THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER. As I lay in the emergency room on July 3 — with a non-explosives-related digital wound, as I abhor cliché — writing about a Marvel movie was perhaps the furthest thing from my mind. Realistically, I was probably busy scrambling for hand-trauma jokes (Will I ever play the piano? What about my career as a hand model? My editor’s gonna kill me if I can’t hammer the F key like I’m supposed to!), none of which I delivered and all of which would have withered before the hilarity of the P.A.’s pronouncement of, “You’re not going to like what I have to tell you.” Near-amputations notwithstanding, I don’t dedicate much idle time to daydreaming about the MCU; other than the copious outpouring of lamentation and regret laid out almost weekly in this very forum. In my (indefensible) defense, time has proven Thor movies outliers among their dour, joy-consuming kin, which is the predominant reason I’ve developed a soft spot (my head) for them. Unlike the immovable bulk of most of the MCU, Thor has taken on an unexpected, dynamic arc. In the beginning, his story was as archly self-serious — falsely Nordic, maybe — as they come; I mean, Kenneth Branagh? Over time, though, Chris Hemsworth’s hero has emerged as the goofiest, most gleefully unaware of the bunch, so much so that these movies stand almost completely apart from the rest of the “canon.” While I would like to imagine this is due, at least in part, to a degree of cleverness and self-effacement on the part of our otherworldly physiqued star (see Spiderhead for more evidence of this), the traits and tropes that make the last couple Thor pictures so endearing are very much trademarks of their driving creative force, burgeoning media impresario Taika Waititi. And yes, in case any of the faithful have read this far, we must of course give credit to super-producer and demigod Kevin Feige, under whose aegis all things superhero-y are made possible. Anyway, Waititi made the unlikely, fortuitous leap from directing episodes of Flight of the Conchords, Eagle Vs. Shark (2007) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014) — one of the greatest movie comedies of the century, incidentally, with a follow-up FX series that rivals it, note for note — to helming Thor: Ragnarok (2017), a delightfully candy-colored departure from, almost-inversion of, the standards and practices of…