HULK sucked.

Well, the experience of watching the movie sucked, anyway, for a few reasons:

Without much warning, Paul’s friend Pat called around quarter of 2 in the afternoon to say that if we still wanted to go, he’d be by in a few minutes to pick us up. Since Paul and I pretty much have to do things when people with cars want to take us to do them (once again, you may brand me an idiot for moving in with the only other adult in the Western Hemisphere who does not drive), we acquiesced. Pat showed up a few minutes later to drive us, and Paul’s friend/neighbor Jeff (another one of Paul’s buds I don’t like much, but I put up with because he’s Paul’s friend and no one has asked me my opinion) over to a 2 o’clock Saturday matinee of The Hulk.

Yeah, I know. Two o’clock matinee on Saturday? Of a comic book movie? WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?

In my defense, while I’m smart enough, when unemployed, to see such movies (nearly any new movie, in fact) during the workday sometime between Monday and Friday, that was in Tampa, at the Westshore Mall, the newest and probably most popular multiplex in a city of 308,000 deeply weird people. (Not weird in any good, interesting way, just weird in a kind of Southern-fried, neo-Hispanic, sexually schizophrenic and deeply geographically insecure kind of way, because Tampa honestly believes that it deserves to be the Next Great American City, and no one who lives there seems to ever consider whether or not they really WANT to be a Great American City, given how goddam unlivable New York, Chicago, and L.A. all are.) Out here in Zephyrhills, which is sort of like a cow-town where forty years ago the City Council decided to stop farming cows and start farming elderly seasonal residents, I honestly didn’t expect a big mad insane weekend rush to see The Hulk. It was dumb of me, I suppose. I guess I just figured these hicks would still be deeply suspicious of them new-fangled moving picture thangs, at least, on some subconscious level.

However, the local six cinema multiplex (which is a cinderblock building doubtless originally built to store tractor parts in, that some enterprising soul bought and put in enough interior partitions to create six somewhat cramped chambers wherein movies could be projected, albeit on quite small screens through fairly lousy speakers) was as a-swarm with cow-eyed rural residents anxious to see various films (including The Hulk) as a great big dog turd in your uncle's front yard would be with flies around noon time on a sunny day, and as we showed up at 1:57 or thereabouts for a 2:00 matinee, well, you wouldn’t think it would make any sense at all for the other three guys in my group to insist on standing in a concessions line at least thirty people long, because, as Paul put it, “I need something to drink”. (In addition to all three being heavy smokers, Paul, Pat and Jeff all also seem to be addicted to sugary carbonated caffeine. If Paul goes a half hour without a Mountain Dew I swear to God he starts to shake like a junkie in a waiting room at a methadone clinic. Whereas most people’s largest bill is rent, I think Paul’s largest bill is easily feeding his addictions… pot, cigarettes, and soda. He’s constantly running up to the little corner store for more smokes and soda, and he gets really really itchy if he’s out of pot for too long… when he’s well supplied, he’ll smoke out three or four times a day. I personally can’t see any difference between the way he acts when he’s stoned and the way he acts when he’s straight, which may mean he’s never really straight any more… but since I’m not a stoner, I have no expertise and will demur from making guesses, beyond that tentative hypothesis.)

Anyway, they had to stand in line for another five or ten minutes for the privilege of buying vastly over priced movie sodas, which is something else I guess I’ll have to get used to out here, since I never, ever even look at the concession stand when I go to the movies… if I think I’m going to be hungry during the film, I hit the food court and backpack something in. I gather that’s rather verboten out here in cowtown, but at the Westshore Cinemas, they didn’t care.

Anyway, when I realized they were closing the doors of the theater where HULK was showing, I hurried on in, leaving the Three Sodateers to their lengthy concessions-queue, and so I did not miss some really annoyingly and pointlessly dreamlike, rather 70s-esque opening credits, yay for me. (I have a thing, apparently much like Woody Allen does, for having to see an entire movie, from start to finish. If I miss the first few minutes, it ruins it for me, generally.)

Here we come into the first revelation of the difference between going to a movie by yourself (which I’ve been doing for years) and going as part of a group (which I used to do back in college and post-college but have really gotten out of the habit of doing in the last ten or fifteen years of my life): You have to find three or four seats all together, or, as Paul puts it, if the gang is having a fit of homophobia on that particular occasion, you need to find twice that many so each of the Manly Men in your posse can have the anti-gay seat between them.

Well, as I stood in the back of that theater watching the opening credits of The Hulk, I realized there was no way in this particular space-time continuum that we were all going to sit together, because that theater was crammed to the rafters with folks who had, you know, gotten there somewhat prior to the two o’clock start time, and either done their concession stand waiting before the film started, or just sanely skipped it altogether.

I also realized, with steadily increasing levels of appalled horror, that the audience was probably half to 75% comprised of family groups… mommy and daddy and one, two, or sometimes even three squalling little brats all under the age of six.

Look. I understand why mumsy and popsie might mistakenly think they should take their annoying little toddlers to see The Hulk. It is, after all, a comic book movie, one that the producers were obviously very very careful to make sure would not in any way get anything remotely close to an R rating. (Which is a stone waste of Jennifer Connelly, but never mind that now.) Nonetheless, this is a pretty adult movie, dealing with some fairly serious themes, and it has some really unpleasantly graphic violence in it. Plus I personally think if I were four years old and someone took me to see The Hulk on the big screen, I’d have nightmares for months afterward; that was one goddam scary CGI effect, to a toddler, anyway. So if mumsy and popsie thought they were taking their brats to see something like The Rug Rats Destroy A Military Base, well, they were just plain darned wrong. But given that comic books here in our culture are seen as being something strictly for kids, I can understand the misapprehension.

What I do not understand is why parents take kids that age to the movies at all.

Look. Kids this age have attention spans roughly as long as their bladders are voluminous. They are not going to watch the movie. They are going to watch it when something they find interesting is going on on the screen (much of which, in The Hulk, they will also find terrifying). The rest of the time they will talk to their siblings, their parents, the kids in the seats in front of or behind them, or, if they’re really bored, to the fat long haired comics geek sitting next to their family group who really wants to listen to the goddam film instead. They will do this in what a four year old considers to be a ‘quiet’ way, as in, ‘this is how I talk quietly when grown ups don’t want to pay attention to me’, which is not at all the ‘quiet’ way in which four years old talk when they themselves are trying, for the moment, to avoid the attention of grown ups. When they aren’t talking or momentarily looking at the screen, they will be crying, or demanding candy, or saying “I gotta go bafroom daddy I gotta go NOW”, or attempting to escape their parental captors by crawling under the seats either forward or backwards. But what they will not be doing is watching the movie quietly, and that’s the social contract of the movie theater, folks… it’s a communal environment, and when you go there, you sit there and you BE FUCKING QUIET.

I swear to God, nominally intelligent adults who would never even remotely consider playing a boom box during a movie, or carrying on a normally voiced conversation with their friends during a movie, or carrying a constantly squawking parrot into a movie, or running a goddam call center out of a working movie theater, will without a second thought pack up the babies, grab the old ladies, everyone goes, and trundle off to a movie theater.

Tampa now has at least one movie theater where only adults are allowed in, regardless of the rating of the movie being shown. This is a lovely and unintended side effect of the fact that that theater is the only one wet zoned in all of Tampa; you can go up to the concession stand and get a little plastic cup of wine, or a bottle of beer, if you want to pay concession stand prices for such, and because of that, no one under 21 is admitted to the theater under any circumstances.

Now, I don’t drink, and as I recall, the admission prices to that adults only theater are pretty steep, but still, this is a development I would personally love to see sweep our entire culture. Let the goddam kids wait for movies to come out on DVD. Reserve the communal act of watching a film on the big screen in a dark, shared environment to those who can behave themselves therein.

Anyway, because I was sitting in the back (there were very few seats) I was distracted every time the exit opened and closed, which it did constantly, because, as I said before, four and five year olds were constantly demanding concession stand or bathroom runs from their authority figures. Paul told me he was distracted by the constant seat creaking as parents with kids continually got up and sat down again, not to mention people moving in front of him to get out to the aisles, but for me, it was that goddam exit door opening and closing every 90 seconds or so. Not to mention the constant jabber of kids all around me, the guy sitting behind me who was carrying on a constant running narrative with his own toddler (“yes, the big green man turned into a normal man, did ‘oo see that? Did ‘oo? Oh you’re just so cuuuuuuute!”), the dirty looks that the Hispanic fellow seated one row up and to my left kept giving me whenever his good looking wife got up to move their kid who was sitting in front of me, because the human eye tracks movement, so naturally I’d look at her when she moved, and since she was good looking (as far as I could tell in a murky theater) naturally I’d keep looking at her, and, well, a lot of other crap.

Frankly, I regretted going along on the expedition a few minutes after the film started and spent most of the movie wishing to hell the experience was over. In the terminology of THE SIMS, I don’t think seeing that film raised my fun or my social level perceptibly. (However, I did not wail and sob aloud, nor did I wet myself, so let’s thank God for small favors.)

Today has been for the most part uneventful. Paul left for work around quarter of 3, and that was fine, until Chewie (Paul’s dog, Chewbacca, a monstrously good natured and devilishly crafty creature who probably weighs in at a good forty pounds or so of red furred, mid sized Chow/Shepherd mutt) went insane and I had to put him out on his leash, at which point, some other large boxer type mutt came trotting over completely unrestrained and they started growling at each other, so I had to bring Chewie back inside again, which he did not like AT ALL. He stayed nuts inside for the rest of the afternoon. I finally put him back out again after the other dog went away, and Chewie promptly slipped out of his collar (devilishly crafty hound of hell that he is) but, fortunately, I was checking up on him often (which is annoying; I do not own pets that require a lot of attention like this specifically because I prefer to just do my own thing… which at that moment was trying to watch a DVD of THE ROAD WARRIOR I bought a few weeks ago… but Paul wasn’t here so I couldn’t just say ‘Paul, take care of Chewie’) and saw him do it, so I went out and got him before he ran off. He growled at me when I carried him inside and has been restless ever since, and frankly, I think Paul is going to have to have some kind of grommet surgically implanted in Chewie’s skeletal structure to attach a leash to, because the fucking dog just keeps figuring out how to slip out of his collars and harnesses, but he can’t stay inside all day; there’s no room and he goes crazy. However, if he keeps running around loose he’ll get picked up by Animal Control, and then my baby brother will be sad, and we can’t have that, either. Grrrrr. This is why I’m a goddam cat person. Well, that, and it means something when a cat jumps up in your lap, whereas dogs are just attention whores.

Okay, I just went out and sifted through Paul’s videotape bookcase and picked out about… well, fine, exactly… nine movies of his that I’ll either watch again for nothing to see if they really suck as bad as I thought they did the first time (actually, 12 Monkeys is the only one that counts under that category), or that I’m curious to check out for nothing (that includes Mallrats, South Park: The Movie, Office Space, Mission To Mars, and some Justice League cartoons) and, finally, movies I remember enjoying and would like to watch again (Broadcast News, Time Bandits, Addams Family Values, and Jurassic Park III… yeah, I liked JP-3, it was the only one of the JP movies that wasn’t incredibly pretentious and that was simply a fun little B list action-adventure with likable characters in it battling… or avoiding… dinosaurs). So, along with The Road Warrior and Eight Men Out still to check out on DVD (Road Warrior in wide screen format is, so far, AMAZING) I should be able to waste my life in the fashion to which I’ve grown accustomed… except for this goddam dog.

All has been quiet lately on the cockroach front. I’ll keep you posted on developments there.

HULK SUCK!

I didn’t care for the Hulk movie. I won’t promise to be succinct doing it, but I’ll at least try to explain why (and bear in mind, I had landslides of rug rats on all sides of me screaming their heads off as I tried to watch the film, so perhaps I missed important nuances that would have made me realize this was one of the greatest pieces of cinematic artwork ever shot on celluloid... but I doubt it).

(But then, I'm the only person on the entire planet who didn't spontaneously orgasm eighty or ninety times while watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, too, so you see what you're dealing with, here.)

First, I was trepidatious about seeing HULK for two major reasons: the film was directed by Ang Lee and Ang Lee can just take a nice big bite out of my ass, as can every single critic and moviegoer anywhere in the world who thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon wasn’t a godawful long stupid meandering pointless boring piece of horseshit where even the goddam fight scenes just made no sense at all, much less the so called plot.

Second, by the time the film opened I’d seen enough promotional material to know that in this movie, Bruce Banner has a father who plays an important role (in fact, he’s the major supervillain), and, well, that’s such a monumentally bad, conceptually buggered idea in context with The Hulk that I just knew it would have to completely destroy the entire film. Which it pretty much did. Although Ang Lee’s decision to score all the military chase sequences with horribly strident and intrusively wailing, dirge-like East Indian/Middle Eastern music didn’t help me much, either.

Let’s start with… well, okay, let’s look at why X-Men and Spider-man were acceptable movies to a comic book geek like me (leaving aside whether they were good films or not, which is an entirely different subject; Rocketeer is a wonderful film, it’s simply got nothing much to do with Dave Steven’s original comic book character except the name, the costume, and the jet-pack). X-Men and Spider-Man work for me because, despite innumerable minor changes that have been made to the origin story and the characters and the backdrop, the essence of the original comic book creations is translated very solidly and completely to the big screen. X-Men and Spider-man are both, essentially, about what it’s like to be a misfit and an outsider, and to suddenly find yourself with enormous power… power which one could use to avenge oneself on the ‘normal’ world that has always excluded you… and the innate nobility and heroism of choosing to, instead, use your new power to protect and defend that same mainstream society that you will never really fit into or be welcomed by.

Although “with great power comes great responsibility” is really Spidey’s specific tagline, it’s very true of X-Men too. Where the two concepts go with the basic idea is somewhat different… the X-Men build their own cool clique of outsiders (something every emotionally alienated geek can readily identify with) while Spider-man remains, for the most part, a completely misunderstood loner (something we can all take a bitter, self pitying satisfaction from), but, nonetheless, the core concept of The Misfit As Defender Of Mainstream Morality is there… and the movies didn’t tamper with that essential thematic underpinning. What we saw on the screen may have varied in many details from the original Stan Lee/Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko comic book concepts, but the underlying foundation remained.

Hulk, on the other hand, has been completely fucked over.

Unless you’re a serious comics geek, like me, you’re probably not aware that The Hulk was initially not a success at Marvel. One of Stan and Jack’s (that’s Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s, to you non-geeks out there) relatively rare creative misfires, the Hulk had his original series cancelled after only a few issues. Lee and Kirby tried to keep the concept in the spotlight by putting him in The Avengers briefly, but he was completely out of place there, and by issue #4 he’d been replaced by Captain America and was left to be little more than a roving menace, monster, and half-assed supervillain without a title of his own.

Lee & Kirby kept awareness of the Hulk high by pitting him against more popular characters like the Fantastic Four (where he and the Thing quickly developed a heated rivalry/enmity that led to many classic battles over the decades), Spider-Man, and the Avengers (where early on Hulk kept teaming up with the Sub-Mariner in an uneasy, treacherous alliance of evil, back when both he and Subby were, for the most part, bad guys). Finally, Hulk got his own strip again, sort of… he was allowed to share a comic with, I believe, the Sub-Mariner (I think it was Tales To Astonish) before, in the end, getting his own title back. This time around his writers seemed to have a better handle on what made the character work for the audience, and the Hulk has since become one of Marvel’s more enduringly popular characters. But it wasn’t always that way.

One of the reasons Hulk took awhile to catch on with his audience is simply that it’s not a superhero book. Hulk is a science fiction/ psychological horror/monster story, in which the audience is continually confronted with one of our universal fears, a fear exemplified by supernatural concepts like the werewolf and, at its most clearly distilled, by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde… the notion that something horrible slumbers uneasily inside all of us, regardless of how civilized and gentle we appear, and if that inner demon were ever to get loose, there’s no telling how much carnage and chaos it might cause.

The Hulk is, basically, all of our ids personified, running amok with limitless strength and absolutely no moral restraint at all. Hulk wants what he wants and he wants it right frickin’ now, and God help anything that gets in his way. Early versions of the Hulk were grey skinned and quite intelligent, if brutally unsophisticated and completely without scruple. Later on, the Hulk became stupider and more childlike, and pretty much all he wanted was to be left by himself… something an authoritarian power structure just wasn’t going to do, given the potential hazard something that big, powerful, and stupid wandering around on its own represented. For a very long time, the green, simple minded Hulk generated endless adventures out of the simplistic seeming formula ‘Hulk leaps away to be left alone, but Some Enemy Pursues Or Finds Him and fucks with him. Whackiness ensues.’

The Hulk is, basically, about the sheer terror of being completely unable to control our most basic, selfish urges. Robert Bruce Banner is meant to be an Everyman, a victim of his own tragic heroism as, in saving someone else from an overdose of gamma rays, he is exposed to that overdose himself and cursed to spend the rest of his days unable to actually control his own deeply repressed rage. It’s a very primal, universal, and scary concept, and, like the emotionally distanced teenager that none of the cool kids like who saves the whole school from the Molten Man anyway because he’s just so damned heroic, but none of his classmates can ever know about his heroism because of some other idiotic plot contrivance, it’s one we can all deeply relate to.

In the movie version of The Hulk, this gets all fucked up.

Essentially, the movie is about child abuse. It centers around the theme of the damage that powerful, aggressive fathers can do to their kids, through active or passive abuse, and, less overtly, around the same damage that weak mothers can allow to happen to those kids when they don’t stand up to those abusive fathers. In this film, both Betty Ross and Bruce Banner are victims of childhood abuse by domineering, somewhat brutal fathers. Betty simply feels unloved and disapproved of by her dad, who has always put his military career before his family obligations. Bruce, on the other hand, has been far more profoundly damaged, not simply by his dad’s active abuse, but by the fact that his father has recklessly altered his own DNA as part of a forbidden military experiment, and that mutated DNA has been passed along to his innocent infant son.

Child abuse is an important theme, certainly, but it’s not the theme of The Hulk. By turning Banner’s green skinned, unstoppable alter ego into essentially a hurt, uncomprehending inner child suddenly made overt and manifest with invincible power, Lee has removed all the scariness from the concept of the Hulk… something he underscores by having his Banner note, almost emotionlessly, to Betty, that he enjoys changing into the Hulk. (In the comic books, Banner loathes and dreads his transformations into the Hulk because it’s impossible to predict exactly what, or how much, damage the Hulk will do, but it’s inarguable that the Hulk will comprehensively and profoundly fuck something up… usually a lot of something.) For all the explosive violence up on screen, the scenes with the Hulk in them are really only scary to small children, and then only because they’re so loud and bright. The movie version of the Hulk isn’t a monster; he’s a poor baby no one has ever been nice to, and that everyone in the film simply wants to manipulate for their own benefit.

As to the truly annoying interjection of an entirely made up father for Bruce Banner who is also a scientist, and who winds up being the movie's main villain... oh, Jesus. First, this is colossally stupid. Bruce Banner and the Hulk got along just fine for thirty years in comics with no mention of Bruce's childhood or his parents at all. Second, the fact that in this film, Banner is specifically victimized by his father's genetic experimentation changes everything about the Hulk concept. Banner is no longer an Everyman, representing all of us who are afraid of what might happen if we ever really totally lost control of ourselves. Banner is now just another mutated superhuman being, one who has little to do with us and that we really find it almost impossible to empathize with. Not that that matters, since all we're supposed to do is stare in awe at the CGI effects and the cool explosions on the screen.

Beyond that, many of the changes made to the Hulk’s original cast of characters and his early storylines simply annoy me in this film. In X-Men and Spider-man, most of the characters come through very recognizably and the storylines survive adaptation to another medium fairly intact. In Hulk, however, Eric Bana’s Bruce Banner is just way too hunky and self assured to seem like the real deal to any tried and true Greenskin fan. Connolly’s Betty Ross is at once much too gorgeous and modern-woman competent to seem true to her originating template (although for all her competence, she basically spends the entire film as a damsel in distress, much like the original Betty Ross, or nearly any female love interest in a Stan Lee comic, did). Glen Talbot is simply unrecognizable; the script apparently created a particular character and then, to throw a bone to us old time Hulk fans, they pulled a name out of the comic book and gave it to that character. (The Talbot sub-plot simply seems like more of Ang Lee’s unnecessary plot complication technique, anyway; he doesn’t do a damned thing that’s really vital to the movie that other characters couldn’t have done just as easily, and when he drops out halfway through, I imagine most people forget he existed within 90 seconds.) Of all the main characters, only Sam Elliott’s interestingly nuanced Thunderbolt Ross seems at all recognizable from the comics.

And while Nick Nolte is one of my favorite actors in the world, the less said about the utterly obnoxiously stupid character (Banner's father, the cutesily named Dr. David Banner, get it, they used the name from the Hulk TV series, aw, isn't that SWEET, and they had a cameo of Stan Lee talking to Lou Ferrigno early in the movie, too, awwwwww, isn't that just ADORABLE?) he portrays in this the better. Although I will say this: when you’ve built up to a climactic battle between your ‘hero’ and your ‘villain’ for the entire running length of the movie, and the whole battle is going to be CGI effects anyway, what in the name of GOD would possess a competent director to set that entire climactic super-battle in the dark where no one can really see what’s going on?? I mean, Jesus Christ, I’ll bet Kevin Smith isn’t dumb enough to do that.

However, to those of you who simply couldn’t care less if The Hulk movie preserves the essence of the original comic book concept onto the big screen, this will be a wonderful viewing experience. Deep-seeming thematic underpinnings, important looking visual film-making techniques (that I found amazingly annoying) meant to make the film ‘look’ more like a comic book (which is stupid; it’s not a comic book, but what the hell), lots of cool CGI effects, Jennifer Connolly looking totally hot, and scene after scene of ‘things blowed up real good’… well, it’s a non-stop thrill ride of action and adventure! Two thumbs way up! Four stars! Another astonishing artistic triumph for Ang Lee! A mystically moving masterpiece of murky mood and mysterious menace! YOU MUST SEE THIS FILM!!!

And I’ll just be over here in the corner, re-reading an old Steve Englehart Hulk comic and thinking to myself how grateful I am that I only blew four bucks on a matinee of the piece of shit.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.