Will the Real Bruce Almighty Please Stand Up

If you're like me and haven't seen enough of the Green Giant since moving out of the continent of North America, you'll be thrilled to know that he just made a movie. Move out of the way, Neo, step aside, Wolverine, because with muscle strength like the Terminator and moves like Super Mario, this guy is way up there with Jackie Chan.

Being a fan of Spiderman, I don't plan to mock anything created by Marvel Comics. So that leaves me just enough room to trash the style in which the epic was presented on the big screen. The Incredible Hulk took a risk proportional to the size of his eight-pack going from Stan Lee to Ang Lee, as it had proven to take him one giant step off beam on the highway to fame, with just about every other Marvel superheroes at the finish line wondering what the hold up is. And by giant step I mean GIANT STEP, as the Hulk is able to travel to Rome and back in no more than three and a half leaps.

I've had days when I enjoyed reading comic books, and I appreciated the classic, traditional way a story is laid out on the pages. But when you try to use that template in a motion picture, it just doesn't quite fit. The diagonal line sweeping across the screen to go into the next scene is lame even on personal homepages; and the split scenes and the mobile picture-in-picture effects just amuse me the way Richard Simmons would if he tried to play straight. They might as well have slapped on handwritten words in a bubble every time a character had a thought, and cover the screen with a POW at every punch thrown. All of the above and the same color spectrum they used back when color television was first launched reminded me of the Brady Bunch.

And is it just me or did they manage to make Jennifer Connelly appear about seven times uglier than she should be? It seems as if she's aged 10 years since appearing as Mrs. Nash. Damn those Gamma rays.

Now, Versace's question: What kind of Acme pants leave intact a perfect boxer-shaped portion whilst everything else on him shreds to dust every time the Hulk emerges?! (For the purpose of this discussion, let's put aside for a moment that the pants are purple.) A 15-foot giant in the pants of a medium built man is definitely pushing the limits of spandex and the like. And I've disqualified the possibility of them being spandex, the hem of the pants floated with his every move. I was more or less relieved to find out that it wasn't Ang Lee's idea. The last thing a Taiwanese director in Hollywood wants to convey is stupidity. "It's a question I always had myself: 'How come his pants always stay on?'" Lee says in an interview. "I thought he should be naked."

But with biceps the size of SUVs, the potentials for his *hm-hm* would be too farfetched for a PG-13 blockbuster. As Nick Nolte, who played Bruce Banner's father in the film, said, "I've seen a nude picture of the Hulk. It's not pretty; it can be used as a weapon. I can't see the Hulk having sex."

With the jaw-dropping ability to expand five times in size in seconds without a stretch mark to show for and that to contract to original size even quicker without a trace of loose skin, Banner is the real Bruce Almighty.