Bruce In Unreal Life
Posted on | June 29, 2008 at 6:27 pm | 1 Comment
It’s Movie Review Sunday! I saw two movies yesterday, one in the theater and one on DVD.
The theater movie was The Incredible Hulk. Based on how many people were in the theater (8 including myself), I don’t think it’s going to be in the theaters for much longer. Although Saturday morning shows are never very crowded anyway. I’m not one of those people who totally villified Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk – it did have its moments (including Jennifer Connelly). But I have to admit this newer incarnation is vastly improved. Edward Norton makes a much better Bruce Banner than Eric Bana did. He’s an outstanding actor and he always has that inner intensity waiting to just burst out, no matter what role he plays. So that makes for a perfect Hulk. Liv Tyler didn’t do all that much for me as Betty Ross, but the part was somewhat underwritten anyway. (I’m probably risking getting some flack for this, but Ms Tyler looked a bit… chunky in the movie. She’s still a very beautiful woman and there’s nothing wrong with her, she just looked different from what I remember. Was the movie made before or after a pregnancy? Or maybe it was just the way they had her dressed.) The climatic fight was a lot more entertaining than the one in the first movie, even though it was just two big CGI monsters duking it out. The Hulk’s face had some real personality to it with some playful boyishness. Love those bangs!
Pet Peeve of the Day: I notice that Marvel is trying to pull in fans of the Iron Man movie by playing up the Robert Downey Jr appearance in TV spots for The Incredible Hulk. That’s pretty low, since the scene is at the very end and is maybe a minute long. It is a nice scene though, and great nod to what Marvel is trying to do with its movies now and an interesting glimpse of the future.
The rented movie I saw was Dan In Real Life. N and I both thought this one was just okay. Steve Carell is excellent, as he almost always is, and it’s cool seeing him handle a part with grace that’s as much drama as comedy. Juliette Binoche is ravishing and vivacious, but I think I liked her more than the girlfriend did, who thought her character was actually kind of annoying. But we both had one big problem with the movie. Dane Cook was not annoying as he usually is. No, that’s not it. Oh yeah:
The movie takes place over a period of a couple of days, as Steve’s character Dan and his three daughters trek up to the Rhode Island shore (to the world’s most perfect all-wood house) for some kind of winter vacation with Dan’s perfect extended family (parents, siblings, spouses of siblings, nieces and nephews). The Burns family is one that could only exist in a movie. Everybody in the family likes everyone else. They all play games together, endlessly. They do dance aerobics outside first thing in the morning. They even have a freakin’ talent show in the living room, where everyone is expected to perform. Gramma and Grampa (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) are full of good humor and good advice, and are apparently in fantastic health for their age. In fact, everyone seems to be in great health and great spirits, except for Dan who is a widower in love with this brother’s new girlfriend. This is the most “together” large family I’ve ever seen in a movie. If they all didn’t drink so much alcohol, I would’ve thought they were Mormons. It was just a little too much sweetness to swallow. That one bit of conflict introduced into the family didn’t really seem to faze anyone all that much, and the family bonds are as strong at the end of the movie as they were at the beginning. I swear, sometimes it seemed as much of a fantasy as August Rush. Maybe it was some sort of wish fulfillment on the part of the screenwriter, who probably had a crappy childhood. I kept waiting for the Hulk to burst in and smash that happy home into wood pulp.
But other than that, the movie was entertaining.
Latre.
Poignant Search Term Of The Day That Led To This Blog: “what is beeping in my kitchen”.
Comments
One Response to “Bruce In Unreal Life”
June 29th, 2008 @ 11:42 pm
Well, I can draw two parallels here, which I’ll take time to do because it’s easier than what I’m supposed to be working on at the moment.
As for making too much of a short cameo, try “Get Smart” in which Bill Murray shows up for about 30 seconds – which should be a criminal offense. And that’s not even mentioning Patrick Warburton, also getting about next-to-zero screentime right at the end! Both were appearances we were highly anticipating.
As for families which get along almost too well, I always felt the Addams Family was a great example of how there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that!