Headline July 28, 2014

''' - "THE HULK" - IS ABOUT 

THE REAL YOU- : CRASH! SMASH? "'

It's pretty rare when the proverbial  800-pound gorilla, in the room actually resembles an  800 pound gorilla,  but that's the case with Lee's film version of the legendary- Comic-book franchise.

Top billing on  ''The Hulk''  went to Australian actor Eric Bana    -{Black Hawk Down)  and Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly  [A Beautiful Mind].

But the film's real draw is an entirely computer-generated  monster who emerges whenever Bana's character, Berkeley geneticist, Bruce Banner, has a major league snit.

Listen to the man, Ang. The Hulk in ''The Hulk'' is arguably the most challenging CGI character ever attempted   -a thinking, feeling monster who grows from nine to 12 to 15 feet depending on the size of his  tantrum-

Runs  100 mph,  leaps  3 miles and tosses tanks like toy cars   -but Lee and ILM have pulled it off. The creature actually gets more impressive as   Hulk emerges from darker settings into the light of the day-

Culminating with a showstopping set piece in the Mojave Desert.

Lee humanizes Hulk, in part, by crafting an unusually naturalistic action movie.

To Lee, though, all his movies  including  "Hulk"  - are about the same thing; emotional repression.  "It clicked right away," he says.

"I call Hulk my new  Green Destiny   -the sword in  'Crouching Tiger'. Both films are about the real you; that you try to cover up with your culture and your character:

It's the darker side, the anger. It's the unknown."

Making the film was no picnic for Ang Lee. After  "Crouching Tiger"  won four Oscars in  2000  and became America's highest-grossing foreign film, the Taiwanese born director had his pick of projects.

That Lee chose  "The Hulk"  -a summer blockbuster based on a comic books he had only vaguely heard of   -came as a surprise. But it probably shouldn't have.

Since launching his career with off beat comedies like  1994's   "Eat Drink Man Woman"   the maker has ricocheted from one subject he has no business conquering to another.

Bruce Banner    -Eric Bana] , the pent up protagonist of Ang Lee's  ''The Hulk'', is sitting up on a volcano repressed rage, and when it finally erupts he discovers an id the size of:

King Kong, Bruce, like the heroes of Freudian dramas, is suppressing a buried primal trauma, images of an Oedipal nightmare he can't quite remember.

Anyone who sees   ''The  Hulk'',  however, will have a hard time forgetting its pristine, powerful, surprisingly beautiful images, which alternate between intimate close-ups, vast vistas and kaleidoscope split screens.

You must have known that the maker of  '' Sense and Sensibility''  and  ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon''  wouldn't deliver your normal popcorn movie.

He hasn't. Dark, stately, with aspirations to tragic grandeur,  ''The Hulk''  is a fascinating synthesis: something old, something new, something borrowed, something -green.

It's also a  love story  (Jennifer Connelly is Betty Rose, touchingly torn between between desire and horror}  and a meditation on fathers and sons  {Nick Nolte, disheveled and deranged, plays Bruce's  mad-scientist dad}.

Lee takes his time getting to the action, but he doesn't skimp when he gets there.

Most spectacular is the desert showdown between  The Hulk and the phalanx of Army tanks, which be flings across the dunes like so many Frisbees.

The Hulk sometimes meanders, it has too many endings for its own good and the computer generated  angry green giant sometimes moves with cartoonish clunkiness.

But where so many comic-book movies had feel as disposable as Kleenex, the passionate, uncynical  ''Hulk''  stamps itself into your memory.

Lee's movies are built to last. 

So, students of the world:

Of course, breaking the rules may not be as dramatic as breaking, say,  walls-  but it still draws a huge, huge crowd 

With respectful dedication to every student  of the world. See Ya all on  !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

"' Humanizing "'

Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless