Posted on November 13, 2008 at 8:50 am
Please take a moment to watch the short films from Charter for Compassion, a group founded on the golden rule that links all religions. And then add your thoughts on their list of the eight core elements of compassion.
Posted on November 9, 2008 at 6:00 pm
“Hellboy” is the “US Weekly” of comic book sagas. Superheroes are just like us! They squabble with their loved ones! They smoke cigars! They take pregnancy tests! When their hearts are broken they get drunk and sing along to Barry Manilow!
And then there are the other things they do, like confronting a kitten-eating a bag lady who is really a troll and battling a building-sized elemental plant guy who is trying to eat everything. And bursting into flames. And shooting people with very, very big guns and punching people very, very hard with a really, really big hand.
Hellboy (“Red” to his friends) is the big devil-looking red guy with one very large brick-like hand, two sawed-off horns, and a tail. Bad guys do not fluster him. He chews on a cigar, pulls out a gun with bullets bigger than a breadbox, lets out a sigh or a wisecrack, and goes after whatever it is, from a thousand bone-munching spidery-looking little creature to a large, slobbering, boar-shaped monster, and that plant guy. When Hellboy showers, clutching a beer can, we hear the Eels’ “Beautiful Freak,” and the warm acceptance of that song, similar to the “just like us” moments, is a nicely understated theme of the movie.
The creatures and CGI effects are a wonderfully inventive, with the exception of the flames that engulf Hellboy’s true love, Liz (Selma Blair), as lackluster as the “when will she tell him the real reason she is so upset” plotline they’ve given her. She needs to get some flame on pointers from Johnny Storm. But this is not a movie that takes females or their powers very seriously. The other leading lady is Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), a typically Stevie Nicks-type of ethereal beauty with intuitive palm-sensing ability who pretty much stands around when all the fighting is going on.
And what fighting it is. The visuals are sensationally imaginative. Director Guillermo del Toro is every bit as excited about the creatures in this comic-book saga as he was in his grown-up fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth.” Wonderfully imagined and intricately constructed, they often reflect the sensibility of a steampunk cracked version of “Lord of the Rings.” Hellboy’s new boss, reported to have an “open face,” turns out to be a clanking robot with a glass dome who speaks through an apparatus that looks like the workings of a Victorian typewriter. The clash and contrast of styles adds a lot of visual flair. A bad guy Prince has long blonde hair and seamed cheeks that make him look like the spawn of Legolas from “Lord of the Rings” and Sally from “A Nightmare Before Christmas.”
The fight scenes are inventively set up and staged. As Hellboy battles the plant guy he has to have one arm around a swaddled infant he is in the process of rescuing. He takes on Victorian typewriter-guy at one point and finds himself battling a barrage of swinging locker doors. When he fights the Prince, he has to be careful to defeat him without hurting him because of the psychic connection that imposes any injuries to him on his twin sister as well. The plot may not be much and the Golden Army of the title is the least interesting of his foes, but even the silly stuff is so imaginatively realized that Hellboy has a bit of a touch of comic book movie heaven.
Posted on November 9, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Oh, George Lucas. Please stop diluting the franchise.
This latest all-animated iteration of “Star Wars” has a relationship to the original somewhere along the lines of the relationship of a homeopathic ingredient to the ultimate concoction. It has been diluted so that its atoms are barely detectable. The saga suffers in part because so many have taken what Lucas did in the 1970’s and 80’s and taken it further in terms of technology as well as story. All that remains here is from the weakest part of the original trilogy, especially the cardboard dialogue, without the screen charisma and acting ability of Harrison Ford and some of the others to make it work. The animation is below the level of most video games.
Worst of all, the movie diminishes the story arc of the original trilogies by taking the key character of Anakin Skywalker in a direction unrelated to everything we knew about him. What should enrich and expand on the stories just erodes further our sense of the original characters.
Posted on November 9, 2008 at 8:00 am
This sugarplum of a movie is held together with good intentions and paperclips, but its appealing cast and seasonal sweetness make it — if not the perfect holiday treat, a pleasantly enjoyable one, especially welcome because there are so few Christmas stories about African-American families.
Posted on November 6, 2008 at 6:00 pm
B-| Lowest Recommended Age: | Mature High Schooler |
| MPAA Rating: | Rated R for crude and sexual content, strong language and nudity. |
| Profanity: | Extremely strong and crude language used by adults and child |
| Alcohol/ Drugs: | Drinking, drugs, character is a recovering drug abuser |
| Violence/ Scariness: | Comic violence, fantasy battles, swords |
| Diversity Issues: | None |
| Date Released to Theaters: | November 7, 2008 |
It takes some brains to make a good dumb comedy. Paul Rudd, who has been the best thing in too many films that ranged from dumb, to awful, to wildly uneven, has co-created a film that manages to insult the intelligence of its characters without insulting the intelligence of its audience too badly.
I could have done with less emphasis on the inherent hilarity of hearing an angry little kid use bad language and make sexually precocious comments. And some of the double entendres were so nudge-nudge obvious they were closer to single and a fraction. But some good lines and sharply observed characters make it above average for its genre.
Rudd and Seann William Scott play Danny and Wheeler, who work for a company that sells a soft drink called Minotaur by visiting schools for a phony “don’t do drugs” talk that is really just a way to push their soda. Wheeler wears a Minotaur suit and Danny half-heartedly tells the kids to drink Minotaur instead of doing drugs and then they drive off in their Minotaur-obile. This is all just fine with Wheeler, a walking id who just wants to get high and have sex. But Danny once wanted more from life and when his increasing bitterness causes his lawyer girlfriend to leave him, seeing the Minotaur-obile towed away is just one indignity too many. He objects, leading to arrests, leading to community service at Sturdy Wings, a Big Brother-style place run by a former drug addict (Jane Lynch). Each is assigned a “Little.” Wheeler gets a precocious kid (Bobb’e J. Thompson) who swears all the time and accuses everyone of racism and child abuse. He is also way too fascinated with feminine anatomy, a trait they manage to bond over. And Danny gets Augie (“Superbad” McLovin’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a cape-wearing nerd whose life revolves around a Medieval-ish role-playing game
Director David Wain manages the tricky balance between having some fun with the conventions of the genre without getting mean about it. Yes, everyone learns a few lessons about self-respect and relationships (and sword-fighting) but when they do it in medieval role-playing gear inspired by a rock band, it’s a lot of fun to watch. Note, however, that a child actor’s bad language and sexual obsessions are more disturbing than funny and raise serious questions about whether the laws protecting child performers are adequate and adequately enforced.
