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Movies I liked this summer:
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (3.5)
The Dark Knight (5)
The Happening (4)
The Incredible Hulk (3)
The Pineapple Express (3.5)
WALL-E (4.5)
Wanted (4)

Movies I didn't like this summer:
Get Smart (2)
Hancock (2)
Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2.5)
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2)
Iron Man (2.5)
Mamma Mia! (2)
The Strangers (2.5)
The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2.5)

Movies that I swore I'd see but didn't this summer:
Sex and the City

391 - Hancock review

Published a month or so ago, sorry for the lateness:

"Hancock" feels like the filmmakers skipped the script and shot the treatment. The idea is there: John Hancock is an alcoholic, homeless superhero. He swears at children, flies at supersonic speeds while wasted, and inflicts millions of dollars of property damage whenever he does virtually anything. Sounds like a good idea for a comically dark superhero movie with a 90 degree twist, right?

Well, it certainly could have been, had they bothered to actually write it. As is, "Hancock" consists almost entirely of scenes that contain the key details but leaves out all those things that actually give a movie a story. We see that Hancock, as played by King of Summer Will Smith, rescues people and catches bad guys, but we're never told why, a particularly befuddling question consider that he's such a misanthrope. When Hancock receives a public make-over from Ray (Jason Bateman), a PR executive that he rescues from a car crash, he volunteers to spend time in prison, though if there's some valid reason he'd deprive himself of whiskey to hang around a bunch of scumbags all day, it's kept from us. Later, he mostly forgets about this and trashes half the city in what amounts to a several hundred million dollar childish tantrum.

Hancock becomes fascinated with Ray's wife Mary (Charlize Theron), though whether he has simply a curiosity over her constant evil-eye or has the hots for her I can't say, because once again the film doesn't bother to. Then we're tossed a plot twist, yet it's dangled front of our faces, the cinematic equivalent of being told there's a surprise waiting for you but that to receive it you have to guess what it is. By the tenth time that Hancock demands answers from the secret keeper, I was ready to jump out of my chair, because if a film wants to jerk us around this much, it needs to be much better than this.

"Hancock" touches on some ideas long ignored by superhero films. When Hancock gets served with countless property damage lawsuits, it behooves you to consider how destructive it would be in real life if superpowered individuals ran amok in a metropolis. But there are other, more interesting ideas that the film doesn't even hint at; what if Hancock were to participate in wars, or was hired to single-handedly build skyscrapers? Foiling bank robberies might be a good deed, but what about paying a visit to disaster ravaged areas of the globe? Considering Hancock's immortality, what light could be shed about his experiences during previous centuries? Good questions, perhaps better suited for a future "Hancock" rip-off.

The scenes where Hancock does his superhero shtick have those spectacular special effects that are now coming standard, but they suffer from the same problem that plagues those of any project involving Superman; since the protagonist can't be hurt, we've no reason to feel suspense, as if they would kill Will Smith anyway.

For good measure, a sort of ad hoc villain shows up during the final act, something that certainly had a greater impact if not so clearly shoehorned in so late in the game. Even the final action scene, aesthetically appealing despite the nonsensical nature of it, can't take things up a notch. I'm certain this could have been killer material, because excluding the story, the elements of a great summer film are there. Sharp performances from the cast (shaky moments from Theron aside) ensure some base concern for the characters despite the one-dimensional arcs that determine their every move. Unfortunately, that story element happens to be the most important one for a film based on a hook, and without it, "Hancock" doesn't soar amongst the clouds, but just hovers gently above the ground.

2 out of 5

390 - Dark City review

Alex Proyas’ “Dark City” is every bit as much an exemplary example of film noir as it is science fiction. This makes sense, as the best sci-fi films always have something serious to say about the human experience by utilizing extraordinary settings and events. And what sort of film cuts to the core of humanity as often as film noirs do, with their tough-guy ruminations on the things that make us tick?

“Dark City” follows John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell), a man who wakes up with amnesia in a gloomy metropolis that just so happens to be controlled by hideous aliens that can alter reality at will. It’s all a big experiment, he’s told by Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland, playing the polar opposite of Jack Bauer), who works for the aliens by routinely erasing the memories of everyone in the city and replacing them with new ones. They want to know if humans are the sum of their memories or something else altogether. The question: what is the human soul?

Proyas’ visuals are magnificent, an amalgam of early-20th century America and otherworldly architecture that shifts and warps into whatever the aliens see fit. But beyond the visuals lies one of the more compelling love stories I’ve seen. John discovers that he has a wife named Emma (Jennifer Connelly), but he can’t remember her. In a way, she doesn’t truly remember him either, because the alien’s memory tampering ensures that everyone in the city lives countless lifetimes. But when Emma tells John she loves him, she means it, because the feeling is there. The hive-minded aliens can’t understand this; they treat their subjects like lab rats, and can learn a thing or two about behavior, but are incapable of realizing that it’s our emotions that drive us.

“Dark City” is most often compared to “The Matrix,” an obvious comparison because of the similarity of the aesthetics, the heady nature (it could likely be argued that the success of “The Matrix” all but annihilated “Dark City’s” position in our culture). But it reminded me more “Memento,” another film noirs concerning memory. Both feature protagonists afflicted with memory loss, kept prisoner of sorts by outside forces manipulating their own dearth of knowledge. In the process, they both find themselves compelled by women, stirred by memories and ineffable feelings of loss and love. There must be a great truthfulness to these feelings seeing as two seemingly disparate masterpieces end up treading the same ground, and that the result are so spellbinding.

5 out of 5