Word: hellboyã
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Alfonso Cuarón, the “Y Tu Mamá También” auteur, produces, as does Guillermo Del Toro, who directed the critically acclaimed “Hellboy?? and “Cronos.” In front of the camera, frequent Pedro Almodóvar collaborator Leonor Watling performs stunningly, and the reliably great Alred Molina (“Spider Man 2”) makes a cameo appearance...
...vibrant photography and Del Toro’s script, as full of thrills as it is of an anti-formulaic, self-aware logic. Ron Perlman, of TV’s Beauty and the Beast fame, has the chops (and the eyebrows and the jawbones) to deliver Hellboy??s throwaway one-liners and punches with the appropriate devil-may-care élan: he’s Dirty Harry with a penchant for beer and pancakes, a superhero-everyman less detached than Batman and much cooler than Spiderman...
Considering Del Toro’s deft exposition of the backstory, deepening Hellboy??s craggy recesses is probably unnecessary; but, in an era when films are shot with the DVD in mind, necessity takes a back-seat to the three disc special edition, complete with collector’s booklet of arcane diagrams and vulgar Latin. Character bios, conceptual art and hours of behind-the-scenes commentary abound; one feature even allows the viewer to jump from the movie into comic book expositions at crucial moments. The trigger-happy viewer will quickly dissolve into Hellboy nerd-dom, muttering...
...nicer than just silly screen-saver animations, especially when DVDs have so much space for extras anyway, and when the films themselves are as fun as Hellboy. Only a few recent DVDs, including the special editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, can, with justification, rival Hellboy??s encyclopedic treatment of the imaginaries and pools of ink that gave rise to its film version. Of course, only the devil knows what kind of tome we’ll get after the inevitable Hellboy sequels...
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