The Dry

The Noir in Negative

or

"When You've Been Lying About Something For So Long, It Becomes second Nature."

Most folks know the genre known as "film-noir," the post-war group of films conceived in post World War II cynicism, displaying a world of moral ambivalence, exemplified by high contrast photography of glaring light and enveloping shadow "where the night is black with something more than dark." B-movies, which couldn't afford or requisition the lights being used in "A"-features, used the pallet so effectively that it became its own cliché, one poked at by Alfred Hitchcock in North By Northwest, where, instead of having his hero have a meeting in a drizzly dark alley, decided to go another way staging it in a flat open field in the middle of the noon-day sun.

Mystery writer Jane Harper did something similar with her debut novel, "The Dry," staging a murder mystery, featuring cases running both hot and cold, in the dusty (and fictional) farming community of Kiewarra, Australia. The book, written with Harper's equally dry style, won many industry awards, so it was only natural that a film be made of it—especially as the Australian film industry has ramped up in the last few years—and Harper has kept her area of interest down-under, and continued writing best-sellers.

The Dry (novel and film) up-ends the traditional mystery/noir tropes; it's Australia is a sun-blasted, heat-stroked terrain suffering from a years-long drought making the entire environment threatening. Nobody can lurk in the shadows in the baking heat, but that doesn't make the situation any less dangerous...or combustible.

Eric Bana plays Aaron Falk, an Aussie Federal Policeman in the Big City, who is drawn back to his home-town after the apparent murder-suicide of the Hadler family, perpetrated by Falk's childhood friend Luke. The tragedy has upended the rural community. An accusatory note from Luke's father guilts the prodigal son to return to the fold—after he and his father were run out of town following the suspicious drowning of another of Aaron's friends, Ellie Deacon (BeBe Bettencourt)—and he he goes back into the dust and the past to find answers, both forensic and personal.

All fingers point to Luke having shot-gunned his wife and son (but, curiously, not his infant daughter) then driving to a dried lake-bed and killing himself. There had been no contact between the two friends for the twenty years after Ellie's death, and Aaron had lied for Luke about his whereabouts at the time of their mutual friend's death. Could the two be tied together? Could Luke have killed Ellie? Could the guilt have finally caused him to snap and kill again? Why now?

There had been four of them—Ellie, Gretchen, Luke and Aaron—and they were mates through high school, easy to do in a small farming town. Ellie had been found drowned and man-handled in the nearby river, now merely a trench undistinguishable from the rest of the parched area. Her father, Mal Deacon—the mother had left years earlier—was screaming for blood, and Aaron, because of an incriminating note in Ellie's pocket—was under suspicion. Then, Luke had come by and given him an alibi—the two were together at the time shooting rabbits. But, was the alibi for Aaron's good or for Luke's. Aaron had had a teen-crush on Ellie, and twenty years of doubt have cob-webbed his mind. Run out of town by the threats of deacon and his nephew Grant Dow, he had never gone back. But he has wondered.

So his current presence in town is not welcome and whispered about, except for Gretchen, the last of the compadres still in town, now a single mother, raising a son on her own. Luke's parents (Bruce Spence, Julia Blake) are wracked with grief, raising the surviving infant of the murder, and desperate for answers. Luke had been fine. Luke had been happy. How could people think he was responsible?

They're in the same boat as local Police Sergeant Greg Raco (Keir O'Donnell), who's investigating and out of his depth, while feeling responsible for the whole town. He wants to believe the Hadler family deaths were murder/suicide and everything points that way and he doesn't want to believe there's a killer wandering around Kiewarra. But, what's the motivation? Nothing is clear-cut as far as who might be responsible. So, for him, it's good to have a fed nearby, doubling down on the evidence, even though that fed is a past-friend of the suspected killer, and even though he's attracting a lot of attention because of his complicated, implicated past.

It's a lot of story and director Robert Connolly—hewing closely to Harper's novel and only leaving out some forensic details—does a masterful job of keeping past and present intertwined with nothing but weighted questions obfuscating the solution until just before the end. Although it's not consistent, the focus is on Falk's perspective, both in the questioning present and the past in his head. Connelly's strategy for keeping this clear to the audience is to transition using sound—an echo of memory intrudes into the current time-line before a hard-cut takes us to the source of the sound back in the world of sixteen year old Aaron. The only time that rule is broken is when the sound trails image—mercifully, for the audience—in a final flashback as Falk is supplied information not known to him before.

It's a fine translation of the book, taking advantage of an excellent, understated cast and the blighted Australian landscape that seems to roil and shimmer with buried malice impinging on the surface. During the Pandemic, I have been intrigued, entertained and challenged by a cloister of mystery writers—Dorothy Sayers, Tana French, and Harper—who have sustained me with colorful characters and intricate puzzles through "troubling times." I have been grateful. The film of Harper's first literary effort does it justice, and in subtle, visual details even surpassed the scenes I saw in my head while taking it in. Good on you, mates.

Star Trek (2009)

Written at the film's engagement. Some thoughts follow after.

"I Dare You To Do Better"

I got a call from the Captain about 5 o'clock (that'd be 2000 hours for him) on Friday, and when I saw who it was, I called him back and said "I know what this is about."

The Captain is a life-long Trekker. He knows the arcana of "Star Trek" in its canon, that being the television series—both broadcast and syndicated—and film. Plus, he's a little "inside," having drinks with the late Majel Barrett Roddenberry, introducing Patrick Stewart to "Buzz" Aldrin, and calling up Jonathan Frakes the day show creator Gene Roddenberry died to talk about "what it all meant."

The Captain knows from "Trek." So I was particularly interested in his take on "The New Version" of J.J. Abrams, or "Star Trek Begins" (a version of which producer Harve Bennett had proposed away back in the time-space continuum before Star Trek V—you know, the Shatner-directed one best forgotten). I'd watched the trailers warily, noting the emphasis on disrobing cadets and slam-bang action (not mutually exclusive), but noting a certain underlying devotion, not entirely slavish, to the original. They weren't trying to re-invent the warp-drive, which was a good thing.

"So..." I said, "what'd ya think?"

"This is the way they should have always done it.." he began.

Yeah. It is.

Star Trek is a rollicking world-and-expectations-shattering version of the Gene Roddenberry original, and most niftily, done in a way that fits within its science-fiction-y concepts. The whole movie is its plot-point and one watches in wonder how the deconstruction happens before one's eyes, while simultaneously nodding acquaintance with the tropes, concepts, and characterizations of the original. One gets the feeling of happy ebullience watching a favorite building imploded with the added delight of seeing it rise simultaneously from its own ashes to be sleeker, shinier and un-compromising.

Part of it is due to budget. Abrams was given a fat check to re-launch Paramount's key franchise (which it had nickeled and dimed into the ground the first time around), so the limitations the creators always had to contend with aren't so apparent. The Enterprise corridors no longer look like motel hallways, Engineering isn't a big space with a back-lit perspective painting behind it, and the aliens restricted to stereo-eyed bipeds with varying head-ridges. No, there's a lot of imagineering going on here in the Enterprise's brave new world of industrial-strength space-faring (at one point the new Captain Kirk sprints—of which he does...a lot—through what I swear was a brewery standing in for some section of the Enterprise's inner workings). 

The creatures have evolved differently* with nonhuman proportions, sometimes tossing out the human baggage entirely. It's a messy universe, but a full one with good ideas and concepts tossed amid the dialogue. It's a "Star Trek" Universe so full of potential, that there's no chance of coming across a creatively bankrupt parallel Earth, although the film manages to do exactly that in its own clever way.

That's the big picture. The question is the actors; the franchise will live or die on how "the New Kids" can portray the old characters. Fortunately, it's where this Star Trek shines. Everyone will have their favorites—mine are Karl Urban's note-perfect blustering McCoy and Simon Pegg's hyper-driven Scotty—but Chris Pine is a genuine find for Captain James Tiberius Kirk, employing none of the Shatnerisms (well, there's one deliberate vocal steal that made me laugh), but supplying the one thing that Shatner always brought to the table—energy. John Cho's Sulu is terrific and it's a hoot to see Russian actor Anton Yelchin employing the wretched "wessels" accent of the original Chekov. 

Zoe Saldana is given much more to do as Lt. Uhura, and given that he had Leonard Nimoy on-set for inspiration, Zachary Quinto might have taken the easy way out with a direct imitation, but his Mr. Spock is far less serene, more volatile and haughty, betraying that human half far more subtly than Nimoy did—and I believe saying that might be a court-martial offense in my house.

Where the other "Trek" movies have fallen down have been the secondary characters, but here they're just as important—Ben Cross and Winona Ryder play the star-crossed parents of Spock, while Bruce Greenwood is a superb Captain Christopher Pike. And Eric Bana, who can be on or off depending on the movie, is terrific as the long-suffering, revenge-driven Romulan Nero.

There will be a lot of sniping from the "Trekkies" who want things their way, or no way—that's to be expected with any "Trek" movie. But in the words of the former Captain Kirk: "Get a life."

Star Trek certainly got a new one.

After-thought: My, my. I did a lot of dancing around on this one because it was imperative not to give too much away (although I was doing some "punning" references to it just to amuse myself). What was wonderful about Abrams' re-boot—far better than his "Star Wars" sequels (although they're entertaining)—was his and the writers pushing "Re-set" on the entire franchise and wiping out the whole old Star Trek Universe in an ingenious time-travel story where another alien goes back in time to kill his version of Hitler, who happens to be Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock.

That's just clever and daring and enough to put the fear of interfering with time into anybody. But, it also wiped the creative slate clean. The Vulcans, on whom the Star Trek Universe became so dependent, became a Universal diaspora. Time-lines could be cleaned up—like the "Eugenics War"—and a better Star Trek could be rebuilt without having to necessarily wipe out "Next Generation" and its successors. And if anybody gripes about it, it's just a parallel timeline; the other one still exists, Ramada-In hallways and all.

It was thrilling—in fact, I did a couple of "Sunday Scenes" around this movie—about aspects that just made me smile.

But, it didn't last. The next Abrams Trek (Into Darkness) did the "Khan" story-line a little too soon and a little too derivatively. As I said in that review, with a new Universe to play with, it was too soon to go back to the well. And the third "Kelvin Universe" story, Star Trek Beyond, attempted to do something a bit different, along the lines of the Original Series, but its dependence on a "movie-villain" and its subsequent disappointment (even Idris Elba couldn't do anything with it) was a let-down, and the film under-performed, perhaps because it was less an "event" film than an "episodic" one.

That was four years ago and everybody's getting older. A new Trek movie was stalled when Chris Pine—and Chris Hemsworth (who played "Daddy" Kirk in the first one, indicating it was another time-travel story and a dull one at that)—had contract demands (money or credit) and it stalled. There's talk of two Treks in the works: one a new production and Quentin Tarantino production of a "Star Trek" movie, which—because QT can't keep himself from talking—was revealed to be merely be his version of a Trek story about the Eugenics War. More time-travel? Tarantino seems to be no longer interested (and I never was).

Whatever the future of "Star Trek" in the movies, one hopes that it will "go boldly"...which means that a bolder studio should take control of it as Paramount seems to be fresh out of ideas.

* There is a wickedly funny bar scene where Kirk tries to pick up the comely Lt. Uhura, while between them sits an alien seemingly modeled on the "Spitting Image" version of Leonard Nimoy, when it suddenly dawned on me what it was doing there: "Why the long face?"

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

Written at the time of the film's release...and before Mark Rylance, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Eddie Redmayne became "Big Deals" (and failed to be mentioned).

"Lord help the Mister who comes between and my Sister/
and Lord help the Sister who comes between me and my Man"

"Gettin' tickets for the 'girlie-show?'" the ticket-taker said to me.

*Sigh* If only...

Sadly, there's not much life in The Other Boleyn Girl--either of them. Peter Morgan's script (from the Phillipa Gregory novel and the BBC production) is a bit cut-and-dried---er, poor choice of words---and it doesn't create anything other than a proper colonist's righteous indignation over the way women in prominent positions were treated back then. Now, the sexism isn't so much like horse-trading (as it is in this film), as in just making sure that standards for men are inequitable with those for women, as we do in these oh-so-much-more-enlightened times. I came away thinking Morgan--who's probably set up a script-writing mill by this time--might want to take a script or two off, and sharpen the quill a bit. But it's not all Morgan's fault--he does get some choice words in once in awhile. The direction by Justin Chadwick is flat and staid--even by Masterpiece Theater standards--without even the benefit of some Merchant-Ivory snootiness to breathe life into the thing.

Then you've got the actors. As "the two Boleyn whores," Scarlett Johansson, as younger sister Mary*, uses 1.5 expressions throughout the entire movie and both involve mouth-breathing--no, sorry, that's unfair--2.5, she has a child-birth scene, and Natalie Portman looks like she's going to run away with the thing, having a fine old time as the smarter, more manipulative Anne but her hysterics towards the end have an air of high-school production--when the chords of her neck stand out you begin to worry that the court is going to catch fire like Sissy Spacek did in Carrie.

As for Eric Bana, it's not good to be the King. Henry VIII is one of those characters that most actors relish playing whether its Charles Laughton, Robert Shaw or Keith Michell. Bana, though is a sometime thing--he can be "on" (Munich, Black Hawk Down, Troy), or he can be totally "off" (Hulk), giving nothing up for the camera (or audiences) to grab onto. Here he plays a weak King by giving a weak performance--as if that'll do the job convincingly enough. But it would be better to have this lusty, conscience-less King do his selfish terrible deeds and have a good time once in a while. I mean, why completely sever the ties between England and the Catholic Church if you're not having any fun while doing it? The same point is made, it's just not so spot-on...or so deadly dull.

One looks for any good performance in the thing, seeing how its not an action-piece at all, and Kristin Scott Thomas continually looks like there's a bad smell on-set and is allowed one moment of high dudgeon, and Jim Sturgess, the chirpy "Paul-ish" lead of Across the Universe seems to threaten to belt out another Beatles tune any minute. There is one ray of sunshine in the whole thing and that is Ana Torrent as Catherine of Aragon, speaker of the earlier "Boleyn whore" line. Every moment she's on the screen there is a power and command that every other member of the cast is lacking. She looks and acts like a Queen who belongs there, rather than one merely playing dress-up.

* "Is the story true", I hear you cry. Well, Gregory defends any historical inaccuracies in the book—or agreed-upon inaccuracies—by saying that it's from the character's point of view, in this case Mary's. But nothing is made of the fact that Mary is rumored to have had an affair with another King—of France, leading to her expulsion from the French court—earlier than her time with Henry, and even the most unreliable of narrators might get the fact that Mary was the older of the two sisters correct.

Hanna

They're making a TV series of "Hanna" for some unfathomable reason (probably money) and it has been promoted with all the regularity of a water torture if you've seen a movie in the last couple months. But, nobody ever talks about the film it's based on...directed by the splendid Joe Wright. This was written at the time of the film's release.

"Grimm's Fairy Spy"
or
"Better Living Through Chemical Brothers"

Hanna isn't like any movie you've seen, that is unless you managed to catch some of the more stylish spy thrillers at the end of the 1960's. When the spy-craze went more mainstream, more A-list directors started to get into the fray and suddenly the thrills started to be taken over by style as those film-makers attempted to impose some of their own creative instincts into the genre. Sometimes the results made for merely a sub-par thriller, with style winning the cold war over substance, while others of their ilk were just plain pretentious.  Some...were interesting (like this one is, and like The American was last year).

Joe Wright is one of the better British directors coming out BBC television work.  He's done his bit for the classics, old and new (Pride & Prejudice, Atonement) quite deftly handling the drawing room choreography and even putting a nicely modern spin on things. But, his 2009 film of The Soloist showed a director who wanted to experiment with the form, break out of the stodgy "Beeb" way of doing things and shake the story-telling up a bit (in that film, he turned Los Angeles into a living, breathing, rumbling sci-fi character looming over its strata of citizenry). It was interesting to see him attached as director to what looked like a common "actioner," and one wondered what he might bring to it, given his three previous films and how he appeared to be changing his style.

Change it, he did. Hanna is a weird mixture of gloss and QT-perversion, with some very strange camera work that, somehow, never manages to not tell you what is going on, to whom, where and why. No matter how over-the-top the theatrics become, Wright never forgets the basic job of keeping the audience informed, and with a screenplay spare on details and depending on the visual to tell the story, his discipline is critical (imagine, for instance, if Tom Hooper had directed it!) for any basic understanding of the film. 

Hanna  heaps on the atmospherics, not only with a brazen fairy-tale sub-text, but an all-encompassing sound-design/Euro-electronica musical score by The Chemical Brothers,* that recall some of the '60's/'70's work of such composers as Mikis Theodorakis and Giorgio Moroder.  But the thumping, edgy noises permeate the entire soundtrack, not just the music, from the sweet tune that one of the Hanna-hunters (Tom Hollander, cast completely against type) whistles, quite nullifying any element of surprise,** to the pounding chase music that keeps the attention focused while Wright spins his camera or shifts perspective, *** to the creepy metal noises and animal sounds that permeate this world. 

It begins in Finland, in the snow as a caribou is being hunted by a lone figure in fur. She dispatches the animal with one arrow shot ("I just missed your heart"), and begins to dress the animal for food. "You're dead!" says a figure behind her, and a rapid brutal fight breaks out, dependent less on fast editing than rhythm, and she is soon slammed to the ground, a snow angel against her will. "Drag the deer back yourself," says the man, who it turns out is Hanna's father (Eric Bana).

She is Hanna Heller (Saoirse Ronan—pronounced "Seersha"—and she worked with Wright in Atonement, and specifically asked that he direct this) and it is all survivalist training. Hanna has been raised to live on the land, kill and cook her own food, have an encyclopedic knowledge of everything (except electronics, apparently) given that her schooling is from the encyclopedia, speak several languages and have a detailed history that is nothing like her own.

What is her history? What is her father's? We don't get too deep into the film before we learn he's a rogue security agent gone missing, and he's a bee in the bonnet of Marissa Viegler (Cate Blanchett—imagine her being creepy and then go a few steps further), an operative high up the chain of command. And she is Hanna's target. And Hanna must get to her before Marissa can find her.  The why's will come, eventually, but already we've invaded a fairy-tale landscape with the sheltered princess (who can snap your neck) and an evil step-mother who stays only a few evil steps behind the whole movie. And given Ronan's goose-like grace throughout the film, one can't help but call to mind all sorts of folk-tales of changelings and bargains and revenge.  But it's a spy thriller, too, as cold as they come, so don't expect "happily ever after."

For me, it was a simple story told well that impressed me throughout.

But it just missed my heart.

* Their impact on the film is incredible. I kept imagining what the film would be like with a "standard" thriller score, and always came up with a duller, less propulsive film.

** This recalls Peter Lorre's child killer in Fritz Lang's M (1931). Hollander vaguely recalls Lorre's look, and, later,  Wright stages a fight to the tune "M" whistled from Peer Gynt—"In the Hall of the Mountain King," (after The Social Network, this piece is getting a lot of traction).

*** "What does music feel like?" Hanna asks at an early stage of the script. Here, it feels like having a heart attack in zero-g.  One of the reasons this film DOESN'T have a traditional score is that Hanna, the character, doesn't know music, and as we're following her struggles, the music reflects her mood, whether placid or on the run.  It's rather interesting where those moods show up.

Countdown to Avengers: Age of Ultron—Hulk/Thor

The latest "Avengers" movie comes out on May first.  For this month of Fridays before the premiere, we'll be re-running reviews of the movies that formed the stepping stones for this latest one, this time two outliers: the first, the subject of the fourth Marvel comic character adapted for the big screen (after a popular TV series in the 1980's) which failed to light up the box office, but whose appearance in the first "Avengers" film was considered the most successful version of the character; and another of Marvel's "major" characters, who had previously not captured the imagination of the movie-going public, but who really only hit his potential (and comic possibilities) in that same "Avengers" movie.  

What links these two characters is they are probably better as supporting characters than they are as the focus of a complete two hour narrative.  Certainly, they were never better than they were in the first "Avengers" movie.

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Hulk (2003) A director of many different genres, this is The Ang Lee superhero movie. Lee, fresh off Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (his tribute to wuxia martial arts films) went full Hollywood with Hulk, with an interesting cast (with less-than-interesting results, but I'm sure they all wanted to work with Lee) of Eric Bana (who can be terrific—but, alas, he's just not here), Jennifer Connelly (just not here), Josh Lucas (ditto), Sam Elliott (never less than interesting, even here) and Nick Nolte (so over-the-top crazy, that he's a bit of a relief). The problem here is tone: Bana described the set as being "ridiculously serious and morbid"—Lee wanted to avoid any sort of light-heartedness and went for superhero tragedy, with ten screenwriters (a lot of good ones, too) tackling the movie in various stages adapting the Hulk origin-revision "Monster" (Incredible Hulk #312, Oct. 1985) showing that the young Bruce Banner was a victim of child abuse from a brutal alcoholic father, setting the psychological stage for his latent reluctance to express emotion and his hidden rage. 

That might have been good if Bana found a sympathetic way to portray it and gain some audience sympathy. The only time the movie takes off is when The Hulk appears (Ang Lee himself did the motion-capture work), and that's a bit too-little-too-late to keep the movie from seeming like the downer it is intended to be. Best thing about the movie: Lee's elaborate work with split-screen to simulate a comic book's fractured story-telling techniques.* The movie could have used more of that inventiveness, as well. The next Hulk movie would have a different cast and a different "take."

* It's a noble experiment, but frankly works at cross-purposes from the intent.  The problem is split-screen does something other than what comic-book panels do: the graphics in comics separate action into different progressing time-frames; split-screen shows simultaneous action occurring in different spaces.  One involves and transcends time; the other involves and transcends space.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The "Maybe-Not-So-Much-Incredible-But-Certainly-An-Improvement-Over-The-Last-Time" Hulk

Don't get me wrong. I admired what Ang Lee tried to bring to the, by now, here-to-stay "Superhero" sub-species (meta-species?) of action-adventure films. Taking his cue from Bryan Singer's "no, it's really about something" furrowed-brow approach to the "X-men," Lee (no relation to Smilin' Stan) made an examination of the rigors of the scientific mind, battling inner demons brought on by a repressed memory of child abuse, and made manifest in the form of a big green berserker id, The Hulk, equal parts Mr. Hyde and the Frankenstein monster.

Good thoughts. But we're talking The Incredible Hulk here. These films should take their cues from the "Superhero" epithets espoused by the characters, like Superman's affirmative "Up, Up and Away" or Batman's introspective "criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot" (these days he just says "Hrn."). "The Hulk" (in one of his incarnations) never got beyond "Hulk SMASH!" He's not the most sophisticated of heroes,* he's as pure a power-fantasy for nerds as can be—a three-year old with super-strength. So to pile on the daddy-complex psychology, when what people basically went to see was the Big Guy punch holes in things, was putting a lace doily on a trash-compactor. Lee had fun bringing back split-screen to simulate comic panels (which was nifty), but Hulk was depressing...and not in a good way, like the "Batman" films. If you want angst, best take it only as far as The Seven Samurai.

So, three years later, with "Marvel Studios" in control of (most of) their characters, and an eye towards creating an "Avengers" film in the future, comes a re-vamped "Hulk," with Ed Norton replacing Eric Bana, Liv Tyler for Jennifer Connelly, and William Hurt (made ruddy and silver-maned) for Sam Elliott. As good as those previous performers can be, the substitutions are all improvements. And this "Hulk," has no other agenda than to be a chase-and-fight film, and succeeds quite well in its humble goals.

Hulk's a little trimmer and hunkier than Hulkier.

Some Hulking thoughts:

The credit sequence re-writes the Hulk's origin-story (always a drag on these films, and is patterned after the TV-series), and gets going with Banner on the run. He's hiding in Brazil, working at a bottling plant in the densely populated box-city of "Rocinia Favela," in computer contact with a research scientist, and working on breathing disciplines to make sure he "don't go changin.'" It makes Banner a less helpless character than the last film, and gives him a goal.

This is not Eric Bana; this is Edward Norton

Norton's re-write of the script (by Zak Penn--who wrote the last two "X-men" films and Elektra and gets full script credit on the film), is clever, detailed, and plays to the actor's calculating strengths. Plus, his Bruce Banner is a sickly-thin, not buff, scientist—in good shape, but not super-hero material. Nice contrast with the uber-defined Hulk.

The cameos all work terrifically, are integrated well, and show obvious affection for their subjects: Stan Lee (though not a drooling fan of his, one has to admit this is his best cameo, and he's terrific in it), Lou Ferigno (he looks great!), and, in an "Aw!" moment, the late Bill Bixby. Plus, Robert Downey, Jr. makes an appearance as Tony Stark (Iron Man).

Tyler and Norton do wonders with the stormy (heh) Betty Ross-Bruce Banner romance. Connelly and Bana never seemed to connect in the first film, and seemed quite diffident to each other. Not here.

These are not Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott
(They are Liv Tyler and William Hurt, and that's different)

Hulk does more than roar and punch. Here he is quite capable of using collateral damage as a defense and weaponry (and kudos to the sound design team for the police car sequence). There is one scene of Hulk being attacked by "sonic-blast" weaponry that is as enjoyably "comic-booky" as in any of these films. Tim Roth makes a very effective villain, green with envy for The Hulk's power, and the simple monster against monster plot is stream-lined and moves along while not feeling very draggy (as the battle sections of Iron Man did).

Director Louis Leterrier keeps the pace going, as one would expect of a director of the "Transporter" films, and there are extended chases through that Brazilian slum-town that recall the run-downs of the "Bourne" series and the parkour scenes of Casino Royale.

Leterrier also treats the Hulk like the shark in Jaws (or "Batman" in Batman Begins); we only get glimpses of him in the dark, as big pieces of machinery go hurtling through the air, placing the audience in the same disoriented mode as the "wet" squad sent to capture him.

Bruce Banner has a Blue Heeler like I do. How cool is that?

It made me happy, right? I enjoyed myself, right? So, why not as high a rating as, say, Indiana Jones? Because, as fun as it is, the effects scenes tend to look a bit shoddy on the big-screen. The Hulk, himself, looks a bit too much like one of those plasticene statues of "the Hulk" you see at comic-shops, and things like helicopter inserts have a video-game quality to them. Everything about it is fine, but I don't think the film will suffer on the small screen. You don't need to spend full-bore on The Incredible Hulk to get the most out of it. The decision is economical, rather than artistic, and for that, The Incredible Hulk goes down a notch.

"Hulk...SMAAAASH!"

* Face it, "The Incredible Hulk" is "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (in the comic book and the first film, the transformation is accidental, while in the TV series and this film, Banner does it to himself). And it's always creeped me out a bit that you could make a "hero" out of "Hyde." But combined with the "poor, poor monster" aspects of Frankenstein (Kirby's early flat-topped Hulk looked an awful lot like Karloff), and the TV series' driving it further, by using "The Fugitive's" running victim conceit, you could tame the brute.

 

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"Thor Thubject  (It's Hammerin' Time!)"
or
"Natalie Portman's Post-Oscar Slump, Part 2"

Never having been a fan of the comic, I could therefore approach the introduction of Thor to the movies without bias—I couldn't argue about the graphics on the hammer, or whether they followed the comics-mythology well, whether the casting was appropriate (they do well with what they got for material, and star Chris Hemsworth does a fine bellow just this side of Brian Blessed in his early, primal days).

But, as a movie, there's nothing too fresh about Thor, in fact, it reminded me a lot of Superman II, but with better architecture (designed by the amazing Bo Welch) with its super-beings walking through a hick-burgh doing derring deeds (in this case, battling a Gort-like robot with a furnace grate for a face-plate—it's one of the genuinely cool things about this one), some dicey flying sequences that look a little flat and the big plot-holes in story-logic (if he could do that THEN, why couldn't he do it before?), and a little too much Unexplainium in how things happen and why.

By now, the Marvel films have become formulaic, let me count the ways: 1) love interest—which feels a bit tacked onto Thor (shouldn't there be an Asgardian demi-goddess he should be attached to?); 2) Stan Lee cameo (mercifully short); 3) cross-characterizations and Marvel Universe details (S.H.I.E.L.D. is back with Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and a post-credits sneak with Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (which doesn't amount to much, as there aren't any other super-heroes in it, and seems bottled up as it involves Stellan Skarsgård's research scientist and Loki, played by Tom Hiddleston), Stark Industries is mentioned a couple times and there's an intriguing sneak peak of another Avenger in the film, (played by an Oscar nominee) and three action set-pieces that involve a lot of hammering, lots of ice-giants who all seem instantly shatterable and not much of a threat, despite some gratuitous growling (Colm Feore is pretty much unrecognizable as the King of the giants), and a lotta leaping with single bounds.

Kenneth Branagh directs with an emphasis on swoops over spires for 3-D effects, ornate throne rooms full of pixelated somethings or other, and a curious propensity for dutch angles (I don't believe there's such a thing as Norse angles).  When Thor is at his most boastful, there is a tinge of Branagh's own Shakespearean projection, and Thor's brother Loki serves as an Iago-like presence throughout. 

But, it ain't Shakespeare. The script wheels between the flat-nothing desert of New Mexico that seems to attract a lot of things falling from the Heavens (make that "The Seven Realms"—one of which is called "Anaheim") and the castles built on nothingness of the Asgardians, ruled over by Odin Allfather (played by Anthony Hopkins in his "elderly King" mode, although he has flashes of interestingness here and there). Natalie Portman tries her best with the romantic sub-plot, but it's a "nothing-girl-friend" role and her sections have a slight "blah-ness" to them, though they do try to punch it up with some wacky banter from a wacky intern (Kat Dennings). Thor feels like a second-rate Marvel movie, like the "Hulk" movies or the "Fantastic Four" films (but several steps above Howard the Duck*). Try as they might to make it relatable, the scale just fails to register as something that humans have any business being a part of...or even caring about. I found myself uninvolved and not caring. Thor might be a hit this weekend, but it's more of a myth.

* Ya know, I'm amazed that George Lucas hasn't done a CG overhaul of HTD.  Yeah, it wouldn't make it any better, but at least it wouldn't look so clunky. 

Update to the above: George Lucas isn't doing one, but evidently Marvel Studios is thinking about it —Howard showed up in Guardians of the Galaxy.

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"I Really Don't Understand What All the Fuss is About"
or
"Is There a Point to All This, Because There Needs to be a Point!"

Marvel's Thor was a necessary part of The Avengers puzzle—the Norse God is a little minor-ish when compared to A-listers like "Spider-man" or "Captain America" (in the comic world, anyway, where the same "minor-league" status could be said for Iron Man) and is usually relegated to second row in group shots. That first movie was a bit "iffy" despite a Shakesperean director (Kenneth Branagh) and a rather breath-taking conceptualization of Vanaheim. It took Joss Whedon, though, to throw a couple of good lines into Thor's mouth (without him turning into a jokey punster) and making a grand villain out of Tom Hiddleston's Loki—so grand, in fact, that they brought him back for the second Thor movie, Thor: the Dark World.

This film is part of the "Marvel: Phase Two," which I translate to "We take advantage of The Avengers success by trying to make hay on individual characters until The Avengers 2 comes along." Good strategy, that. But there's the danger of watering down any anticipation of that next film if they don't show some promise in the second installments, which already showed signs of rust in Iron Man 3. Even if you're Thor, lightning doesn't always strike twice in the same franchise.

Thor 2 (if we can call it that) is quite a bit lighter in tone than the first film, the first one being rather stuffy, as if  any humor would possibly blow the Norse mythology segments away in a puff of whimsy. No, it was taking its playbook from Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy where the heroes are rustic and the villains are really vile looking and the violence is over-the-top, but not so over the top as to risk an "R" rating.

In lieu of a program, clip and save this
 handy diagram of the Thor Universe

It also compares to TLOTR by sharing the propensity for using the first six minutes or so of the film to shoe-horn as much detailed exposition intoned with doomed gravitas as can be wedged in before the title card. "Long before the birth of Light," Anthony Hopkins' Odin informs us, "there was darkness. From the darkness, came the dark elves." That's quite a jump, but then, we have to find out about the Aether (everything in the Marvel Universe seems to be a common term spelled wrong), the Kursed on Svartalfheim, and the 5,000 year configuration of the nine Realms, at which point evil with a capital "E" can take out all nine of them without having to make it a bank-shot. Malekith (because everybody needs to have a name that sounds like a lisp) and who is played by an unrecognizable Christopher Eccleston* is the leader of the Dark Elves and wants the Aether all for himself, so that he can destroy the nine Realms because...well, I don't know why, it seems like a really dumb thing to do, akin to crapping where you eat.

And at that point, I didn't care. I just wanted something familiar so that I could stand any chance of following the movie. Now, the last time I saw the Thor character, he was in The Avengers movie, and some mention is made here of "New York," especially by gal-pal Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who uses it 1) as part of a "why didn't you write me for two years?" hectoring of Thor (Chris Hemsworth, not so stodgy this time) and 2) a chance to lash out at Loki (Hiddleston) as if he personally took out her favorite pizza cart on Fifth (and he gets a chance to do his version of the line from The Dark Knight: "[She's got some fight in her]. I like that."). Plus, Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgaard) has been acting strangely—making international news by stripping naked with some sort of stick-devices at Stonehenge that are supposed to do some sort of astral plane alignment or some sort of something, or maybe nothing as he's a bit of a raving lunatic at this point (His excuse: "I've had a God in my head. I don't recommend it" Geez, Doc have you watched TBN lately?).

Meantime, the already-mentioned Loki is imprisoned in As-Gitmo, where, when he isn't using his quick-change ability, he's sulking and throwing illusory daggers at people, babbling contradictory dialogue ("You know, I've always loved our little talks because...actually I haven't"). That's some trickster. As with Hensworth's Thor, Hiddleston's Loki actually had become an interesting character in The Avengers movie, and although he's still a little devil, you begin to think that his motivations, if not his brains, are a little scrambled. He does provide a couple of little quick-changes in a walk-and-talk out of Asgard, one of which might be considered a cameo appearance. He also provides the big "question mark" of the film, that is one of those things that the film-makers will either resolve, or, if they have bigger flounder to fry, will just dismiss with a line somewhere down the road.

Speaking of which, there could be considered three "stingers"—the convention of mid and post-credit "tags" in the Marvel super-hero films—in Thor: the Dark World, that have decreasing importance, but increasing complexity (how many of these things are they going to have, not that Brian Tyler's score isn't rather fun to listen to, but sometimes I have better things to do than watch all the credits). There is the "stinger" that ends the film, and confuses the issue of what was going on; there is the second "stinger," after Blur Studio's main credits, that serves as a preview for another Marvel production**—in this case, Guardians of the Galaxy with a look at Benicio del Toro's "Collector" (and we'll just say two words: "tonal shift"); finally, a third stinger at the very end of the movie that's purely for "shippers" and has an "after-thought" joke, much like the "shawarma" scene from The Avengers. There's nothing essential to wait for, if you have a ride waiting or a train to catch.

Throw in some ramps and Asgard could look like one of Carmine Infantino's futuristic cities.

So, summing up, Thor: the Dark World is generally more entertaining than the last one, but not entertaining, realm-changing, or artistic enough to make it rise above the Rental category. Characters are born, characters die, and the Universe is returned to the same point it was at in the beginning of the movie, not unlike episodic TV. Nothing major is going to happen until somebody's contract runs out. In the meantime, it looks good, fulfills the action quotient, without going over the line (Hello, Man of Steel) to the point where you think it might be better not to have superheroes "saving the day" when they're destroying the infrastructure. It does suffers from the Marvel "I-don't-know-but-it-sure-is-big" syndrome, where there are no rules, and merely randomness in phenomena that just show up, make a big noise and then *poof* go away, leaving us to mull over our shawarma or bowl of "Shreddies." There is no order to the Marvel Universe (as much as the tick-tock clockwork of the art direction says there is), and it's easier to take a page from "The X-Files" and just leave it unexplained. Or come up with a convenient new super-power like "amnesia kiss" to take care of it. Sometimes, rather than thinking through a problem, it's just better to hit it with a hammer to make you think it's getting better.

"I've won an Oscar; why am I in this Moooo-viiiiie?"

The comics Malekith

* Actually, I recognized him as Eclipso, a character from the DC Universe.  And you'd never recognize him as the Ninth Doctor. "Doctor who?" you ask.  "Exactly," I say.

** Although that's completely arbitrary, nothing is set in celluloid stone, and the solar wind is more stable than the tides of movie marketing—the cosmic villain Thanos appeared in The Avengers, may appear in Guardians of the Galaxy (he did) and definitely won't be in Avengers 2.

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Now that that's done, one is worried about how to write about super-hero movies in the future. There is a sameness to them that creeps from film to film—the mythos, the "givens" of selfless good and illogical (and often impractical) evil, the unquestioning quest for revenge, the brooding sky-scapes, the heavy air of portent, and the elaborate CGI. One feels like they're in the process of grading different brands of chocolate. They may be bitter or sweet, but they're all chocolate.

So, in the future, as the tent-poles of the franchise circus increase in number, we're going to do reviews of super-hero movies with a basic form—a Comic-Book Movie Matrix, that should distill what the movie's about, where it fits in its own little universe, and how successful it is—as a movie-movie, and maybe as a representative of that character.

Take a look at the list, and if you have any suggestions for what might be a critical consideration, drop a comment.

1) Is the movie version of the character recognizable from the graphic/comics version?

2) Is the plot something that someone who doesn't know the comic can come in and still understand?

3) If not, how complicated is the back-story that is provided in the movie?

4) What's wrong this time, plot-wise?

5) Is the story important enough to deserve its own movie, or is this one just "marking time?"

6) In relation to 5): Major villain or minor villain?

7) Is the back-story and motivation the same as in the graphic/comics version?

8) How radically different is the setting of the movie version to the graphic/comics version?

9) What compromises have been made to the comics version to make it "play" on-screen?

10) Is there a "Noooooooo!" moment? Yes? No?

11) Any easter-eggs for the true fans?

12) Is there a stinger? Is it worth waiting for?  Where does it occur?

 

Really, this is just to increase my Internet "hits"
Jaimie Alexander as Sif in Thor: The Dark World