cinema and all

Time for me to own up. I never thought this movie would happen. The first Hellboy wasn’t exactly a box office smash and let’s face it, selling a superhero movie about a character who looks like Satan was never a sure thing to begin with. Yet I’ve never been happier to be wrong. The original movie showed tremendous potential, the character of Hellboy was flat out fantastic, needing only a better story, preferably one with fewer random, badly CGI’d tentacles, to roam around in. Hellboy II: The Golden Army delivers that, along with more of the charming, growling, cigar-chewing character depth which made Hellboy so damn engaging to begin with.

Director/writer Guillermo del Toro is going to get a lot of the credit, but it’s Ron Perlman, the guy under Hellboy’s red makeup, who makes this universe work. His performance is once again, nothing short of Oscar caliber. With Perlman under the prosthetics Hellboy isn’t just some freakish creation, he’s a living, breathing person who just happens to be really red. His demonic appearance means plenty of personal problems, and more than once Del Toro goes hook line and sinker for the well-meaning Frankenstein versus pitchfork wielding villagers comparison. But lumbering brute Hellboy is not. With or without horns, he’s the kind of guy you’d want to hang out with. Forget Batman or Spider-Man. If I had to have a superhero friend, Hellboy is the only one I’d want to plop down on a couch and drink beer with.

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The religious fervor and hype which attached itself to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has burned itself out. You won’t see Prince Caspian shown at Church’s in place of Sunday sermons, they’ve already taken what they wanted from Narnia and now we’re simply left with the magic of C.S. Lewis’s imaginative, fantasy world. Whether or not he’s playing the Christ figure, Aslan still roars, and louder than ever.

More than any of the other “Narnia” books on which Disney’s movies have been or will be based, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is a war movie. Making what is essentially Narnia’s Saving Private Ryan work in the context of a PG rated family movie had to have been challenging, but director Andrew Adamson pulls it off by riding that PG rating right to the edge. In the process, Narnia loses some of the innocence and wonder that buoyed along the first film, but replaces it with carefully thought out meditation on what it really means to grow up.

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A love letter to science-fiction films of old with a modern environmentalist message, WALL-E is another winning confection from Pixar, the folks who have made an art out of wrapping adult themes in childish whimsy and coming out with movies that please both elements. Starring a box shaped little robot with more than a passing resemblance to E.T., WALL-E is quite possibly the cutest Pixar hero ever, despite the fact that he’s a trash compactor with eyes. A story centering on a wordless robot could be cold and uninviting, but not in Pixar’s capable hands. Never has a robot been this compassionate: WALL-E’s got heart.

The story of the film is deceptively simple. WALL-E (Waste Allocator Load Lifter - Earth Class) is the last of his kind, a robot created by the Buy-N-Large Corporation to clean up the piles of trash left on Earth by the conspicuous consumption of human beings. The humans themselves have evacuated the now-toxically trashed Earth for a Eden-like spaceship habitat called the Axiom (also created by BNL corp.), where they spend their days sipping meals out a cup and reclining on floating easy chairs. Though all his robotic compatriots have long since compacted their last, WALL-E continues plugging away at his job in an endearingly human way. He wakes up each day to the chime of a Macintosh starting up (score for the iFolks! Thanks Steve!) and heads out for another day among the trash heaps. He brings a battered coolie along with him to save the things he likes: a ping-pong paddle, a plastic dinosaur toy, a light bulb, a small seedling saved in an old boot. He ends each day in his home, watching an old video tape of Hello Dolly! - an important motif throughout the film. Read the rest

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Is it so much to ask producers to take a tiny fraction of those tens of millions of dollars they’re throwing at computer generated graphics and hand it over to a writer and director capable of making a movie that isn’t a tedious waste of time? Like so many movies that have come before it, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is stuffed full of special effects (none of which are all that eye-popping or adrenaline pumping) but lacks any of the great qualities that made the first Mummy film a wild, entertaining ride.

For that matter, I have to wonder why on earth they even bothered to make this movie part of the Mummy storyline in the first place. It could have worked far better as a completely separate tale. Instead, the characters that worked so well in ancient Egyptology have been carried over to Asian mythology and turned into lackluster drones. Neutered, sedated and lobotomized, they’re miserable shadows of the fun characters they used to be.  Read the rest

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