The other movie I got last night, but didn’t watch until today is Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk.’
When it came out, I was excited at the prospect of an Ang Lee comic book movie. I mean, Lee got a best picture Oscar nomination for the movie of a Jane Austen novel (which won a screenplay award, though Ang didn’t get it). He did ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.’
Then the reviews said it stank, so I never made it to the theater.
But watching it today, it’s pretty darn good. What I liked most was that, visually, it’s a comic book. It has panels and overlapping scenes. It moves with a fluid, almost disconcerting style. Lots of over-shoots from strange angles and bizarre editing. It’s interesting to me because movies are narrative, and a whole set of vocabulary has developed around that narrative. The editing in ‘Hulk’ blows a lot of that away, adopting the comic book vocabulary. I was all primed to think about this because ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ shoehorns literary figures from the Victorian era into comic book characters, and subsequently into a movie. And Chris Cunningham… Well, if he’s not about manipulating formal boundaries, who is?
Anyway. So the point is that the visual language of ‘Hulk’ is worth thinking about, and the story’s pretty good, too, and it’s just a helluva lot of fun to watch a huge green guy throw a temper tantrum and rip tanks apart and smash the pieces into each other like playthings. Plus the Ang Lee commentary track on the DVD is pretty good, too. I only listened to some of it, though. That’s the problem with these commentary tracks: You have to watch the whole movie over again to hear it, and I’m not renting a DVD again just to do that.
