Director: Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me, Grimsby)
Budget: $150million
Box Office: $263million
- Damn, this isn’t the Ang Lee one. Which is a shame as then I could have made the “Don’t make me Ang Lee, you wouldn’t like me when I’m Ang Lee” joke. Now I can’t 😦 I hate life and everybody in it.
- Random fact, the director wanted Mark Ruffalo as the lead but was declined. As such we will now never ever know what Mark Ruffalo would look like as The Hulk. Never, ever, ever.
- Entire origin story takes place during the opening credits. Thank god for that otherwise it would have added like an extra two hours onto the run time.
- “The best way to control your anger is to control your body”. It’s taken him years to be told this? I’d have thought that would be the first lesson.
- One slap round the face gets him that annoyed? If I got that annoyed everytime I got slapped in the face it would just distract me from the prostitute I paid for.
- Edward Norton is being smart and scientific, you can tell this because he’s wearing glasses.
- How did he miss that REALLY obvious blood on the bottle?
- Everyone’s looking at him like he’s crazy, as if we’re supposed to think that everyone doesn’t know why he’s worried about his blood getting in the drink. Even without it being Hulk blood, that’s still not something a business wants in their drink. And I know “but they’re a Brazilian company, they don’t have health codes like we do”, maybe, but even Coca Cola wouldn’t want blood in their drink, and they’re practically Satan.
- “get lost, gringo” That’s racist, I think.
- “You wouldn’t like me when I’m hungry”. Ok, let’s get this clarified: “Angry” in Portuguese is either: Irritado, com raiva, zangado, furioso, colerico, or amarrado, whilst “Hungry” is: com fome, faminto, esfomeado, avido, ansioso, desejoso, pobre, esteril, arido, or pouco productivo. There’s no way you can mistake the two in that language, it really only works in English. You’d think Edward “Everything Must Be Perfect Or Else I Will Stab Everyone” Norton would have picked that up. Cute joke though.
- “another failure” The exact same language was used by my family when they announced my birth.
- “living with gamma poisoning not safe”. Thank god for scientists, I never would have known that.
- Hey Tim Roth’s in this movie.
- Oh god, Tim Roth’s in this movie. Poor Tim Roth.
- Still, better than United Passions.
- Sure, just shut down your laptop. Don’t wait for him to answer or anything. Dick.
- These guys didn’t even check the exits? They’re awful planners.
- Tim Roth shoots a dog.
- Yeah, that’s good, hide your identity and then stare straight at the the guy hunting you. You’re an idiot.
- “Do not lose him” oh really? Well I was going to just let him escape but now you said that.
- I’ve never had to run across rooftops to escape people, yet it seems to happen in almost every film.
- All those coke bottles behind him, Holy product placement Batman!
- “Not so tough now are you?” Yeah, you show what a strong guy you are by hitting him when two other people holding him down. You big man, you very very strong man.
- We’ve already established this factory is not doing that great financially, repairing all this damage could bankrupt it. People talk about the damage done to New York in the Avengers movie, but they’re able to pay it off. This company is ruined.
- “who’s this woman in this newspaper clipping?”. Wait, so you didn’t even take a look at the newspaper clipping and see that this woman has the same name as the guy giving you orders? You suck, Tim Roth (please note the punctuation there, there’s an important difference between “You suck, Tim Roth”, and “You suck Tim Roth”).
- “He threw a forklift truck like it was a softball”. No Russian person who was raised in England would ever use the word “softball”. At all.
- “Days without incident: 1”. No, it’s zero, he had an incident just before, it doesn’t count as one if it’s on the same day. You wouldn’t say “I haven’t had chocolate for a whole day” just because you’re not eating chocolate right at that moment.
- Distance between Brazil and Guatemala: 3,000 miles. How on earth did he go that far without people noticing?
- Music from the original Incredible Hulk series reminds us that this is in fact, a movie. Maybe that’s the problem with this film, everyone is really familiar with the character, a lot more than they are any other of the characters from the MCU. So everyone goes in with preconceptions about the character which makes it hard to bring something new to the table.
- “In WW2” Don’t be that guy, just say “world war 2”. Don’t say “WW2”, you sound like a prick and it takes longer to say, it’s like double the syllables.
- “he thought he was working on radiation resistance. I would never have told him what the project really was”. That’s the perfect way to get accurate scientific data, have them attempt something else.
- “that mans whole body is the property of the US army”. Sounds a bit rapey.
- Edward Norton is using Norton antivirus. Hah!
- Yeah, that’s it Liv Tyler, walk out on your date without saying a word. Rude!
- Rain powered entirely by emotion.
- “he wants to make it a weapon” A weapon he can’t control or order around. Having an army of Hulks would cause a lot of damage, yes, but a lot of it would be to your own army. It would be like having an army of bears.
- Note to self: find army costumes for bears.
- Ok, this is a visually impressive set-up, the whole “Hulk in the glass covered room which is full of smoke”, but it’s not really done effectively. They showed the transformation and the view from inside the room. What they should have done is the last we see is him as Banner, then silence, and then Hulk bursts out of the smoke.
- Why does everyone keep shooting him? Surely after the first shots have absolutely no effect you’d think of a different tactic?
- So this takes place on a University campus in middle of the day, and there’s only two bystanders? There were more bystanders at college when a car crashed into a lamp-post.
- Do they ever use these sonic cannons again? Does every Marvel film feature a fantastic weapon which for some reason is never used again?
- This movie is pretty much responsible for keeping rain machines in business.
- Jesus how much did Coke pay to be in this film so much?
- So he can swallow a usb stick and it still works? Yet I have one in my pocket for a twenty minute walk to uni and it stops.
- Wait, so he can’t have sex without hulking out? What about masturbation? So he hasn’t jacked off for years? That might be why he’s so angry, I stopped for two weeks once and committed a small genocide in Rwanda.
- Can The Hulk get high? Serious question, couldn’t he just get really really stoned? Or maybe he tried and that’s why he’s so green.
- “I had to make more” Wait, you can just make more blood? Then why the fuck do the NHS keep asking for mine?
- “I will never forgive what you’ve done to him” for some reason I hate that sentence. It just sounds really clunky, like it’s been translated into english from a foreign language.
- “The mixture could be……….an Abomination”. Hmmm, I wonder which Marvel character Tim Roth will turn into.
- I’ve realised where I know that guy from: he was in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmdit.
- Unbreakable. They alive, damnit. It’s a miracle.
- I love that show.
- Ooooo season 2 came out a few days ago. Yay.
- Bruce’s blood landed on his head wound, what are the odds of that?
- “That’s impossible”, oh so now you start to question things.
- So the lead character has to fight someone with the same superpowers as him? Just like Iron Man then? Or Thor. Or Ant-Man
- “You think a rifle’s going to hurt that?” Most logical sentence in this film.
- So his plan involves jumping out of a plane with no parachute? I tried that once, I didn’t save anybodies life and now I’m banned from British Airways
- Hulk and Abomination just holding onto each other. Now kiss!
- Did Hulk just stop the fire by clapping? I’m going to try that next time I see a fire heading towards me. If it doesn’t work and I die, someone sue Marvel.
- Look, we know you’re in the Army but “reload” instead of “another drink”? Just makes you sound like a twat.
- This is the only Marvel film without a post-credits scene. Instead it puts it just before the ending credits, like a normal film does.
combined with his veneer of a can-do attitude, echoes many promises the recession generation were educated on, but didn’t have delivered. Showing how ruthless someone really has to be to achieve the ever elusive American dream.
manipulative, and downright evil at times. “If it bleeds, it leads” as is repeated multiple times in the film, with Rene Russo giving a chemical turn as the News show runner, clearly taking inspiration from 1996’s Network, with the satirisation of the ultra-violet media being the focus of that film, but as I haven’t seen it, can’t comment further.
Gyllenhaal, giving still a career best performance in an already well versed one, dropping 20 pounds and digging deep to portray a mere reflection of a real man. The other being Dan Gilroy’s dark, clever and witty script; both married perfectly to fully realize and bring this character and story to life, and give us a sociopath for the digital age. (Move over Sherlock)
Behind the camera Dan Gilroy does a clean job of making the L.A. nightscape a very cold and isolating place, reflecting its lead character, and sharing many shades with Michael Mann’s Collateral, which was clearly an influence. It’s a high-class and pristine looking film, especially for a directorial debut, having a gorgeous neo-noir style; and his motifs of focusing on camera screens to establish how the camera sees things – instead of exactly how they actually are – works as a great and sometimes surreal effect.
anything wrong with the direction, just compared to its other elements. It doesn’t seem like it pushes the envelope as much, and has left me wondering how the film would have turned out in the hands of a David Fincher or a 
Richard Linklater and animated dystopian science-fiction; not a combination even the stoners from Dazed and Confused would think of, let alone guess it would be one of the highlights of the genre; but this list is titled thus for a reason. Adapted from Phillip K Dicks novel, it depicts a group of drug addicts, formed of Robert Downy Jr, Woody Harrelson, and led 
by undercover cop Keanu Reeves in a totalitarian America, where the only thing they have more of than drugs is cameras: Big Brother is always watching. Linklater sticks very close to the text, adapting the films dark themes of drug abuse just as effectively as its constant bursts of dark and surreal humour. But what really makes this film something else, is that its rotoscoped (animation done over live-action footage), a style that not only makes it timeless, but adds a toxic physicality to the labyrinth of confusion and paranoia the story revels in; capturing imagery from the material like no live-action film ever could.
A 30’s set period dramedy, a love letter to the stage (which clearly inspires Linklater’s writing, though ironically he didn’t write this), and a personal favourite of mine: I find this film is unfairly overlooked as a Zac Effron vehicle (who fits the period like an old glove), as at the time he was in the heights of his High School Musical fame. But in actuality it’s a genuine showcase of his talents, as it is a delightfully charming and fascinating film that looks at the friendship between a young man with theatre dreams and a pre-Citizen Cane Orson Welles, as he and his famous Mercury troop put on their career making performance of Shakespear’s Julius Caesar.
Filmed over twelve years, from May 2002 to October 2013 (almost my own exact adolescence), using the same cast, Boyhood follows a boy and his broken family through his life, on their journeys to adulthood and everything else.
Troubled Productions 