Monday, April 16, 2007

Edward Norton Blah Blah Hulk Blah Blah Reboot Blah Blah Blah

In case you're one of my family or close friends who live under a rock and haven't looked at any other entertainment website at all today, Edward Norton has been cast as Bruce Banner in the next Hulk film.

The new Hulk film is inevitably going to be better than the previous one, but I wouldn't expect much from it at the box office.

Ang Lee's monster mess was an insult to the very language of comics. He made these vague pretensions towards incorporating what he saw as comic book grammar into the film by featuring split screen effects, but of course, this removed the basic language of film even further from the language of comicbook storytelling. Simply put: comic panels aren't simultaneous; the passage from one to the next is an indication of the passage of time. Just like the flow of normal, single-screened shots in a normal film. The split screen goofery smacked of intense arrogance and ignorance on Lee's part.

For a good taste of how the language of comics would appear on screen if filmed, the opening sequence of American Splendor offers up some clear possibilities. Of course, the languages are different enough that moving images can never truly match still ones.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you think the Transporter director is going to stick around? That's the major question here and I'd love it if FilmIck did some investigatory work here. Some sites are saying yes, others no.

Norton will bring them in for this one. He's as intense as Bale, but a lot more well known to both the NYC intellgentisia and mouth breathers everywhere. American History X and Fight Club are two must haves in any trailer park. This looks to be a major film financially and for the genre - I wouldn't dismiss it's box-potential so easily.

Mark Kardwell said...

Norton is a good actor who isn't in enough good movies. Will wait and see how this pans out.

I've said it before elsewhere, my problem with Lee's evisceration of the Hulk mythos is he removed the notions of sacrifice and heroism from Bruce Banner's origin story, leaving just solipism and self-indulgence. Banner saves the kid, takes the blast of radiation, becomes Hulk. It's his curse, his penance for creating the bomb in the first place, but we accept the creature's violence and darkness because Banner became the Hulk because of this single, noble, act.

Which is why the movie Hulk, and to a lesser extent, Mark Millar's "Ultimate Hulk", sucked.