Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Dangerous Hulk and the Incredible Beauty

So that's a really lame attempt at a eat blog title where I quickly give my thoughts on two films I watched in the last couple of days. Dangerous Beauty which we watched Sunday night and the Incredible Hulk which we just got back from taking the kids too.

Dangerous Beauty as noted before is part of Ali and I's veiwing game the link between Moulin Rouge and Dangerous Beauty being Courteseans. Dangerous Beauty is a favorite film of mine, I love the romanticism of it and the grand poetic nature of the speach. It also contains two great performances those of Catherine McCormack and Rufus Sewell as the star crossed lovers kept apart by their stations in life. The speaches they both make at the end of the film are the type of unabashedly nonrealistic deeply felt declarations that I swoon for. The sort of speaches that in the wrong hands are laughable but in the right hands sore off of the screen and into your chest. McCormack in particular is fine in this moment of bold and Inquisition defying speach, but is equally impressive and effective in quieter scenes. One scene in particular has her display on her face without words various looks and feelings as her Mother describes them. This is a bold, and sensous film highly reccomended A-.

The Incredible Hulk, I've been hearing some more or less it doesn't suck but it's no Iron Man reactions to this one. Maybe that helped, because I was pleasantly surprised. I liked this quite a bit, it's better than Ang Lee's version that is for sure. Is it as good as Iron Man, not quite, but it doesn't fall too far short of it either. Liv Tyler is the weak link performance wise, but it doesn't really hinge on her and she isn't terrible. Smartly this Hulk completely ignores the first film and creates a new backstory which is given during the opening credits, the great thing about this is it's closer to the old TV series than the last movie in fact the sequence has shots and bits that are almost identicle to the series opening sequence. There are other nice homages to the series, quite obviously the studio has chosen to distance this film from the previous and try instead to associate it with the popular TV series, a wise move. The CGI work in this one is also much better, it's still CGI but it feels more real. I think this is much much closer to the film fans were expecting and wanted 5 years ago. It's a cross between the comics and the old TV Series as opposed to the comics and a Haiku.
B

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Rob. Have you seen Kinky Boots on DVD? A nice little comedy.

Love your blog, and expecially love the blog on your dad and on Moulin Rouge.

NoName

Dunkproductions said...

I have not seen Kinky it is in one of my Netflix queues though. I'll scoot it closer to the top, thanks for the suggestion. And thanks for reading.