4 Thumbs Up, 2 Thumbs Way Down

Posted by Melvin Bray on June 21st, 2008 filed in Useful Perhaps

If you like movies, here are a couple I’ve seen of late that I loved:





I collect live-action comic book flix, so I was especially pleased to see one done with such a well developed storyline and complex characters, as was the case with Iron Man.

It is for the same reason I HATED The Incredible Hulk. Saw it on Wednesday. It was awful! It’s unpardonable sin was that it had no unifying plot. At best, it was a poor collection of character subplots, the most interesting of which belonged to someone other than David Banner. They tried to make Banner’s quest to rid himself of the beast within the central storyline, but that’s the underlying theme of all things Hulk (tritely justaposed with someone else’s quest for power). It’s equivolent to making a movie about how much Superman loves flying or how conflicted Batman is. These are quintessential elements of each character, not storylines!

I was disappointed again last night by the movie Jumpers. Bad for similar reasons. However, I will be eternally grateful from its preview. The director’s visual interpretation of teleportation–which, before seeing the movie, I thought was time travel–was the recent inspiration for, my own favorite figment, Revelations’ idiosyncratic habit of arbitrarily switching tenses when he’s talking to someone. In the trailer, as a jumper moves through the ‘space-time continuum’ it looks as if he could accidently come out in the wrong place and time–past, present or future–if she were not careful. This got me thinking about rememberance, embodiment and anticipation as more than just states of mind. I wish the director had gone there with it. If he had, the movie might have kept me awake.

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