Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army.  It was way better than the first film.  This time the plot revolves around an angry elf-lord eco-terrorist who is trying to revive the "golden army" of robot warriors to wipe out mankind.  Hellboy is chafing at being kept hidden and continuing to date fire-starter Liz.  The film contains far more and far more interesting imagery than the first, evoking Princess Mononoke, MirrorMask, and, at one point, the work of Zdzisław Beksiński.  To say nothing of course of the echoes of other Del Toro movies.  There's a pale-man-like dignitary at one point and a Trollmarket which I think also appears in the Trollhunter series (I don't know for sure - I haven't seen it.)

So there's a lot of connections, but also a lot of great imagery.  This film veers away from the Mike Mignola comics and as a result there's fewer occult Nazis and more trolls and angels.  The images work far better for film though.  There's some elf council which takes place in the sewers where autumn leaves are perpetually falling.  There's a fight scene of course, but it's very pretty to look at.

So, I enjoyed this one more.  There's more of everything that was good in the original: more visuals and more grotesques, more world building and interpersonal drama and Del Toro-isms.  The most interesting bits of the film revolve around hints that Hellboy will ultimately have to choose between fabulous monster-kind and benighted humanity, but alas these hints are for the sake of a cancelled third film (or rather, long delayed and finally directed by someone else.)  Too bad.  But the rest of the film is a spectacular ride, which is nice.

Cape Fear (1991)

Saw Cape Fear (1991), which finally contains the scene where the bad guy is strapped to the bottom of the family's car and the only reason I watched this movie and the original 1960s version.  So, quick recap: the film follows a lawyer who is being menaced by a rapist ex-con.  This ex-con is clever and cruel and always just on this side of the law.  Driven to further and further desperation, the lawyer finally takes matters into his own hands in a climactic house-boat show down.  This one was directed by Scorsese.  It was a better film than the 1962 original.  It was better in many ways, but also a bit trashier.  There are extended torture scenes, in particular which evoke Funny Games's grim audience endurance tests.  Anyway, it's an interesting update.

In the original, the lawyer was the one to put him away but in this version, he was the defense council who, horrified by his client's crimes, buried an important piece of evidence.  The plot deals very frankly with the interplay between law and justice.  In the original, the ex-con drives the lawyer out of the bounds of the law, but this time it's the lawyer's extra-judicial decision which spurs the ex-con into action.  Indeed, the lawyer character is weakened greatly by Scorsese.  Whereas the original had a happy family, this one is fractious and philandering.

Scorsese is one of those blood-and-guts artists who want to confront us with the violence they think we're all capable of.  The villain reasonably argues that the lawyer and he are not so different.  They both broke the law, but only he is punished with years in prison.  Is that just?  The ex-con argues that if he may be judged by a self-appointed god, so too may the lawyer be.  This is all very fun and edgy, but I kind of feel like the ex-con is right.  If you want vigilantism, you should accept that there are cleverer, crueler people out there.  This is not so much a confrontation of a universal inner nature so much as the exploration of one particular, self-reinforcing world-view.  The film suggests that the only way out of this cycle of violence is with more violence, but I always wonder what would happen if the lawyer had gotten lunch with the convict, in that opening scene where the convict is introduced.  I think the story would have progressed more rapidly if nothing else.

Another update is the treatment of the lawyer's teenage daughter.  She is a screaming victim in the original, but here she is ambiguously interested in the rapist and perhaps even his co-conspirator.  I believe that she is the latchkey kid - left ignored by her bickering, self-absorbed parents, and left vulnerable to predation.  She plasters herself in a cocoon of off-putting rock music videos and rolls her eyes at her father's increasingly frantic efforts to keep her safe.  There's a nice microcosm of parental anxieties there which reinforces the whole man-as-beast thing (or young woman as beast, here.)

The film was better in a lot of ways.  It wisely makes the villain more philosophically consistent than the hero and plays into Scorsese's interests.  The film is sort of necessarily a bit more trashy of course, being made in the 90s and being made by Scorsese.  It's tough to confront with bestiality without being a bit repulsive however, so this is on purpose.  An interesting pair of films, but I'm glad to be leaving it now.

Hellboy (2004)

Saw Hellboy (2004), a film based on Mike Mignola's comic book of the same name.  This film precedes the Marvel films by a little, but the first Tobey Maguire Spiderman film and the Ang Lee Hulk movie were already out, so this film also helped prove the market and pave the way.  Anyway the plot is very comic book-ish, involving monsters and government agencies, occult Nazis, and fraught, teenage-ish relationships.  It's all pretty fun, but not particularly my cup of tea.

The main engine that drives the Hellboy comics and this film is the protagonist's underwhelmed reactions and workingman nature even in the face of eldritch horrors.  He may be red and have filed-down horns, but he's just an average guy, you know?  There's a scene where he happens upon a boy on a rooftop and has a soulful chat with him about his feelings for one of the other characters.  The boy sympathizes and brings him cookies.  This is peak Hellboy.  In the comics, he's often hilariously put-upon by the monsters, eye-rolling and referring to them with diminutive pet names ("Stinky").  Alas, the Hollywood machine transforms these into snarled one-liners, ala Schwarzenegger or late-franchise John McClain.  He's supposed to be annoyed, not defiant.

Anyway, the film was directed by Del Toro, who was probably attracted to the property because of its kindliness to its monster heroes.  Abe Sapien bears a distinct resemblance to the monster in The Shape of Water.  As with his other films too, here there's a bureaucrat who is the voice of intolerance and repression but who is also clearly miserable and suffering in his job.  It's a background note, but this archetype also shows up in Shape of Water, Pan's Labyrinth, and others (I saw a youtube video on this once) so I enjoyed spotting this Del Toro-ism.

The film is mostly spectacle and fight scenes.  I am too old and jaded to be really delighted by these things, but they supplied me with a good amount of striking imagery which I enjoyed.  Also, while the fights are the focus of the film, the characters do exist outside of the fights and even have some relationship problems (albeit sit-com-level stuff.  "Closer" it ain't.)  But it wasn't just empty spectacle, which was nice.  Not my cup of tea, but not exactly a bad cup either.

Irma Vep

Saw Irma Vep, a movie-movie about the filming of a fictitious remake of the silent serial Les Vampires.  The film is ultimately a critique of the state of French filmmaking.  It follows Maggie Cheung (as herself) as she arrives in Paris to shoot this film.  When she arrives, no is there to greet her or pick her up and she gets lost and abandoned in a hectic film-studio office.  She's excited to ditch Hong Kong-style big-budget action films and be a classy French film for once.  Alas, everyone she talks to is all too eager to dump on the classiness of French films.  An interviewer scoffs when she praises the original silent film.  He claims that films for "elites" have suffocated French films.

The French filmmakers are simultaneously hungry for the big money of crassly commercial films but also very aware of their own legacy.  Some feel crushed by the weight of having to compete with Truffaut and Goddard while others attempt kill their heroes, labelling them as elitists and inaccessible.  The end of the film reveals their smallness however.  Maggie doesn't need them.  She has an agent in Hollywood and backup plans with Ridley Scott.  She is the rare bird of art and she has flown.

At the same time, they also don't appreciate their own, home-grown talent.  The film is initially helmed by a fictional director who is widely praised by who everyone agrees isn't as good as he used to be.  He leaves the project unable to figure out how to make a remake relevant.  We get to see his in-progress work and it's very artsy, very off-putting, but definitely much more than just a remake.  There's a sense, in the closing moments of the film, that an amazing film that could have been was killed.

Cape Fear (1962)

Saw Cape Fear (1962), starring Greggory Peck as another stalwart lawyer.  This came out the same year as To Kill a Mockingbird and his character is a stern, unimpeachable Atticus-like figure.  He's being bedeviled by a rapist he put in jail 8 years ago who is now showing up again to menace his lovely wife and daughter.  The film is sort of in the spirit of Death Wish or Batman: for the sake of peace and justice, the law must be taken into the hands of a grim, wealthy man.  It's a pretty gripping movie and has some nice tension and suspense, but it is also regressive.

The film was post code, so they could artfully allude to rape, but it was still quite unspeakable.  Many times the unspeakable nature of rape is used to eliminate possibilities.  An unrelated victim cannot be brought to testify because she cannot think of her parents reading about it in the papers.  The law can seemingly do nothing in the face of this silence.  I think that that same silence is re-enforced by the film itself being so coy about sexual assault.  If we can't even talk about it in a pretend-land, how can we deal with it in real life?  There's a rigidity and repression here that fuels the conflict.  Peck is a wealthy, untouchable lawyer being menaced by the scum of the streets.  If he were less freaked out by the whole thing, it would be easier.  If he and his wife could just laugh at or disapprove of this sad ex-con trying to menace them over the phone.  Then again, the villain is so supernaturally three steps ahead at all times.

The film is very Hitchcockian in its style.  Full of inky black shadows and brittle, stoically frightened dames.  It's not quite as good as Hitchcock however.  Also, the quiet menace of a clever, always just-out-of-sight villain serves to underscore the regressive elements inherent in the story.  Can no one really do anything?  Add to this the fact that the antagonist has an easy, frank, drawling demeanor which would become quite popular in the 70s (think of Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando's sloppy sex-appeal).  Against this slouching, libidinous threat is Peck's squared jaw and straight back, defending our women.