Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

            Low expectations can really be wonderful. I can walk into any Ben Stiller film and expect absolutely nothing, but if the movie makes me giggle, it has managed something I didn’t expect from it. Now, if I walk into a Ben Stiller film, say Tropic Thunder and cannot stop laughing from the first second on... Well, that is the makings of a classic my friends.

            I remember, as I’m sure many of you do, the power and glory of The X-Files in its hey-day. Scully was hot, Mulder was cool, and you could cut the sexual tension with an alien anal probe. The stories were all weirder than anything on TV short of Jerry Springer’s talk show, and we couldn’t wait for the next bizarre piece of evidence to slip through their fingers. Now, the only thing slipping is the franchise, and there’s probably a reason it took so long to convince anyone to make The X-Files: I Want to Believe.

            At their heart, Batman stories are morality tales. Sure, they are about a guy who dresses up in funny pants to beat up other people in funnier pants, but at the core, these are stories about the ambiguity of good and evil. The best of these have always focused on the relationship between the Joker, a force of pure chaos, and Batman, a symbol of hope in the darkest of times. Christopher Nolan has captured this dynamic in a way that outclasses any attempts by his predecessors. The Dark Knight is one of those rare films that manages to combine a well written script, technical mastery, and phenomenal performances into a cinematic masterpiece.

            When I walked into the theater to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army, I wasn’t surprised that half the crowd wasn’t dorks. Since Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro has become something of a household name, no longer simply the director-du-jour of fan boys everywhere. Indeed, the tenor of the script and the visual work in this film simply scream the director’s name. Beyond crowning Del Toro as an auteur, this is a comic book movie, and I was really hoping to see something that could hold its own sandwiched between Iron Man and The Dark Knight. I was not disappointed, by any means.

            The superhero is a modern mythological being. We take these new gods and dress them in leather and spandex, but they are still very much the gods of old. In Hancock, that idea is taken a step further and runs very close to lifting the premise of Neil Gaiman’s The Eternals from Marvel Comics. Enough of the story is different from Gaiman’s that I don’t expect a lawsuit anytime soon, and the humor is all original, but this Will Smith vehicle still felt like it had a hard time getting off the ground.

            The toughest questions in Timor Bekmambetov’s (Night Watch, Day Watch) directing career likely came when he signed on to direct Wanted. How do you shoot the unfilmable book? How does one make their long awaited American directing debut with a movie about a serial killer/rapist/terrorist? The answers are simple: You don’t. The script, by action movie vets Michael Brandt, Derek Haas, and Chris Morgan, sticks closely to the source material as long as it possibly can before veering off in a totally new direction, with writer Mark Millar’s blessings, of course.

            Back before cable and satellite were a mainstay in most every home, the most television variety one could expect on a rainy summer afternoon was from UHF channels. Many of my generation spent the 80’s watching re-runs ofThe Munsters, The Addams Family, and Get Smart. While the first two were funny, they didn’t possess the sheer comic genius of Mel Brooks and Don Adams. It was with some trepidation that I sat down to see the latest retelling of these classic characters in cinematic form, because so many fond memories have been trashed by crappy remakes. Get Smart, however, is in the hands of Peter Segal (Tommy Boy, Anger Management) so I had nothing to worry about.

            What happens when M. Night Shyamalan takes a straight forward approach to making a thriller, adds some gore, and avoids the requisite “twist ending”? He gets compared to Alfred Hitchcock, that’s what. The Happening is one of those films that I entered with such low expectations that I was already grumbling to myself during the opening credits about the film and how I would smash it to bits in this review like some sort of critical Hulk. This, however, is not that review. By the end of the 91 minutes, my only complaint was that the film perpetuates the “Einstein Bee” myth.

            Let me sum up the plot of The Incredible Hulk for you: Smash smash smash, smashy smash smash, love, smash smush, pissed off British guy, run run run, smash run, crazy scientist, bad military, love, smash smash, love. That’s really about it. It doesn’t take a S.H.I.E.L.D. special projects genetic research scientist to tell you that this is EXACTLY what fans wanted the first time around. When Hulk shows up, stuff gets broken, be it people, places or monsters.

            The first Hulk film done by Ang Lee left a lot of the fans with a bad taste in their mouths and absolutely no hope for a long running franchise but Louis Leterrier and Edward Norton prove that you just cannot keep the Jade Giant down. I will warn you ahead of time this review contains a lot of spoilers so read on if you do not mind, otherwise check out the movie first and tell me what you think.