Thursday, July 31, 2003
I wasn’t going to bother reviewing “The Hulk” until I ran into a few positive reviews of it online. How dare you!Damn you all! Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry! Have you at long last no DECENCY? Here’s a little clue, when the bulk of the audience is grinding their teeth, moaning, and beating their heads against the floor, it might not be a good movie.
I realize that all you people are Communists, and as such find it morally offensive that anyone would dare to make a product to the taste of its intended consumers, but we are living in a capitalistic society in which movies are products that people pay money for, and the terms “good movie” and “bad movie” are really only meaningful in that context. Clarification: Many people do like bad movies and dislike good movies, but it does not follow that a movie no one likes is necessarily good. Even if the people who don’t like it are bourgeois.
I hearby state with confidence that no movie has ever been as bad as “The Hulk”, and I sat through every frame of “Robot Monster”, carefully listening to the entire “Must and Must Not” monologue. Say what you will about Ed Wood, he never caused his audience to suffer INTENTIONALLY. (Not sure if Wood had anything to do with “Robot Monster”, I mean those to be two separate examples). Ang Lee clearly acted with malice aforethought here. At many points in the movie, you can hear him saying “The audience wants to see some action or hear some coherent exposition at this point, but I’m not going to give it to them because I’m so artistic”.
In order for a movie to be good, there has to be something good about it. All of the qualities that Ang Lee apologists praise in this film are not to be found in the film itself. This exemplifies a cheap little bit of tawdriness that must have been going on in film schools for some time now. Apparently, effete young cineasts are being taught that the quality of “artfulness” consists of the mere absence of action, coherence, or in fact anything that could give any pleasure to a normal viewer. Since “Alien” proved that what you don’t see of the monster can be scarier than what you do see, according to this theory, the ideal horror movie would be ninety silent minutes of pitch darkness.
Having viewed “The Hulk”, I am left, for the first time in my life, with no idea what caused Bruce Banner to be afflicted with hulkism in the first place. All that is clear is that the GIANT GREEN MUSHROOM CLOUD had nothing to do with it, or anything else in the movie. I sat through that fifteen second flashback for about forty-five minutes. If that flashback conveyed anything at all, it conveyed it the first three times. I estimate that it was replayed about a dozen times. People who can’t tell if something is good or not without consulting their primer of Aristotelian aesthetics call that “character development”, or “subtlety”, or “sensitivity to a woman’s needs”. The proper cinematic term is “padding”.
Out of every character in the history of fiction and mythology, Hulk/Banner is without question the easiest to identify with, at least for anyone who has ever been an infant. In order to identify with this film’s version of Bruce Banner, the viewer would have to have seen his father stab his mother, become functionally amnesiac, and spent the next couple of decades among co-workers who don’t seem to find it at all odd that you don’t know who your damn parents are and have apparently made no real efforts to find out.
This sick Lee bastard has managed to make a movie about THE INCREDIBLE HULK, with less internal conflict than exists within a box of Raisin Bran, between the raisins and the bran. The Hulk of the film is, in fact, merely Bruce Banner with super-powers. The Banner character actually goes as far as to explicitly state that he “likes it”. Without Banner and the Hulk struggling to annihilate each other, little reason remains to tell any story about them. Whenever he’s in a difficult situation, he might as well just say “Shazam”.
The defenders of this monstrosity are exactly the type of wieners who are wont to rhapsodize about the heartbreakingly intricate beauty of non-linear storytelling. They have nothing to say about the fact that this is the most sadistically chronological movie to be produced since we were all forced to watch everyone Forest Gump ever met die one by one just because that’s what happens in real life. But if you don’t enjoy this protracted CBT, the only possible explanations are that you have something against comic book movies, or that you need to see an explosion every six seconds like someghastly American .
Certain critics have officially gone through the looking glass, into a bizzaro world in which phoned in crap that makes children cry is “good”, and sincere and successful efforts to entertain are “bad”.
I realize that all you people are Communists, and as such find it morally offensive that anyone would dare to make a product to the taste of its intended consumers, but we are living in a capitalistic society in which movies are products that people pay money for, and the terms “good movie” and “bad movie” are really only meaningful in that context. Clarification: Many people do like bad movies and dislike good movies, but it does not follow that a movie no one likes is necessarily good. Even if the people who don’t like it are bourgeois.
I hearby state with confidence that no movie has ever been as bad as “The Hulk”, and I sat through every frame of “Robot Monster”, carefully listening to the entire “Must and Must Not” monologue. Say what you will about Ed Wood, he never caused his audience to suffer INTENTIONALLY. (Not sure if Wood had anything to do with “Robot Monster”, I mean those to be two separate examples). Ang Lee clearly acted with malice aforethought here. At many points in the movie, you can hear him saying “The audience wants to see some action or hear some coherent exposition at this point, but I’m not going to give it to them because I’m so artistic”.
In order for a movie to be good, there has to be something good about it. All of the qualities that Ang Lee apologists praise in this film are not to be found in the film itself. This exemplifies a cheap little bit of tawdriness that must have been going on in film schools for some time now. Apparently, effete young cineasts are being taught that the quality of “artfulness” consists of the mere absence of action, coherence, or in fact anything that could give any pleasure to a normal viewer. Since “Alien” proved that what you don’t see of the monster can be scarier than what you do see, according to this theory, the ideal horror movie would be ninety silent minutes of pitch darkness.
Having viewed “The Hulk”, I am left, for the first time in my life, with no idea what caused Bruce Banner to be afflicted with hulkism in the first place. All that is clear is that the GIANT GREEN MUSHROOM CLOUD had nothing to do with it, or anything else in the movie. I sat through that fifteen second flashback for about forty-five minutes. If that flashback conveyed anything at all, it conveyed it the first three times. I estimate that it was replayed about a dozen times. People who can’t tell if something is good or not without consulting their primer of Aristotelian aesthetics call that “character development”, or “subtlety”, or “sensitivity to a woman’s needs”. The proper cinematic term is “padding”.
Out of every character in the history of fiction and mythology, Hulk/Banner is without question the easiest to identify with, at least for anyone who has ever been an infant. In order to identify with this film’s version of Bruce Banner, the viewer would have to have seen his father stab his mother, become functionally amnesiac, and spent the next couple of decades among co-workers who don’t seem to find it at all odd that you don’t know who your damn parents are and have apparently made no real efforts to find out.
This sick Lee bastard has managed to make a movie about THE INCREDIBLE HULK, with less internal conflict than exists within a box of Raisin Bran, between the raisins and the bran. The Hulk of the film is, in fact, merely Bruce Banner with super-powers. The Banner character actually goes as far as to explicitly state that he “likes it”. Without Banner and the Hulk struggling to annihilate each other, little reason remains to tell any story about them. Whenever he’s in a difficult situation, he might as well just say “Shazam”.
The defenders of this monstrosity are exactly the type of wieners who are wont to rhapsodize about the heartbreakingly intricate beauty of non-linear storytelling. They have nothing to say about the fact that this is the most sadistically chronological movie to be produced since we were all forced to watch everyone Forest Gump ever met die one by one just because that’s what happens in real life. But if you don’t enjoy this protracted CBT, the only possible explanations are that you have something against comic book movies, or that you need to see an explosion every six seconds like some
Certain critics have officially gone through the looking glass, into a bizzaro world in which phoned in crap that makes children cry is “good”, and sincere and successful efforts to entertain are “bad”.
