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.

            If you never forgave Val Kilmer for what he did to Batman, I think you should see The Salton Sea. In what is arguably his defining role, the Kilmer plays a character you never saw coming in, oddly enough, a film you most likely haven't seen.

            Imagine if you will, the geniuses at Saturday Night Live (back before it started to suck) did a 2.25 hour long parody of VH1's Behind the Music. You got the image? Great, now make it really, really funny. Include copious amounts of dick and fart humor, more non-sequiturs than an entire season of family guy and you have quite possibly the funniest movie of 2007, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. All hyperbole aside, this film is funny enough to make a gay man go straight, a genius go retarded, and a stuck up film elitist douchebag critic/comedian (cough me cough cough) laugh until they almost choked.

            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.