Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

Since last Thursday, I’ve seen more films in the theater than it feels like I have in the whole last month. It’s been nice, and I thought I’d spitball my thoughts on everything I’ve seen before I head underground again.

HULK

dir. Ang Lee

scr. John Turman and Michael France and James Schamus

It’s always funny to me when I hear people talk about how AICN and Marvel must have some kind of “deal.” One of the guy who has been working hardest to try and advance that theory is David Poland, who went to not one, not two, but THREE separate free press screenings of HULK before it opened. Y’know how many I was invited to? Zilch. Zero. I mean, I tried to get into one. I pulled whatever strings I thought I could pull. And in every case, I came up empty. Shit, maybe we’re so far in Avi Arad’s pocket that he forgot he put us there.

At any rate, I just ended up buying 12 tickets for the 7:10 show opening night at the Cinerama Dome, one of my favorite theaters in the whole world. Me and a whole mess of friends planned an evening of it, and I stopped trying to work out a way to see it early. Then, late Thursday night, I called John Robie to ask him something completely unrelated to HULK, something I forgot to ask because of the question he cut me off with: “So... are you going to the midnight show?”

When I bought those Friday night tickets, there was no pre-Friday midnight show scheduled yet. I wouldn’t have bought them if there were, since I wasn’t even sure I was going to be in town that night. Robie told me they had just added the show, though, and there were still plenty of tickets left. “No one knows about it.” The six-year-old Marvel freak inside of me couldn’t resist, no matter how early I had to get up for business on Friday morning. “Dude... get me one.”

The lobby of the Arclight was surprisingly quiet when I showed up about a quarter till. I recognized many of the faces I saw in the small crowd packed into the first few rows of the balcony and most of the floor. Quite a bit of the Dome was empty. Still, thanks to the assigned seating, the ushers wouldn’t let me sit with Robie and Gregor Samsa. As I made my way to my seat, I spoke to several people I knew. This year, I’ve seen the same hardcore geeks at every pre-opening midnight show for every big summer geek movie. At the Chinese, at the Arclight, at the Grove. No one hands out written invitations or coordinates anything, but still... every time... there’s Brian Posehn, front and freakin’ center. I settled in, sleepy but excited and curious as all hell. The next night, I was thrilled to take everyone back so I could see it again and so I could talk to my friends about it afterwards.

As long as I’ve been at AICN, there’s been a HULK movie in some stage of development. In some ways, seeing that first screening felt like a dream. It was one of those things I figured would never actually happen, like INDY 4 or FREDDY VS. JASON. Wait... I’m sensing a trend... my god, if the impossible keeps happening at this rate, I may end up seeing my own name onscreen soon.

I thought the end result was well worth the wait, a film that is alternately silly and sad and spectacular, a schizophrenic spectacle with a chamber drama heart. The things I love about the film totally outweigh the things that left me cold, and with each day that goes by, as HULK sinks further in, I find my admiration for Ang Lee’s damn fool experiment growing. His work with cinematographer Fredrick Elmes (BLUE VELVET) and editor Tim Squyres (who’s been with Lee on every film he’s ever made) is bold, assertive, and seems to be hotly dividing viewers. Me... I loved it. The film has a pulse, a heartbeat, and it’s painted with one of the richest palettes I’ve seen in any film all summer. The Hulk makes green look gooooooood, to paraphrase Will Smith.

Eric Bana and Jennifer Connelly have largely thankless roles. Most of the material between them makes up the “boring” first hour. Thing is, I didn’t think it was boring. At all. It was too busy being weird as shit to be boring. From that first loony montage with the two guys doing their best impressions of young Nick Nolte and young Sam Elliott to that last shot of Bana with the big Jesus beard and the frog on his head, this film walks the fine line between dead serious and completely deranged. Jellyfish swarming over a desert floor like iridescent mushroom clouds. Green and purple swarms of genetic information. A Hulk Poodle. I repeat... a goddamn Hulk Poodle. An ending as cosmic and far out as the strangest ‘70’s comics I cut my teeth on. The absolutely laugh out loud crazy death of Talbot. These are the touches that make the film for me, but I can easily see how they might be the exact flourishes that turn some other audiences off.

And then there’s Nolte.

I think it’s safe to describe his work in the film as “screaming bugfuck nuts.” Which is, I think, the point.

I moderated Nolte earlier this year in a live Q&A in Santa Monica after a screening of THE GOOD THIEF, and one of the things I asked him is why he took a role in HULK when he’s been so notorious for turning down role after role in potential blockbusters over the years.

”Well,” he growled, “I told ‘em I’d play SUPERMAN back in ’78, but only if they’d let me play him clinically schizophrenic.”

The audience laughed for a moment, but he glared them back into silence. “I’m not kidding.”

Seriously. He’s not kidding.

My favorite Nolte moment in the film is also the place where it feels like the whole enterprise has hopped the tracks and gone just plumb loco. You know the scene I mean, too, even if I don’t say it. It’s like a community theater production of August Strindberg’s version of HULK suddenly. Nolte and Bana. The stage. Two spotlights. No score at all. And Bana’s basically just sitting there shaking the whole time. That means it’s all up to Nick. And what does he do? He just dives in and bathes in the crazy. He starts chewing the scenery. LITERALLY. The scene is astonishingly goofy... and yet... that’s why it works for me.

My favorite performance in the film is by the title character, the Hulk himself. I cannot fully express how much I enjoyed watching every move the Hulk made. He is strikingly designed, an impossible mass of muscle and angles, and he manages to convey real depth of emotion. He’s at his best in the rampage that leads him from Desert Base to San Francisco. The way he responds to each fresh obstacle, the way he discovers new limits, or lack of limits, almost by accident... it convinced me that he was a living, breathing thing. I love the moments where he wobbles, almost out of control, but figuring it out as he goes. I love how he closes his eyes, lets the wind whip at his face. His pure emotional pleasure at the act of flying (and, yeah, I know he’s technically just jumping, but puh-leeeeze...) makes me think of Miyazaki and the best moments of KIKI or NAUSICAA or PORCO ROSSO. The Hulk is a thing of nature, not of science, and that choice bothers some viewers. They like their superpowers delivered in a box, nice and tidy. Peter Parker + radioactive spider = Spider-Man. 1-2-3.

That’s not what Lee’s after, though. He seems to say here that we’ve all got the Hulk inside us. David Banner accidentally triggered something in his son, tampered with some primal, important switch that shouldn’t be tampered with. He gave an exit to Bruce’s id. He paved the way for the Hulk to come out. The accident here is just a catalyst, part of a process. The movie’s version of the Hulk breaks the carefully drawn line that has always existed in the Marvel universe between heroes born of technology and the mutants, born to it. Maybe it’s that simple transgression that rubs so many fans the wrong way.

I love that Universal’s embraced the controversy. They’re not running from the mixed reviews; they’re delighting in them. The new radio spots say, “See the film everyone’s arguing about.” Right on. Love it or hate it, HULK is worth seeing. I love it when a filmmaker slips a freakshow over on a studio, like Tim Burton’s BATMAN RETURNS or... well... Tim Burton’s MARS ATTACKS. No one but Tim Burton would ever think to make those films that way, for better or for worse, and it’s the same way with Ang Lee’s HULK. The film is a visual and aural assault on par with Godfrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI.

I never expected that the word that would best sum up HULK for me would be “beautiful.”

SPELLBOUND

dir. Jeffrey Blitz

I have written before, at length, about the special place in my heart for good documentary films. At their best, they are windows into other lives that somehow impart something that we can understand, no matter what our differences. Sunday afternoon, I debated between this and CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS, and ended up choosing this just because it’s been out longer and will probably leave theaters first. This is one of those warm, human little snapshots that stick with you for days afterwards. Jeffrey Blitz, a first-timer with a sharp eye and a big heart, follows eight kids as they prepare for the National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. We meet the kids, we meet their families, and we get a glimpse at how these very different personalities handle this one particular pressure.

I was always too much of a smarty pants to do well in spelling bees. I would do great at first, and then as soon as got smug about doing well, I’d screw up and get booted out. It takes a special kind of kid to do really well in those competitions, and the film’s true brilliance is the way Blitz gets each of the kids to open up and reveal themselves. Wait... actually, that’s not true. One of the kids, Neil, is a total stiff on-camera, but his father more than makes up for it. Seems fitting, since the kid seems to have no interest in spelling. It’s his father who is obsessed with victory and excellence and the value of hard work.

In all the other cases, though, we meet smart kids who are fascinated by words. They are self-driven by a variety of motivators, and the fun comes from figuring them out. There’s Angela, whose Mexican father snuck across the border into this country so that she’d have a shot at a good education. He’s never learned English in his 20 years in the country, but his silent pride in his daughter’s accomplishment is quite touching. There’s Nupur, the sweet-faced Indian girl who loves the violin, who is amazed by herself each time she spells something right, a stealth prodigy. There’s Harry, the hyperactive overemotional kid who opens the film with his showstopping performance on the ESPN coverage of the Bee. There’s Ted, a lurching Yeti of a kid who just doesn’t seem comfortable in his own skin, and whose whole family seems confused by his obvious intelligence. There’s Emily, the princess of the piece, a little Veruca Salt in training, all sunshine when she’s on a horse or practicing for the Bee, but whose competitive nature really comes out as the film progresses. There’s April, the little sourpuss who convinces herself early on that she won’t win, but who seems to be unstoppable as the competition wears on. And there’s Angela, the black girl from D.C.’s inner city, who has one of the sweetest dispositions of any kid I’ve ever seen, an unquenchable spirit.

One of the film’s canniest moves is the late introduction of Georgie. See, up until Georgie comes along, we’re naturally assuming that one of the kids we’re following is going to win. I mean, that’s how films like this work, right? But in Washington, at the National finals, we meet last year’s fourth-place winner, a doughy home-schooled little assassin with an Elmer Fudd speech impediment. This is Georgie. And Georgie, who is younger than basically everyone else there, is determined that he’s going to win this year. All the other kids are suitably afraid of Georgie. I love how his arrival suddenly ratchets up the film’s suspense. We want out of “our kids” to win as we watch, not this Georgie kid. That’s the mark of great documentary filmmaking. Blitz makes us care about each one of these kids and really invest in them. This is as effective a sports film as ROCKY or THE KARATE KID or SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER, and I highly recommend you check it out when you get the chance.

28 DAYS LATER

dir. Danny Boyle

scr. Alex Garland

I am of mixed opinion on Danny Boyle’s work so far. SHALLOW GRAVE was sick fun that holds up. TRAINSPOTTING makes me drunk on movies every time I see it. A LIFE LESS ORDINARY is like the hangover the morning after, a painful mess. THE BEACH is a noble failure, and his small films STRUMPET and VACUUMING NUDE IN PARADISE were minor gems, promising if inconsequential.

Walking into 28 DAYS LATER on Tuesday night, all I wanted was a decent genre exercise. Both the Harrys I talk to most often – Knowles and Lime – had prepped me for the shameless Romero theft, so I was more interested in the energy of the film than I was in the story being told. And, yes, you could point to material in this that is reminiscent of all three of Romero’s films, but oddly, that didn’t really matter to me once things got going. Thanks to Alex Garland’s lean, smart screenplay and Boyle’s crackling good directorial work, what I got was one of the big surprises of 2003 for me so far.

I’d seen the film’s iconic first ten minutes several times already, but that’s probably a good thing, since I found myself more amazed by how good the DV looks on the bigscreen than interested in what, specifically, was going on. This is important cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle, a milestone of sorts. Anyone looking to shoot a microbudget film would do well to study this movie. The image quality isn’t a problem; it’s a blessing. It feels gritty. It feels immediate. It feels real.

The performances are strong across the board. Cillian Murphy, Naomie Harris, Megan Burns, and Brendan Gleeson are all excellent as survivors of the Rage virus epidemic, and when Christopher Eccleston shows up with his soldiers later in the film, there’s some great ensemble work on display. These people are all shell-shocked, still just coming to grips with the end of the world. I’ve always been fascinated with the character of Lord Humungous in THE ROAD WARRIOR. I’ve asked Harry Lime before, “What do you think that guy was doing before the world ended? And what made him decide that it was time for the hockey mask and the bondage gear?”

The world in 28 DAYS LATER hasn’t decayed quite that far yet, but it feels like it’s on its way. It feels hopeless, truly without escape. It successfully paints a picture of life upside down, a waking nightmare that’s still sinking in for those who are trapped in it. It’s real horror... and it’s a damn good film.

I was going to try to finish up today with my review of SINBAD, since I saw it this evening and it’s still fresh. I was also going to try to work in some DVD reviews. But the sun’s coming up, and I’ve got pages to make today. I guess all that is going to have to wait until next time. Until then...