Cynical Cinema

The Incredible Hulk was the third-best comic book adaptation of the past summer.  Considering, however, that the other two were Iron Man and The Dark Knight, that’s some pretty good company.  And it appears that if you’ve seen Iron Man, then you definitely have to see The Incredible Hulk.  And vice versa.  Not only are both of them terrific movies, but a tiny cameo appearance at the end of this film indicates that there will be some kind of cross-over between the two at a later date.  And that crossover is certainly something that I want to see. 

The main reason these movies are great are the actors.  Robert Downey Jr. is magnificent as Iron Man, and Edward Norton is just as good as The Incredible Hulk.  Where normally film studios making superhero movies are looking for guys with chiseled bodies and chiseled faces and “the look”, rather than people who can really act.  So we get Brandon Routh playing Superman.  Which is fine, but the added element of serious acting provided by Edward Norton as Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk creates a far more compelling movie overall. 

That being said, the other serious actors in this movie are underused.  Willima Hurt, one of the world’s great actors, plays Banner’s nemesis, General Thaddeus Ross, who wants to capture Banner to harness the power of the Hulk into a weapon.  He is cartoonish, which one would expect from a comic book movie, but I was hoping for something more.  Norton’s character isn’t a cartoon, why should Ross be one?  Same goes for Liv Tyler, who plays Banner’s obligatory love interest, and yet she serves the comic book movie cliched purpose of being in distress and getting rescued, and then complaining to her father (General Ross) about his treatment of her boyfriend.  Basically, her sole purpose in the movie is to get hurt or attacked, an event which inevitably leads to more rage in the Hulk, which allows him to become more powerful.  And that’s about it.

Tim Roth is fantastic as the really bad guy, Emil Blonsky, a commando from Russia and Britain (mostly Britain…I think).  He is so impressed with the power of the Hulk that he wants the same thing for himself, and this leads to a showdown at the end of the film between two massive behemoths in New York City.  It’s always New York City when two massive creatures have a battle to the death.  Well, New York City or Tokyo.  In this case, we don’t see any people die, or at least, we’re not certain they are dead.  But with the crazy mayhem of wreckage that exists at the end of this scene, we can only assume that hundreds of innocent people have lost their lives.  At the very least, hundreds of people lost their cars.

The Incredible Hulk works because of Norton.  The special effects are pretty good, although there are some moments where we are acutely aware that we are watching computer-generated monsters fighting.  The story movies along quickly, but for the most part it is a chase movie.  The government agents try to track down Bruce Banner, but he turns into the Hulk before they can capture him, and he wrecks a bunch of stuff and runs off, only to be tracked down again, and the whole process is repeated.  There is a love interest who exists mostly to help make him angry.  And the bad guys exist mostly to be cartoon-bad-guys, so evil that they make the Hulk seem like the good guy in comparison.

With all this going on, it would have been very easy for this movie to sink to the level of the standard, average, by-the-numbers comic book adaptation.  But it’s Norton who gives the movie it’s heart and soul, something it desperately needs.  When the movie opens, he’s a tortured man working at a soda-bottling plant in Brazil, trying desperately to keep his emotions under control.  Even when a situation calls for anger, he can’t allow himself to become excited in any way.  He wears a heart monitor to make sure that nothing goes awry, and the conflict within him is apparent.  This also leads to the best line in the movie.  In Brazil, the film is subtitled, and Banner’s Spanish isn’t exactly top-notch.  He says “don’t make me…hungry.  You wouldn’t like me when I’m…hungry.”  One of the two lines we expect in the movie - the other, “Hulk Smash!” plays out at the end.  Bases covered!

On the Blu-Ray DVD I have, there are dozens of special features, some of which are worthwhile and some of which are not.  The most interesting of these special features is an “alternate opening”, which I think would have worked better than the one they used.  Bruce Banner is running across the deserted wasteland of either Antarctica or the Arctic, having just wreaked havoc in his personal life, and seen the Hulk appear in himself for the first time.  It is incredibly poignant, as it parallels almost exactly the final scenes in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein book, where Frankenstein’s monster is running off, by himself, over the ice in the Arctic.  It sets up the movie perfectly, worldlessly conveying the conflict in Banner’s tortured soul.  He can’t help what he is, but he can’t live with it either.

At the very end of The Incredible Hulk, we get a cameo appearance from another major star, one which indicates that there will be a crossover movie in the coming years between The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man and perhaps some other, as-yet-unreleased movies.  And even though I’m generally not a comic book guy, this is about the most exciting news I can imagine.  Watch these movies.  Buy Iron Man, and at the very least rent The Incredible Hulk.  Then you, too, will be prepared for the upcoming awesome.

There is an absolutely phenomenal box set being released on August 26th. Woody Allen has been one of the greatest American directors for many years, and while he is mostly remembered for his all-time classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall, every one of his films is worth watching for one reason or another. With his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona in theatres, Alliance Films decided to release Woody Allen: The Collection today, August 26th. Every movie in this box is good, some are great. And while six of the discs have been readily available before this on DVD, the seventh is the bonus.

Wild Man Blues, a 1997 documentary film about Woody Allen, has been a hard-to-find item for some time. Not a film about Allen the film maker, but a film about Woody Allen the jazz musician. Allen, when not making films, plays jazz clarinet at a New York club. This film, directed by Barbara Kopple, follows Allen around as he takes the jazz ensemble on the road. The documentary was made right around the time when the public image of Allen was at it’s lowest. He had just left Mia Farrow for their stepdaughter Soon Yi Previn, and people were beginning to look on him as some kind of sexual predator. This film was accused of apple-polishing by some critics upon it’s release. As though it were some kind of brown-nosing attempt by Kopple to repair Allen’s tarnished image, and the movie was quickly forgotten. But in watching it now, it is merely a window into the man’s private life, his relationship with Soon-Yi, which really does appear to be pretty normal, and his relationship with his parents, which is eye-opening.

The other films in the set are all second-rate Woody Allen films, which would be first-rate films by almost anyone else. Mighty Aphrodite, the film for which Mira Sorvino won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, is a pretty fluffy film that works best as a reminder that Mira Sorvino CAN actually act. Bullets Over Broadway is a brilliantly funny comedy about gangsterism and the roaring twenties, featuring terrific performances by Chazz Palminteri and Dianne Wiest. Everyone Says I Love You is a musical comedy that is absolutely jammed with star power, and as such is one of the only Julia Roberts movies, AND one of the only Drew Barrymore movies, that I actually enjoy. Deconstructing Harry is a very dark comedy that is equally star-studded, with Robin Williams, Demi Moore, Billy Crystal and dozens of others in perhaps Woody Allen’s most under-rated movie. Celebrity is also jammed with big names, but isn’t one of Allen’s best efforts. And Scoop is likely the low point of the box set, with Scarlett Johanssen turning in a surprisingly mediocre performance and Hugh Jackman being a little more irritating than necessary. Not a horrible movie, but weak by Woody Allen standards.

Woody Allen: The Collection is a must for fans of his work, with Wild Man Blues being the icing on the cake. Get this box set, then pick up Annie Hall, Manhattan and Crimes And Misdemeanors, and you have all the Woody Allen you’ll ever need.

Francis Ford Coppola has come out with a new, bizarre and mystical movie called Youth Without Youth.  It stars Tim Roth in a virtuoso performance as a man who gets hit by lightning at the age of 70, and all of a sudden finds himself to be a young man again.  Well, he’s like 35, but compared to 70, that’s pretty young.  He has a few problems though.  It seems as though the 70-year-old Roth has actually split into two 35-year-old Roths.  At times this seems like it is actually two people, but more often than not it’s manifested as a split personality, where he is able to do two things at once, and talk to himself.  One of those personalities appears to be good, the other evil, although it is never stated so explicitly.  More than that, with his seemingly incredible regenerative powers and status as a curiosity of science, he attracts the attention of the Nazis and their doctors.  Oh yeah - this movie is set in Romania in the 1930s, as the Nazis begin their plot to conquer the world.

Pursued by the authorities, and the Nazis, Roth leads them on a kinda-chase around the world, to Switzerland and Malta and elsewhere.  Although really, he’s just trying to hide out and protect his true identity, and they sometimes discover him and send someone after him, but there seems to be more a vague notion the world over that certain groups would like to track him down than there is an actual pursuit.  (This also produces a great, but brief, cameo from Matt Damon as an agent trying to track down Roth, likely with benign intentions, but we never find out.) 

This is the first half of the movie.  The second half revolves around a woman who has a similarly bizarre experience after being hit by lightning.  Her name is Veronica, and she is played by Alexandra Maria Lara, in another tour-de-force performance, and seems to be the reincarnation of a woman Roth once loved named Laura.  The two of them are both magnificent in this film, both together and seperately.  But it just isn’t enough.  The whole movie exists in this David Lynchian type of dream state, where weird stuff happens and we get strange crooked camera angles, and we’re just supposed to accept that things are just weird.  And we move on.  Which means that we have to quickly stop worrying about the previous scene, and we have to stop caring about what happened in that scene.  Which means there is such a lack of continuity that we don’t care about the movie at all.

Youth Without Youth feels straghtforward, and to a certain degree it is, but it just feels overstuffed.  Like when my girlfriend describes the dream she had last night, and has to throw in details like “the ottoman was sky blue, but the next time I went through the same room it was navy blue”.  Which means a dream that she could have related in two minutes takes twenty.  And that’s how this movie feels.  It’s divided into two parts, each of which could have been told in forty minutes, but it takes two hours plus to get to the end of the film.  The story itself is easy to grasp, and we do know what happens at the end, although the second half throws a lot of odd references and moments into the mix.  I’m going to get real nerdy on you here, but the second half of this film seems to have been written by Neitzche himself.  Really.

Youth Without Youth is watchable, and vivid, and features two seriously great performances by the under-rated Tim Roth and the magnificent, glorious Alexandra Maria Lara.  But it’s too full of imagery, too full of oddities, and in the end, too full of itself.  It’s just like that story, the one Roth references at the end, about the king who dreams he’s a butterfly dreaming he’s a king.  Only it takes way longer to tell it.