[Peace-discuss] Hellboy II: a modern Bosch

[John W.]

It occurs to me somewhat belatedly to ask why, if indeed Hellboy II is a
modern filmic rendering of Boschian proportions, the writers of the movie's
"teaser" failed to reference Bosch, to give the film that certain highbrow *je
ne sais quoi*.  I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with the fact that 999
out of 1,000 Americans - myself included - would have absolutely no idea who
Hieronymus Bosch actually was.  :-)

John again


On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:30 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:

[John W.'s animadversions re Hellboy II have the unintended effect of
> alerting us to some contemporaneous artistry that's reminiscent of
> Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthy Delights (ca. 1500 CE).  Bosch's
> triptych (now in Madrid) has always seemed to me a characterization of an
> age; a college friend had a reproduction of it over her mantelpiece, and it
> reverberates down the years for me. (One minor correction to what follows:
> the veteran English character actor is Roy Dotrice [not Ray], now in his
> mid-80s.  About the time I came to appreciate Bosch, Dotrice was in the US
> with a one-man show based on the great book Brief Lives by John Aubrey, the
> 17th-century gossip who even had discreditable stories about Shakespeare.)
> --CGE]
>
> http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/07/11/hellboy_ii/print.html
>
>        "Hellboy II: The Golden Army"
>        The fanciful, witty follow-up to "Hellboy" is so beautiful,
>        you may forget it's a "special-effects" movie.
>        By Stephanie Zacharek
>
> Jul. 11, 2008 | There's a minor character in Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy
> II: The Golden Army" who wears a king's robes and a crown that resembles the
> spires and turrets of a European fairy-tale city. Except it's not a crown --
> this skyline of towers and curving walls springs directly from his head.
> Explaining the character's conception in an online New York Times feature,
> del Toro said this regal creature -- who came to be known as "Cathedral
> Head" -- was "somebody that instead of thinking about his home city, he kind
> of carried it around."
>
> Del Toro himself is a kind of Cathedral Head, a filmmaker whose strong
> sense of place -- whose sense of preserving the notion of a personal, if not
> literal, home -- has been the foundation of pictures like the extraordinary
> post-Spanish Civil War fairy tale "Pan's Labyrinth" and its precursor "The
> Devil's Backbone," as well as the two "Hellboy" movies. That the 2004
> "Hellboy" and, now, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" are both mainstream
> pictures based on comic books (created by writer-artist Mike Mignola), and
> not "small" pictures initially designated for the art house, doesn't
> diminish the scope of del Toro's vision. The bald truth is that del Toro is
> one of the few young filmmakers working in the mainstream who actually has
> any vision, as opposed to just a knack for dreaming up cool effects.
> "Hellboy II" -- poetic, funny, darkly romantic and beautifully structured --
> is a very different picture from "Pan's Labyrinth." But there's no doubt
> that it springs from the same cathedral.
>
> Hellboy, for the uninitiated, is a strapping demon with red skin and a
> right hand and forearm that resembles a block of concrete. (As an infant,
> during World War II, he was rescued from a remote Scottish isle and raised
> by his adoptive father, professor Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm, played here,
> as in the first movie, by John Hurt.) Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a swaggering,
> wiseacre presence in a duster raincoat: He works for the Bureau for
> Paranormal Research and Defense (which happens to be in New Jersey), and,
> along with a band of fellow misfits, fights evil wherever it rears its ugly
> head. Hellboy is a misunderstood beastie, and average citizens don't know
> what to make of him: His looks scare people, and his inability to tolerate
> idiots makes him cantankerous. But even though he comes off as something of
> a roughneck, a cigar-smoking, beer-guzzling, TV-watching guy who's always
> spoiling for a fight, he's at heart a tremendous softie, as evidenced by the
> throngs of affectionate kittens who swarm around his feet when he's relaxing
> at home, in Bureau headquarters. Hellboy's closest friends, the only
> "people" who really understand him, are his colleagues at the Bureau,
> including his girlfriend, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair), a mite half his size
> who has the ability to start fires spontaneously with her fingertips, and
> the elegant, well-read aquatic creature Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), who has the
> gills of a fish and the soul of John Donne.
>
> Del Toro -- who wrote the story and script, working from Mignola's material
> -- opens "Hellboy II" with a back story in the form of a mythological
> bedtime tale that Trevor, in a flashback sequence, reads to the young
> Hellboy (Montse Ribé) about a king (played by veteran English character
> actor Ray Dotrice) who, in the fight for dominance between the elf world and
> the human one, assembles a "golden army" of superwarriors. But these troops
> cause nothing but more heartache and destruction. The king repents,
> declaring a truce between the two worlds and disbanding the army by
> literally breaking up his crown and scattering the segments. His
> power-hungry son, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), a malcontent in an Edgar Winter
> hairdo, slinks away from the scene in disgust, only to reemerge in the
> modern day with a plan to reassemble the army and thus take control of the
> human world.
>
> You can imagine what Hellboy thinks of that plan once he gets wind of it.
> The biggest complication is that Nuada has a twin, Princess Nuala (played by
> Anna Walton, in a performance that's both serene and vampish). It's not
> clear at first where Nuala's sympathies lie. But she is connected to her
> twin by supernatural bonds: When he bleeds, she bleeds too.
>
> Nuada and his henchman, Wink (Brian Steele), a giant, scaly creature with a
> right hand that's something like a retractable mace (a parallel to Hellboy's
> own "deformity"), unleash an assortment of ills upon the world, beginning
> with boxes full of small, skittering creepy-crawlies who wreak havoc at a
> Manhattan auction house. (They're called "tooth fairies," and you don't want
> to know what their deal is.) Del Toro works confidently on both the small
> scale and the bigger canvas. Minute details are important: He originally
> wanted to have little people living inside Cathedral Head's towers and
> ramparts. (When he realized what the movie's budget was, he told the Times,
> "the people suddenly left the city.") But there's also something intimate
> about his large-scale creature creations, which include a hungry beanstalk
> with a pointed, impassive, masklike green face, whose dual purpose is to
> give life and take it away. Everything -- not just everyone -- in "Hellboy
> II" has a discernible personality that emerges through his, her or its
> movements within the frame, or simply from the movie's vivid visuals. (The
> cinematographer is del Toro's frequent collaborator Guillermo Navarro; the
> production design is by Stephen Scott.)
>
> There's so much to look at in "Hellboy II" -- so many weird beings with
> crepelike skin, or eyes in all the wrong places -- that the picture runs the
> risk of being excessive. But in the end, its grandness works because it's so
> well balanced by the expressions on the actors' faces (even when those faces
> are laden with latex and makeup), or by offbeat little touches like the
> troupe of cats who cautiously emerge from beneath Hellboy's bed after he and
> Liz have had a particularly noisy dust-up. I confess I've come to dread
> movies in which the hero faces down an "army" of anything: Elaborate battles
> are now a staple of fantasy movies, and the big CGI showdowns of the "Lord
> of the Rings" pictures set a standard that everyone is now trying to top.
> But bigger isn't necessarily better -- in fact, it seldom is. Even del Toro
> seems to realize that, and he constructs the climactic battle sequence so
> that it caps off everything in the story that's come before -- the movie
> ends with an emphatic (if somewhat open-ended) period instead of three
> exclamation marks.
>
> And as with the first "Hellboy," del Toro is most interested in using
> fantasy to explore the humanity of his decidedly nonhuman characters. There
> are some new ones, including Johann Krauss (his voice belongs to Seth
> MacFarlane), a walking suit of armor that serves as a container for a
> personality, which is essentially an ectoplasmic vapor. (The fact that
> Krauss is German gives Hellboy, who was rescued from the Nazis as an infant,
> no end of wisecrack material -- although his prejudices aren't permanent.)
> There's some domestic strife between Liz and Hellboy, who strive to do good
> in the world even as they're finding it difficult do right by each other.
> Blair and Perlman have a lovely, prickly give-and-take here: Their recurring
> annoyance with each other is part of the electricity of their love.
>
> And in "Hellboy II" del Toro has created an expanded role for the wonderful
> Doug Jones as Abe Sapien. (In "Hellboy," David Hyde-Pierce was the voice of
> Abe, but Hyde-Pierce realized that Jones was so completely responsible for
> the shaping of the character that, magnanimously, he withdrew his name from
> the credits. In "Hellboy II," the voice we hear belongs to Jones.) It was
> only a matter of time before a deeply romantic creature like Abe fell in
> love, and in "Hellboy II," he does. As he explains to Hellboy in his most
> lovesick moment: "She's like me -- a creature from another world," a simple
> way of explaining how wonderful it feels to be connected to someone when
> you've spent your life feeling isolated.
>
> Special effects have so radically taken over the content of mainstream
> movies -- particularly summer blockbusters -- that they've reached the point
> of being nothing special at all. We're still seeing more action movies that
> use special effects to beat the audience into a state of something
> resembling awe (as "The Incredible Hulk" did) than ones that put the focus
> on live performers, using special effects judiciously and with some sense of
> how they need to serve a story and its characters (à la "Iron Man").
>
> But Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" is something else
> again: It's too wildly fanciful, too witty, too operatic in its vision, to
> fit comfortably into any of the convenient folders we might use to keep our
> mainstream entertainments sorted in our minds. I left the theater so
> enraptured, so energized, that it didn't immediately register that I'd just
> seen a "special-effects" movie, although, of course, I had. The
> alien-looking eyes of Jones' Abe Sapien are difficult to read by themselves.
> And so Jones expresses his character's deepest fears and longings just by
> blinking, or by a subtle inclination of his blue-striped, almond-shaped
> head. These delicate, precise movements are also special effects, small
> curlicues in the movie's grand design, and del Toro's boldness lies in the
> fact that he sees their value as part of the magnificent whole. Unfazed by
> the noisy Hollywood industry around him, del Toro always carries his home
> city in his head.
>
> -- By Stephanie Zacharek
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