Cynical Cinema

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors in the world.  He is the man behind the best of the Blade movies, Blade II, the incredible recent film Pan’s Labyrinth, and of course the first Hellboy film, which I really liked.  The thing that made Hellboy great was that it didn’t look like other superhero or comic book movies.  It looked like something totally new.  Dark, spectacular and imaginative, the world occupied by the characters was vivid and appealing.  And Ron Perlman as Hellboy was perfect.  A completely new type of comic book hero.  The spawn of hell, a creature who existed to protect the world from the supernatural creatures that threaten to destroy it, who at the same time has the emotional maturity of a 19-year-old.  He smokes cigars and drinks beer and basically lives the life of a young adult, only he lives it in isolation, separated from the world by the government which uses him to do their dirty work.

Hellboy II:  The Golden Army is very similar.  The set designs are once again vivid and wonderful, the creatures and monsters Hellboy has to face are once again interesting and really cool looking, and Ron Perlman is as good as ever.  (Perlman, I should add, has worked with Del Toro twice before - once in the original Hellboy, obviously, and once as the coolest bad guy in Blade II.)  However, the creatures are not quite as cool as they were the first time around.  Partly because they remind me of a lot of other creatures.  Guillermo del Toro creatures.  There is a bizarre creature with no eyes in it’s head, but rather in it’s wings, that at one point helps to heal Hellboy.  And it really reminded me of the creature with eyes in it’s hands from Pan’s Labyrinth.  The bad guy, an elf prince named Nuada, played by Luke Goss, reminds me very much of the bad guy in Blade II.  Perhaps that is because, now that I’ve done my research, in Blade II the bad guy Nomak was played by…Luke Goss.  But he seems to be made up the same way in this one - he’s just Nomak with hair - and it’s a little disconcerting.

I really don’t want to rag on Guillermo del Toro for ripping off…himself.  Once you’ve created such memorable stuff in your career, it’s not such a bad idea to revisit the things that worked once before.  After all, we all want to hear the new AC/DC album, knowing full well it will be exactly the same as every other AC/DC album.  But the story in Hellboy II is a little weaker as well.  This movie could have been a much deeper commentary on the “nature of heroism” and so forth.  Not that I’m asking it to be The Dark Knight, which would be an unreasonable expectation, but this sort of thing is hinted at so often in the movie that it’s disappointing not to see it fleshed out.

Hellboy is of course, being a young adult at heart, eager to escape from the close confines of the government lab where he is housed.  He now lives with his girlfriend from the first movie, played by Selma Blair, a woman who can control fire.  And he’s constantly at odds with the government management, represented ably by Jeffrey Tambor.  Hellboy wants to be a hero, beloved in the city, and wants the public to recognize him for his good deeds.  Basically, he feels he deserves to be a celebrity.  And perhaps he’s right.  The government wants to keep him under wraps.  They want to relegate “Hellboy” sightings to the tabloids, creating a “bigfoot” or “loch ness” aura around him.  And perhaps they’re right.

There are a few scenes where Hellboy IS seen by the public, and even though he has clearly just helped them out, they are afraid of him and assume he’s a bad guy, because, well, he looks like the devil.  All of this stuff would be really interesting if the movie was willing to go into it, but it never really does.  Also interesting would have been the real motivation of the elf prince, Nuada, and his relationship with his twin sister.  He wants to resurrect the Golden Army, an unstoppable force, to take over the world from the humans.  He points to the fact that the elves and mystical creatures have abandoned the world to the humans many years ago, and human beings have just screwed it up.  Unless these supernatural creatures reclaim the world from the humans, the Earth will be destroyed.  And it’s their Earth too.

This could be a really fascinating debate.  Is it worth killing the humans if you know they are in the process, inadvertent or not, of killing you?  Does the word of the elf king, given to the human race many thousands of years ago and forgotten by today’s people, mean more than protecting your environment?  I could see this movie becoming a serious ethical dilemma for everyone, but it never goes there either.  Nadua is the villain, he wants to destroy all human beings, and he must be stopped.  He is evil.  End of story.  It;s too bad, because Hellboy II is every bit as visually impressive as Hellboy, the cast is equally terrific (although I do miss David Hyde Pierce as the voice of Abe Sapien), there is still a lot of good humour and the energy is still fantastic. 

But Hellboy II does not reach the level of Hellboy simply because it sets up some interesting stuff that never pays off, in favour of throwing even more impressive and stunning visuals at us.  And all of that is great - Guillermo del Toro is one of the directors who can make the best use of a massive budget - but it’s a little overwhelming while the story ends up being a little underwhelming.  The first one was a must-see.  And if you liked that one, this one is a should-rent.

Anthony Hopkins should feel good about his new movie Slipstream. He directed the film, as well as starring in it, and I am going to go ahead and assume that it turned out exactly the way he wanted it to turn out. That is, weird. I respect the fact that as long as his movie fit his vision, he didn’t care at all whether the rest of us got it or not, and even may not have cared if we enjoyed it or not. Slipstream seems to be about a movie script-writer whose mind is going, and who lives half in reality, half in his mind. Somehow, when I watched the trailers, I got the sense that this movie was about time travel. Maybe it was supposed to be about time travel, and I just didn’t get it. Hey, for all I know, this film could have been about a rabbit and a butterfly. Frankly, there’s no good way to tell. I have the sense that if I watched this film five or six times, I would be able to figure out what’s going on. But I don’t feel like doing that. Frankly, I don’t feel like watching it twice. I also have the sense that if David Lynch was allowed to make an entire movie while on PCP, it would look something like this one.

It’s OK to make a movie that doesn’t make perfect sense. Look at Lynch - Mulholland Drive, for example. And some of the greatest films are almost as bonkers as this one. Like, Weekend, for example, or Fellini’s stuff. But you have to either go all out, or wrap things up in some way. Slipstream starts out with a bunch of scenes that don’t fit together, a series of weird moments, one after another, slight changes in scenes that seem to indicate there is something bigger going on…and all of a sudden we’ve hit the 40 minute mark. And we still have no idea what’s happening. At all. Then things start making a little more sense. But by then, no one cares. We’ve completely given up on trying to make sense of anything, and when stuff sort of starts coming together, we just want it to wrap up and the movie be over. And this one never really comes together at all. Individually, each scene is likely compelling. Hopkins is quite good at creating a memorable image, or phrase, or moment. But taken collectively, this is just too much for your average viewer. Or your sub-par viewer, or your above-average, gifted viewer. Any viewer.

There are some great performances in here. Hopkins is terrific, and John Turturro is awesome fun as a maniac movie producer. The film also stars Camryn Manheim, Christian Slater, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jeffrey Tambor, and in the most bizarre cameo of the year, Kevin McCarthy as himself. For some reason, Slipstream continually refers to the 1956 classic horror film Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers. And Kevin McCarthy, who was the star of that film, shows up as himself, now at age 84, in order to sit in a car with Hopkins. Since the movie ended, I have been trying very hard to understand the references to Bodysnatchers, but I have yet to figure it out. And I’m not willing to watch it again to help me understand. Slipstream is a ballsy film to make, it’s as experimental and avant-garde (if that’s even a real term) as anything made this year, but it doesn’t work. When it was over, I suspected that it was a movie designed specifically to confuse me, rather than to make me think. It’s like having one of those magic-eye pictures, the ones you stare at for a long time until you see a sailboat or a tiger or whatever. Only, this one has no underlying picture. So you can stare at it for as long as you like, but you’ll never see anything. And you will be frustrated and angry.