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First the important question. What happened to Jennifer Connelly. She used to be soooo hot. So shapely She is so damn skinny now. She must be on the Clarissa Flockhart diet.As for the movie it was OK. I think the effects could have been better. I kept thinking the Hulk looked like he was painted with water color.
Follow Ups:
but I don't recall seeing him. Anyone catch which scene he was in?
good listening- GL
He was the guard at Berkeley along with Lou Ferigno, also a guard (rent-a-cop)... He had a few lines.Derick
looking for grown up angst and character depth. Searching for David Copperfield in the DC comic isle.Sheesh, these self appointed guides of enlightenment need to stay focused on the non-cartoon character Summer Blockbusters. They need to remember Cannes is in the Spring, summer is for kids/entertainment and the cash cows that keep the studios willing to take chances on the "three guys sitting around a dead bird, smoking cigarettes and conteplating their childhoods" types of movies.
Hulk was fine for spending a few hours with my son this summer. I got a tiny bit more out of it than the other mass market comic book hero movies I've gone with him, and he gets to talk about bashing tanks and chewin missles. He didn't care how Hulk looked and he also knows that Utah Raptor isn't real either even though he can see his skin tones!
I can hardly wait to read the indepth failings of the next installment of Marvel Comic BlockBuster Release for Summer 2004!
When I see a movie based on a pop-culture comic book character, there are two things expected:1) That long established comic characters (i.e., cultural icons), translated to the big screen, are "reasonably" true to my recollections of the original comics, and...
2) that the vision of the director doesn't intrude upon my preconceived notions and insult my intelligence in order to reach a theoretically hipper, more youthful, target audience.
Using those two paradigms as my criteria, here is how I would grade some of the feature films based on comic characters (both Marvel & DC):
Superman (C. Reeves): C- [on avg.]
Batman (Keaton & Clooney): C [on avg.]
X-Men: B [averaging I & II]
Spiderman: A-
Daredevil: D
Hulk: CIn regard to "Angst" Lee's take on the Hulk, he is the one touting his film's depth and endeavoring to place so much emphasis on exploring the subconscious duality of the Hulk/Banner character. I had no problem with this added dimension to the character as long as Lee's dissection of the psychological aspects of Banner's traumatized personality didn't dillute the primal energy of the Hulk character and inevitably, the film. Unfortunately, that's exactly what did occur and the pacing suffered tremendously for it, IMHO. That's about as close to a "grey poupon" Cannes (canny?) analysis as I care to get. :o)
BTW, are you suggesting that us advanced culture "Braniacs" should only be qualified to review flicks based upon DC Comic characters (Superman)? ;^)
Cheers,
AuPh
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This unjolly green giant never seems to occupy the same space, even the same realm, as everyone else.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Review by Duncan Shepherd
Published June 26, 2003On the sliding scale of critical standards, "not the worst" has become a form of praise, however faint. And "the worst," though a seeming superlative, can no longer be limited to only one. The Matrix Reloaded, as an example, is without doubt the worst of the summer's sequels. But so are X2 and 2 Fast 2 Furious. And the imminent arrivals of the Charlie's Angels, Lara Croft, and Bad Boys sequels seem unlikely to reduce the number, highly likely to increase it. I expect, for various reasons, that the Terminator and Legally Blonde sequels will be not the worst. But I could be mistaken. The elasticity of that category is as yet unknown.
From this perspective, Hulk -- not The..., much less The Incredible..., but just plain Hulk -- can be said to be not the worst of the proliferating comic-book films. All the same, any concerns over the involvement of director Ang Lee in such a project have turned out to be not unwarranted. (My own concerns would have been greater had his most overrated work, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, not intervened since his most underrated, Ride with the Devil. At that midpoint, it was no longer such a leap to a Hollywood blockbuster.) These concerns get immediately stirred up in the opening credits when you see, and hear, that the musical score has been ceded to Danny Elfman, who seems to have a virtual monopoly on such things (Spider-Man, Batman, Darkman, etc.), a textbook example of thinking inside the proverbial box. And they are further stirred in the first stages of the plot: the square-one biographical approach habitually taken in any comic-book superhero's screen debut. It will be fifteen minutes, and three child actors, before we reach the adult "Bruce Banner" -- Australian actor Eric Bana, who, under a helmet of windproof black hair, rather looks as though he is auditioning for the part of Superman.
Granted, there's more than normal justification for this traipsing through the hero's boyhood ("He's just so bottled up") and adolescence ("There's something inside you so special"), inasmuch as the slant is far more heavily psychological than the norm (way beyond the "revenge" motive of Batman, let's say). The film, never deviating from an Oedipal orbit, features a pair of oppressive father figures, not only the hero's mad-scientist father (Paul Kersey in the early days, Nick Nolte in the present), but also the ramroddish military father (first Todd Tesen, then Sam Elliott) of the decorative heroine (Jennifer Connelly, standing by her split-personality man as she stood by the one in A Beautiful Mind). Nor does the psychological heaviness ease up after the hero, in a lab accident, absorbs a deadly dose of gamma radiation which, in combination with the doctored DNA inherited from his father, brings out the Mr. Hyde in him: "The gamma just unleashed what was already there." What was already there, of course, was a blatant appeal to the underage audience of comic books: to their sense of powerlessness, their sense of specialness or differentness, their resultant feelings of rage, their fantasies of transforming that rage into power. Ang Lee's film is nothing if not self-conscious. Even the irritating split-screen effects (sometimes just for a second camera angle on the same subject) can probably be justified as a replication of the juxtaposed panels in a comic book. It cannot be justified as seamless filmmaking. Seldom have the seams been more palpable.
The first appearance of the big green man, nearly an hour into the action, changes almost everything. It changes the film, for one thing, into a mix of live action and animation comparable to Roger Rabbit or Space Jam. To be sure, this is computer animation instead of hand-drawn, but CG imagery has always done better, for instance, with reptiles (Jurassic Park, Godzilla) than with flesh-and-blood figures, even if the flesh happens to be the color of a tree frog. This unjolly green giant never quite seems to occupy the same space, even the same realm, as everyone else. And once he begins to flit about the landscape like a flea, all that psychological heaviness comes to look more and more pretentious, more and more incongruous. (Am I saying I'd have actually preferred that the hero transmogrify into a Lou Ferrigno, to whom a bone is thrown in the form of a walk-on part as a security guard, or possibly into, for his name alone, a Hulk Hogan? Frankly, yes. I am.) One thing that does not change, despite any change in our perception of it, is the overall heaviness. Far from a kinship with the superhero of Spider-Man (likewise not the worst of the comic-book films), the hero of Hulk establishes a bond with the tragic figures of such grade-Z science fiction of the Fifties as The Amazing Colossal Man and Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, all the way to their miraculously stretchable clothes. Where he parts company with them is in his inability to be at once a source of tragedy and a source of fun.
[Review of 28 Days Later follows]
;^)
...ever agreed with Mr. SHephard about a movie.
z
"You have no idea."I tend to prefer the cinematic musings of Ken Turan, David Denby and Michael Wilmington.
And The FLick Filosopher...just for fun.
> > Where he parts company with them is in his inability to be at once a source of tragedy and a source of fun. < <David Cronenberg should have directed this one as a horror-tragedy. Or Sam Raimi for a source of fun. Or Bryan Singer for his irreverent wit.
> David Cronenberg should have directed this one as a horror-tragedy.
> Or Sam Raimi for a source of fun. Or Bryan Singer for his irreverent
> wit.Or Jonathan Frakes as a tax write-off...
That's the first character in an action flick that was 100% digital. Golum in LOTR, had a live actor moving about, who's movements were filmed and then Golum was digitized. Don't know how this would make much of a difference seeing that in both, what we see is digitally rendered.However, this being said, you're one up on the competition in your next Trivial Pursuit game.
Take care, Chris
It'll be interesting to see how it fares long term.I noticed it was a box office record breaker for the first weekend, but also heard the mediorce reviews. I'll wait for the $1 Monday night rental.
The clips that I saw looked hookey too. Geez, the toys in Toy Story looked more real.
...I even thought I caught a glimpse of the little green monster lurking around the subject line of your post. ;^)AuPh
Bring back animatronics!!! These CGI characters have none. Yuck. The artificiality is distracting. While I admire attempts to push beyond the confines of the current envelope, it's failure detracts from the movie. Isn't that what makes a FX movie a classic? Ignoring Chuck Heston's remarkable performance in "Ten Commandments" & "Planet of the Apes" for a second. How much worse would those movies have been if the director pushed the envelope? EG: The director knew he couldn't do a convincing space re-entry/crash scene so he filmed it from inside the vehicle. In "Ten Commandments", the director knew some of the FX were hokey so he attempted to portray them as a bad drop whenever possible to accentuate them. Then, OTOH we have "Jaws". "Jaws" IMHO is a classic precisely because the mechanical shark broke down so much in salt water. Thus, Spielberg had to be creative shooting the same scenes shark less. Otherwise, I suspect it was destined to be another slasher movie with a modern sea monster. Hollywood still doesn't comprehend that "The Matrix" worked because the FX didn't overstep their bounds. Of course some help was innate to the script. A viewer can dismiss some lame CGI FX because it was a CG world. However, most were proven technologies professionalized, like the "Lost in Space" movie. Then, add a bit of "Avengers" slickness & we have a showpiece. It wasn't revolutionary at all. It was a polished piece of concurrent film neuer carried by Laurence Fishburne & Joe Pantoliano. (end of rant)
♪ moderate Mart £ ♫ ☺ Planar Asylum
With rare exception, whenever I think of Charltan Heston's acting an image of the world's biggest ham sandwich comes to mind, and how much better off we'd all be as vegitarians! ;^)FTR, I don't like badly done FX either, but animatronics? With rare exception animatronics draw attention to themselves by the very nature of their unnaturalness. I agree that what Spielberg did in "Jaws" was inspired, necessity being the mother of invention as the saying goes, but occasionally, whenever one gets a near field glimpse of that animatronic shark it still looks REAL hokey. I'd wager that, if Steven were filming many of those same shots today, he'd employ cutting edge CGI to great effect. Note: My all time favorite Spielberg movies are his Jurassic Park series, which do employ some animatronics, but in those films the effects shots which work the best are the CGI shots.
AuPh
Yes, Spielberg did use CGI on distant shots, because CGI looks really hideous in a close-up. Plus, I found animatronic hokiness is a direct function of the puppeteer more than technical limitations. At least manipulation is far more convincing than hi-tech gooing of actual creates like "Cats & Dogs", or pur CGI like the dead soldiers in "Mummy".
♪ moderate Mart £ ♫ ☺ Planar Asylum
That's also where animatronics tend to look more fake, even when in the hands of competant animatronic operators, but you're right about the degree of hokiness being directly proportional to the skill of the puppeteer.As far as Jaws is concerned, the few mid-range shots of the shark lurching up on the boat, etc., look pretty fake to me. The best stuff is always the brief glimpses of a fin, a shadow, surface agitation or those moving-in-for-the-kill shots taken from the shark's perspective.
AuPh
I didn't. Too long, slow, self-important, disconnected, etc. Not a drop of humor to ease the pain and seriousness. I was hoping that the term "comic book" would be true to its first word: "comic".
It started off like it had promise but kind of petered out. The end was a let down. I wouldn't pay to see it again.
nt
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