Branaugh does a good job of making something fun not seem completely weightless.

But if I have a gripe, it's about the 3-D. I think it's a gripe I can have about almost any of the movies using 3-D and Roger Ebert is currently in the middle of a jihad against it on his blog, but he's right. I'm tired of spending extra on a movie that looks really dark and in which the 3-D adds little to it. I'm willing to bet I'm going to enjoy Thor a lot more on Blu Ray when it comes out because I'll appreciate how much brighter and sharper it is.

So a decent start for the comic movies of the summer of '11. And next week's X-Men: First Class is getting early comparisons to X-Men 2, which is a very good sign. Still not sure about Green Lantern. I think it's going to be spectacular, but good or bad I don't know. I still don't know enough about Captain America to have an idea of how that's going to work out.

2. An update for those of you who might possibly care about the banking stuff I mentioned the other day. CIBC seems oddly friendly to me right now. People at the bank certain seem to know who I am, although whether that's good or not I don't know. But they did step up. We got a much better deal at CIBC than RBC (and by much better, I mean 2.5% better at least) so that's enough to keep me happy for now.

I don't know if we're going to use it or not. We're juggling a few things here right now. The car (It's going to be an Equinox), upcoming sea lift order, our vacation and the desire to hammer some money down on the mortgage. Oddly, there is only so much money to go around.

But on the upside, we should have our new Equinox by early July, assuming the ice breaks up on time and the sealift boats stick to schedule. Which is questionable, but you can always live in hope. It'll be the first brand new vehicle for either of us in 10 years, which is pretty exciting. Mmmmmmm, new car smell...

Last Five
1. What you're missing - Sean Panting
2. DNA - The Kills*
3. Way out - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. Tightly - Neko Case
5. El Manana - Gorillaz