I’ll admit that going into Hancock, I had no idea what to expect beyond the concept of a misfit superhero that does as much harm as good fighting crime.  I can tell you that, having seen Hancock, this seems to me to be a movie that started out as a great concept – an action/comedy featuring a misfit superhero doing as much harm as good fighting crime – but somewhere along the way lost focus and never quite came together as a solid film.  However, judging from the screening audience I saw this with, Hancock is going to be successful.  The film delivers a few entertaining action sequences with some impressive special effects, and Will Smith as the title character garners laughs with visual gags and even more so with his own wit and charm.  I’m confident audiences are going to enjoy Hancock, but to correlate that prediction with its overall quality would be a little fallacious.

It was a little movie that created a big controversy: in 2006, members of London’s Bangladeshi community protested the filming of Brick Lane, the movie version of Monica Ali’s acclaimed novel. They claimed that the book—and the film—portrayed Bangladeshis as uneducated and crude, specifically citing a scene (which does not appear in the film) where Bangladeshis infested with lice are coming over to England on the hold of a ship. When the film crew planned to film around the real Brick Lane—a street in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood—the protesters took to the street, allegedly threatening to burn copies of Ali’s book. The controversy didn’t end when filming stopped: in September 2007, the British royal family canceled the Royal Film Performance, an annual film screening that had been held every year since 1959. Although a royal spokesman claimed the cancellation was due to the inability to find a date when Prince Charles was available to attend, he did note that the controversy had been taken into account.

Guillermo Del Toro is a geeky mad genius. 

He’s one of those young, passionate directors that can pique your interest in a project just by having his name attached to it.  Perhaps this explains why he’s been associated with so many geek projects coming out in the next 5 years: Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 3993, two films based on the The Hobbit, The Coffin, Deadman, The Champions, oh and he’s expressed interest in directing an adaptation of Frankenstein.  Does the man never tire?  All this, and there’s also At the Mountains of Madness, a film that should come out sometime around the two Hobbit films he’s going to direct.  If the script for Mountains (written by Del Toro and Matthew Robbins) gets faithfully translated to the screen, moviegoers will be served up a haunting, tragic tale of men encountering a force beyond their comprehension, and it will come with a big side-helping of déjà vu.