• Glenn Kenny considers that “instant hit”, The Incredible Hulk. “If Edward Norton’s idea, if your idea, if my idea, of an intelligent mainstream genre picture won’t play with the money people, where the hell does that leave anybody’s idea of an intelligent mainstream picture, period?” He raises the issue to Norton himself, but ultimately comes closest to an answer via Jay-Z.
• “It’s not just that there were a lot of black and white movies last year — it’s that most of them were fucking awesome,” writes Rich at FourFour. “Among them: Perspolis, Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!…Killer of Sheep (a 30+ year-old bit of brilliance that didn’t see official release till last year), I’m Not There, in part (and, my opinion, the b&w parts were the only ones worth watching), and Frank Darabont’s preferred cut of The Mist. But my favorite black-and-white flick of ‘07 and possibly of all time is Control.” What follows is a short treatise on that film’s humanity through black and white cinematography; there are a lot of screencaps.
• “When a filmmaker tells a story in such broads strokes, he or she does so because it allows certain ideas to be explored without exposition; when the scope of a story is already understood, already deeply seated in the audience’s understanding of narrative, those audiences are more perceptible to the details and nuances the filmmaker is able to explore and play with within that structure.” David Lowery considers Silent Light at /Hammer to Nail.

Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:

The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”

Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters, Shawn Bowers, after the jump.

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Never mind the fact that my school just let out for spring break. It’s a beautiful 77 degrees in New York City today, the outdoor bars are open and I’m wearing shorts for the first time this year. Plus, the Entertainment Weekly Summer Movie Preview just arrived in my mailbox, giving me the signal that it is officially the blockbuster season. Sure, May 2nd isn’t for two more weeks, when technically Iron Man begins the summer movie stretch (can’t we just pretend The Forbidden Kingdom is the first summer action flick?), but nothing says, “break out the beach ball,” like the bible of blockbuster buzz.

Yet there’s something strange about this year’s issue. There’s a little less marketing-agency-fueled promotion and a little more reality checking. Maybe it’s because these days, thanks to the web, most moviegoers have already heard about the big releases. That would explain why EW devotes most of its two-page spread on The Incredible Hulk to describing its troubles:

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