Ang Lee's Hulk Dared To Smash Traditional Superhero Movie Rules

Ang Lee's Hulk is the Johnny B. Goode of superhero movies.

In Back to the Future, Marty McFly delivers a lively performance of Johnny B. Goode at a 1950s prom. Similarly, Ang Lee unleashed his unapologetically unique Hulk move onto the public in June 2003. The creative ambitions of McFly and Lee were clear. They both knew exactly what they wanted and were executing their creative visions to match those ambitions. Unfortunately, both the teens at that 1950s prom and summer moviegoing audiences in 2003 weren't receptive to what McFly and Lee, respectively, were dishing out. "I guess you guys aren't ready for that, yet," McFly said once his Johnny B. Goode performance went over like a lead balloon, "But your kids are gonna love it!"

The Lead Character of Alita: Battle Angel Packs A Wallop, The Movie Overall, Less So

After more than two decades of production, Alita: Battle Angel has finally made its way to the big screen. A long-time passion project for James Cameron, the filmmaker behind Avatar has turned over the directorial reins of Alita: Battle Angel to Robert Rodriguez, though a number of fixtures of Cameron's 21st-century artistic passions can still be found in the film (after all, Cameron still wrote the script), primarily the use of a protagonist brought to life through motion-capture animation. Fusing together the sensibilities of the director of Titanic with the director of Machete turns out to result in a movie that's agreeable but not quite outstanding.

Throwing It Back To The 30's Serves The Rocketeer Well

Nowadays, the prospect of Disney releasing a superhero movie inevitably means big box office thanks to them purchasing Marvel Comics in 2009, thus allowing the studio to release the various features in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But there was a time when Disney and live-action superhero films actually didn't get along so well in terms of box office glory, with their first foray into this domain, Condorman, being a big enough money-loser that it'd be an entire decade until Disney tried their hand at superhero fare again in an attempt to cash in on the massive success of 1989's Batman. This feature was called The Rocketeer and unfortunately for Disney, it would end up being another box office bust.

Despite Being About A Real-Life Genius, A Beautiful Mind Is A Pretty Thoughtless Movie

Russell Crowe has had quite the odd career hasn't he? Now, he's a famous actor, no one would ever deny that, but after headlining two back-to-back Best Picture winners (Gladiator and the subject of this review, A Beautiful Mind) and scoring a Best Actor win, the guy starred in two big projects (Master And Commander: Far Side of The World and Cinderella Man) that underperformed financially and then headlined the box office dud A Good Year in November 2006. In the nearly twelve years since then, he's only starred in a handful of movies and mostly stuck to supporting roles. Not an odd career trajectory at all for a leading man to shift into supporting roles, it just feels, to me anyway, like Crowe's time as a leading man came and went in the blink of an eye given how buzzy he was at the start of the century.

Requiem For A Dream Is An Uncompromising Slow-Burn Look At Addiction

Director Darren Aronofsky loves to put the characters in his movies through pain. Not just through conflict, he loves to toss the assorted individuals in his stories through a meat grinder of agony and then proceeds to hold the audience's eyes wide open as they witness these characters being incinerated. Keeping that in your mind, it should be no shocker that that Aronofsy's 2000 effort Requiem For A Dream (his first film to garner any sort of Oscar recognition) is entirely oriented around the process of destruction that, for varying reasons, consumes the lives of four different people in drastic ways.

What The Actual Hell Is Going On With American Pastoral?

Now that we're 50 years removed from America in the 1960's, any given storytelling has enough distance from that 10 year period in this countries history to cultivate a story that can really lend a sharp eye to this decade with a sense of perspective. For his directorial debut, Ewan McGregor adapts the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, which primarily takes place in the 1960's and revolves around various events that shaped this era, namely the Vietnam War and radical protestors of this war. And it ends up saying nothing at all and doing nothing despite attempting to give off the impression that lots of something are occurring on-screen. It's like that one passage from an Alice In Wonderland book where Alice has to keep running just to stay in one place.