Went to see the The Hulk this evening.

Ang Lee is an ass.

(Man, I've used that three-letter word two entries in a row now... not sure what's up with that.)

For those who don't know, Ang Lee is the director of this flick. And I'm sorry, I suppose he (or she? I don't know) is famous, and maybe has done some good work. Perhaps I've even admired some of it.

But the directing of this film sucked.

Not the film, or the special effects, or the acting. Some wonderful moments in there (the GI on an APC (a Bradley?) as they first espy the Hulk in San Francisco... priceless).

And, okay, some of the acting sucked. People (okay, "characters") reacting totally out of context with what is happening around them, or the dialogue being expressed. The believability of the first hour or so is really stretched. Not because the science is that fictional, but because the people are so fake. Worse than cartoonish. Roger Rabbit at least behaved as you would expect.

The giant green guy leaping great bounds across the desert, snatching missiles from the air... I can suspend the air of incredibility for that. I believed that.

But not the conversations these people were supposedly having for the first forty minutes (yeah, it was forty minutes before the green guy showed up, although he snuck in a brief cameo a few minutes earlier in a doorway).

But the real kicker? The thing that made me sit back, over and over, and say "I'm in a theater watching a movie," (instead of being in the movie)?

The freakin' split screens.

Over and over again. Up to six overlapping windows of film on the screen at one time, with different views of the action, or faces. I suppose Mr. Lee (or Ms. Lee?) thought he was being clever. That he was mimicking the multi-tasking computer world so many of us live in.

Well, yeah. Which immediately took me out of the Marvel Comics world he was supposed to be making me live in.

My best guess? Ang Lee is either a lousy editor, or was just too tired of editting to bother deciding which was the best camera angle for a particular scene, or how to transport the viewer through this sequence, so he instead put all of them up there, and called himself clever for doing it.

Lazy and disingenuous would be more like it.

So do you gather I didn't like the film?

You would be wrong.

It has Jennifer Connelly in it. A lot.

I mean, a lot. And at all sorts of beautiful, wonderful angles, and close-ups. Almost enough to make me forget about Carrie-Ann Moss.

If you can ignore the multiple split screens (and you can't... you have to follow some of them through), and all the multiple strange scene changes (again, never keeping with any handful of patterns... like an amateur who just learned how to do PowerPoint, and has to try every melt, fade, roll, blend, flip and bullet in the menus in their presentation), and all the unnecessary weird special images sequences (like Star Trek 1 or 2001, you're not even sure why these sequences are in there, except that somebody did this, and thought it looked cool), there are some really good parts to the film.

If you're a Hulk fan. Or Jennifer Connelly fan.

Of which I'm both.