Category Archives: Movies

Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989)

''Was that you, George?''Short and sweet version:

The defining, stand out scene of this whole movie (the one we all get our pictures from) turns out to be a dream sequence.

Long and painful version:

Remember when I called The Incredible Hulk Returns “a fine capstone” to the series? Well, that was the truth. It’s unfortunate no one at NBC realized this in time. Not very surprising, though. Happens everywhere. A decent little picture miraculously becomes popular (popular enough to snatch the fifth highest rating of any program aired in the same week) only to be sullied by a lackluster, assembly-line sequel.

Hot off the success of Returns, NBC rushed to make a deal with Marvel for future Incredible Hulk outings. And, wouldn’t you know it, less than a year later Trial of the Incredible Hulk roared and flexed its way to prime time. And as the talking head said on the news, right before the aliens blew up all those cities, “Indeed, God help us all.” {More}

Van Wilder (2002)

Our Hero, in his natural habitat.I hate modern comedies. Their grotesque obsessions are polluting the very fabric of our culture. We are getting dumber for no reason. It has nothing to do with resources. Thanks to the Farrelly brothers, Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, and the curious cloud of anti-rationality radiation hanging over Los Angeles,  Hollywood just throws money at the people who produce gross out comedies. Future film historians will look back and wonder how, each year, as the twenty-first century opened, more production companies wasted so much talent into this cinematic cul-de-sac? I’m not sure what scares me more: the fact that this kind of movie exists, or the fact that it is so popular.

All of which brings me to Van Wilder, which I recently borrowed from a co-worker who hyped it as the funniest National Lampoon picture in twenty years. She wasn’t that exact…but really, the point is this: Chris, I love you, chica, but we radically different taste. Not that she knows this site exists. I’ll have to tell her in person. I’ve spent the past three days figuring out just what to say. What do you say to your friend when s/he hands you a piece of crap and tells you it’s the laugh-out-loud hit of the young decade? {More}

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992)

A man alone.In the summer of The Year 2000, my parents and I embarked upon a European Vacation. After two nights in Paris, circumstances found us in the quiet little town of Bois (pronounced just like it’s spelled…as long as you’re speaking through a mouthful of yogurt). With a few hours to kill before the restaurants opened, I flipped on the TV and found Manufacturing Consent, the almost-three hour documentary profile of MIT Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky. Filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick followed the man around for  four years, taping talk after talk in a variety of countries. They also managed to dig up hours of archival interviews from as far back as the 1960s. All of which is cut-n’-pasted into a one hundred sixty-seven minute primer for anyone too lazy to pick up one of the man’s many (many, many) books.

For those who don’t know (I was once one myself), Professor Chomsky is one of the most respected linguists in the world. When my mother went back to get her Masters in English, or her certificate to teach English-as-a-Second Language, her coursework amounted to a whole hell of a lot of pouring over various Chomsky’s work. The Professor teaches at MIT, writes shelf-fulls of books, and has appeared on numerous TV shows, mostly in other countries. Thanks to his old-school, anarcho-syndicalist views on the Ideal Society, and his scalding, unrepentant criticisms of America’s most-imperial foreign policy ambitions, he remains largely unknown to the general public, even unto today. {More}

Roger and Me (1989)

Michael Moore uncovers the sad truth about whom I dated in high school.It’s easy to forget that, once upon a time, all the talking heads dismissed Michael Moore as a “comedian.” God only knows why. There are very few ha-ha moments in Roger & Me…unless the slow, painful death of a community strikes you funny.

On September 16, 1908, philanthropist William Durant opened the first General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. With seventy-two years experience in ol’ fashioned, American car making, the company realized record- breaking profits in the the 1980s. It did this, in part, by closing eleven plants in Flint, leaving thirty thousand factory workers suddenly unemployed. The company considered this savings on labor-cost a profit, but it became death blow to the city of Flint, which entered a financial nosedive which it has not climbed out of to date. All attempts to revive the area have failed miserably. Today, Flint is as much an urban wasteland as anything this side of Detroit, South Africa, or Afghanistan. If you’d like a sneak peak at America’s future, hop a flight to Michigan…and bring some spare change for the guy standing on the highway with a cardboard sign. WILL WORK FOR FOOD. {More}

Alien (1979)

"Hi-ya! Howyadoin?"
“Hi-ya! Howyadoin?”

There are three films, more so than any other, that typify modern genre cinema. Ken Begg calls them “template” films, and while that’s a darn good phrase it falls short of describing the true end result of Hollywood’s slavish corpse eating. I hear “template” and I think of this massive assembly line, stamping its slow way to entropy. But the creative process isn’t quite like that. If it were, there’d be a lot more good movies out there.

Instead, for twenty years we’ve drowned in a seemingly endless barrage of rip-offs, plagiarisms, and bastardizations. It’s almost like a virus latched on to hundreds (if not thousands) of creative minds, churning out volumes of absolute shite that then go on to spread and mutate, each time loosing just a little bit more of what made the template what it was to begin with.

Alien is one of those movies you hate to review, but can’t bare to leave unmentioned, in favor of its dismal progeny. You fall into a cycle of Jesus, what could I possibly say about this that hasn’t been said? But that didn’t stop Dubbya, and look where he is now. I hope this will be interesting. Or at least functional. {More}

X2: X-Men United (2003)

"Well...are you coming?"
"Well...you coming? You do have a movie to star in, you know?"

I went into this farce with no expectations.  In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a natural pessimist. So much of a pessimist I was prepared to write X2 off completely, like all the idiots I criticize for the blatant hypocrisy inherent in their dismissal “comic book movies.” Then the maintenance man comes by at nine in the morning, screwing my sleep schedule all to hell. And he tells me I should see this movie. It apparently “kicked serious ass.”

So off I go to Target. Twenty minutes, two cigs and one neutered anti-theft device later, I returned the proud (if ambivalent) owner of X2, second in what will no doubt be the epic superhero movie trilogy to end all epic superhero movie trilogies. For, like, ever.

As if. I say “ambivalent” whenever I’m faced with something like this…like almost any movie from the summer of ’03…with one notable exception…something that makes me feel anything but united. I love glitz and glamor as much as the next Red Blooded American Male, but I’m getting mighty tired of leaving a movie feeling hollow and gypped. After all, didn’t they used to make movies with something more than a few hundred million dollars of special effects? Something that engaged its audience? That challenged us? Was that just a dream? I swear they were still doing it a few years ago… {More}

Night of the Creeps (1986)

I had a plan…really, I did. I was going to blow the roof of this whole Month of the Living Dead thing. I was. Because I had a plan. Sitting on my ass, watching Friday the 13th Part VII (again), it hit me. Zombies, you say? Hell, son, who’s a more famous zombie than Jason mothafuckin’ Voorhees? And didn’t they just make another one of these damn films? Hell, I thought, Why not just review the rest of ‘um all at once. Back to back to back to back…

Things didn’t turn out that way. For one thing, I sobered up. For another, I saw Night of the Creeps staring out at me from out of the Horror racks.

Night begins with…alien midgets. Good God, we’re in for it now. Alien Midget #1 runs down a dimly lit corridor and through an airlock, gripping a canister in his (her? its?) hands. Alien Midget #2 orders #3 to blow the hatch, warning him (her? it?) that “The experiment must not leave this ship.”

Too late, Pinky. Alien Midget #1 promptly tosses the canister out the airlock and we’re off to… {More}

Hulk (2003)

You know, straining too hard can cause a brain embolism.For various and sundry reasons, the Incredible Hulk casts a long shadow over my pantheon of superheroes…and what better time than now to examine each and every one in agonizing detail? It’s all because of that damned TV show. See, a long time ago, on a farm far, far away, my parents had a brief flirtation with mid-eighties middle-class status symbols. They got the VCR. They got the VHS. They got the satellite dish. One of those unwieldy, forty-foot fuckers that typified success for millions. Sure, go plant a ten foot tall metal tree in my back yard. Boy, that’ll really add value to the house.

By the time I came around, we got exactly two channels on the damn thing. Everything else was snow, bandwidth to bandwidth. Until the Sci-Fi Channel. One day, there it was: twenty-four hours of good ol’ fashioned science fiction programming. The Visitor, The Prisoner, The Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, Battlestar Galactica…and The Incredible Hulk, every day at four, staring Bill Bixby. I’d get off school and bam, there it was,  Lou Ferrigno large and in charge. I developed quite the ritual around it, as I did with all the good shows. And like all the good shows, eventually, Hulk disappeared without a trace. {More}

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002)

Why, you may ask, don’t I like Harry Potter? After all, hasn’t it captured and captivated many a fan of speculative fiction (including my girlfriend)?

Is it the infectious commercialism? A paranoid distrust of the mainstream? Or the thousand and one soccer moms crying joy to the heavens? “Oh, The Children are reading again!” As if some of us haven’t been reading all this time. But then a trend isn’t a trend until the lame, the halt and the stupid catch up. Remember that, children, and remember it well. Especially once Michael Bay makes another movie.

Oh, wait, he already has.

On that happy note…

To be fair, I went into Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone with a kind of wry resignation. Alright, I thought, I can at least read one of the damn things before I go off and bitch about them. At the very least, I figured I could get some good ammo for the daily debates on the subject I was having at the time. Probably not the best mind-state for good analytical analysis, but I made it.

While J.K. Rowling’s prose is nothing to write home about, I survived The Sorcerer’s Stone without any permanent damage. Rowling’s no R.L. Stine, but she never pretends to be. Stylistically, Harry strikes me as more in keeping with the old school children’s authors of the early twentieth century. Think of J.M. Barrie. By now, Harry’s certainly as famous as that other supernatural English pre-teen male. Whether he’ll have an equally long shelf life is a debate I’ll leave to the actual fans.

I watched the movie version of Sorcerer’s Stone on my old computer, during the three glorious months I enjoyed a cable modem and KaZaa version 1.0. The movie went exactly as I thought it would, being an almost perfect Xerox of its source material. The only surprise came when I clocked the movie in at just under three hours. Not the most satisfying experience. So when my girlfriend rented The Chamber of Secrets my first thought was, Well, at least this time I’ll be surprised.

We catch up to The Boy Who Lived (still played by Daniel Radcliffe) as he sits in his room, making googly eyes at his Magic Photo Album (ask for it by name). It’s summer, and summer finds Harry confined to his eevil aunt and uncle’s house (still played by Richard Griffiths and Fiona Shaw). But Our Hero’s non-life takes a sharp left when Dobby the House Elf (voiced Toby Jones) shows up with a requisite Dire Warning. Harry “must not return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry this fall.” Apparently, “terrible things” are massing against him, and Dobby (a horrible Gremlin/Gollum crossbreed) is determined to keep Harry safe, despite the wishes of his unmentionable “master.”

Thankfully, the timely intervention of the Weasley brothers and their flying car saves Harry from having to spend another damn day with his hopelessly muggle relatives. Soon, Harry’s right back in his element and Year Two begins eerily enough as soon Harry begins hearing voices: mysterious whispers that inevitably lead him to The Wrong Place at The Wrong Time. It seems someone (or something, dun, dun, dun) is petrifying the students of Hogwarts, leaving behind cryptic messages written in blood. “The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir…beware.”

Just what is the Chamber of Secrets? Who the hell is the “heir”? And just where is all this blood coming from? Fear not: two out of three of those questions will be answered. All one has to do is survive this movie’s two hour, forty minute running time.

Chamber of Secrets was (apparently) made hard and made fast. All involved got a total of four months between films to bask in the success of Sorcerer’s Stone. Then it was back to the grind for all the principal cast and crew, which is a blessing in itself. And a curse.

Once again we follow the adventures of Harry, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) in agonizing detail. Director Christ Columbus opts for a literal translation from book to film in a painstaking effort to piss off as few fans as possible. Which makes it all the more amusing when he fails.

I know my girlfriend was pissed. I endured many a dissertation from her on the (apparently numerous) divergences from the book. She informed me that a fair amount was cut from this production for (one presumes) running time. If this proves true, I can only thank Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steven Kloves. As it is, Chamber of Secrets moves like a roadrunner with grapeshot tied to its ankles. God only wonders what the Columbus/Kloves team will make of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. At one hundred and four pages longer than this movie’s source, their Azkaban could shatter the three hour mark. To say nothing of that 870-page monstrosity Rowling’s just loosed upon us (and already sold to Hollywood). Are the Golden Globe’s ready for the eight hour, scene-to-screen director’s cut of Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix?

Am I? Jesus, only a die hard masochist would even contemplate such things. But then again, I did watch Chamber of Secrets twice.

And, yes, we were talking about Chamber of Secrets before we skewed into this tangent. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve just spent the last three days immersed in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. That’s my excuse.

All the principal actors pull through once again. The children’s acting is no more or less adequate than the last time around. I suppose that’s more a fault of what they have to work with than anything else. This is obviously Harry’s movie. His Little Friends function more as foils than anything else. Hermione manages to pull through with some relevant plot info, but by then we’re over two hours in and it’s time to rap shit up. Radcliffe has just enough Leading Man Mojo to carry the flick, but by the 130-minute mark (when the epilogue is dragging on and I’m beginning to wonder what’s on the WB) even his honest face starts to wear a bit thin.

Actually, it’s not that bad. The Two Towers was longer, and galaxies more complex, but Chamber of Secrets is missing something. Perhaps it’s a reason for me to care. I salute Christ Columbus for his efforts. Every Harry movie he makes distract him from making another Home Alone. But no amount of CGI assisted sweep-pans is going to make me fear for these character’s lives. I already know who lives and who dies. Not all that different from a Slasher flick, now that I think about it.

Chamber of Secrets, for all its sluggish plotting and one-damn-thing-after-another storytelling, its still light years away from, say, your Jurassic Park 3s or your Tomb Raiders. And it is nice to look at. Columbus and cinematographer Roger Pratt make sure of that with a lush color palette, the aforementioned sweep-pan, and some great production design from Stuart Craig.

So, yes, props to all involved. They gave us a finely made, empty movie. I’m tempted to tack on an extra half-G purely for technical reasons. It’s an okay flick for a boring Thursday afternoon, but is it good for much else? Doubtful.

Because when you get right down to it, I just don’t care about Harry Potter. And now we’re back where we started. Which is always a good place to stop.

GGG

 

The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988)

In 1979 the gray hairs at CBS shocked the world by unleashing The Incredible Hulk on prime time television. It was revolutionary in a post-Superman America, where comic book properties were thought either too expensive for television (unless they were animated), or just too damn campy. The tragicomic failure of TV’s Spider-Man the year before only worked to shore up these illusions. And yet…

On one level, The Incredible Hulk was a horrific Franken-show. Its cast and crew of soap opera veterans had little idea how to run a superhero series. Its producers could barely drum up enough money to keep the green paint on Lou Ferrigno’s skin. And the network insisted on changing the main character’s name from “Bruce” to “David” because “Bruce” was just sooo gay. Even in 1979.

And yet it ran for five years with respectable ratings. The fan base seemed to grow and grow. People just couldn’t get enough of the not-so-jolly green giant and his puny human alter-ego. This marked a spike of hope in that superhero dead zone. Not bad considering every show featured exactly the same plot.

Then in 1982 The Incredible Hulk vanished. And silence covered the sky. With their mainstay gone, Marvel Comics seemed to fold in upon itself, shying away from live action film production. Just look at the ratings, they told themselves: people were getting bored with it, we were getting bored with it. Better to fade away than burn out. Could’ve been worse. They could’ve hated it. {More}