Hancock rocks the house

The vertiginous mood swings and abrupt tonal shifts of Hancock may too jarring, too unsettling, for moviegoers who prefer movies that are more smoothly consistent – and who may feel this apologetically all-over-the-map opus is as zig-zaggedly sloppy as one of the title character's flight patterns. But if you find yourself thinking, as I do, that this is some kind of terrific entertainment, chances are good that you'll feel that way because of, not despite, its free-wheeling, risk-taking untidiness.

Of course, lead player Will Smith deserves a fistful of kudos for his fearless performance as Hancock, a surly superhero who drinks himself into super stupors, passes out on bus-stop benches, and only reluctantly rouses himself to take flight in pursuit of bad guys. (Before you ask: No, he doesn’t wear a costume. And if you asked him about that, you’d probably wish you hadn’t.) Maybe he’s killed too many brain cells to think clearly. Or maybe he’s so bored with being bulletproof and super-strong that he must go to extremes to amuse himself. Either way, Hancock makes it very clear very early that he does whatever he damn well pleases, and to hell with the consequences, while pursuing fugitives, dousing burning buildings or, in one especially memorable scene, rescuing beached whales. If Smith weren’t around to generate at least a modicum of rooting interest in this mighty malcontent – well, it would be ridiculously easy to join Hancock's ever-expanding on-screen chorus of disapprovers.

Off-screen: Larry Ratliff has the eyes to see, the mind to discern and the heart to understand. So does Sean Axmaker, and David Denby. You can read my Houston Chronicle review here.

Good reading: David Denby on rom-coms, from It Happened One Night to Knocked Up

Bless his heart: David Denby of The New Yorker remains one of the few gainfully employed film critics of our age with the insight, intellectual heft, movie-history savvy and graceful writing style to produce provocative and engrossing essays such as this one on the current state of romantic comedies. Mind you, it’s the sort of lengthy piece that is best savored away from the computer monitor: You should print out the article, or maybe even buy the magazine, and page through it at your leisure, perhaps while Mozart wafts from your stereo and a glass of fine wine is within easy reach. But, then again, since he spends so much time focused on Knocked Up – about which Denby expresses profoundly mixed feelings – perhaps you could substitute an ice-cold beer or a tightly-wrapped doobie for the vino.

BTW: According to early weekend box-office reports, Knocked Up (which, Denby rightly notes, “feels like one of the key movies of the era — a raw, discordant equivalent of The Graduate forty years ago”) has grossed enough to remain in the top ten for the eighth consecutive week. Not shabby at all.

The state of cinema

David Denby writes in The New Yorker: "In the past, commercially successful artists like Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, George Cukor, John Ford, and Billy Wilder would have been astonished if anyone had told them that they could succeed with only slivers of the audience. They thought they were working for everybody, and often they were. Today, with a few exceptions like Ang Lee, Scorsese, Spielberg, and Eastwood (and not necessarily with all their movies), the artistically ambitious director who is considered to have universal or even widespread appeal is an endangered species. Part of the reason, perhaps, is that directors are working for an audience more diverse than the audience of fifty or sixty years ago. The most important reason, however, is that, by splitting the audience into a spectacle-and-comedy, opening-weekend crowd and a specialty-division urban élite, the studios have given up the old dream of movies as an art form for everyone."

And mind you, according to Denby, that isn't the worst of it