Robot & Frank

When someone goes out of his way to recommend a film to me, I hesitate to see it. What if I think it stinks and I hurt that person's feelings?

Someone went out of his way to recommend Robot & Frank to me. 

Here's the story: it's the near future. Dracula (Frank Langella) has given up his vampirism and is now a sad, lonely old man with dementia. The highlight of his week is walk to the local library, where he flirts with librarian Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon). Oh, to be young and living in a castle again!

Anyway, Langella's son (James Marsden) worries about him, so he buys him a semi-anthropomorphic robot to help out around the house. Langella regains his vigor and decides to reembark on a previous career (with the robot's help): high-end jewel thief.

That's about the time I fell asleep. When I woke up, the third act was getting started. I gutted it out, but I never got into the film.

I fell asleep because Robot & Frank never gave me a reason to care about Frank, beside the fact that he was played by an actor who had once delivered one of cinema's greatest Transylvanian counts. Since I didn't care about him, I didn't care about what happened to him. When I returned to the film after my short doze, nothing happened to change that fact.

Sorry, buddy. I wish had liked it.

The Incredible Hulk

(Pictured: The Once and Future Hulk)

I liked the new Hulk well enough, but it seemed too precious to me. All the little nods and winks to previous incarnations of the character, while flatly ignoring the most recent outing, seemed rather mean, and that threw me off.

But _The Incredible Hull_ had a bigger problem, and that was the fact that David Banner, as portrayed here, just wasn't a very interesting guy. When he was human, he was a normal, unassuming fellow trying to make the best of a bad situation. When he was the Hulk, he wasn't particularly dangerous. Had the Hulk been a murderous brute, then we might have been playing for keeps. As things stood, Norton seemed primarily interested in protecting the world from excessive property damage.

That needn't have been the end of things, however. If a hero is only as good as his villain, Tim Roth does everything in his power to make Hulk one of the greatest heroes of them all. Roth plays Emil Blonsky, a commando who's out to get The Hulk.  To some extent, commandos are professional athletes. In the case of Roth's character, here was one athlete who was not going to make a graceful transition to higher leadership and the joys of paperwork. He was willing to take any steroid, go through any regimen, to keep playing with the big toys and, when his 'roid rage makes him an abomination, he welcomes it. Roth plays the transition well, and I found myself much more interested in his arc than that of the supposed hero of the story.

Though Roth does great work with his character, the filmmakers make two errors with him that broke my disbelief. First, they explain that he's "on loan" from the Royal Marines, then put him in U.S. Army working uniforms, with U.S. Army pins and ribbons. Second, they make the Hulk more than the match of his Abomination in the final battle. This film has established that Norton has spent, tops, one year in Brazil working on his martial arts skills, while Roth has been doing this stuff pretty much his entire adult life. I simply could not buy that a half-thinking, semi-trained Hulk could outfight a fully aware, fully trained Abomination. Granted, _Iron Man_ had a couple of illusion-snapping moments, as well, but that film was so much fun that I was willing to give it a pass. For whatever reason, _The Incredible Hulk_ never built up that goodwill with me, so those moments stuck.

All this is not to say that _The Incredible Hulk_ is a bad film. It's fine, for what it is, but I didn't hit my sweet spot. I may be in the minority here, but I liked Ang Lee's version a whole lot more.