Coverage of what is truly interesting in the film world

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Hulky Talky. BlogNosh 06/12/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 2 months ago
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  • “If Iron Man was about America’s power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home,” writes Charlie Jane Anders in a long review at io9. It’s about the impossibility of transforming young men into “super-soldiers” and then expecting them to blend back in.” Related: Anders takes a look at superheroes who can’t have sex, including “Poor Rogue from the X-men. She’s got the cool Susan Sontag hair, and the leather jumpsuit, and the hot boyfriend… but she can never touch anyone.”
  • Anders isn’t exactly ga-ga over New Hulk, but she calls Ang Lee’s version “disastrous.” At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Man, it’s a sad day on our bitterly defended-from-Galactacus earth when an Ang Lee Hulk film is just dismissed outright, and here it is a super and vastly underrated picture. Granted the CGI was a bit cartoony in the previews (I know I laughed at the time) but looked much better in real big screen life.”
  • David Poland bottom lines it: “The truth is, for all its flaws, there is not a single frame of The Incredible Hulk that contains a fragment of the artistry that Ang Lee brought to Hulk. Of course, the film was too long and the psychodrama too thick for most people. But there was true aesthetic beauty. I hate to even pull this one out of the backpack, but Speed Racer? Genius in comparison. Every frame.”

The SmartBuster. BlogNosh 06/11/06

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 2 months ago
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  • 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 vs. The Dweebs

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 2 months ago
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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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Summer Time is Here

Christopher Campbell
By Christopher Campbell posted 4 months ago
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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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