Month: May 2004

If you don’t know anything about legendary golfer Bobby Jones going into this film, you certainly won’t know anything on the way out. Glowing, soft-focus, hagiographic, toothless: Rowdy Herrington’s bland portrait posits Jones as a saintly, near perfect human being whose only flaw is the occasional indulgence in creative swearing when he flubs a swing. … more…

But there’s another side to the film that nauseates me: the PG-porn undertone, aimed straight at all the adult heterosexual men who’re counting the days until June 13 of this year, when the Olsens turn 18 and these horndogs no longer have to hide a lust that is no longer near-pedophiliac. It’ll likely go pretty much over the heads of the dreamy tweens, but for anyone who knows about the online countdowns to the Olsens’ majority (to which I refuse to link — find ’em yourself if you must), it’s really, really icky.

This is an indication of the willingness I had, going into *Van Helsing,* to forgive a lot. For before the psychopath point, there is a self-indulgent black-and-white interlude in which Dr. Frankenstein is run out of Transylvania by revolting, torch-wielding peasants, as well as some jam-packing of Victorian pulp into the V.H./Hyde thing, which besides calling to mind *Hunchback* (which isn’t quite Victorian, I know) also suggests that Hyde may well have been Jack the Ripper. And I was only worrying briefly about vocabulary.

We’ve seen this story many times before, though rarely in such harrowing fashion, or with subtitles: Neandethal husband wants the wifey barefoot and pregnant. He hits; she cries; he apolgizes; she forgives him. Repeat in a vicious cycle. Intense and dark, the film — which was nominated for four Goyas, Spain’s Oscar, including ones for … more…

It’s kinda like an episode of some imaginary HBO series about love and sex and the best ways to screw it all up — hardly surprising, as it comes from TV vets Maya Forbes (The Larry Sanders Show) and Wallace Wolodarsky (The Simpsons) — and that’s just fine. This small-scale flick manages a kind of … more…