I am watching Hellboy II: A Return To Love on Blu-ray... Let's get the bitching over first:
I've complained about this before, not the least in connection with Buffy, but it's rampant in stories on this planet... please, writers, get this straight: being willing to sacrifice thousands or millions of lives to save the one you "love" is not a sign of "love", it's a sign of perspective being limited to the point of clinical insanity.
In Hellboy II: The War Goes On, this happens twice within five minutes! It is so not romantic.
Apart from that, Hellboy II: As Above, So Below is an enjoyable movie. The story/script won't win a place in the annals of literature, but it's serviceable*, and the visuals are where it's at. Just the lengthy visit to The Troll Market makes it all worthwhile.
Hellboy II: Caught In The Vortex is the kind of film which justifies suffering the clunkiness of current Blu-ray players: the spectacular detail is almost too much for DVD really, and unlike cinema, you can rewind and take in more details of your favorite visuals.
Hellboy II: Love And War has more weird and wonderful creatures than a Star Wars film. The imagination to make them up and the work and time invested to put them down on disc is impressive. And most of them they built physically, so unlike a film like Van Helsing, it all looks very real.
This visual feast is all the more impressive when you find out it was made on half the budget of other big fantasy/superhero movies (85M as opposed to 170M or more).
Hellboy II: The Golden Army gets two thumbs up from the visual maven.
Buy it from Amazon US or Amazon UK.
*Don't get the impression that the story is sub-par. Actually many of the characters are quite faceted, and it's often quite funny too.
Se below... again and again, what impresses me most about Hollywood is the amazingly talented visual designers working there. This book appears for all of half a second in the film...
Also, the "Wink" creature is absolutely incredible. He's nigh eight feet tall, and he's real, not CGI. His animatronic face is so alive that you can't believe that the face is not CGI. There's footage of some of the actors when they see him for the first time, and they all go "oh my god!"
Not to mention the guy in the suit, Brian something, good lord. The suit weighs 130 pounds, and he has to walk around in it for hours, acting and fighting. And of course the heat and moisture from his body can't escape.
3 comments:
Pretty book. Seems faliliar. Is that the Plasmanomicon Ex Necros, "The Book of the Dead But Without Any Hemoglobin"? Or the Buffibiblion Angelicum?
I'm working on a story where a romantic element, interestingly, is precisely about sacrificing personal love for the good of the far greater number. And I'm not talking 6 billion earthlings. More like 600. Or maybe 300, I haven't counted them yet.
And this, from a character that is, precisely, slipping on the frontier of clinical insanity, and knows it.
Then again, can you be truly insane if you're aware of your mental instability? A question I haven't resolved yet.
"The nightmares. All red, everywhere. Can't sleep, can't think straight. Who knew there were so many different reds? Fight... the... bloodlust..."
And still, being only at the frontier of insanity is a miracle. But to know more you'll have to buy the book once it's out.
}:-)
It also has naked chicks. Of course.
Bad story + good visuals... I don't see a reason to watch it twice. I winced a number of times in the movie, and had absolutely no "that was cool" moments.
I would rather watch an animated Hellboy that has a good story.
I'd like that too, but I was not impressed with the animated Hellboy.
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