bruceb

Saw it this evening, thanks to Netflix and a friend's persistent urging, and I really liked it a lot. It was classic, straight-up adventure fantasy, and spectacular from one end to the other. I saw things I've never seen on screen, heard echoes of the parts I remember happily from the book, and just really felt it all hung together very, very well. There are times when sticking to the fundamentals lets you hit a whole lot of archetypal emotional notes, and for me tonight, at least, the movie hit 'em, and often and well at that.

This is going into the list of movies to get for comfort-food re-viewing. It was exciting, beautiful, dramatic, melodramatic, and fun. Precisely what is wanted.
 

My general catching up continues.

Short form: Wow. Amazing improvement from individually small changes.

Now, I'm a big ol' Alex Proyas fan, and make no bones about it. But it's true that Dark City wasn't quite the film it felt like it could and should have been. And now it is.

The most obvious change is the absence of narration. We open with space, the city, and the world's least wholesome doctor since the passing of Drs. Mabuse and Caligari, the credits, and John Murdoch waking up. Explanations come later.

But it's not just that. There are a lot of little edits. There are two short moments where we see the daughter of the prostitute Murdoch leaves the automat. There are extra lines of dialogue here and there. The music's been remastered. It's very much the kind of revision that makes good work excellent.

Now I've seen Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, and glad I am of both.

Iron Man is such a jewel. My pick for best superhero movie yet? Maybe so; it certainly doesn't have a lot of competition. This is the role Downey was born to play, in the way that Shelly Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl. I was impressed at how smoothly the origin updated, and of course I'm pretty much always up for corporate schemers as the villains. And the action. Wow. The action. I am in looooove with the flight sequences. I was also pleased to see the secret identity thing go out the window. Yeah, it's a venerable supers convention, but it just plain doesn't work for a lot of characters anymore, I think. Have I ever mentioned how much of a sucker I am for building-and-testing sequences? It's true. Give me good forging and experimentation and I'll follow you anywhere. So this was pretty much gadget porn for Bruces.

Thumbs up, and then another one, and the robots will put some more up.

Incredible Hulk is not that reliably excellent, but it worked very well for me. In the first big fight, in the Brazilian bottling plant, I suddenly realized that they were giving me reveals paced as if in a horror movie. And really, it's a werewolf movie. The escalating revelations, and wow, the sense that transformation hurts, this is classic horror-movie territory appropriated well. It occurs to me that I haven't seen a lot of use of that idea in the comic, and now I want to. Roth and Hurt were fun as antagonists, and Roth suggests someone who's both uncovering layers of suppressed crazy and finding new ones to dig through, which is a good act. The "days without incident" timers were very effective—the scrolldown from 158 to 0 had a nice little emotional wallop in it, I thought. Oh, and the CUNY biologist whose name I'm not remembering, the hyper guy, reminded me so very, very much of people I'd see at Caltech on Seminar Day.

So again, happy thumbs up.

Oh, and two great soundtracks.

This is such a remarkable time to be a superhero fan.