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

Hellboy II
with Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, and Monsieur Verdoux
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

HELLBOY II: The Golden Army
(Three and a half stars)
U.S.; Guillermo del Toro (Universal)

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is one of my so-far favorites of this summer’s flood of big, splashy action fantasy movies -- not exactly my favorite genre, but one that seems to be cooking right now, at last commercially. And I suspect it will remain that way. (I’ve already seen The Dark Knight.) In many ways, it’s more fun, more magical, more delightfully characterized and more splendiferous imagined and stunningly visualized than the others -- perching atop a summer short list that also includes Wall-E and Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Director/Co-Writer Guillermo del Toro is obviously a genius at this kind of unbuttoned fairytale horror story, as he showed already in the first Hellboy, Pan‘s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. Here, he’s been granted seeming carte blanche to indulge, seemingly, his wildest visual whims and most incandescent fancies.

But there‘s also a human factor here, as there was in his previous fantasies. Based again on Mike Mignola‘s comic book, this crackling sequel relies again on the actor and character who makes the movie work best on personality terms -- Ron Perlman as the wisecracking cynical, rough-hewn Hellboy, a working man’s hero born unsettlingly of an unholy alliance of evil and fascism, shorn of his horns, fighting for justice and looking as red, mean and muscular as a devil popped from the bowels of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Del Toro‘s “Labyrinth.” What gave Iron Man, and to a lesser extent, “Crystal,“ their edge was the fact that one had an interesting, likeable hero (Robert Downey, Jr.), and the other had Indy, in whom we were already emotionally invested in.

Hellboy II has something just as valuable: a hero who makes us laugh -- and who’s also willing to mix it up with hordes of villains, Bruce Lee-style -- in this case an entire Golden Army, sprung from an ancient pact, and run by the evil (if not, here, too impressive) Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), whose twin sister Nuala (Anna Walton) becomes the major crush of Hellboy’s C-3PO-ish buddy Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). Aiding The Hellster besides Abe, are his flaming (honest-to-God) inamorata, Liz (Selma Blair) and a new Teutonic cyber-guy, Johann Krauss, (voiced by Seth McFarlane). Messing things up is their unctuous boss, Tom Manning (a skewering of the typical corporate jerk by Jeffrey Tambor). And all of these characters move, in Oz-style, from one magical underworld to another.
    
Several critics have commented that Hellboy 2 is visually overloaded -- and that’s true, as it also is of most of the other summer action-fantasy mega-movies. But the crucial difference among them lies in the amount of character and personality they add to the brew, to their heroes (as in Iron Man) or villains (as in The Dark Knight) and Hellboy II, one tepid villain aside, supplies the most. Anyway, if you spend 100 million plus on a movie, it probably should be overloaded, even if some of us would rather see the overpacking on the “War and Peace” side rather than for another comic book splurge.
    
We should be glad that del Toro is operating at his peak right now, getting all the money and latitude he needs to weave his spells -- just as Coppola once was with the Godfather movies and Apocalypse Now, or Welles with Citizen Kane -- because, as history definitely shows and overshows, the good days pass and the money may not always flow so freely. Or, as in this case in the right direction.
    
By the way, I’ll bet I’m one of the few critics around right now who’s reviewing this movie before seeing the original -- which I missed first time out and haven’t caught up with yet. But that proves the movie works for people who come in cold. And I’ll return to Hellboy 2 next week, after I catch up with its predecessor.


Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (Two and a half stars)
U.S.; Eric Brevig (New Line)
    
Once again, we plunge with author Jules Verne and his intrepid fictional explorers, into the mysterious bowels of the earth, finding in plentiful supply Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit-hole tumbles, roller-coaster thrill rides, and King Kong creatures running amok. The visual effects rule here, along with Brendan Fraser (the ideal star-hero for this kind of movie) and Verne himself, whose imagination remains more transcendent (almost) than the real thing. The script is silly; Fraser’s hot-to-trot Trevor Anderson is accompanied by a juvenile, his nephew (Josh Hutcherson) and a Swedish bombshell (Anita Briem), two characters who almost make you long for the 1959 Henry Levin movie’s two-three punch of Pat Boone and Arlene Dahl. But those CGI coups are really something. And Fraser reacts to them wonderfully.


Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (Three stars)
U. S.; Patricia Rozema (Picturehouse)
    
Where has Canada’s Patricia Rozema (who made the whimsical 1987 I‘ve Heard the Mermaids Singing) been all these years? Well, among other things, she‘s done a film adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s great bleak masterpiece Happy Days, which is why it’s surprising to find her here, directing a project more seemingly in sync with the Garry Marshall Happy Days. This is a movie of the American Girl corporate symbol/character (played by Abigail Breslin of Little Miss Sunshine) in a production that suggests a ‘60s Disney studio version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Of course, a Disneyfied “Mockingbird,” however much it might pale next to Mulligan’s and Pakula‘s, might actually swing, up against most of the rest of what we see. In this case, Breslin and her adults, especially Stanley Tucci and Joan Cusack, as a magician and librarian who may be more than they seem, engage us mightily -- even as Rozema and company are able to make Depression America occasionally look like a wonderland.


Wanted (Two and a half stars)
U.S.; Timur Bekmambetov (Universal)

A mixed bag of violence and satire. I enjoyed the first third of this action-thriller from the director of the Russian Night Watch and Day Watch series, because it starts off like a crazy mix of The Office, Pulp Fiction and La Femme Nikita. James McAvoy is a beleaguered white collar schnook who is plucked from obscurity and groomed for a new job as an international hit man by an assassination company, led by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman. But the midsection, in which McAvoy gets his brutal tutoring in the art and craft of the rubout from Jolie and others, turned me off, and the ending, which puts him through more twists and turns -- and an astonishing hellbound train fight -- doesn’t redeem it.
     
Can you make a really sympathetic movie about a contract killer or assassin? Well, there are the Bourne movies, Melville‘s Le Samourai with Alain Delon’s gloomy assassin, Day of the Jackal, Mr. and Mrs. Smith (the Brangelina version) and the recent In Bruges in which Brendan Gleeson does wring sympathy for the damned. Generally speaking though, it’s a hard trick, unless the movie is played for dark comedy or unless the hit man is trying to quit -- and McAvoy doesn’t turn the trick. It is now and then an exciting show though -- especially during that wild train ride -- and Bekmambetov seems to relish diving into the Hollywood formulas he once copied back in Russia.


The Wackness (Two stars)
U.S.; Jonathan Levine (Sony Pictures Classics)

The Wackness -- which won the Sundance Film Festival audience award for writer-director Jonathan Levine -- is an arty little New York anti-romance that wafts us back to the summer of 1994, in the heyday of Forrest Gump, ganja, hip hop wigger lingo, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s war on crime and pushcarts -- an audacious but ultimately dispiriting love comedy, about a dangerous three-cornered relationship among an insecure Upper East Side high school drug dealer named Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), his pot-smoking, deeply depressed ‘60s-loving psychiatrist Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), who gets paid by Luke in dime bags; and the shrink‘s sexy, hedonistic stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), who breaks Luke’s heart -- and takes his cherry.
    
The movie, well-acted but not quite as well-written, plunges us into the dangerous liaisons of these three hip, glib but sometimes morally unattractive types, navigating us through drugs, promiscuity, masturbation, toilet sex, prostitution and near suicide -- as well as somewhat less gamy problems like facing eviction and finding Donovan songs (“Season of the Witch”) on a local jukebox.
    
Levine and Peck -- whose mumbling delivery suggests David Schwimmer trying to mimic Marlon Brando or Mickey Rourke -- work hard to make Luke both charismatic and likeably vulnerable; they’re trying to create a sort of magnetic schlemiel. But it’s hard to sympathize with a drug dealer who’s so blasé about his daily rounds and so full of seeming admiration for his supplier Percy (Method Man). It’s harder still to believe it when Luke confesses to an inferiority complex and a stubborn case of virginity -- and hardest of all to accept him at the end as a full-hearted romantic.
    
Thirlby is much less mannered and more spontaneous, but her character has a similar creep factor. (The title comes from Steph’s slangy remark that, while she looks for the “dopeness” in life, gloomy Luke looks for the “wackness.”) But the performance that almost makes the movie comes, as you’d expect, from Kingsley. Here, with his long messy hair, haunted eyes and four-letter gab, Kingsley’s Squires suggests the late George Carlin, both physically and verbally. And if that doesn’t seem like startling versatility, imagine Carlin as Gandhi.


Heartbeat Detector (Two and a half stars)
France; Nicolas Klotz (New Yorker Films)
   
An intelligent, relentlessly dour and gloomy thriller about a corporate spy (Mathieu Amalric of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) who’s assigned to snoop into the life of a CEO (the great Michel Lonsdale, who once chased Fox‘s Jackal and played Almaric's father in Munich), whom company flacks suspect of a breakdown. Almaric is hovering on the edge himself -- booze and dance club orgies -- and he soon finds a whole dark underpinning to the spying: a links to the evils of the Holocaust.
    
The film certainly held my attention, but, despite its Melvillean understatement, it lacks the wrench of surprise and the chill of history. Still, it’s a kick to find a thriller that, like this one and The Lives of Others, works with human and social issues, and that doesn’t depend for its impact on putting us into adrenaline overdrive.

Monsieur Verdoux (Four stars)
U.S.; Charles Chaplin, 1947(Re-released by The Film Desk)
    
Savaged on its release by conventional critics and right wing pundits, Charles Chaplin’s 1947 comedy of murders, based on the Landru (Bluebeard) case, is now being re-released in a sparkling new black and white print. Today it looks like the gentlest and most woozily charming of dark comedies, a great rowdy but elegant American classic that didn’t deserve the public lynching both the film and Chaplin received.
   
Chaplin plays Verdoux, a mild-looking but indefatigable seducer in the France of the ‘30s who supports his unknowing family by seducing rich old widows and killing them for their fortunes. Verdoux isn’t a psychopathic murderer, and he’s even capable of mercy and compassion -- toward his family and toward a friendless ex-convict hooker (Marilyn Nash) whom he picks up one night. He murders out of need, because he‘s lost his lifetime job as a bank clerk in the world depression and finds that his aptitude and talent for wooing leads him inevitably to violent crime.

Charlie here abandons the sweet gentleman tramp character on whom his legend was built, and plays instead a reprehensible little dandy (like his early silent comedy drunks) and killer/adulterer, whose heart can beat both cold and hot, and who’s just as punctilious about his life of crime as he was with his bank accounts. There‘s some great black slapstick, especially in the scenes with the apparently unkillable heiress Martha Raye, and there are also moments of vintage Chaplinesque poignancy, as when Verdoux spares the hooker a poisoned drink by spotting “cork“ in the glass. The ending, as in The Great Dictator, is an “author‘s message” that rings even more strongly today, and that moves us because we sense it coming not from Verdoux’s dark soul as much as Charlie‘s light, warm heart.
 


MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

Batman Begins (Three stars)
U.S.; Christopher Nolan, 2005 (Warner Bros Home Entertainment)

Batman the Movie Series, begins again, through the dark lens of Christopher (Memento) Nolan and the capable cape of new batguy Christian Bale. Not wholly a new release, I guess, but certainly worth catching up with again, as Nolan’s first sequel, The Dark Knight, with the late Heath Ledger as The Joker, is poised to fly.

CLASSIC RELEASES

Mon Oncle Antoine (Four stars)
Canada; Claude Jutra, 1971 (Criterion)
    
A neglected masterpiece, at least in the U.S., Director-cowriter-actor Jutra’s portrayal of a Canadian small town boyhood in asbestos-mining territory, has been three times voted, by Canada’s film critics, their country’s greatest film. Unlike its American equivalent Citizen Kane, it’s a quiet classic; the color period provincial atmospherics (beautifully shot by Michel Brault) suggest Terrence Malick in a Renoir mood. The DVD extras -- which include documentaries on Jutra and the film and the 1957 Jutra-Norman McLaren short A Chairy Tale -- are superb

BOX SET

Catherine Deneuve (5 Film Collection) (Three stars)
France; Various directors, 1968-84 (Lionsgate)
    
Five lesser-known films with the ravishing French movie actress who, in the opinion of many, was/is the world‘s most beautiful woman. (Her poster was on my college room walls for three years, right beside Humphrey Bogart, Ray Charles, Steve McQueen and James Dean.) These five films are not her best, of course, but they’re not bad at all , and have been usually hard to find. She’s at her most beauteous and sexy, in my opinion, opposite Yves Montand, in the underrated Jean Paul Rappeneau‘s scrumptious comedy Le Sauvage.

Includes: “Manon 70” (Jean Aurel, 1968) (B-). “Le Sauvage” (Jean Paul Rappeneau, 1975) (B+). Hotel des Ameriques (Andre Techine, 1981) (B+). Le Choc (Robin Davis, 1982) (B-). Fort Saganne (Alain Corneau, 1984) (B)

 

- Michael Wilmington
July 10, 2008

July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
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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