Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
To those who would eagerly praise the deficiencies and clichés of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army as daring pop, I propose The Ting Tings scintillating new single, "That's Not My Name." Once the song's chorus begins ("They call me Hell..."), The Ting Tings make Hellboy's campy, bad = good subversiveness seem like a stack of dusty old comic books. It reveals that today's comics-movies and their easily specious Pop attitudes distance us from realizing our own identities.
Hellboy himself is already a corrupt concept: First seen as a devil-child enjoying a Christmas Eve bedtime story, then played by Ron Perlman as a lovable, unconflicted lug. He makes no sense as a surrogate for New Millennium audiences who are divorced from religion and politically apathetic. The filmmakers simply exploit that unease, offering adolescent narcissism—that's what Hellboy's huge, masturbatory, stone right hand represents. Yet, the movie is lax on personal expression, simply a spook-the-kids, psyche-the-hipsters carnival. Del Toro's monster movie routines lack the freshness of hearing The Ting Tings vivify the crisis of identity that Hellboy bungles.
The Ting Tings offer a sassy refutation of ignominy and alienation—themes that ought to be at the heart of Hellboy's story of a housebroken miscreant (standing in for the formerly misunderstood teen). The Golden Army is too snarkily satisfied with its illusion of subversion to actually examine the issue of inherited cynicism (Hellboy fights a evil scion who wants to usurp his father's throne and command an underground army—"a harbinger of death, the unstoppable tide"). This idea was also handled better in Adam Sandler's 2000 Little Nicky, a sketch-comedy revue about an individual (the son of Satan) discovering his own morality. The Ting Tings' exuberance celebrates what Sandler's persevering half-demon/half-angel desired. Their cheekiness, like Nicky's irreverence, subtly reconsiders modern ethics and identity—themes Hellboy fails to accomplish.
Hellboy wrecks the symbology taught in Western Judeo-Christian culture, whereas Sandler parodied it to achieve justice—and, always, humor. (Nicky pondered, "The Prince of Darkness should have a distinguished look, like George Clooney.") The Golden Army pretends to be about a fight between good and evil, the corporeal world against the sinister occult. But it continues the trite moral irony of the 2004 film (and the 1993 Mike Mignola comic) that introduced the devil's son working as an agent for the U.S. government. Thus, it is politically and spiritually naive. The reformed government agent never questions his heritage the way a girl balks at being called "darling," "bird" or "Hell." Let's put a name to this kind of pop: bull crap.
Del Toro's last film, Pan's Labyrinth, was worse. It attempted an adult-serious allegory for fascism through the story of a little girl witnessing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (a retread of his lousy The Devil's Backbone). But the superfluous addition of del Toro's fairy-tale sensibility to real human misery made that story insufferable. Only critics and fanboys (not the general public) fell for its titular allusion to Borges. But in the Hellboy series, del Toro's historical mish-mash and pop frivolity are undisguised and shameless: Tough guy Hellboy dresses like a WWII pilot (a working-class Indy Jones) but talks like a hardboiled detective from some postmodern film-noir caricature ("I'm not gonna kill him but I am gonna kick his ass"), while duking it out with ghosts and fiends in the gravity-defying style of HK action flicks—but minus the Zen moralizing. Absurdly, the superhero paradigm becomes trivialized Christian morality—perverting the Book of Revelations into comics lore. The first film was well-timed for the anti-Mel Gibson brigade who relished having a hip religious travesty. What could be cooler than the beginning of another cliché-dark, comics-based movie franchise?
Now this time, childlike del Toro goes all out. A bigger budget means using animation, puppets and live-human actors to create an elaborate (yet narratively cramped) world of intermixed dimensions, age-old hermeneutics and both classical and pop iconography. The prologue describing the creation of The Golden Army uses quaintly charming Karel Zeman-style graphics and cheesey episodic TV music, yet it's essentially inane: Stringless marionettes—but not without strings: Its ultimate effect is derangement. Del Toro designs wild creatures (like the plague of "toothfairies") to inhabit his lame plot—a blurred resemblance to last year's Stardust and The Golden Compass. Not visionary, he's on the same banal wavelength as every other commercial fantasy movie.
Employed by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy is no longer a metaphor for the moral struggle of the 20th century (the first film used Nazism as a crutch). Del Toro dives into a morass of fantasmagoria that, just like Iron Man, The Hulk and and Wanted, celebrates comics culture rather than bring clarity to modern moral issues—or provide the pizazz of a pop song. But this adolescent way of seeing the world, reducing historical dilemmas to fantasy interpretation, gets caught up in the dull silliness of del Toro's comic book style and CGI frills. Somehow, this technology has been confused with the essence of Pop, the essence of cinema. In all the ways that count—emotional identification (Hellboy's romance with a pregnant Selma Blair), social connection (contemporary real-world politics are forsaken for an otherworldly power struggle) and ethics (moral beliefs represented by symbolic figures)—this movie destroys pop culture's usefulness. It frustrates any philosophical reading and retards Pop's progress. Our commonly understood sense of duty, obligation and right action are replaced with Lord of the Rings-style nonsense.
That's why The Ting Tings' hand-clapping ecstacy feels so restorative. When CGI leads a movie narrative, the human element goes out. It seems the entire purpose of The Golden Army is just to keep special effects houses on several continents busy. Del Toro is certainly the most talented of Mexico's "Three Amigos" (the filmmaking brand that includes Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu). Unlike his hack hermanos, del Toro shows recognizable personality in his obsession with grotesque fantasy and horror genres. He has a comics artist's dedication to drawing and fantasized imagery (such as a creature with eyes embedded within black wings, or a breast-hugging infant figure who pouts "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor!"). But he's still a third-rater. In The Golden Army, del Toro's expansion on the first Hellboy reveals a stunted imagination. In lurching from macabre scenes to sentimental ones, del Toro can't buoy the ghoulish humor at which Joe Dante's The Howling ("I like pretty girls!") excelled.
Douglas Wolk's new book Reading Comics, partly about today's comics-into-movies empire, describes this youth-cult phenomenon: "Cartooning is, inescapably, a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception." This has allowed Hollywood to recklessly exploit adolescent sensibility, betraying pop culture's means of creating self-knowledge and emotional sustenance. Hellboy preferences the small, ugly joke of a demonic hero—and uses that as an excuse for CGI excess. The Golden Army's insultingly simplistic cast of a thousand Bosch and Star Wars creatures distracts from the identity-crisis that ought to be the point of a second installment and a larger vision. Instead, del Toro submits audiences to the mob-mentality cartoonishness of adolescent snark.
There's less solipsism and more life--more resistance—in the powerful ditty "That's Not My Name" that sustains the edifying light of pop culture. The Golden Army really goes to hell when del Toro throws in mindless humor like Hellboy and pals doing a karaoke version of Barry Manilow's "I Can't Smile Without You," attempting to make nihilism cute. It doesn't rank with Little Nicky's joke about the '70s pop band Chicago as the epitome of evil whose devilish backwards-track commands spoofed both the trendy occult and corporate pop in one liberating jest. Hellboy tries to win pop fans over to its moral confusion by demonizing/heroizing adolescent rebellion. Pop fans should rise up and sing the revolutionary chorus "That's Not My Name."
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
To those who would eagerly praise the deficiencies and clichés of Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army as daring pop, I propose The Ting Tings scintillating new single, "That's Not My Name." Once the song's chorus begins ("They call me Hell..."), The Ting Tings make Hellboy's campy, bad = good subversiveness seem like a stack of dusty old comic books. It reveals that today's comics-movies and their easily specious Pop attitudes distance us from realizing our own identities.
Hellboy himself is already a corrupt concept: First seen as a devil-child enjoying a Christmas Eve bedtime story, then played by Ron Perlman as a lovable, unconflicted lug. He makes no sense as a surrogate for New Millennium audiences who are divorced from religion and politically apathetic. The filmmakers simply exploit that unease, offering adolescent narcissism—that's what Hellboy's huge, masturbatory, stone right hand represents. Yet, the movie is lax on personal expression, simply a spook-the-kids, psyche-the-hipsters carnival. Del Toro's monster movie routines lack the freshness of hearing The Ting Tings vivify the crisis of identity that Hellboy bungles.
The Ting Tings offer a sassy refutation of ignominy and alienation—themes that ought to be at the heart of Hellboy's story of a housebroken miscreant (standing in for the formerly misunderstood teen). The Golden Army is too snarkily satisfied with its illusion of subversion to actually examine the issue of inherited cynicism (Hellboy fights a evil scion who wants to usurp his father's throne and command an underground army—"a harbinger of death, the unstoppable tide"). This idea was also handled better in Adam Sandler's 2000 Little Nicky, a sketch-comedy revue about an individual (the son of Satan) discovering his own morality. The Ting Tings' exuberance celebrates what Sandler's persevering half-demon/half-angel desired. Their cheekiness, like Nicky's irreverence, subtly reconsiders modern ethics and identity—themes Hellboy fails to accomplish.
Hellboy wrecks the symbology taught in Western Judeo-Christian culture, whereas Sandler parodied it to achieve justice—and, always, humor. (Nicky pondered, "The Prince of Darkness should have a distinguished look, like George Clooney.") The Golden Army pretends to be about a fight between good and evil, the corporeal world against the sinister occult. But it continues the trite moral irony of the 2004 film (and the 1993 Mike Mignola comic) that introduced the devil's son working as an agent for the U.S. government. Thus, it is politically and spiritually naive. The reformed government agent never questions his heritage the way a girl balks at being called "darling," "bird" or "Hell." Let's put a name to this kind of pop: bull crap.
Del Toro's last film, Pan's Labyrinth, was worse. It attempted an adult-serious allegory for fascism through the story of a little girl witnessing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (a retread of his lousy The Devil's Backbone). But the superfluous addition of del Toro's fairy-tale sensibility to real human misery made that story insufferable. Only critics and fanboys (not the general public) fell for its titular allusion to Borges. But in the Hellboy series, del Toro's historical mish-mash and pop frivolity are undisguised and shameless: Tough guy Hellboy dresses like a WWII pilot (a working-class Indy Jones) but talks like a hardboiled detective from some postmodern film-noir caricature ("I'm not gonna kill him but I am gonna kick his ass"), while duking it out with ghosts and fiends in the gravity-defying style of HK action flicks—but minus the Zen moralizing. Absurdly, the superhero paradigm becomes trivialized Christian morality—perverting the Book of Revelations into comics lore. The first film was well-timed for the anti-Mel Gibson brigade who relished having a hip religious travesty. What could be cooler than the beginning of another cliché-dark, comics-based movie franchise?
Now this time, childlike del Toro goes all out. A bigger budget means using animation, puppets and live-human actors to create an elaborate (yet narratively cramped) world of intermixed dimensions, age-old hermeneutics and both classical and pop iconography. The prologue describing the creation of The Golden Army uses quaintly charming Karel Zeman-style graphics and cheesey episodic TV music, yet it's essentially inane: Stringless marionettes—but not without strings: Its ultimate effect is derangement. Del Toro designs wild creatures (like the plague of "toothfairies") to inhabit his lame plot—a blurred resemblance to last year's Stardust and The Golden Compass. Not visionary, he's on the same banal wavelength as every other commercial fantasy movie.
Employed by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy is no longer a metaphor for the moral struggle of the 20th century (the first film used Nazism as a crutch). Del Toro dives into a morass of fantasmagoria that, just like Iron Man, The Hulk and and Wanted, celebrates comics culture rather than bring clarity to modern moral issues—or provide the pizazz of a pop song. But this adolescent way of seeing the world, reducing historical dilemmas to fantasy interpretation, gets caught up in the dull silliness of del Toro's comic book style and CGI frills. Somehow, this technology has been confused with the essence of Pop, the essence of cinema. In all the ways that count—emotional identification (Hellboy's romance with a pregnant Selma Blair), social connection (contemporary real-world politics are forsaken for an otherworldly power struggle) and ethics (moral beliefs represented by symbolic figures)—this movie destroys pop culture's usefulness. It frustrates any philosophical reading and retards Pop's progress. Our commonly understood sense of duty, obligation and right action are replaced with Lord of the Rings-style nonsense.
That's why The Ting Tings' hand-clapping ecstacy feels so restorative. When CGI leads a movie narrative, the human element goes out. It seems the entire purpose of The Golden Army is just to keep special effects houses on several continents busy. Del Toro is certainly the most talented of Mexico's "Three Amigos" (the filmmaking brand that includes Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu). Unlike his hack hermanos, del Toro shows recognizable personality in his obsession with grotesque fantasy and horror genres. He has a comics artist's dedication to drawing and fantasized imagery (such as a creature with eyes embedded within black wings, or a breast-hugging infant figure who pouts "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor!"). But he's still a third-rater. In The Golden Army, del Toro's expansion on the first Hellboy reveals a stunted imagination. In lurching from macabre scenes to sentimental ones, del Toro can't buoy the ghoulish humor at which Joe Dante's The Howling ("I like pretty girls!") excelled.
Douglas Wolk's new book Reading Comics, partly about today's comics-into-movies empire, describes this youth-cult phenomenon: "Cartooning is, inescapably, a metaphor for the subjectivity of perception." This has allowed Hollywood to recklessly exploit adolescent sensibility, betraying pop culture's means of creating self-knowledge and emotional sustenance. Hellboy preferences the small, ugly joke of a demonic hero—and uses that as an excuse for CGI excess. The Golden Army's insultingly simplistic cast of a thousand Bosch and Star Wars creatures distracts from the identity-crisis that ought to be the point of a second installment and a larger vision. Instead, del Toro submits audiences to the mob-mentality cartoonishness of adolescent snark.
There's less solipsism and more life--more resistance—in the powerful ditty "That's Not My Name" that sustains the edifying light of pop culture. The Golden Army really goes to hell when del Toro throws in mindless humor like Hellboy and pals doing a karaoke version of Barry Manilow's "I Can't Smile Without You," attempting to make nihilism cute. It doesn't rank with Little Nicky's joke about the '70s pop band Chicago as the epitome of evil whose devilish backwards-track commands spoofed both the trendy occult and corporate pop in one liberating jest. Hellboy tries to win pop fans over to its moral confusion by demonizing/heroizing adolescent rebellion. Pop fans should rise up and sing the revolutionary chorus "That's Not My Name."
anonymous
