Month: April 2004

I guess the idea is that if a hitman nicknamed “The Tulip” is (theoretically) amusing, then a retired hitman nicknamed “The Tulip” who’s gone domestic and loves vacuuming the house in bunny slippers must be (at least theoretically) downright freakin’ hilarious. Would that it were so. Even more tedious than its predecessor, this mob “comedy” … more…

I guess I’m starting to catch up a bit to the bizarrity that is Charlie Kaufman’s brain. Not that I didn’t love *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,* but I was only 50 percent blown away by it. Like how something of the surprise is spoiled when you know there’s a ‘twist’ in a film even if you don’t know what the twist is, just knowing that a movie is written by Kaufman prepares you for the fact that it’s going to be odd and discomfiting and off-kilter, and so because you’re *expecting* that, the impact of the oddness is lessened a bit.

I don’t have a terribly impressive personal track record with Lars von Trier’s films — I haven’t seen all of them, but those I have seen have, at best, left me less than satisfied. So it was with limited expectations that I went in to *Dogville*… and expectations, at that, that were mostly along the lines that I was in for something half intriguing and half annoyingly experimental.

I couldn’t even begin to tell you what *Hellboy* is about, but unholy crap is it cool. It’s like geek soup, a goulash — ghoulash? — of everything that makes a movie neat and nerdy and like so totally awesome. Just the opening sequence alone has it all: black magic, cartoon Nazis, an icy Nordic blonde in leather, a geeky Fox Mulder-type paranormal investigator, weird machines that spin around and make the kind of disturbing throbbing noises that you know means they’re futzing around with the fabric of the universe in a bad way, freaky guns that look more like hair dryers than guns, portals into other dimensions, candy bars, a cute little red devil thing, and Rasputin.

Well, it’s no *The Rundown,* that’s for sure, and *The Rundown* wasn’t much to speak of except for The Rock and his charm and his charisma and his big toothy grin. He’s still got that movie-star It here, but It ain’t quite the same thing surrounded by action junk that thinks it’s serious drama. The Rock’s costar this time out is a big wooden stick, which is certainly an improvement over Sean Patrick William Michael George Henry Scott, but in all other aspects, this film cannot be said to be an upswing in The Rock’s Hollywood career.