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Rating: 3 stars
My friends were all pretty stunned when I told them I was looking forward to Hellboy II: The Golden Army—I’m not usually a Hellboy kinda gal. But what many people don’t realize is Hellboy is not just a high-budget comic-book action film featuring a cigar-chomping, do-gooder demon and his band of mutant sidekicks, it’s a high-budget comic-book action film directed by Guillermo del Toro. Yup, the same visionary genius who did Pan’s Labyrinth. Color me stoked.
In some ways, Hellboy II is a strange cross between the gruesome/beautiful otherworld depicted in Pan’s Labyrinth and your standard summer blockbuster. I love Ron Perlman’s take on Hellboy—he plays him as a lovable lug with a fearsome temper—but is it really all that different from Michael Chiklis’s take on a similar character in The Fantastic Four? And while some of the film’s wit is spot-on—a scene where Hellboy sings a bad Barry Manilow duet with his lovesick amphibian pal Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) is both touching and funny—...
1:55 pm
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The experience of watching Hard Times at Douglass High is akin to that of walking into a very dark room that has a few slivers of sunlight peaking in. The documentary, filmed by Susan and Alan Raymond over the course of one school year in Baltimore and airing this month on HBO, doesn’t really tell you anything you don’t already know about inner city schools or the pressures of No Child Left Behind—it just manages to bring it into sharper focus. So we see students falling asleep in classes or not going to class at all (oddly, they come to school, but loiter in the hallway), being rude to teachers and administrators, fighting with each other in the hall (in one horrific scene, a muscle-bound boy starts beating on five girls who were flirtingly teasing him), and struggling with the most basic of assignments. We see teachers, mostly hard-working and committed, who don’t have text books, who beg their students to show up “just two days in a row,” who bemoan the fact that, on parent/teacher night, so few parents actually arrive. We see administrators forced to make grueling choices—pass kids who really...
