Why did The Hulk fail so badly? The CGI Hulk is impressive. The thing has a pretty emotive face, much better than the usual blank masks we see. Which reminds me. My favorite supplement on the Attack of the Clones DVD shows parts of the process of animating some of the cgi characters and interactions, focusing on animating Yoda, particularly for the Dooku fight scene and his line at the end when he says that the Clone Wars had started up. Which was bad. Particularly for that scene, they go through several iterations of the facial animation for Yoda, and you get to see the process, which is neat.
Anyway, Hulk has emotion in his face, and he integrates quite well into his surroundings, not standing out too terribly as a cgi insert (burly brawl, Anakin rides a hippo...). Hulk smashes, and there are real smashings filmed done which look to be the result of the cgi smashing. Unlike, say, The Matrix Reloaded's agent car hood jump. Sadly, the Hulk's shitty supplements that, for some reason, warrant a double disc set out of the relative flop, go over the animation process in very brief detail.
The flick also has Nick Nolte as a complete nutter, which is fun up to and including the point where he huffs out of a giant black plastic tube and irradiates himself. It looks to be something out of Nick's daily life. Plus, he has these freaky dog familiars early in the film, including a French poodle familiar that's really weird but works well with Nolte's character.
The last twenty minutes of the movie suffer a bit from Stephen King-ism, that is they present a ludicrous, overly symbolic way of resolving the story. Plus, the film makes no sense at this point - why is Banner's pop coming to visit him, why does he grab a power line, why does frenching it cause him to turn into v-ger from star trek the motion picture...it really makes no sense. But up to that, it was a pretty cool, smart little flick. If they'd just ended it with Hulk's capture in SF, it would've been a much better film.
Incidentally, Jennifer Connelly's hot. Sadly, she has no double-dildo action in this film. Shame, that.
I Spit on Your Grave
Meir Zarchi's rape revenge film. New York writer goes to the boonies to live in a summer home and write a bullshit bourgeois novel. There, over the course of 15-20 film minutes, she's chased, beaten, and raped by four townies. This stuff is pretty fucking intense and scary. Plus, it's a really fucking long time up there on screen. Now, mind you we're not talking penetration scenes, most of the actual act is filmed in cinemax's trademark imply-o-rama, but the implied acts are pretty nasty. There's also a fair amount of explicit beating, and some really scary chase sequences. This is the stuff that pissed off people who gave the film a lotta guff back in the day. One can understand having a strong reaction to this part, to be sure.
I can see that the rest of the film wouldn't endear such viewers, either. Having been savaged, the writer then stalks and kills each of her attackers. Usually she begins to seduce the characters and then kills them once the dudes've been suckered into erotic reverie. The nastiest of these takes place in her home, where she's taken the ringleader and is giving him a bath. Whilst manually ministering to the mastermind under cover of soap froth, she stealthily sneaks a...eh, fuck it. She cuts off his dick and locks him in the bathroom to bleed to death. We see the guy standing up, holding the bloody remains of his cock as blood spurts out. Pretty nasty, yes.
The film is pretty effective, I mean you really do feel something as all this is going on, how could you not? My complaints with the film are that the yokels are particularly yokely, and I'm sick of the cliche of boonie-types as backwards rapists or otherwise crazy. There are plenty of smaller towns out there in the US, and they're not all filled with homicidal nutjobs.
My second complaint is that the really hot cover shot of a nice ass barely covered by dirty panties, with a hand clutching a knife, appears nowhere in the film. Yeah, the chick is hot, and there's plenty of film time with her naked or cutely dressed which doesn't occur in the context of a horribly figuratively dick-deflating rape sequence or a horribly literally dick-deflating emasculation sequence. But that cover was hot, you know?
She's a pretty decent actress, too. The role's not terribly verbal, and she does completely sell the physical. When she gets around to the seduction/revenge portion of the film, she's like something from another planet. She's a convincing seductress, and yet you know what's gonna happen. She teases and taunts just as a setup for the kill. It's a femme fatale in a literal sense, which is pretty engrossing. So to speak. I mean, yeah, there are plenty of film women who figuratively lead guys to their doom, but she does it very literally and in a way that makes you totally root for her.
It's a rare moment in a film. A woman is using her wiles to seduce and murder a bunch of guys and the audience can't help but be totally sympathetic with her, the audience as ready for de-cocking as the movie is ready to show it.
We're not talking retarded, Charlie's Angels-style girl power here, this is the real deal. And the chick, Camille Keaton, completely sells it. She's like a force of nature by the second half of the film. She's Buster Keaton's grand-niece, by the way.
The revenge portion of the film is the source of the I Spit on Your Grave title, also of the film's alternate title, Day of the Woman. Criticized as violently misogynistic, it's hard to see the film that way, I think. I mean, she gets back really well at the rapists, and the film works really hard to balance the savagery. It's just so shockingly done that I guess it just sticks in people's craws.
The DVD has a great commentary by Joe Bob Briggs, who demonstrates a fine aesthetic sense regarding gory b-pix.
Posted by mattb at October 29, 2003 11:20 PM