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Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow review....
Theatrical Release

This went up on Gamerdad first. Take a look-see here.

Intrepid reporter Polly Perkins gets a hot tip on the recent disappearances of some scientists, and before she can even get back to file the story the city is under siege from giant robots. No one knows why or where they come from. Captain Joseph Sullivan (aka "Sky Captain") gets called in to save the day, and we're off into the wild blue yonder as they are embroiled in a shadowy conspiracy of global proportions. They have to track down the villain before it's too late and save the world.

One of the joys of this film is it never even pretends to realism. It's a view of that time through the pages of a Sam Spade serial, or Jimmy Olsen's lens. But the way they did it, it made it seem more real. As I write this, I keep having to stop myself from reaching up to slap the return lever at the end of each line. Under the click of my keyboard I hear the rattle and ding of that old Underwood sitting on Polly's desk. Their world is awash in Bakelite radio microphones and clicking telegraphs. The rockets and robots and the planes with their fantastical abilities and the von Zeppelin-meets-Miyazaki airships are straight out of the mind of a 12-year-old boy under the covers with a flashlight and a Tom Swift book.

Style is thick in the air. Just the gorgeous twist on the old conceit of shortening travel sequences by showing a map was worth the price of admission to me. And there's a whole lot more there. It's used to beautiful effect. Every frame of that film has been monkeyed with. It's as heavily drawn as a doxy's eyeliner, but it works, too. The robots and the backgrounds work seamlessly with the live action sections, and the heavy processing of the film stock blends it all into one seamless shot.

Keep an eye out for the little hooks into the genre that are sprinkled all over. My son caught the Godzilla silhouette in the newspaper montage, and I recognized those old Buck Rogers comics and their connection to the ray gun in Dex's hand. There are great details all over the place, like Paltrow having to rip her skirt so she could run from the robots, or the screening of "The Wizard of Oz" at a crucial point.



This one doesn't just look like those older films; it marches to the same drummer as well. There is no hurry, and even the petulant bickering is given time to develop. Today's movies have become so frenetic you can barely whisper "hypotenuse" between the action beats. To those conditioned to this sort of hyper-speed, it's going to seem way too leisurely. The wit isn't rapid-fire; it's as much the slow smirk and the barbed comment as it is volleys of snappy comebacks.

Jude Law's character is based on parts by some of the most famous actors in show business. He has a very big silk scarf to sling around his shoulders. He manages it, but only just. He would have made a truly fabulous wing mate to Clark Gable. Gwyneth Paltrow's attempt to channel Noell Neill's Lois Lane is okay, but she comes off as much more a Lana Lang. There's a little bit too much of an incompetent brat in her to make me believe she could get on and off the subway safely, much less do her job. Giovanni Ribisi does get his geek on with that great little grin of his; he looks and acts just the part of the comic-reading kid grown into long pants in a world that gives him the tools to make it real. Angelina Jolie is quite simply her leather-clad self. They tried to tone her down a bit with the eye patch, but I think they would have had better luck with The Shadow's hat, mask and coat. She was supposed to be someone who could stand up to Paltrow's character to make a believable love-triangle, but from my seat she blew her right out of the water just standing on the deck. She pretty much blew away Law, too. Sir Lawrence Olivier's appearance has to be seen to be believed. Yes, I said Sir Lawrence Olivier. Through the magic of CGI, archive footage of him is used to great effect. I don't want to spoil, but talk about two birds with one stone!

The story is just about as thin as a comic book, I'm afraid. This wouldn't have been Oscar-fodder, even back then. This sort of thing plays well in a video game because the player's actions carry the drama and engross them in it as they play, whether they will or not. In a film, there just isn't enough there. What I would like to know is why they didn't take this visual idea and pitch a Crimson Skies film using this technology. In several of the flight sequences, I caught myself flying along as if I had a controller in my hand. The look and the feel were perfect, and with those characters and story it would have been an unvarnished miracle.

I did love this film, despite all the flaws and foibles. If you're looking for "Casablanca" or "A Guy Named Joe", you're in the wrong theater. If you're looking for "Captain Blood" or "Flash Gordon" (Buster Crabbe's 1936 version), then settle down and make sure you have plenty of popcorn. You're not going to want to get up.

Kid Factor:
For kids, I say stick with the rating. Even at that age you'll have some explaining to do. Judging by the constant stream of questions out of the eight-year-old girl sitting to my left, there's a lot they just don't understand. To you and I those things are instantly recognizable, but not to them. A young child of today might not recognize a casette tape - telegraph is the start of a LOONNNGGGG conversation. I also got questions about the camera, the typewriter, the rotary-dial phones, telegrams. She wanted to know why was there so little color in the picture. She was fascinated with the concept of black-and-white film. I was surprised my son knew what Double-bubble is, and he's spent enough time in various other stuff from this genre he sort of knew his way around.

There is quite a bit of action, but it's pretty toned down. There are a couple disturbing points, like the one guy who gets fried to ashes and a skeleton by an electrical security device, and there's one very old dead body towards the end. There are several other deaths, but they're of the fall-over-and-be-still kind. The only blood I remember is some smears on the face after the final fight to make Sky Captain look like he'd had to try.


MPAA Rating: PG for sequences of stylized sci-fi violence and brief mild language
GamerDad Age Recommendation: 6+

Hellboy
DVD and Theatrical release
Originally posted on Gamerdad.

Baby Ruth bars and pamcakes and kittens! Yes!

I've been reading Mignola's work for years. He's not a household name, but his beautiful flowing style is recognizable to comic fans from such stalwart titles as "The Watchman", "The Dark Knight Returns", and "Gotham By Gaslight" for DC Comics. The character of Hellboy started out as the cover of a convention program, drooling and snarling at readers. When he moved to Dark Horse comics Mignola took the character front and center with John Byrne penning the story. Hellboy's origins were laid out in "The Right Hand of Doom". It explains his giant stone hand by saying that Hellboy is Anung Un Rama, the Son Of The Beast and Bringer Of The Apocalypse, brought into this world to start the Apocalypse by Hitler's lust for power but lost to the world of mortals after eating a pancake (in the film it was a Baby Ruth). Raised as a son by the young occultist working with the Allied Forces who foiled the plan, he works for a secret splinter bureau of the government whose job is to protect us from paranormal attack. It's sixty years later.



The story is an interesting choice. It's not what you think it is, but it all seems familiar at the same time. With the recent spate of comic movies the underlying story threads of someone very different trying to fit into the world and what makes a man a man are starting to feel familiar, but del Torro did a great job of making it not seem old-hat. Even for an old comic hound there were surprises. Good ones. Mignola's not Shakespeare, and he's not Ellery Queen. If you were expecting that sort of thing you're in the wrong theater. This is a comic book. Probably one of the best out there, but still a comic book and it never steps too far away from it's pulp origins.

There are some influences there. Mignola has read way to much H.P. Lovecraft, and I think del Torro has, too. It shows up in the design of the bad guys, and in some of the Dunwich-esque plot elements. This isn't a bad thing, though. The bad part comes with the choice of bad guys. One of the main truisms in fiction is that you have to have a good villain. For every cat there must be a fine rat. In the case of this story, well, the rats were more than a little wimpy and moth-eaten. Hellboy needed a villain worthy of his immortal powers to face. He got a flock of obnoxious dog-lizard-fish things with hydra-like habits, a generic bad-guy clone and his moll, a wind-up toy with sharp bits, and a really large tentacled slug that he took out in one explosion.

Even opponent-challenged, Hellboy himself carried the film. If HB hadn't been believable, this whole thing would have stunk to high heaven. But it was magic. Between them, Ron Perlman and Rick Baker wrought a miracle. A picture pulled itself out of the paper and into real life. Many people thought del Torro was crazy for insisting on casting the 56-year-old Perlman, but there are a lot of believers out there now. Even through a really offensive amount of latex and paint his performance balanced perfectly on that knife-edge between over the top and understated.

His cohort, Abraham Sapien was also ably done. The decision not to go CGI with him was a surprise, but it turned out so well that you really can't fault them. I never pictured him with David Hyde Pierce's voice, but it gave his character a strange touch of incongriousness that actually made him seem more real. They never could have made it match, so they made it as different as possible. The take on Liz and her powers was interesting - I had pictured her more as a Velma-type rather than the knockout beauty. John Hurt's fatherly love for Hellboy was a warm thread through the whole film. His very human performance gave credence to Hellboy's raising and his choices. Agent Myers is a wet-behind-the-ears nonentity, but he steps up to the plate and you see the beginnings of a great friendship. Oh, and keep an eye out for that little boy on the roof - we'll be seeing him again I think. He did a great job.

There is a lot of occult symbology in the story - if that sort of thing makes you uncomfortable I'd think twice. Hellboy was born a demon, one of the Princes of Hell. While he has been raised as a human and to do good, he also uses his powers. He animates a corpse to get directions, for example, which actually turned into a funny point in the film. He doesn't take the easy way of staying good by denying his origin, he uses it just as you or I would use our hands to help someone. You never get the feeling that he's trying to restrain his "evil side" or anything - he's Dr. Brum's son through and through. That's not his struggle here.

I loved it, but a lot of my love for the film is sheer relief that they didn't hose it up COMPLETELY, which would have been incredibly easy to do (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, anyone?). Cinematically, it's not a perfect work. It's missing a lot of context information that would make the character's actions make a lot more sense. Hellboy isn't a story that everyone knows, and some more information for the people who haven't read the books would help a lot. The villains were paper dolls, for the most part.

The great thing about it was it just felt like sitting down and opening up one of the books. I can offer no higher praise than that. Judging by it's box office performance, this has frachise written all over it. That would be good. Then this film will serve as an absurdly expensive prequel for the next one and we can all watch Hellboy kick some evil backside. Heck, pull out all the stops and get a couple of the Many-Angled ones in here rather than their stunt-doubles and let's mix it up!

Kid Factor:
As far as taking the house-apes, I would stick with the rating. There's a lot of goo, a lot of property destruction, the Sammaels are just nasty. There are several deaths and there's some blood and creepy spots. And having to explain Kroenen and the other bad guys was interesting on the way home. Any kid who's seen Don Bluth's "Anastasia" will recognize the name of Rasputin, but the rest of them were the start of a very long conversation.

Rated: PG-13, for sci-fi action violence and frightening images