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April 2, 2004

Demon, Lover

HELLBOY
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]

HELLBOY may be the best adaptation of a comic book hero ever.

Comic book fans can only gnash their teeth in frustration at what has been done to their beloved characters in the past. Recently, THE HULK was a chick flick disguised as an action film (as was that director's previous CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON). DAREDEVIL caught the tone of the originals but blended several generations of the magazine and had the misfortune to make the villain more interesting than the hero.

Personally, I've never been a big fan of the movie versions of X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN, or the first Tim Burton BATMAN (I thought his second BATMAN film was the best). These films dwelled too much on the origin of the characters, and again blended different generations of the source books, as did the first SUPERMAN film. Also, the final big action scenes tend to be boring and poorly thought-out. Meanwhile, LXG was a bad joke.

Frankly, I think that the best adaptation of a comic book character to the screen has been RoboCop — and it wasn't even based on a preceding comic book series. Instead, Paul Verhoeven's film, from a script by Michael Miner and Edward Neumeier, is all original, but captures even better than most Marvel adaptations the psychology of vicious villains and a compromised, emotionally haggard hero. In some of the final sequences, big-chested RoboCop's twisting, thrusting agony looks like it was torn from the panels of a Jack Kirby page.

Now, after what seems like a hundred comic book tale adaptations, with more in the future, comes HELLBOY, derived from Mike Mignola's Dark Horse series. There haven't been all that many HELLBOY stories, but what there are have been great. Mignola has steeped himself in weird science, Nazis, and religion, and presents his stories with crisp hardboiled dialogue that clashes amusingly with the sketchy chiaroscuro of his visual style.

But Scott Tipton over at Comics 101 offers a most thorough account of the history of the Hellboy comics and their importance in the comic book scheme of things.

I thoroughly enjoyed HELLBOY. If I ended up thinking that the first half was better than the first, that's probably because the first half still took place in an ostensibly real place (Newark, I think) where monsters and heroes mingle with the pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders they are trying to kill/save to comedic-exciting effect. The second half takes place in a frozen Russian outpost, and is one of those lengthy action sequences in which several characters are in peril at once and which huge looming combatants go at each other and tear up the place in a fustian of activity that more or less abandons the story the film is telling.

Essentially, HELLBOY is a WWF Smackdown movie, with big thuggish creatures knocking each other around. It also has the wit of the WWF, and the battle for dominance that drives WWF narratives. (With the release this week also of the excellent WALKING TALL, one could easily write an essay marking Vince McMahon as the most influential agent on contemporary movies.) But it is still the comic book which most comic adaptors seem to lose track of.

Guillermo Del Toro directs the film with Verhoevian affection for the source material — if one can be said to really direct a huge, action packed special effects package.

Quibblers might complain that the movie (as opposed to the books) is borscht of cultural influences. A quick mental survey brings up such obvious analogs as X-FILES, X-MEN, H. P. Lovecraft, Doc Savage, and less obvious ones such as The Phantom of the Opera, Johnny Storm, Darth Vader, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, Sleeping Beauty, The Cube, RING, and del Toro's own MIMIC.

And unlike the source comics, which are carefully (and intuitively?) plotted, the HELLBOY makes "movie sense." In other words, the film is made up of big set pieces that are sometimes not clearly motivated. Amid the noise and effects you might ask yourself, "So, why are they going over there to Russia again?" "Why did the bad guys invade the good guys' space only to kill one guy and then flee again?" "Why do the bad guys want to destroy the world?" "And if Hellboy can revive a corpse, why can't he bring back to life one of his closest friends?"

It must sound as if I didn't really like the film, but that's not true. If you go along for the ride the film is very funny and thoroughly convincing. Del Toro has the perfect sensibility for the material (he comes originally from the world of special effects make up). You might call this his Spielberg film, after making a Corman film (CRONOS), a '70s horror film (MIMIC), a Buñuel film (THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE), and a Cameron-Bigelow film (BLADE II). He is fascinated by mystic underworlds, secret societies, objects that bestow great powers on their finders. These are more or less the concerns of the Hellboy comics and so del Toro matches up with them perfectly.

And as in any good Marvel-style comic, there is a tragic and impossible love story at the center of it. Hellboy loves Liz Sherman, a "firestarter." As in the X-MEN movies' love triangle, there is a rivalry between Hellboy and another character for her affection (one of the best scenes in the film has Hellboy watching them from afar on a rooftop, where a pre-teen gives him courtship pointers). One of the things I like about HELLBOY's approach to this story element is that it begins in media res; the viewer has to get caught up. It sets forth a mood in which whole world of events has taken place before the movie has even started.

Dark Horse makes it easy to find out more about the film. HELLBOY: THE ART OF THE MOVIE (200 pages, $24.95, ISBN 1 59307 188 4) contains an annotated screenplay (along with deleted scenes) and comments from the filmmakers on choices they made in art and plot. Also, the April issue of CINEFEX (No. 97) has a detailed account of the making of the film by Jody Duncan. And "Seed of Destruction," from which the movie is loosely based (the source story itself is mostly all climax), is available in a trade paper back (Dark Horse, $17.95, ISBN 1 59307 094 2).

KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume 17

KILL BILL VOL. 1
As a subscriber to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, I occasionally receive invitations to enter sweepstakes for advance screenings of movies, carefully selected for EW readers. On March 29th, I got an e-mail from EW inviting me to enter to win a ticket to KILL BILL VOL. 2. Well, you can imagine my joy, given that I have been writing about the movie non-stop for four months, or since VOL. 1's release.

I was rather pleased that EW chose KILL BILL VOL. 2 to sponsor with this giveaway. Given the tenor of the first half of the story, you'd think that the magazine would shy away from a movie with so much violence and cartoony plot twists (though EW did do a cover story on the first film when it came out).

The only problem is this: I have never won any of these free tickets. I've received about 25 of these e-mails in the last year and always enter the contest (if there is a screening in my town). I happened to get the KILL BILL VOL. 2 e-mail seconds after it was sent, so I was fairly confident that I would be one of the "first 35" to respond "in my city." But once again, it was not to be: I never heard back from EW.

On another front, the World Wide Web has ushered up in the last week or so a list of the songs that will appear in the second film, as listed on the soundtrack CD. The CD is set for release on April 16. The contents of the CD were announced by various websites, including Boxoffice.com, on March 15:

• "A Few Words from the Bride," by Uma Thurman, the dialogue from the teaser trailer
  
• "Goodnight Moon" by Shivaree, with lead singer Ambrosia Parsley, the band's only hit tune, as fan sites moan. I think that the song title is also the title of a popular kids picture book
  
• "Tramonto" or "Il Tramonto," by composer Ennio Morricone, from (this is a guess) the comedy ANCHE SE VOLLESSI LAVORE, CHE FACCIO? ("If I didn't work what would I do?")
  
• "Can't Hardly Stand It," by Sun Records rockabilly star Charlie Feathers, whose "That Certain Female" appears in VOL. 1. The song was originally recorded and released in October of 1956
  
• "Tu Mirá" (edited), by flamenco singer Lole Y Manuel
  
• "The Summertime Killer," by Argentine pianist Luis Bacalov, from the soundtrack to a movie called MOTORCYCLE CIRCUS. Among other things, Bacalov did the music for Michael Radford's IL POSTINO
  
• "The Chase," by Alan Reeves, Phil Steele and Philip Brigham, an instrumental number about which information is hard to find
  
• "The Legend of Pai Mei," featuring David Carradine and Uma Thurman (more dialogue)
  
• " Il Mercenario (L'arena)," another one by Ennio Morricone, from the Franco Nero-Jack Palance western A PROFESSIONAL GUN (A.K.A., MERCENARY, EL MERCENARIO, REVENGE OF A GUNFIGHTER), directed by Sergio Corbucci
  
• "A Satisfied Mind," by the late Johnny Cash, another hard-to-find tune from the film
  
• "A Silhouette of Doom," the third piece by Ennio Morricone, used in the teaser trailer
  
• "About Her," a tune by punk rock co-founder Malcolm McLaren that one reviewer thinks is a club re-mix
  
• "Truly and Utterly Bill," a snatch of dialogue between David Carradine and Uma Thurman
  
• "Malaguena Salerosa," by Chingon, QT pal Robert Rodriguez's rock band. This Tex-Mex song is also recorded by Paco deLucia
  
• "Urami Bushi," by Meiko Kaji, from LADY SNOWBLOOD, which is in the first film but not on the soundtrack CD
  
• And finally there is a "hidden track," "Black Mamba," The Wu Tang Clan