Hellboy II: The Golden Army

(See my comments on "Hellboy" here.)

(See my comments on "Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms" here.)

(See my comments on "Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron" here.)

Sorry, Internet. "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" isn't going to change your life.

Well, I suppose it might, a little. It might encourage you to spend some time reading Mike Mignola's excellent "Hellboy" comic books, a delightful reinterpretation of ancient folklore cleverly disguised as an action-adventure starring a genuine prince of Hell (rebelling against his Old Man by working for the good guys). It might even make you think a little bit about the person other people want you to be and the person you want to be. Hell, it might even turn you into a Barry Manilow fan.

But it isn't the greatest film ever.

It's merely very, very good. Not only is it a well-told story, but it's phenomenally imaginative. Creator Guillermo Del Toro (who made "Pan's Labyrinth," one of the best films I've ever seen) opens the picture with faerie tale reminiscent of "Strings," another brilliantly imaginative tale, and builds on that tale by weaving it into an exciting and funny modern adventure starring Hellboy (the great Ron Perlman), his pal Abe Sapien the gill-man (Doug Jones, whom I still haven't forgiven for the nightmare -inducing Pale Man), and the love of his life, firestarter Liz Sherman (Selma Blair, who outdoes herself here). See, the elves are pissed. Long ago, the made a deal with humanity - humans got the cities, and faerie creatures got the forests. But humans kept cutting down the forests, and the elves are running out of room. Their hotspurred prince declares war and sets out to reanimate the Golden Army - a goblin-built brigade of automatons who can't be bargained with; can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until all humans are dead.

There's your story, but just outlining the story doesn't do the picture justice. Del Toro has an extraordinary imagination, which is woven into every scene of this visually delightful film. From the throwaway creature designs to the evocations of other worlds, the man gives us the kind of movie we enjoy seeing in the theater but can't wait to frame-by-frame when we bring it home on Blu-Ray. There's so much detail, so much creativity at work; not only in the already-famous Troll Market scenes, but throughout the film; that this movie is more than the clever telling of a good story. It's a multifaceted experience that's well worth savoring.

But it won't change your life.

Well, okay, maybe a little.

There Will Be Blood

Ahh, summertime. For normal people, it's a season of giant Hollywood blockbusters. For those of us who see most of our movies at home, it's time for last Christmas's prestige pictures.

A short time ago, I wrote of the prestige picture, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," that it went on far too long; that it was too meditative; that it seemed the DP edited the thing. "There Will Be Blood" is roughly the same length as "Assassination," and it, too, loves the long shot, the meditative moment. But there's a difference. "There Will Be Blood" is absolutely riveting, with commanding performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano, as well as strong supporting work by Ciarán Hinds and the young Dillon Freaser.

I've been aware of Day-Lewis since "My Beautiful Laundrette," and I became an outright fan with "The Age of Innocence." This, I was a little wary of his Daniel Plainview here. Was I watching a genuinely great performance, or was I merely bringing my predisposition to respect Day-Lewis's work to a pedestrian portrayal. This is where Paul Dano comes in. Looking over his filmography, I realize I've seen Dano before. But I never really noticed him, never bothered to remember his name, until now. Dano gives a performance that brings to mind Edward Norton in "Primal Fear," a commanding evocation of a young man who is part prophet, part hustler, and all calculation. Compared to Dano, Day-Lewis does, indeed, give a great performance. It's broad at times, close at others, but always commanding, always fascinating. There's so much going on behind those eyes that I was more than happy to spend two and a half hours trying to figure it out.

Of course, a major film such as this is about more than actors on a stage. Paul Thomas Anderson, who matured with "Punch-Drunk Love," directs a film that makes the Southwest of the late 19th and early 20th Century come alive. I read somewhere that he shot in West Texas, and he makes that country look as rough and deadly as it ever has, even if there are no Apache about. He made an interesting choice in Johnny Greenwood, the Radiohead musician and composer, who eschews
the standard orchestral score for disturbing, postmodernist music that keeps us in the film without ostentatiously highlighting its beats.

"There Will Be Blood" reminds me that there are no short movies or long movies. There are only poor movies and good movies. This is a very, very good movie. I could easily view it again, and I'm sure the time would race right by.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

I didn't follow the Enron disaster too closely. It was a busy time in my life, and I was concentrating on keeping my family afloat. I did, however, have a general understanding of the magnitude of the crimes committed by the top echelon of Enron's leadership and a general feeling that they were getting off a lot lighter than the poor schlub who steals $20 from the local 7-11. I never really bothered to go back and look into the story until a trusted cousin of mine (an executive, himself)) strongly recommended that I give this movie a look.

Wow. What a shocking, well-made movie. As it turns out, the criminals at Enron weren't just the top three or four guys. There was widespread criminality throughout the company's trading floor, an entire corporate culture of "me first and screw the country" at work there. _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ takes inside the company through interviews and archival footage, and it raises real questions about how to balance the freedoms necessary for capitalism to work while ensuring that those involved in the actual workings of capitalism stay on the straight and narrow.

Sure, the movie spends some unnecessary time on the salacious. Did I really need to know about one exec's stripper fetish, complete with gratuitous nudie footage? I mean, c'mon - I was watching this movie in an airport lounge! Nevertheless, _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ entertains and compels. It is one fine documentary.

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.

The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD ("ASSASSINATION," hereafter), is what you get when you put the director of photography in charge of editing. Here's a movie filled with beautiful images that linger, linger, and finally overstay their welcome. ASSASSINATION is an interesting movie. It's a beautiful movie. It could have been a great movie if it had just moved the heck along.

Casey Affleck plays Robert Ford, a man who gives Frank James the creeps just by being around, and who creeps him more the more he is around. Unfortunately, he creeps us out, too, making the seventeen hours the movie spends with the guy remarkably uncomfortable. Robert is, um, fond of Jessie in a creepily warped hero worship / deeply closeted homosexual kind of way. But Robert makes the ultimate mistake for a hero worshipper: he gets too close to the object of his admiration and learns that his hero is just a man, after all.

In the case of Brad Pitt's Jessie James, his hero isn't just a man, but an increasingly unstable psychotic who represents a danger to himself and everyone around him. Hell, by the time Ford takes his shot, it's a no-brainer. And in the moral world of the James gang, a world in which shooting a man in the back is just another day at the office, it makes perfect sense. And that works, and Pitt and Affleck are both quite good (as is the underappreciated Sam Rockwell as Robert's older brother Charley), and everything's fine, but the movie is just so damn slow.

This is a picture whose sunsets seem like they're in real time. Caterpillars mature into butterflies faster than ASSASSINATION moves along. Everything is so stately, so operatic, and for what? The murder of some other murderer? Maybe you have "get" the romance of the James Gang to "get" this movie, but all I saw was a bunch of thugs being led by a charismatic thug who eventually got what was coming to him.

No, thanks.

After The Sunset

AFTER THE SUNSET is like OCEAN'S TWELVE without everyone trying so hard to be cool.

It's a great premise - what happens after the brilliant jewel thieves pull of the ultimate heist and retire to the tropical island? Will they really be able to enjoy a life of lobster dinners and fruity drinks with umbrellas in them?

In this case, Pierce Brosnan and Salma Hayek play the thieves and Woody Harrelson is the FBI agent who just can't let them go. He follows them to the island just as a cruise ship displaying the world's most kickass diamond pulls in to port, determined to stick so close to the couple that they won't have enough room to breathe, much less try another heist.

And away you go from there, rolling into a brisk 90 minutes of jokes, cons, doublecrosses, and slamming-door farce. There is not a single beat in this film in this film that you won't see coming, in part because the film doesn't so much telegraph as broadcast its intentions. Nevertheless, the affair floats along on a tide of bonhomie, willing to bet that its audience will enjoy viewing a light, tropical, grownup fantasy as much as it seems its creators enjoyed staging it.

I rented AFTER THE SUNSET because I just loved the premise. How nice that it followed through.

Kung Fu Panda

I flat-out loved KUNG FU PANDA.

I walked in expecting a mildly entertaining Dreamworks cartoon, but I got a legitimate wuxia film with heroic swords, scrolls of wisdom, and absolutely stunning fight choreography. "But wait," you say. "You hated HAPPY FEET in part because you claimed that you can't get into CGI dancing. You've written that kung movies are basically dance movies with fake blood. So why don't you hate CGI kung fu dancing?"

Umm, because this is better. HAPPY FEET never allowed me to suspend my disbelief, but I was able to accept KUNG FU PANDA as I might any story a parent may tell his or her child. Sure, the kung fu is fantastic, but hey, it's a fairy tale, so why not?

As a comedy, KUNG FU PANDA kept my kid laughing. But hey, my kid's an easy laugher so I'm more impressed by the fact that it kept me laughing from beginning to end. As an artwork, KUNG FU PANDA is nothing short of stunning. In fact, I have an image from the film as my desktop at the moment - it's just that beautiful. And as a wuxia picture, well, the second voice we hear is that of James Hong. What more need I say?

I think this picture will wind up in my top ten for the year. It's just that good. Color me surprised and delighted.

Dragon Lives Again

DRAGON LIVES AGAIN is a cheap Hong Kong ripoff of Bruce Lee. It's a riot!

Here's the deal. Bruce Lee has returned from the dead to do justice and kick people in the face. My favorite part: the bit of exposition explaining why Bruce Lee looks surprisingly like Bolo Yeung: "Silly girl. Don't you know that people's faces and bodies look diferent in the afterlife?" If you've ever wanted to see a Bruceploitation flick featuring the The Man With No Name, the priest from THE EXORCIST, and Popeye, this is your movie. See it with friends.

Le Cercle Rouge

We were about ninety minutes into ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ when it dawned on us: “Hey, this is a heist movie!” ‘Le Cercle Rouge’ isn’t really about a heist, nor is it really about the people who take part in that heist. It’s more about a late-Sixties concept of cool, of honor, of codes and those who follow them. In that, it has a lot in common with ‘Bullitt,’ I suppose, but Alain Delon is no Steve McQueen. I found myself less than captivated.

Coach Carter

COACH CARTER is combination of Great Coach and Great Teacher movies. As such, it plays closely to form, offering few surprises as its titular character shapes his motley crew into a team, teaches his young people some truths about themselves and their lives, and guides his team to the Big Game.

But hey, we don’t knock sonnets for being fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. The real question is, how good is “Coach Carter,” even though it confines itself to the strictures of its format? The answer is, “pretty good.” Samuel L. Jackson convincingly plays a man who can control 10-15 tough kids through the power of his personality alone. The remarkably acne-free and personal-trainered kids execute their roles with precision, and everything rocks along with the smoothness of well-tuned Hollywood product. When you rent 'Coach Carter,' you get what you paid for. Take that as you will.

No Country For Old Men

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN devotes most of its screen time to a character who is not its protagonist. Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) looks like the hero of this movie, acts like the hero of this movie, but wasn't ever the hero of the movie. Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is the hero of this movie, for NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is a story about a man facing the fact that his whole life has been dedicated to pushing against a river. Not a tide, mind you, but a river, as illustrated by Ellis's story of the Apaches and Ed Tom's grandfather.

It's no country for old men, because old men have lived long enough to see their illusions stripped away; and the brutal reality behind those illusions can be too much to live with. The book, and the film, is about Ed Tom reaching that point in his life. The story, in both media, breaks my heart.

On another tack, I found the film to be a faithful rendering of one of my favorite novels. Its changes did not violate the themes of the story, and I sensed that the Coen brothers "got it," as they often do. I bought every single one of its characters, including Harrelson, whom I was inclined to doubt after reading the criticism of him here on the Balcony. I bought the milieu, the presentation, the whole package.

This is a film worth seeing.

The Flight of the Phoenix

FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX'S first victory is in its casting.

I know it isn’t fair to bring extratextual knowledge to a film, but when we see Jimmy Stewart behind the controls of that old Air Truck, we know we’re seeing a guy with a Distinguished Flying Cross, an Air Medal, a Croix de Guerre, and 7 battle stars in his dresser drawer. The movie doesn’t have to spend a lot of time convincing us that its lead character is a salty pilot because its lead character is Jimmy Frickin’ Stewart, BGEN USAFR, Ret’d.

The casting victories don’t end with Stewart, however. Ernest Borgnine is phenomenal as a mentally-challenged passenger, Hardy Krüger shines as an aircraft designer who happens to be onboard, and everyone, with the exception of Richard Attenborough, rises to their tasks. A word about Attenborough: while he’s generally fine, there’s a scene that requires him to blend laughter into jagged crying. It’s an important scene, and the actor can’t quite pull it off. Nevertheless, that’s one misstep in an otherwise fine performance.

Great casting aside, FoP works as a Boys’ Own Adventure, with all the elements of exotic location, survival concerns, competition for dominance, honor, loyalty, and the delicate balance between knowledge and skill. It works as an adventure, it works as a psychological study, and it works as a great way to spend two hours and twenty minutes. What a delight.

Un Chien Andalou

This movie struck me as so much self-indulgent wankery. Rather than try to maximize the possibilities of the art form, UN CHIEN ANDALOU settles for smugly smirking, "Look at me. I'm avant garde." Thanks, but no thanks.

Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster

I can't figure the Japanese. First, they're all freaked out about the proliferation of nuclear power plants and cook up Godzilla, the atomic fire-breathing monster. Then, they're all freaked out about air pollution (like the kind that comes from coal-burning power plants) and the cook up Hedorah, the pollution monster who must be brought down by - you guessed it - Godzilla. Subtextually, GODZILLA VS. HEDORAH seems to assert that nuclear power isn't so bad after all. In fact, it seems to argue that nuclear power will be the salvation of Japan's environment. Make up your mind, people!

On to the movie itself: GVH gives us guys in rubber suits fighting one another, a cute kid in danger, and plenty of groovy sixties-era music, ideology, and freakiness. GVH also serves up an interesting variation on the Godzilla storytelling formula: animated interstices between acts of the film, a la Terry Gilliam, moving things along and underlining important thematic elements. GVH is interesting and kinda fun.

The Ant Bully

Parents watching THE ANT BULLY will find no surprises and no storytelling innovations. They will be able to predict every plot point, every character moment, every beat. If they're like me, they'll enjoy it anyway.

THE ANT BULLY tells the story of a bullied boy who takes out his frustrations on the local anthill. Until the ants, that is, figure out how to shrink him down to their size. His punishment for his crimes? Join the colony and learn to live like an ant. It's a nice premise, and a solid chassis upon which to mount lessons of teamwork, respect, trust, and general trustworthyloyalhelpfulfriendlycourteouskindobedientcheerfulthriftybravecleanandreverent -ness. Will the boy learn to trust, find strength within and without, and earn redemption? Will the ant-sceptics be won over? Will there be a heartwarming moment near the end when ants and boy vow never to forget one another? Will the boy learn to stand up for himself in the human world? Oh, of course he will. But that's not the point. The point is that all this is executed very well, with solid animation and fine voice acting.

The child playing the titular ant bully is fine, but the supporting cast sells this picture. Julia Roberts plays his ant-mentor, Nicholas Cage the ant who figures out how to shrink the boy, and Bruce Campbell kills as as a scout who's part hero, part comic relief. Paul Giamatti, Lily Tomlin, Meryl Streep, Ricardo Montalban, and even Cheri Oteri are just great, and it's a pleasure to hear their performances.

I didn't expect to enjoy THE ANT BULLY, but I was quite pleasantly surprised. If you have kids, give this one a spin.

Shark Tale

SHARK TALE is a horrible trainwreck of a movie, a “family film” that’s too adult for kids and too childish for adults.

Will Smith plays a fast-talking loserfish who takes advantage of a misunderstanding to convince everyone that he’s a shark slayer, a protector of the reef. Robert De Niro plays the Godfather Shark who is unamused by this upstart, and away we go. I could see the concept having a certain appeal for film buffs, but who really wants to show their 8-yr-old a scene of two thugs torturing a hapless victim, no matter how many in-jokes are crammed in?

The Mummy

C'mon: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, a damsel in distress, and more aristrocratic English accents than you can shake a walking stick at. If you don't like Hammer's take on THE MUMMY, you don't like movies.

Alvin and the Chipmunks

Consider, if you will, two children's films: UNDERDOG and ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS. Both are Product with a capital P, lowest common denominator entertainments designed to keep the kids occupied while their parents (first run) get in some shopping or (DVD) take care of some chores. Sure, somewhere in the productions there are people who are actually passionate about the work, but pretty much everyone knows what they're about on projects like this.

The two films have similarly innocuous leads, follow predictable arcs, and have nothing to offer anyone much past age ten. But there's a difference between them, and that difference is worth noting.

Peter Dinklage plays UNDERDOG's villain, and Patrick Warburton plays his henchman. Both actors know what kind of movie they're in, yet they bring their A games to their work. They craft near-perfect kids'-movie villains, threatening but not too threatening, funny but not too funny, and they make roles that must have looked pedestrian on the page absolutely sing in production. David Cross plays the villain in ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS, and his contempt for the material seeps into everything he does. There's something of a sneer in the guy's performance - it's as if, in his heart of hearts, Cross knows he's too good for this movie. It kills his scenes and hurts the picture, and it makes troupers like Dinklage and Warburton shine all the brighter.

Ok, but is the overall movie any good? Well, it's about what you'd expect: something to keep the little ones occupied while you fold the laundry. So I guess it does its job.

Crash

I wanted to like David Cronenberg’s CRASH. I really did. But it didn’t give me anything to hold on to.

The film is ostensibly about a sexually adventurous couple who enter the world of automobile crash fetishisation (Note: As far as I’m aware, so such world actually exists. But the internet is a big place. It could be out there somewhere.). It’s really about compulsion and the proper location of boundaries on sexual experience. That makes it interesting, but it fails to be engaging because its characters are too remote, its music is too remote, and even its photography is too remote.

All that remoteness makes CRASH a cold, dull experience. It’s like reading an encyclopedia article on sexuality. All the words are there, but it fails to capture the essence of the subject. At no time in the course of the film did I feel like I was watching real people have real experiences or speaking in real ways. At no time did my pulse quicken or eyes dilate. CRASH is an exercise in observation, and observe it does, but it’s more science than art. Had the film given me even one character to whom I could relate, one situation that I could even tenuously connect to my life, it might have engaged me more thoroughly.

As it was, I had to will myself to power through to the end. What a disappointment.

Iron Man

There’s a sequence in IRON MAN in which protagonist Tony Stark builds and tests his Mk II fighting suit. It’s 5-10 minutes of a guy turning a screwdriver, doing some tests, and turning a screwdriver some more. The sequence requires an actor of exceptional magnetism and charisma to pull it off, and there are only two contemporary mainstream leading men who could do it.

Which is why I think it was written into the movie after Robert Downey, Jr. signed on.

I’ve been in Downey’s camp since CHAPLIN. The guy has had his ups and downs, but he seems to have hit his stride somewhere around KISS KISS, BANG BANG (touched upon here). In IRON MAN, the guy is so charismatic, so much fun to watch, that we love him when he’s a shallow billionaire and we love him when he gets a conscience. I think it’s because Downey has so much fun with the role, and director Jon Favreau lets him run.

Downey couldn’t cut loose without a strong supporting cast to keep the picture grounded. Jeff Bridges, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Terrence Howard are every bit as good as you’d expect and, heroes or villains, they keep us believing in what’s transpiring onscreen. By the time IRON MAN becomes a third-act CGI slugfest, I’m sufficiently involved in its world that I forget I’m watching pixels and hearing foley – these are real people onscreen, and I care about what happens to them.

Superhero movies are hard to do. Just ask the people behind KRRISH. But Jon Favreau really nails it with IRON MAN. I can’t wait for the sequel.