..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The
Incredible Hulk
plus War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

Ang Lee’s 2002 Hulk, a somber take on Marvel Comics’ greenest and most angst-ridden superhero, was a good, thoughtful movie which had a killer opening week, but didn’t ultimately please many hard-core fans.

That shouldn‘t be a problem with the new Marvel edition of the saga, The Incredible Hulk, from hyper-active French director Louis Leterrier (The Transporter) and blockbuster-prone scriptwriter Zak Penn (X-Men 2 & 3). They deliver what you might call a rock ‘em, sock ‘em action tornado, a mile-a-minute bash-and-crash-athon that taps back into the original comic book‘s wish-fulfillment wellsprings, recruits a fine new cast (Edward Norton as Bruce Banner, and Liv Tyler and William Hurt as Betty Ross and her general father Thad), brings on an odious new villain (Tim Roth as Emil Blonsky/The Abomination), simplifies the angst, pours on the CGI, and finally fits to a bloody T the Hulk‘s own catch phrase (and by now, a constant litany in Hulk movie reviews): “Smash!“

It probably will be. It’s been a good summer for Marvel, and this movie can only make it better, at least financially. (As if to remind us of Marvels past, Robert Downey, Jr., in his Iron Man mode, pops up at one point, to seal the deal.) I’m not being sarcastic here. I liked the movie, and it held me all the way, though the film’s grip relaxed pretty soon after I left the theater.

Why? Perhaps it’s because the cast and the production, not the story, are what make this movie special. Lee cast his earlier version somewhat strangely, with pretty boy hunk Eric Bana as Bruce -- Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott were also there as more plausible Rosses -- thereby sacrificing some of the story’s action-hero, worm-turning fantasy. Norton is a more ordinary-looking and empathetic Bruce, and he even suggests a deeper character psychologically -- while Tyler is a more fetching Betty and Hurt a more complex Ross. As for Roth, as a competing monster-antagonist, he‘s off the charts: a fishy-eyed, dead-souled bastard who keeps getting meaner and more dangerous with every scene.

The plot is fairly standard and, in a way, it picks up from Lee‘s movie: Bruce, on the run from relentless, icy-eyed Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Hurt), and faced with his own imminent Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation into the huge, green, screaming-mad Hulk (tipped for us by time titles), sneaks back from Rio to the States where he’ll pursue his antidote and meet up with his love, Betty -- while Ross protegee Blonsky fouls things up by misusing the “Hulk” serum and getting even more of a kick from unscrupulous scientist Professor Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), finally turning himself into a worse, scaly, mad-eyed nightmare. At the end, the Hulk meets the Abomination. Smash!

One of the reasons that the Spider-Man movies, Iron Man and now this new Hulk, play so well with both huge audiences and (sometimes) critics is that the transformation aspects of the stories, allow the filmmakers to cast less hunky actors highly capable of wit, depth and emotion (Tobey Maguire, Downey, and now Norton) in the hero roles, something which nicely balances the dramatic and action scenes. (You don’t have to wait, and pray, for a Christopher Reeve to show up for these parts.) As an action movie, Incredible Hulk is something of flame-thrower. But having Norton around for the dialogue scenes (not to mention having Hurt and Roth too), gives them an extra charge.

Norton, with his sensitive shifty eyes and hurt face, makes the stakes higher, the predicaments realer. And since Leterrier has a flair for non-stop, down-and-dirty action, the movie would wear you out, if the actors weren’t there to shoot some reality into the quieter (or at least, less spectacularly noisy) scenes.

There’s also a socio-political edge to the conflicts between Bruce and Gen. Ross and The Hulk and the Abomination. The Hulk, Spider-Man and most of the other Marvel fables, were conceived in the ‘60s, and they reflect those ‘60s values, in more evolved ways. Bruce is a reluctant rebel, trying to control his uncontrollable inner self, trapped between the cold, self-serving establishment (Hurt), his true love (Betty), and an utter nihilist (Roth). We wouldn’t love the Hulk if he weren’t a trapped outsider, wouldn’t thrill to his transformation as much if we didn’t find his mad rages, on some level, an irresistible release.

Stan Lee’s heroes and their alter-egos were always much more emotional, more sympathetic than the average comic book secret identity guys were in their beginnings. Putting an actor like Norton or Downey in these parts, now seems like a stroke of genius -- or a least a stroke of ultra-financial savvy. I wish, in the end, that writers like Tolstoy, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Shakespeare (or, to get more contemporary, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, could command the budget and resources now regularly lavished on Lee‘s work, by Lee‘s companies. But at least the studios show some good taste in comic books. Anyway, the whole huge deal is more a matter for accountants than aestheticians, or even movie-lovers. Smash!

War, Inc. (Two stars)
U.S.; Joshua Seftel

John Cusack’s new movie tries to put the Iraq war through a savage satirical shredder, right smack in the dark comedy anti-war style of Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove or Joseph Heller‘s “Catch-22.” I’d love to say it worked, but it doesn’t -- with one major exception.

Star-producer-cowriter Cusack’s targets are laudable: George Bush‘ miscues, Dick Cheney’s Halliburton antics, the whole trend toward “privatized” government and warfare, geo-politics, and media phoniness and corruption. And he has a super cast, including his sister Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley and Dan Aykroyd -- and an amusing and scary setting, a surprisingly well-detailed (for the budget) “fictitious” war-torn Oz called “Turaqistan.”

In the midst of sometimes bitingly realistic street warfare, comedy and fanciful Casablanca-style romance, whimsical pro hit man Hauser (Cusack, borrowing a leaf from his comic noir Grosse Point Blank) tries to handle some 007-ish kissing and killing -- and mostly does. He’s been assigned by the Vice President (Dan Aykroyd) to terminate with prejudice an oil minister puckishly named Omar Sharif (Lyubomir Neikov), while disguised as a trade show producer for the Halliburton-like corporate monolith Tamerlane.

Once in Turaqistan, Hauser copes confusedly with his uptight Tamerlane contact Marsha Dillon (sister Joan), wards off the advances of the red hot Iraqi pop tart Monica Babyyeah (teen deity Hilary Duff), and gets in some heavy flirting with his press nemesis Natalie Hegalhuzen (Tomei) -- a lefty sexpot obviously modeled on the Nation’s photogenic editor/TV pundit Katrina vanden Heuvel. Watching over all this is a C. I. A.-style heavy and Oz-like Wizard named Walken (played by Kingsley, not Christopher).

Writers Cusack, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser aren’t shy about attacking or ridiculing the mighty -- whether in government or media. And that‘s all to their credit. But though the names and the ideas are funny, the execution mostly isn’t -- and maybe that’s because director Joshua Seftel is a documentary specialist (Taking on the Kennedys), making his first fiction feature. Comedy-wise, despite that cast, the movie’s timing is usually always off.

There’s a happy exception to all this though, and that‘s sister Joan, who, as the insufferable Marsha, explodes into amazing arias of neurotic bossiness and wrath. She’s the office scold from hell -- you‘d like to see her take on Steve Carrell -- and, if the rest of the movie was always pitched in her loony key, it might have really burned down the screen.

Shotgun Stories (Three stars)
U.S.; Jeff Nichols

Is there a North Carolina/Arkansas school of film-making? Maybe not, but this film by David Gordon Green’s fellow Little Rock, Arkansas homeboy and North Carolina School of the Arts schoolmate Jeff Nichols -- Nichols’ first dramatic feature -- impresses you in some of the same ways Green’s work (George Washington) does. Set in small-town Arkansas, it’s the hauntingly understated tale of a family feud -- waged by three abandoned young man against the more “legitimate” sons of their father, their half-brothers sired after their dad left their mother and found the Lord and a new family.

Shotgun Stories is remarkably non-exploitive. Even as the feud explodes into gunplay and killings, the film never descends into hysteria. And the acting -- especially by Michael Shannon and Douglas Ligon as two of the outsider brothers -- always stays quietly real. Green was a producer here, and like George Washington, Nichols‘ Shotgun Stories is a model of low-budget independent regional filmmaking.

It Always Rains on Sunday (Four stars)
U.K.; Robert Hamer, 1947

Robert Hamer has always been something of a puzzle to me. The man who wrote and directed the sublimely ironic and murderously elegant 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets, one of the greatest of all British film comedies, has to be regarded as a cinema master. But Hamer’s filmography remains so obscure, and his biography so troubled (alcoholism drove him from his last film, 1960s School for Scoundrels), compared with his more durable Ealing Studio contemporaries Alexander Mackendrick and Charles Crichton, that it’s easier to confirm his talent than to affirm his genius. Except for Hamer’s Haunted Mirror episode in the classic 1945 horror anthology film Dead of Night, I’d never even seen another of his movies, despite decades of trying, since I first saw Coronets, entranced, on TV as a teenager.

Now, Rialto has ended that drought, and affirmed that genius, with its highly welcome re-release of the 1947 Hamer film noir It Always Rains on Sunday -- a masterpiece of a very different kind, and set in an entirely different milieu, than the playful comedy of aristocratic murders, Coronets.

Sunday is a brilliant, poetic and deeply humane romantic thriller, set in London’s East End, in a mixed Jewish-gentile area where hordes of what Coronets' social-climbing killer Louis (Dennis Price) would consider the unapproachable “riffraff” crowd the streets, watch outdoor boxing matches, hear “Danny Boy” played by street musicians, pour into jazz-dance clubs and try to dodge the on-and-off rainfall on one particular Sunday.

The main characters are two ex-lovers, Rose Sandigate and Tommy Swann, played by Googie Withers (of The Lady Vanishes) and John McCallum (in real life then, a married couple). Rose is now wed, living with her kind, considerate husband, their children and her prim or sluttish sisters-in-law. Tommy is a convict escaped from Dartmoor, a man on the run whom she hides in her room, trying to disguise his presence from her crowded household, while he rests up and she gets him enough money to leave the country.

As the rainy day proceeds, we see how much she still loves this once charming and self-confident rogue, and he keeps proving to us (and her) how weak and immoral he really is. Meanwhile, her boy uses blackmail to get a mouth organ; the sisters become involved with the nearby Hyams family, whose scion Morry is a music shop impresario and dance band player “with sax appeal.” Through it all, three petty crooks who’ve been short-changed by their fence, prowl the streets, harbingers of the doom we know may come.

Rain has rarely been used, as background and leitmotif, in such an evocative, cinematic way. The lyrical precipitation begins in the morning, falls lightly or heavily by turns, and paints the streets with a film noir glisten. Sunday’s last great set-piece, in inky wet night, is a magnificent chase through a railroad yard, with Tommy pursued by the smart, dogged cop, Fothergill (Jack Warner), who has been dogging his heels all day.

Film noir has lately become both a cult and an institution among movie buffs, but one wonders how many have seen this great movie, the dark side of Brief Encounter filtered through He Ran All the Way. With its powerful evocation of a vanished place and time, its gorgeous cinematography by noir master Doug Slocombe (photographer of Coronets, The Servantand the first three Indiana Jones movies) and its unforgettable working class urban ensemble, Sunday presents a strong, revealing kinder-hearted contrast to the amoral, high-style aristocrats of Coronets. Watching it we can see the roots of the later film’s dark, comic social vision.

It’s sad that Hamer has been so neglected over the years, with the exception of his one universally hailed masterpiece. Now there are two.

 

MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Funny Games (Three stars) (B)
U.S.; Michael Haneke, 2008 (Warner)

Haneke’s ironic and coldly unsentimental rethink of The Desperate Hours, with two affably mean, preppy-looking punks terrorizing a previously complacent upper middle class family in their vacation home, plays better in the English-language version, largely because it has a better cast -- Tim Roth and Naomi Watts as the increasingly horror-stricken parents; Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the smiling killers. I hate the gag with the remote, by the way.

CLASSIC RELEASES

High Noon (Two-disc Ultimate Edition) (Four stars) (A)
U. S.; Fred Zinnemann, (1952) (Lionsgate)

On his wedding day, retiring western marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper, in his archetypal performance) faces a deadly countdown. As clock after clock keeps ticking away, he awaits the noon train arrival of Frank Miller (Ian McDonald), the man sworn to kill him, while a town full of “friends” keeps vanishing away and refusing to help him. Howard Hawks so disliked this movie that he made the tougher, funnier Rio Bravo in reply.

But High Noon is still a classic: a suspense western that ties you in knots, with a memorable cast: Cooper, Grace Kelly (as bride Amy, the darling who may forsake him), Lloyd Bridges, Katy Jurado, Thomas Mitchell, Lon Chaney, Jr., Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and many others -- all but one of whom let good citizen Kane down or can‘t cut it. Bill Clinton’s favorite movie, so he says -- and a great Western, whatever we Hawks fans may once have thought.

______________

The Ballad of Narayama (Four stars) (A)
Japan; Shohei Imamura, 1983 (Animeigo)

Imamura‘s great remake of another classic, Keisuke Kinoshita’s 1958 Ballad of Narayama, about the isolated mountain town that harshly leaves its elderly to die in the snow, because it can’t feed them. With Ken Ogata: a quietly annihilating film. (In Japanese, with English subtitles.)

BOX SET

The Fugitive, Season Three (Three stars) (B)
U.S.; Various directors, 1965-6 (Paramount)

Run, Kimble, run.

 

- Michael Wilmington
June 12, 2008

June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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