Grate Things Come In Wacky Packages

Hancock
More Like HanPOPPYcock
Trailers & Mo

And the most misleading trailer of the year goes to… Hancock! What looked like a kooky fun anti-superhero superhero flick delivers such promised goods for the first third, and then ugliness rolls in with unpromised bads for the rest of it. The idea of a reluctant alcoholic superhero who decides to turn his life around is a solid one to run with, but when you exhaust it so quickly, there’s nowhere to run cept out of steam. It was enjoyable to watch Will Smith play a deplorable character for once, and then it wasn’t when the script made a 180 degree turn into poopsville. And what’s up with Charlizezzee Therszszzzoseeon? She’s in the trailer for a total of 4 seconds, yet she plays a major role in the poopsville part. What kinda major role? Well, since it’s so redonkeylous, we’ll tell you. She’s like Hancock’s superhero soul mate or something who has been hiding her abilities as a suburban housewife to Michael Bluth. She used to run around the globe for hundreds of years with Hancock, but at some point, he got hurt and amnseiad or something like that and he doesn’t remember her, but then he does or something and then they realize that when they occupy the same space their powers are about as powerful as Powers Boothe asking for a booth in a restaurant that only has tables. Do you follow that? If so, follow us out of the theater and into another one playing anything but this

Cameo-flage: Hancock producers Akiva Goldsmith and Michael Mann both make cameos as bidness executives. It marks the first time Mann has been credited for being in front of the camera, but maybe Hancock woulda benefited a bit mo with him behind it

Verdictgo: this should be Slit Youreffic, but we’re getting soft in our old age so Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Gonzo: The Life and Work of
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Cheer & Loving On The HST Trail
Trailers & Mo

The life (which ended with a tragic suicide in 2005) and work of the gun totting, non-stop drug and alcohol ingesting, gonzo journalist extraordinaire Hunter S Thompson could easily fill 24 hours in documentary form. So to cram all the fear and loathing into 2 measly hours and try to paint a full portrait of the man and the myth of the man he created and could never cut loose is an impossible task to tackle. Hot doc director of the moment Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, our pick for 7th best of ’05, and this past year’s Oscar winning Taxi to the Dark Side) is certainly up to the challenge, even if the strokes we get are pretty broad. Colored with a wide spectrum of interviews, from politicians he glorified and vilified (George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, and Pat Buchanan, filling in for the dead Nixon), literary compadres in awe of him (Tom Wolfe, Rolling Stone honcho Jann Werner), to loved ones who had to live with his Jekyll and Hyde lifestyle (his two wives and son Juan), and brought to life through the trippy drippy artwork of his collaborator Ralph Steadman, and in his own words, read aloud by Johnny Depp (who perfectly captured him in Terry Gilliam’s rightfully manic Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas flick), Gonzo is a fantastic film sure to capture the attention and imagination of HST novices and textpert experts alike. What a time for docs about writers who shaped and were shaped by the eras they lived in. This would make a great double feature with Trumbo, another muss see, so buy the ticket and take the ride (which is the name of another doc on HST with purty much the same set of talking heads that we haven’t seen and therefore cannot compare or comment on)

From Hunter To The Hunted: The Smoking Gun‘s gots the police report from HST’s death scene and here’s a nice article about his loony funeral from editor and friend Douglas Brinkley, who also appears in the doc

Verdictgo: Breast In Show

The Wackness
Down In Smoke
Trailers & Mo

1994 was a formative year near and dear to our hearts, and apparently that’s also the case with writer/director Jonathan Levine. He pours his love (and some hot tunes, like Biggie, the Wu-Tang Clan and Nas) of that more mellow time into The Wackness, but we didn’t necessarily pour ours into his tale of a NYC weed peddling yo boy’s last summer of discovery before he heads off to college. Our hip-hoppin protagonist Luke Shapiro (Drake and Josh kid Josh Peck… btw, no Jews name their boys ‘Luke’) is actively courting the stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby, ready to break out of the shadow cast by being Juno’s BFF) of a bong-rattled psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley, doing his best Cheech and Chong song) he’s dealing to. While Luke dispenses the dope (via his awful Rastafarian imitating dealer Method Man), the doc dispenses his wisdom of love, life and his own failings on him so he doesn’t fall down the same hole he’s currently in (with wife Famke Janssen, who has such a nothing role, you’ll forget that she was even in the film). It all comes off as being sincere, but it also goes on and on and on, hispecially the spaced-out stylings of Kingsley’s character. When we see these screenings, they hand us press notes that usually detail the making of the film. The notes for The Wackness contained a timeline for 1994 that evoked a better picture of what life was l
ike back then than what we saw on the screen. Had Levine sprinkled more of the real-life events into his fictional ones (besides a bus w/a Forrest Gump poster on the side) it woulda worked a lot better. Maybe you all should read the press notes and skip the flick. Then again, they don’t hand these babies out to just anyone, although we think they should, cause in the end, aint wees all critics?

Aguirred Taste: we love us Douglas J. Aguirre’s typecast resume, which seems to be an endless career of playing some sort of law man. In The Wackness he plays a ‘Desk Officer in the Prison’

Verdictgo: it’s like Kids lite, so Sum Merit But No Stinkin Badges

Hancock and Kit Kittredge [review here] open at a theater new Jew today, while The Wackness rawks out tomorrow and Gonzo on the Fourth of Jew-lie in limited release

until next thyme the balcony is clothed…