Couldn’t agree more.

It makes me feel a whole lot better about the future. With Nolan and Del Toro so revered in the industry, they’ll hopfully become the benchmark / blueprint Hollywood looks to when considering films to be put into production. The dross won’t go away and, despite the rose tinted spectacles I look through when discussing classic Hollywood, it’s well known that the dross percentage was high back then too, in fact it’s always been high.

As long as there’s enough genuinely good stuff being made to redress the balance, I’m kind of happy.

I certainly agree with the notion that Nolan and Del Toro use CGI as a storytelling tool as opposed to someone like Michael Bay or Paul W. S. Anderson who seem to use the story as a bridge to move the plot on to the next CGI set-piece.

Funny you should mention the Hulk in reference to the movie being an extended advert for the tie in 360 game as in the games industry they have a thing called the “Uncanny Valley”.

The valley is the gap between what CGI can achieve in bringing ever more realistic “human” effects to the small (or big) screen and those thousands of little human things that aren’t really noticeable to the human eye but are picked up subconsciously. Be they the tiny movements of the tongue over the lips, the dilation of the eye, the subtle change in the jaw or the dozens of shifts in stance we make during a conversation.

No matter how good looking the CGI model is, until all these little things are built in they will never pass our built in human BS detectors. So even with the phenomenal CGI models in latest Japanese CGI Anime like Advent Children they still look no more REAL then Mickey Mouse back when he was playing Willie and driving a Steam Boat.

And for that reason no matter how good Hulk or Iron Man are technically those CGI performances are still light-years away from jumping the Valley.

That I think is where Del Toro’s genius in CGI use comes to bear. His CGI performers aren’t human and his Humans never need CGI. Thus Pan is totally convincing and so is Ofelia. They don’t get in each others way unlike Peter Parker/Spiderman or Bruce Banner/Hulk.

Until directors like McG or Roland Emmerich understand this or CGI makes its next quantum leap forward I’m afraid we are going to see plenty of this dross.

CGI is, and always should be, secondary to the story and should never dictate the aesthetic of the picture. Modern cinema, and especially the superhero genre (I again refer to HULK) has been awash with lazy attempts to startle us, amaze us and prepare us for buying the XBox360 game of the film…. all of this at the sacrifice of basic interesting narative.

Del Toro and Nolan use this tool in a completely different way….. You don’t notice it as you’re too wrapped up in what’s actually HAPPENING on screen, you care about what’s going to become of the characters so don’t find yourself searching for something else to hold your attention… That’s not to say they’re not INCREDIBLY impressive looking. Del Toro takes it one step further of course and organically creates elements you think should be CGI… the faun in Pan’s Labyrinth for instance.

I’m really looking forward to Hellboy 2 but have contacted my friends at lovefilm to hit me with the first installment before it comes out.

“and if your folks would hurry up and win the pools.” …… Ah, those golden days of trying to find the elusive score draw. Don’t you just hate the national lottery?

“Begins” is indeed a fantastic re-boot of what was a horribly abused franchise by all who had gone before.

Whilst Burton’s movies may well have been visually stunning and his Gotham certainly had an appeal for those of us steeped in the Batman mythos that was where his connection to the DC legend ended. His Wayne in Michael Keaton was believable enough but his Dark Knight was most certainly not. Jack Nicholson’s Joker may well go down in history as one of cinemas great villains but he wasn’t the Joker I knew and as for killing him off in the first film, this was an act of heresy in mine and most other fans minds. Those that came after Burton showed an even greater disregard for cannon and worse still equal disregard for the characters themselves (nipples on the Bat-suit for heavens sake)!

Nolan has done that thing (with Begins and Dark Knight) that only he and Guillermo Del Toro seem to do. He has taken the source material and rather than ignoring all those things that made it interesting in the first instance as so often seems to be the case in Hollywood (Constantine being the prime example) he has immersed himself in it. Taking influence from the comic book greats like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Denny O’Neil (not only a seminal writer but the greatest of all the editors DC has placed in charge of its greatest title) and put them to good use.

It felt new again and very rooted in reality. And that’s the thing with Bats, of all the comic book icons he is the only one you feel could be out there somewhere, stalking the night streets. The one that, as a kid, you could dream of growing into as long as you ate all your greens, studied REALLY hard, learned kung-fu and if your folks would hurry up and win the pools.

As for Del Toro his work on Blade and with Hellboy prove that these kids books really can be put up there on the big screen to outstanding effect roll on Golden Army (and of course the Blu-Ray release of Dark Knight)!!

http://www.hellboymovie.com/