Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

            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.

            Kids movies always sing the same refrain: Believe in yourself and you can do anything. Not a bad message, but the challenge is telling that moral in new and interesting ways. Kung Fu Panda does just that, and keeps up DreamWorks’ tally of funny and enjoyable animated flicks.

            Sports comedies are often at their best when a few formulae are followed. Like geometry, deviation from the formula is dangerous and often disastrous. You need a sport without a popular professional following, like dodgeball or beer drinking. Endanger something the main characters love. Add a crazy guru to train the hero, and then have him compete in a tournament that will earn him the exact amount of money to save the aforementioned threatened something. It sounds easy, but the list of these films is short enough that it must go wrong a lot. When it goes right it is a wonderful event to behold, and Clubless: The Legend of Victor Montango goes right in almost every way.