Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Whizz-bangy fun, really. Apparently, ages ago, the massed races of fantasy folk
fought a war against humanity. They won, having employed an unstoppable
ultimate weapon, but so appalled was their king at the carnage he had wrought,
a peace was made, and the two groups took to ignoring each other, such that the
whole business faded into legend. Only now the Prince of the Elves has finally
lost his patience and is attempting to gain control of said ultimate weapon, in
order to wipe out humanity again, and set everything to rights. He's got
himself a legitimate beef in my view.

In the other corner is the BRPD and their gang of freaks and weirdos, led by
Hellboy, who aims to punch him until he stops. Fair enough. Game on.

It's very much a SFX/Creatures movie, and the action sequences are king.
There's some bits and bobs of character floating about, but really, what we
want is rampaging elementals flattening New York, and being shot to death with
absurdly large guns. And that's what we get. And it's very nice.

The thing I find somewhat surprising is that a) Mike Mignola, Hellboy's creator
is heavily involved in it and b) that the film is way less talky and thinky
than the comic. Sure, in the comic, Hellboy does fall down a lot, and his
indestructability is used for the same kind of comic effect, but he's also
quite the occult investigator, whereas in the film, he's more like The Thing
out of the Fantastic Four - short on smarts, but long on "It's Clobberin'
Time!"

Anyroad, it's a good little grotesque action movie, lots of fun, but not a
whole lot to take home and think about later.

Man On Wire

There's two ways you can view this film. In part, it is certainly a very
interesting documentary about the occasion when a maverick French wirewalker,
and his mates, broke into the World Trade Center, slung a cable between the two
towers, and had him walk across it.

On another level, it's a documentary about some fantastically smug and
self-satified people who did the above in 1974, and have been dining out on the
story every since. I'd hate to actually know Philippe Petit, he's probably a
dreadful person to be stuck next to at a dinner party, Mastermind specialist
subject: Myself and How Clever I Am.

Essentially, it's not an uninteresting tale by any means, but there's two
problems. One, it's overlong. A bit of judicious editing would make this a
bloody good 45 minute BBC documentary. At double that, it begins to pall. Two,
there's not enough source material. Part of the reason for this is obvious;
there is, tragically, no way of revisiting the scene, and saying "yes, this is
where we attached the cables" or similar. Fortunately, taste prevails and we
don't travel to NY to mawkishly paw over ground zero, but that leaves us
essentially with archive footage and talking heads, and the archive material
really isn't that good. It would seem that their exploits were filmed at the
time with a few cine cameras and still cameras, but not with anything like the
professionalism you'd like. There's a lot of distant blurs of what might be a
man, on what is possibly a wire. Likewise, there's just too much of Petit and
his team banging on about their recollections of the event, and that's what
makes them look smug; if they'd said how clever they were just the once, you'd
have accepted it.

With more material to work from, this might have been worth 90 minutes of our
time. Cutting their coat according to their cloth, they'd have ended up with a
45 minute documentary. What we end up with, to quote Bilbo Baggins, is butter
scraped across too much bread.

A Complete History Of My Sexual Failures.

Independent Filmmaker Chris Waitt, in light of the fact he's just been dumped
yet again, decides to make a documentary, going back over his life,
interviewing his exes, in an attempt to work out what is wrong with him, and
why they all dumped him. And this isn't the premise for a fictional film, this
is a documentary. Albeit one where some of the scenes are of dubious veracity.

I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that you'll know what's wrong
with him and why they dumped him in the first five or so minutes. The next 85
minutes or so, however, chronicle his own gradual discovery of his own
shortcomings, in frank, embarrassing detail.

Essentially, it's 100% pure bottled schadenfreude. The guy's hopeless, and
frankly, I think he's edited the film to make himself appear more so for comic
effect. The real mystery is not why 10-15 perfectly lovely seeming girls dumped
him, it's why 10-15 perfectly lovely seeming girls went out with him in the
first place.

Anyway, it's a whistle-stop tour of the guy's misery, lingering uncomfortably
long on the issue of his erectile dysfunction, including a visit to a
dominatrix who seems to feel that whipping his gonads will help in some way,
though whether it's intended to help him, or get vengeance on behalf of the
women of the world is not clear. I mention this episode in particular, as it
contains actual footage of his privates being whipped, and I think anyone
seeing it should be thus far forewarned.

I'll give it 8/10. Riveting, in the sense of "I want to look away, but can't."
People with a low tolerance for embarrassment and humiliation may wish to look
elsewhere.