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Movie Review, Hellboy II
The movie starts off far more funny than the first Hellboy. This is very much in keeping with the quirky ad campaign that has been promoting the film (the inside the actor's studio commercial for example is quite funny). Hellboy is once again Ron Pearlman- the genius bit of casting that made the first movie so great is a huge win for any sequel. He's tired of working for the BPRD in secret and is going out of his way to be spotted by the real world. But a mythos of ancient elves is working to retrieve and unify some widgets to awaken a golden army of indestructible robots, and it's up to our heroes to stop it from happening.
The elven world is very much Del Toro's designs. Likewise, an extended sequence through a secret troll market hidden under the brooklyn bridge gives him a great canvas to paint his stylistic genius. And seeing the big and clumsy Hellboy smash through it is incredibly satisfying. The action sequences are all excellent, and the final robot battle is very fun and well done.
All the while this is done with some nice plot twists for the major characters. A love interest for Abe comes along. A new good guy is sent in from the BPRD to reign in our uncontrollable hero: Krauss is voiced by Seth Macfarlane basically doing his fish char from American Dad, but inside a wacky suit controlled by ectoplasm vapors. Selma Blair is back as Liz: they give her some good lines and a few good sequences, but she's mainly a support role.
So Guillermo Del Toro was able to work within Mike Mignola's world. He put his own thumbprints all over the work, and the whole comes out better than the sum of the parts. And this makes me all the more excited for the Hobbit, where I have all the same concerns: Tolkein and Jackson will give him even bigger shoes to fill, and now I think he can do it.
Haven't read the review because it is "mostly spoiler free," which seems to me like manufacturing something that is "mostly carcinogenic free." If someone has a problem with spoilers, it's unlikely they're going to read the review on the off chance you've only spoiled the stuff they didn't care about and not the stuff they did.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
Loved the visuals, and the song scene had me nearly rolling on the theatre floor with laughter.
I went into it with high hopes, but was largely disappointed. It seemed to barely be about hellboy. While the visuals, background and world were interesting and appealing, they seemed to me to be a completely separate franchise, that very distinctly left the world created in the first one.
Thought the "new" character was an epic disappointment as well.
Felt like the director wanted to make a movie primarily about something else, and dragged hellboy along for the ride in a bit role.
I was amazed at the following the the original Hellboy garnered. I took my kids to see it, and we ALL hated it. To the point that, when we see a movie we don't like, we all recant "Well, at least it wasn't as bad as Hellboy". And my son is a real movie person!
I don't really know the comic, and I suspect that clouds a lot of peoples opinions of the movie, but as someone who came in fresh, Hellboy was just awful-terrible.
Hard to imagine the sequel being better (actually, I really can't imagine it being worse).
As a comparison, loved Wall-E, thought Ironman was just OK.
Give Taco a break. His spell checker wanted to spell it "SQL".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I guess he won't be doing his script for At The Mountains of Madness.
I was looking forward to the shoggoth merchandise... shoggoth keychains, shoggoth pudding...
Taco seems to make the same mistake that I hear other people saying. Guillermo Del Toro, was also largely responsible for the first Hellboy movie; writing the screenplay and directing.
I do think he was given much more free reign on this one, and is reflected in the things Taco commented about.
Response to this movie is turning into two camps - love it or hate it.
I fall mildly into the 'hate it' camp. Too much of the director's vision, not enough freakin' story.
Underdeveloped characters, waaaaaaaaaaaay too much CGI, overly cluttered scenes, eco-terrorist plot. All adding up to me literally yawning my way through the movie.
The original movie appeals to me because of a strong story with supporting visual effects. This movie seems to be all about overwhelming visual effects with some story thrown in to try to pull them together.
If this is what Pan's Labyrinth is like then I'm glad I didn't waste my time in seeing it. I don't see the director as 'visionary' any more than I see M. Night Wasshisname as a visionary.
Harsh, I know. But I'm rather picky about how I spend my precious free time and wasting it on this movie just annoys me.
There's worse.
...
TOLKEIN?!
I mean seriously, that's like some sort of deadly sin of spelling. Geeks have been sentenced to geek card revocation for far lesser crimes.
Saw it this weekend. The plot was long & drawn out. A little over a 2 hour film with all the trailers. The love interest plot was cheesy, as were the elves. Visual effects and the actor playing hell boy was good, new actor playing fish stick. German frauss
Don't worry about the spoilers, you know whats going to happen by 20 min into the film, the plot is pretty translucent. Not a whole lot of new ideas.
1) LOTR man / elf pact gone wrong - Check
2) One crown to rule them all (need I say more) -check
3) Goofy (corsecan brother's with out the weed) twins feeling each others pain - check
4) Secret withheld by girl but known by mind reader until he spills it - check
5) What is with these freaks heads? (seriously castles?)
6) New agent hard nosed / by the book then turns rebel with the group.
I could go on....
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
My wife had neither seen the first Hellboy movie, nor is she much of a fan of comic book movies in general. However, she really enjoyed this. There's an especially good scene with Abe and Hellboy and lots of Tecate that had us both just about falling out of our seats, we were laughing so hard.
Is $7.50 the Senior discount for a Sunday morning matinee in Topeka?
The Sunday morning matinee for Wall-E cost me $9.50!
Just saw it last night.
I am a Hellboy fan, and have seen the first movie.
I enjoyed Hellboy 2 last night, it was quite good. Worth a trip to the theater.
Lots of action, funny parts, plenty of beautiful cinematography, good acting. Pretty much can't go wrong.
If I really wanted to be a hard critic there were a few things I could say.
1) So much eye candy. In some parts there was so much beautiful cinematography and action going on it was hard to take it all in. It makes me want to watch it again so I can see in more detail everything that is going on.
2) It seemed to me that a lot of star trek red shirts (BPRD normal human agents) get killed off and the main characters don't seem too upset. Could be they are just used to it by now, came across more callous than it should have been I thought.
3) I didn't buy into Abe's love interest 100%. Though I could rationalize it perhaps that he is inexperienced in love and perhaps more infatuated or desperate so I can let it slide.
Oh and I also thought Jeffrey Tambor was very good in his role. I also really liked how the very beginning of the movie started, though I was initially a bit skeptical. Very Creative. There are also a few laugh your ass off parts which are lots of fun, particularly in a theater setting.
I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Iron Man is a "perfect A" movie if you are like 11 years old.
Maybe I am. It depends. How old were you when you got the stick shoved up your ass?
The enemies of Democracy are
Come on, it wasn't that good.
The visuals were nice but the story was cheesy and had far too much "support the troops" patriotism in it (is there any reason Iraq had to be in the movie at all?)
I'd give it 70-80% at best.
Pan's Labyrinth (to pick a movie at random from the review) was way better.
No sig today...
If it's not real (maybe she's taking some of that morphine) then her death is really quite tragic and awful, even compared to all the other events.
If you've seen it, what do you think? I think "not real" and my wife thinks "real".
One, the other, or both depending on my mood and what I decide to focus on. One thing I like about the movie is that it is open to multiple interpretations.
On the one hand, nobody but her ever sees any of the bizarre things. On the other, her mother does actually start to get better with the mandrake, and worse when its removed. Fairy magic? Coincidence? Or maybe the girl's feelings affecting her mother's health.
In either case, though, the girl dies in the end. If you believe it's all real, then this was the final step of a journey into a fantastical afterlife. If it wasn't... maybe it was still such a step? The poignancy of sacrificing herself for her brother, and the metaphor for achieving an enlightened or holy state, still exists.
The enemies of Democracy are
Bring on Mamma Mia! *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
At one point in the last few decades it was estimated that, thanks to the human population explosion, more than half the human beings who had ever lived were still alive. (There were jokes about the expectation of eventual death being less than 50%. B-) )
I hear that, since then, the origin date for "humans" has been pushed back enough by additional evidence that the "less than half" estimate was discredited.
But it is an interesting thought.
(Why SHOULD people HAVE to die, after all? At least before the heat death of the universe? OK, so the machinery of the meat breaks down. But is there any inherent reason one couldn't, with sufficient improvements in technology and application of resources, repair it indefinitely? Or even rebuild and restart it after it fails? For some time now death has been, not a state, but a prognosis: That (with current medical technology) the body's systems can no longer be repaired (and if necessary restarted) to the point that it can again operate in a way recognizable as "alive".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way