Contempt
If Harold Pinter wrote a version of The Big Knife, it might come out something like this.
I’d be kidding you if I said that the movie struck me immediately as a masterpiece. Because it’s Godard and for me, Godard always comes off as willfully opaque and even boring on first viewing. It takes some time, in this case 18 hours and a good night’s sleep, for his narrative strategies to reveal themselves.
A french writer (A novelist? A playwright? We’re not sure; he describes himself as a playwright but his wife says he’s a “crime novelist”) living in Rome is hired by a boorish (that is, American) producer to “fix” a new film by director Fritz Lang (played by, well, director Fritz Lang). The film in question is an adaptation of “The Odyssey.” The director wants to put myth on screen, gods and goddesses and mermaids, heroism and simplicity. The producer wants to make Ulysses a “modern man,” ie neurotic and perverse, so that the audience will have a way into the story. The writer is caught between these two impulses.
None of this is immediately apparent.
The writer is married to Birgitte Bardot, the ne plus ultra of “desirable women” in 1963. He has, in other words, everything a man could want. He is offered the job by the producer and goes to the studio to watch what there is of the movie the director has made.
(The film, as shown, appears to be even more opaque and than the one we’re watching. Only a few of the shots are of actors doing things, the rest are shots of Greek statues posed in fields. When actors appear, they have no dialogue, only a few poses and motions. If the director was trying to resurrect the gods, he’s crashed on the shores of film’s limitations — a static shot of a painted statue does not evokes godhood, it evokes tackiness and pretension.)
After the screening, the writer, completely baffled, is invited by the producer to come back to his villa to talk. The producer offers the writer’s wife a ride in his Alfa Romeo and the writer encourages her to go. This action, for reasons that remain mysterious to the end of the movie, ends his marriage, although it will take him the rest of the movie to figure that out.
The producer asks the writer and his wife to come to the set in Capris that weekend and they part. The writer and his wife go home to their flat somewhere in Rome. We’re all set for an involving drama about the making of a motion picture, but Godard, as Godard will, dashes our expectations and instead gives us a half-hour scene in the couple’s apartment where the writer asks his wife, over and over, in a dozen different ways, if he should go ahead and take this job, and what happened that afternoon that has made her start acting so strange. Did the producer do something to her in the car? Did the writer say something to offend her? What the hell is going on? Birgitte Bardot is pissed, and one tends to want to know what Birgitte Bardot is pissed about. The couple putter around the flat, take baths and set the table, start twenty different halting, incomplete conversations, take off and put on clothes, hats and wigs, fight and make up and fight again and make up again. This scene takes up the entire second act of the picture and, like many things in a Godard picture, the purpose of it remains hidden for a while.
The writer and his wife, in any case, go to Capris. The writer takes walks through the wilderness with the director where they discuss what writers and directors have always discussed: What does the protagonist want? That is, Why does Ulysses go off to the war to begin with, and why does it take him ten years to get home? The director believes that that’s just the story, it is what it is, but the writer believes (or is being paid to believe) that Ulysses went to the war to get away from his wife and is taking his sweet time getting home because he’s not sure if he ever wants to see her again.
Aha, so that’s what the 30-minute Pinteresque flat scene was about. The writer whines and grumbles about how he wants the job and worries about whether his wife still loves him, when secretly he wants to both reject the job and get rid of his wife altogether. The man who has everything is intent on throwing it all away.
And so in the end (spoiler alert) the protagonist of this movie gets exactly what he wants, although not in the way he expected. Instead, the gods that the director wanted to put in his movie enter, as gods often do, offscreen, in the form of , literally, a deus ex machina. When I was a youngster, a high-school comp teacher warned that the weakest ending imaginable is “And then they were all hit by a truck.” Godard, surely, must have had that rule in mind when he devised the ending for Contempt, a fitting end for a movie about modern perversity.
Renaissance
Go.
See it on the biggest screen you can.
You have never seen anything like it. This I promise.
Required viewing for anyone with an interest in the art of animation.
The story is a sci-fi noir not unlike Blade Runner or Minority Report (but without the Dickian moral complexities); the look recalls Sin City but more styized (ironically, it looks more like a Frank Miller graphic novel come to life than that movie did) and the visuals are absolutely mind-blowingly staggering. Without exaggeration, I would say that there are more fresh ideas and innovations in any given three minutes of this film than there are in most other entire animated features.
Made me believe that there is still something new to say in the art form of film, that we haven’t quite reached the boundaries of this medium.
The Jonny Quest title sequence: an appreciation
What’s happening on this DVD cover?
Someone has stolen the jet! And we need it, because either
it’s a beautiful sunset, or else an atomic bomb has gone off!
Quick, let’s run to see if we can, I don’t know, outrun the atomic
blast! Maybe Skeet Ulrich will be able to help! Bring the
binoculars, Dr. Quest! Lead the way, 10-year-old boy! Let’s
bring the dog, we might need him to eat later!
My interest in The Venture Bros has led me to Jonny Quest. Any fans of VB out there, I urge you to try to watch some of this show. There will be much you recognize, and the show is also a valuable viewing experience on its own terms.
Jonny Quest was one of those shows that I watched the title sequence of every week but never stuck around for the whole show. I could name dozens of others, including Baretta, Mannix, Perry Mason, Ironsides and Barnaby Jones.
But now that I’m actually watching the show, the title sequence has a bizarre, compelling logic all its own. Quite apart from the bizarre, compelling logic of the show.
First of all, there is no title card telling us the name of the show, which has to be a first. Apparently the title of the show must have been announced elsewhere, because each show starts cold with:
Jonny? Dr. Quest? Race? Hadji? Bandit? No!
INDIANS! Indians run through some jungle undergrowth. Why are they running?
CUT TO: Some Guy in torn clothing, also running through the jungle, looking rather upset. The Indians are chasing him! No wonder he’s upset! Who is this man? Is this who the show’s about?
No time for questions! Here comes a LARGE PURPLE PTERODACTYL, diving out of the sky, its mouth agape, a savage screech emanating from the depths of its prehistoric lungs. Is the pterodactyl going to swoop down and get the worried man before the Indians catch him?
No! The pterodactyl is apparently after A PANTHER, who looks up from a patch of jungle as though hearing something, maybe a pterodactyl screeching and diving out of the sky.
MEANWHILE, on the other side of the jungle, aCROCODILE slithers silently into some swampy water.
BUT HERE COMES THE PTERODACTYL again! He can’t seem to make up his mind who he’s going to swoop down upon!
Luckily, THE ARMY is here! And they’ve got machine guns! And they’re shooting them! Are they shooting at the pterodactyl? Is that the best way to deal with the appearance of a prehistoric creature?
But wait! No, they’re not shooting at the pterodactyl at all, they’re shooting at A LARGE, ROBOTIC WALKING EYE! A LAVENDER walking eye, no less! Why? What threat does the walking eye pose to the army men with the machine guns? It must be a pretty big threat, because HERE COMES A TANK for backup! The tank FIRES at the Walking Eye, blowing it to Kingdom Come! The world is safe from the menace of Walking Eyes!
Meanwhile, a MUMMY staggers down a well-decorated hallway. It SMASHES through a wall with all the strength and unstoppable power of a 5,000 year-old dried-out corpse.
It must be a very threatening mummy, as TWO GUYS in colorful hazard suits fire rifles at it!
With no affect! The mummy PICKS UP an EGYPTIAN GUY in a fez!
While RACE BANNON (the first appearance of an actual character from the show) shoots at the mummy with a rifle, causing a CAVE IN that clouds the screen in an explosion of dust.
LATER, or MEANWHILE, or APROPOS OF NOTHING, four guys in bright red Cyclops uniforms glide over the eerie, desolate surface of the moon in special tin-can-shaped hover-pod-craft.
Back on Earth, a VULTURE swoops down out of the sky. So many winged creatures in this show, so much swooping. And here’s poor BANDIT, a small, adorable bulldog, running for his life! Look out Bandit! Too late, the vulture has scooped him up from the ground!
Is the vulture going to eat Bandit? Or is he just rescuing him from the TRIO OF DEADLY POISONOUS ADDERS slithering across the ground? Or maybe from the pair of LEASHED KOMODO DRAGONS skulking through the bush?
Don’t worry Bandit, here comes Race Brannon, swinging off the deck of a moss-covered shipwreck! He’s — he’s — he’s kicking over a guy in a lizard outfit, that’s what he’s doing! That’ll fix those adders and komodo dragons! But he’s too late! Another Lizard Guy fires off a LASER CANNON from the deck of the moss-covered shipwreck!
The laser blast annoys DR. BENTON QUEST, who, as luck would have it, is seated at the controls of AN EVEN BIGGER LASER CANNON, which he fires in defense tout suite! It’s facing the wrong direction, but Dr. Quest is, apparently, prepared to overcome this problem, as his laser blast somehow magically CHANGES DIRECTION and BLASTS the moss-covered shipwreck, killing all the lizard-guys! Hooray!
Later, a jet plane glides through the stratosphere, and THE TITLES BEGIN. Still no main title, but at least we get to know who the characters are.
And look! One of them is a little blond boy named JONNY QUEST, who apparently is the star of this show, even though this is the first (and only) time we will see him in the title sequence. Apparently he was too expensive to book for the earlier shots. He sits looking out his airplane window, looking for all the world like he’s bored and distracted by having to be in a TV show at all.
When his name appears onscreen, a very strange thing happens. Jonny does a take to camera, but it’s not a smile or a thumbs up or a wink; he gives us a sly, condescending nod, as if we’re old friends of his and share a deep personal secret with him. I can’t tell you how much this shot unnerves me. I don’t wantto share a deep, personal secret with a ten-year-old boy I’ve never met before. How did the animators achieve that look? Why did they? Why isn’t Jonny just happy to be on a TV show? Why can’t he smile and wink, why does he have to give us this sleepy, indolent nod and weary, sexy grin? How am I ever going to un-see this shot?
Dr. Quest, Race (or “Race” as they spell it) and Hadji, for their part, do not even deign to look at the camera as their names come up; they’ve got other things on their minds. Dr. Quest, at least, isn’t wearing the perpetually pissed-off scowl that he wears in every other shot in the show; here he almost looks as though he might actually be enjoying himself on this silent, conversationless jet trip. Race is busy piloting the jet of course, he doesn’t have time to participate in title-sequence shenanigans, and Hadji is too interested in the antics of Bandit, who looks out the window and barks. At what, we don’t know. Maybe he’s just trying to break the deadly still mood of this silent jet where no one speaks and no one can even look at each other.
Dr. Quest has a problem with his son, which will be explored in posts to come, but all the dynamics are right there in the final shot: the two adults sit in front, staring dispassionately out at the world crawling slowly below them, and the two ten-year-old boys sit in back, not speaking to each other, smiling wanly as though remember some fond memory of lost love as the jet hurtles through the sky.
Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist, sadly, is no longer the world’s greatest living cinematographer.
I am both extremely proud and terribly ashamed to be the author of Curtain Call, Mr. Nykvist’s last film. He was very kind to me, a young, unproven whippersnapper, and everyone else on our crew. He told me a funny story about working with Tarkovsky and expressed, with total good humor, his frustration with working with Woody Allen. My pathetic excuse for a romantic comedy was far below the typical material he worked with and I feel blessed to not only have had him shoot my script, but to actually have lit me for a cameo scene.
I knew that he was a great cinematographer when I was working with him, but like the philistine I am I did not see his work with Bergman until long after we parted ways. Had I seen, for instance, Through a Glass Darkly before I met him I doubt I would have been able to look him in the eye, I would have been too ashamed to work with so great an artist.
Seven Samurai
First of all, there is a new edition of Kurosawa’s masterpiece out now from, of course, Criterion. It’s rather staggering in its quality. If you’ve never seen the movie, you’ll never have a better chance to experience it than now. Even if you own the previous edition, just go out and buy the new one, I’m serious, it’s just rather staggering.
Plenty of words have been spent talking about this movie so I’ll keep this brief.
Kambei (a career-best performance that made me fall deeply in love with Takashi Shimura) seems to have decided that a samurai is something like a warrior monk. When we meet him, he’s actually disguising himself as a monk in order to root out and kill a desperate, kidnapping thief. Later, when a group of penniless farmers ask him to assemble a team to aid their village in battling an army of vicious bandits (also ex-samurai), Kambei accepts the job even though there is no money and no glory involved.
The farmers constantly complain about how poor they are, but in a land where no one has any money, they are the ones under attack because they have the only thing worth anything: food and land. The samurai, once a wealthy, influential class, are now in the same boat as everyone else, and Kambei has apparently decided that when no one has any money, what is valuable is one’s actions, one’s code, one’s behavior. In his case (he is in the minority among samurai) he seems to think that being a samurai involves helping desperate people in need for free. His altruism inspires four other samurai of various background and experience to join the team. One is an old friend, one is a genial goof, one is a remote, opaque killing machine, all represent, again, greatly differing ideas of what a samurai “acts like.”
Then there is Katsushiro, a teenage samurai who attaches himself to Kambei out of fawning idealism, and Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune, in a brave, off-the-rails Depp-like performance) as a drunken fraud who’s only pretending to be a samurai.
Kikuchiyo, we learn, was once a farmer himself, and has promoted himself to samurai out of shame for his background and the supposed glamour and class elevation of samurai. But once we get to the village, we learn that the samurai are despised and reviled by the farmers, who don’t trust the very people they’ve hired (for nothing) to guard their village with their lives. In fact, we learn that the farmers have actually killed other samurai who have passed through, out of fear and supposition of how a samurai acts.
And so Kambei and his team of samurai, wanting nothing but to be helpful and good, encounter nothing but dishonesty, greed, trickery, fear, suspicion, small-mindedness, theft, short-sightedness and stupidity. Given all that, Kambei has every reason to a) say “The hell with this” and leave the village, or b) join the bandits and destroy the place. But he does not; with each affront, he merely gives a discouraged look, rubs his shaven head and gets on with his work. It’s all he knows how to do, and something inside of him tells him that it will all somehow be worth it.
In the end, whether it has, indeed, been worth it, is the movie’s lingering question.
And so the samurai train the farmers to become samurai too, further blurring the distinction between samurai and non-samurai. And soon, everyone in the movie starts questioning their roles, wondering what it means to be a farmer, a father, a man, a woman, a wife, a patriarch. In one key scene, the teenager Katsushiro is romping in a sylvan glen with his farmer girlfriend, and she literally throws herself in front of him in sexual frustration, demanding “Damn you, why can’t you act like a samurai?!” and poor Katsushiro can only stand and stare in trembling fear. And who can blame him? He hasn’t got the first clue how to “act like a samurai.”
(Later on, when Kikuchiyo sits mourning the death of one of the farmers, Kambei chides him by saying “What are you doing? This isn’t like you.” Kikuchiyo has let Kambei down by dropping his facade, by not pretending to be a loud, cockeyed brazen fool for once. I’m reminded by Vonnegut’s quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we have to be very careful about what we pretend to be.” I’m also reminded that having courage and pretending to have courage are actually the exact same thing.)
One of the samurai paints a satirical banner intended to make fun of Kikuchiyo, but in the end it is Kikuchiyo, the one who admittedly isn’t even a samurai at all, who pulls the team together and turns them into a fighting force. When one of the samurai is killed in a raid, he grabs the banner , climbs to the top of a house and plants it. It whips in the wind and suddenly everyone sees “Yes, this is what we are, the hell with all the suspicion and misunderstanding, we are samurai, no matter what the hell our doubts are, and we’ve got a job to do, so we’d better get our minds together and do it.”
When the bandits finally show up on their murderous rampage, Kambei does not seem fearful or tense; rather, his sense of relief is palpable: finally, a battle, something he actually knows how to do.
When Katsushiro finally gives in to the girl’s demands and “acts like a samurai” on eve of the final battle, the results are devastating. The girl is thrashed by her father for being a slut and Katsushiro is mortified by his actions, even though he was motivated by tender love instead of brutal lust. When the battle against the bandits is won and the farmers go back to their simple, happy lives, Katsushiro is caught in a double bind: his girl no longer needs him, his destiny as a samurai will lead him elsewhere and he still has no idea what he is supposed to do.
Day For Night
A French film crew shoots a romantic melodrama at a studio in Nice. Would make a nice double feature with CQ.
Words that I jotted down while watching:
crackling
deft
joyous
fascinating
multilayered
Altmanesque
It’s shaming to see Truffaut so utterly in command of his tools while playing a director who constantly feels like he’s a failure and a fraud. The ensemble work here is wonderful. The narrative steps in and out of realism, scenes go from strict behavioralism to coy, affectionate commentary in the blink of an eye, the pace never drops a beat and Truffaut makes it all seem easy.
Late in the movie, Truffaut laments that movies like the one he’s shooting are a thing of the past, that there will never be big, fake studio pictures any more, that movies will from 1973 on will be shot in the street with non-actors. I don’t know what he was thinking, but one of the sweet, sad things about watching this movie now is realizing that, to a large extent, the techniques being employed here, seen from the age of digital sets, digital backgrounds and digital actors, are as quaint today as a movie set during the time of silent film would have seemed to Truffaut.
CQ
A charming, intricate, compulsively watchable, rather brilliant comedy by Roman Coppola, his first and, to date, only feature.
A young, experimental filmmaker in 1969 Paris is suddenly handed the reins of an unfinished sci-fi sex comedy. As he grapples with his daunting new assignment, he also deals with his fractured love life, his stunted artistic ambitions and his decaying family.
It perfectly captures a moment in film history when the possibilities of film as a language seemed unlimited. As the young man tussles with the problems of his film and life, the mysteries, pleasures, seductions and promises of the art form open to him and allow him to lose and find himself. That the movie pulls all this off while remaining funny, fast, original, unpretentious and fizzy is something like a minor miracle.
Jeremy Davies, it-boy of the modern independent film movement, plays the young filmmaker, and Gerard Depardieu and Giancarlo Giannini are on hand to remind us of the moment that the film encapsulates.
If the movie finally falls short of its revolutionary promises (“Astonish me!” is the producer’s note to the untested director, while an older director insists that film has the power to change the world), well, then it reflects well the time it’s describing. But it also shows the joys and sadness of the art of film, and how the most malleable, most complex, most powerful of artistic tools is consistently put in the service of silliness.
RKO 281
Orson Welles incurs the wrath of William Randolph Hearst when he makes Citizen Kane. An important story about the collision of art and commerce, told in a brisk, enjoyable, coherent, straight-ahead fashion.
In the manner of most TV movies, it is overlit, overacted, oversimplfied and over-explained. In the manner of most biographical dramas, compression renders complex relationships into two-line exchanges, scenes where Famous People trade Statements instead of human beings conversing. The characters almost wear name tags and plot points are telegraphed far in advance. John Logan, who wrote the screenplay, went on to write many very good scripts, including the similar The Aviator, which gets the Famous Person Biography genre with much more panache, grace and detail.
The presence of Brenda Blethyn reminds me of Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh’s film about Gilbert and Sullivan, which is my personal high-water mark for biographical drama of this sort. In that film, a premium is placed on observation and behavioralism; one picks up the plot as the film goes along. Here (and, honestly, in most biographical drama) the viewer is constantly reminded who everyone is and what their relationships are. Or as David Mamet puts it, people are always saying “Come in, because I am the King of France.” The drama is presented instead of inferred; the audience does little work, there are no dots to connect.
The cast is an extraordinary collection of very good actors, but sadly, whenever a group like this is assembled to play Famous, Charismatic People from the Past, all they can really do is demonstrate how we don’t have titans like that in our culture any more.
Liev Schreiber, one of my favorite actors working today, can only hint at the towering presence and commanding force that Welles possessed. I can hardly blame him; the last time I saw Welles depicted on film, it took both Vincent D’onofrio and Maurice LaMarche working together to pull it off. (It’s funny how, in yesterday’s query for films about filmmakers, Welles comes up so often, and always in such tragic terms.)
One thing that RKO 281 does that I wasn’t expecting was to make a human being out of William Randolph Hearst, and it brings up an idea that fascinates me: how does it feel to be the subject of a brilliant artist’s scathing portrait? How does it feel to be portrayed as a soulless monster by an artist with full command of his tools, to know that, no matter what else you accomplished, you will always be remembered as “that guy from Citizen Kane?” How does it feel to be the guy in Alanis Morrissette’s “You Oughta Know?” How does it feel (sorry) to be the subject of “Like a Rolling Stone?” It doesn’t matter what “your side” of the story is, the other side has already been told too well, no one would ever believe you, or care to listen. The subject is defenseless.
Ironcially enough, it’s largely through the craft and brilliance of Citizen Kane that anyone bothers to think about William Randolph Hearst at all these days. Also ironic is that, as much as Hearst must have hated the film, that Welles, in fact, endowed him with more pathos and sympathy than he probably deserved.
Contest!*
Favorite movies about people making movies. Preferably, though not necessarily, comedies.
For example: 8 1/2, Living in Oblivion, Day For Night.
*not a contest
Hulk
A number of extremely talented people worked to try to make this the best movie possible. It’s hugely ambitious and has a complex, elaborate editing scheme. I liked it a lot better than I did when I saw it in the theater.
I wish I had a better understanding of exactly what the hell is going on in it.
This paragraph from A.O. Scott’s review in the New York Times sums up my feelings regarding the plot:
“I’m far from an expert in such matters, but I would have thought that a combination of nanomeds and gamma radiation would be sufficient to make a nerdy researcher burst out of his clothes, turn green and start smashing things. I have now learned that this will occur only if there is a pre-existing genetic anomaly compounded by a history of parental abuse and repressed memories. This would be a fascinating paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, but it makes a supremely irritating — and borderline nonsensical — premise for a movie.”
And I also agree with this paragraph:
“All of this takes a very long time to explain, usually in choked-up, half-whispered dialogue or by means of flashbacks inside flashbacks. Themes and emotions that should stand out in relief are muddied and cancel one another out, so that no central crisis or relationship emerges.”
The tone sways wildly from ponderous to outrageously campy, sometimes in the same scene. At one moment a father and daughter discuss the unpredictability of the human heart, at the next moment the daughter is attacked by a giant mutated poodle. At one moment the Hulk is smashing tanks and swatting down helicopters, the next moment he’s lounging on a hillside contemplating lichens with a misty, faraway look in his eyes. At one moment a father and son have a colloquy on matters of identity and social order, the next moment Nick Nolte is gnawing on an electrical cable.
There are three bad guys, and none of their plots seem to make any sense. The biggest of them, which gets a very late start at an hour and eighteen minutes into the movie, involves Nick Nolte turning on some kind of machine and huffing on some sort of hose, then turning into some kind of super-being with some kind of super-powers which are visually impressive but which also seem tacked on, forced and incoherent.
There seems to be some kind of battle going on between the creative team and the genre they’re working in. They’ve chosen to make a movie about an enraged green smashing guy, but they also want the movie to be about “deep” themes and ideas. They’ve given their protagonist an inward journey (“Who am I?”) instead of an outward problem (“I’ve got to stop the bad guys”) and so the narrative seems choked, static and listless at just the points where it should be fleet, extravagant and larger-than-life.
Then there’s some problems with the plot. I’ve seen the movie twice now and there’s things I just don’t follow. I think I know why Hulk’s dad tries to kill him but I don’t know why he set off whatever green bomb thing he set off, or what the consequences of the blast were. I know in the comic book, it’s the “gamma blast” that created the Hulk, but here the script takes great pains to explain that the blast had nothing to do with it. Then why is it in the movie?
Then there’s the matter of the General’s daughter. This is a movie about, among other things, intergenerational conflicts, and so in addition to a scientist who has problems with his scientist father, there is a daughter who has problems with her general father. And the plot has to bend itself into a pretzel in order to keep those conflicts afloat, which is too bad because there isn’t much interesting going on in them.
But for the record, here goes: A Long Time Ago, there was this army base, see? And there was this general. And the general had a daughter. And the general was tussling with this scientist, who blew up the base with the Gamma bomb and then ran home to try to murder his son. And then many years later, the son grew up, forgot all about his murderous father, and then became a scientist, where he, by sheer coincidence, began studying in the exact same field as his murderous father, alongside the general’s now-grown-up daughter! This is a plot to make The Comedy of Errors seem like the acme of observational behavioralism.
Then there’s whatever Nick Nolte turns into. It’s pitched as the big battle that the narrative has been leading up to all this time, but it comes off as a late attempt to kick the movie into gear. Nick Nolte argues with his son, bites into an electrical cable, becomes a Big Weird Thing, then flies off, somehow, with The Hulk, to Some Place Far Away where the two of them fight as Nick turns into rocks and water and lightning and ice. Then a jet comes by and drops some kind of Large Bomb on them and somehow that takes care of Nick but also leaves Hulk alive. If anyone has any idea what any of that is supposed to mean, please let me know.
Then there are the special effects, which never quite take off. There are moments of great visual flair and compelling action, although the titular Hulk never really seems to be part of the scene he’s in. That’s okay, I don’t quite buy the special effects in the Spider-Man movies either. The difference, I think, is that the Spider-Man movies are pulp, understand they are pulp and function well as pulp, carrying their cliched truths lightly and with grace, while this movie slows down so often to think about “serious ideas” that it gives you too much time to realize how silly all of it is.