HULK (2003) *** This is a film worth talking about. No, really, some films just don't lend themselves, but this one does. The production is both intricate and immaculate: Ang Lee's comic strip styled multi-screen bugged me a little bit at first, but it either works itself into the narrative better as the film goes along or I got used to it. And that's only one of the more obvious idiosyncrasies of a film that goes layers deep in several directions. Yeah, yeah, I know, the artsigentsia would rather take their profound metaphors with footage of suffering debutantes or Nietzsche praying for the edification of a horse that would out-live him, but they're probably in the least need of metaphors anyway: they've fallen into the concept and already see them where they are not. So, what we have here is an elevated, abbreviated, lied about, and pseudo-transcendent comic book flick, delivered in a manner that echoes, not mocks, the Buñuel/Dali flicks, the primary difference being...well, there isn't one of course, primacy is irrelevant to surrealist constructs, which also don't exist, but the thing is that Lee works hard, and employs the subconscious psychedelia in furtherance of the plot, rather than as some portion of an eclipse or front. Is that better? Well, it's a matter of taste, isn't it? It certainly is for the comic book set. No small proportion of whom must have felt left out in the cold, incidentally, and for heaven's sake don't fall for the advertising schlock that this is a family movie. Your kids will be scarred for life. Yeah, yeah, they will anyway, but less. The main character is unquestionably Lee, pulling levers like the Wizard of Oz, but all of the acting is noteworthy as well, for one reason or another. Erik Bana is absolutely terrible, for example, there's no point in even looking at him, and even when he turns big and green and gets all computer graphic'd he doesn't look like the Hulk right. Then there's Jennifer Connelly, who would seem entirely unnecessary as the love interest. I mean, one of the things about the Hulk was that he was a loner, right? Yeah, but Lee uses the dynamic to raise some issues, I mean, the central metaphoric thrust is either: (a) Hulk is, here, in his intellectually aggrandized form, a representation of the necessity of overcoming parental flaws, or (b) political ones, right? Lee works metaphor A effectively, but without as much depth as a psychotic convention would want, and metaphor B lines up nicely with the desert music but less so with the South American implications. Or does it? Isn't it fair to suggest that surrealist metaphors need be neither straight nor consistent? Yeah, it's a comic book movie that encourages you to think such things. Anyway, Jennifer, some of her lines are so bad that she can't salvage them and no one could have, but I think some of the more bitter takes are intentional posturing towards those comic book looks-back-over-the-shoulder that involve young men in the interior concerns of women. That's not a bad thing. Sam Elliott is consistently excellent as the embodiment of most of the good, and some of the bad, characteristics that Big Brother induces on a daily basis in the realms of the lost (see military, corporate), but never rises to near the levels that bizarre but painlessly inconsistent Nick Nolte...I mean, that scene with the speech and spotlights and wire-taps and electricity and dark night and generational angst...that's a fucking scene, man! So, anyway, see it, but be aware that the main things that the big green guy is going to run around busting up are in your cerebral cortex.
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